Loudun, in the northeast of Poitiers, remains today a small town, with just over 7,000 inhabitants. A few monuments bear witness to a past that made it the backdrop of a strange history and which has provoked not a little bibliography. In the 17th century, when the famous Cardinal Richelieu ruled France with a firm hand, the convent of Loudun began to be the scene of events that even today are full of controversy and controversy: its nuns were possessed by the devil. France had never seen anything like it before. Behind all this was a Parisian priest named Urbain Grandier, whom Richelieu detested with all his might.
Born in 1590, Grandier was appointed in 1617 as canon of the collegiate church of Sainte Croixe in Loudun, as well as pastor of the church of Saint-Pierre-du-Marche in the same town. For the religious it was a good opportunity and a help to support his widowed mother and his siblings. Although there were many who looked askance at these two appointments, the religious took office and went on to become quite a personality in the locality.
Soon after his arrival, rumors began to follow him. Grandier's weakness was women: he liked them very much and that made him follow a reputation of Don Juan that had little to do with his religious commitments. That made that, for example, ten years after his landing in Loudun, it was suspected that he was the father of the son of Philippa Trincant, daughter of Louis Trincant, the king's prosecutor and Grandier's friend. The priest began to seduce the wives and daughters of the town's forces, something that seemed an open secret but that few dared to denounce.
Things became more complicated as they moved up the ladder. Grandier had his hands full with the female civilian population. So when the abbess of the Ursuline nuns' convent, Jeanne de Belciel, begged him to be the nuns' confessor, he refused to accept the offer. It is at this point that Cardinal Richeleu, one of the most powerful men in France, and his desire to put an end once and for all to Urbain Grandier's sinful career, came into action. It has never been clarified how the collaboration between the cardinal and the abbess went, although it was suspected that there was a generous financial donation by the French prime minister to implement a plan of dire consequences. Aldous Huxley, in his novel "The Demons of Loudun", suggests the possibility that the abbess had become obsessed with Grandier when she heard about his sexual adventures. She did not like feeling rejected and sought revenge, making Richelieu the perfect accomplice for it.
In 1632, several of the nuns in the convent began to publicly claim that they were possessed by the devil himself. The demons Asmodeus and Zebulon had possessed them and ordered them to commit all sorts of impure and evil acts, some as bizarre as performing a wild dance in the cloister of the convent. You can imagine who had brought so much wickedness to those poor wretches. Yes, they all indicated that it was Urbain Grandier who was guilty of so much evil. After several exorcisms, the Archbishop of Bordeaux finally ordered the kidnapping of the nuns, which put an end to the strange behavior caused by the one who came from hell.
Grandier had already been in trouble with the law. In 1629 Philippa Trincant had succeeded in having him arrested, accusing him of being the father of the child he was expecting, but the accusation of immorality did not make much headway. Although a year later he was sentenced to leave Loudun for five years, Grandier pulled his influence and was able to remain in his post. Now things had changed and a handful of nuns pointed out that Grandier had introduced the demons Asmodeus and Zebulon into the convent inside a bouquet of flowers that he had thrown inside the religious building. Our protagonist rejected the charges and even got a doctor, the doctor who treated the bishop of Bordeaux, to inspect the possessed nuns. He found nothing in them to support that the devil had actually entered them.
But the evidence against Grandier began to accumulate.
The most important came in the form of a manuscript signed by the demon Asmodeo himself, who acknowledged that he had made a pact with the religious. The document was admitted as evidence. It was learned much later that the parchment had actually been written by the mother superior, the woman who was hurt by Grandier's rejection. On December 7, 1733, he was imprisoned in the Castle of Angers where he was tortured in every imaginable way, hoping that he would confess his sympathy for the devil. He never did.
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