In the majority of cases adduced there is no evidence that the Church intervened at all with its fulminations, and, even when the anathema was pronounced, the insects appear to have departed of their own free-will after having eaten up every green thing and reduced the inhabitants to the verge of starvation; and yet M. Bailly, supposed to be a man of judicial mind, disciplined by study, accustomed to reason and to know what sound reasoning is, goes on giving accounts of such scourges, as though they proved in some mysterious way the effectiveness of ecclesiastical excommunications and formed a cumulative argument in support of such claims.
The most important portion of M. Bailly’s work is that in which he shows how actions of this kind should be brought and conducted, with specimens of plaints, pleas, replications, rejoinders, and decisions. First in order comes the petition of the inhabitants seeking redress (_requeste des habitans_), which is followed in regular succession by the declaration or plea of the inhabitants (_plaidoyer des habitans_), the defensive allegation or plea for the insects (_plaidoyer pour les insectes_), the replication of the inhabitants (_réplique des habitans_), the rejoinder of the defendant (_réplique du defendeur_), the conclusions of the bishop’s proctor (_conclusions du procureur episcopal_), and the sentence of the ecclesiastical judge (_sentence du juge d’église_), which is solemnly pronounced in Latin. The pleadings on both sides are delivered in French and richly interlarded with classical allusions and Latin quotations, being even more heavily weighted with the spoils of erudition than the set speech of a member of the British Parliament.
The following abridgment of the plea, in which the prosecuting attorney sets forth the cause of complaint, is a fair specimen of the forensic eloquence displayed on such occasions:
“Gentlemen, these poor people on their knees and with tearful eyes, appeal to your sense of justice, as the inhabitants of the islands Majorica and Minorica formerly sent an embassy to Augustus Cæsar, praying him for a cohort of soldiers to exterminate the rabbits, which were burrowing in their fields and consuming their crops. In the power of excommunication you have a weapon more effective than any wielded by that emperor to save these poor suppliants from impending famine produced by the ravages of little beasts, which spare neither the corn nor the vines, ravages like those of the boar that laid waste the environs of Calydon, as related by Homer in the first book of the _Iliad_, or those of the foxes sent by Themis to Thebes, which destroyed the fruits of the earth and the cattle and assailed even the husbandmen themselves. You know how great are the evils which famine brings with it, and you have too much kindness and compassion to permit my clients to be involved in such distress, thus constraining them to perpetrate cruel and unlawful deeds; _nec enim rationem patitur, nec ulla aequitate mitigatur, nec prece ulla flectitur esuriens populus_: for a starving people is not amenable to reason, nor tempered by equity, nor moved by any prayer. Witness the mothers, of whom it is recorded in the Fourth Book of the Kings, that they ate their own children, the one saying to the other: ‘Give thy son that we may eat him to-day, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’” The advocate then discourses at length of the horrors of hunger and its disastrous effects upon the individual and the community, lugging in what Milton calls a “horse-load of citations” from Arianus Marcellinus, Ovid and other Latin prosaists and poets, introduces an utterly irrelevant allusion to Joshua and the crafty Gibeonites, and concludes as follows: “The full reports received as the result of an examination of the fields, made at your command, suffice for your information concerning the damage done by these animals. It remains, therefore, after complying with the usual forms, only to adjudicate upon the case in accordance with the facts stated in the Petition of the Plaintiffs, which is right and reasonable, and, to this effect, to enjoin these animals from continuing their devastations, ordering them to quit the aforesaid fields and to withdraw to the place assigned them, pronouncing the necessary anathemas and execrations prescribed by our Holy Mother, the Church, for which your petitioners do ever pray.”