We have now noted these alleged phenomena, literally ’from China to Peru’.  Let us next take an old French case of a noisy sprite in the nunnery of St. Pierre de Lyon.  The account is by Adrien de Montalembert, almoner to Francis I. {110c} The Bibliography of this very rare tract is curious and deserves attention.  When Lenglet Dufresnoy was compiling, in 1751, his Dissertations sur les Apparitions he reprinted the tract from the Paris quarto of 1528, in black letter.  This example had been in the Tellier collection, and Dufresnoy seems to have borrowed it from the Royal Convent of St. Genevieve.  Knowing that Cardinal Tencin had some acquaintance with the subject, Dufresnoy wrote to him, and publishes (vol. i. cxli.) his answer, dated October 18, 1751, Lyons.  The cardinal replied that, besides the Paris edition of 1528, there was a Rouen reprint, of 1529, by Rolin Gautier, with engravings.  Brunet says, that there are engravings in the Paris edition of 1528, perhaps these were absent from the Tellier example.  That of Rouen, which Cardinal Tencin collated, was in the Abbey of St. Peter, in Lyons.  Some leaves had been thumbed out of existence, and their place was supplied in manuscript.  The only difference was in chapter xxviii. where the printed Rouen text may have varied.  In the MS. at all events, it is stated that on March 21, the spirit of Sister Alix de Telieux struck thirty-three great strokes on the refectory of her convent, ‘mighty and marvellous,’ implying that her thirty-three years of purgatory were commuted into thirty-three days.  A bright light, scarcely endurable, then appeared, and remained for some eight minutes.  The nuns then went into chapel and sang a Te Deum.

At the end of the volume, a later hand added, in manuscript, that the truth of the contemporary record was confirmed by the tradition of the oldest sisters who had received it from eye-witnesses of the earlier generation.  The writer says that she had great difficulty in finding the printed copy, but that when young, in 1630, she received the tale from a nun, then aged ninety-four.  This nun would be born in 1536, ten years after these events.  She got the story from her aunt, a nun, Gabrielle de Beaudeduit, qui etoit de ce tems-la.  There is no doubt that the sisters firmly and piously believed in the story, which has the contemporary evidence of Adrien de Montalembert.  Dufresnoy learned that a manuscript copy of the tract was in the library of the Jesuits of Lyons.  He was unaware of an edition in 12mo of 1580, cited by Brunet.

To come to the story, one of our earliest examples of a ‘medium,’ and of communications by raps.  The nunnery was reformed in 1516.  A pretty sister, Alix de Telieux, fled with some of the jewels, lived a ‘gay’ life, and died wretchedly in 1524.  She it was, as is believed, who haunted a sister named Anthoinette de Grolee, a girl of eighteen.  The disturbance began with a confused half-dream.  The girl fancied that