des deux extrêmes. On peut avoir l’orgueil de valoir en crimes ce qu’un saint vaut en virtus.”
It has been said that a saint is a person who always choses the better of the two courses open to him at every step. And so the man who is truly wicked is he who deliberately always choses the worse of the two courses. Even when he does things which would be considered right he always does them for some bad reason. To identify oneself in this way with any given course requires intense concentration and an iron strength of will, and it is such persons who become vampires.
The vampire is believed to be one who has devoted himself during his life to the practice of Black Magic, and it is hardly to be supposed that such persons would rest undisturbed, while it is easy to believe that their malevolence had set in action forces which might prove powerful for terror and destruction even when they were in their graves. It was sometimes said, but the belief is rare, that the Vampire was the offspring of a witch and the devil.
Throughout the trials and in the confessions of witches there are many details of the coitus of the devil and the witch, but those examples given by Henri Boguet in his great and authoritative work Discours des Sorciers (Third edition, Lyons, 1590) may stand for many. He devotes Chapter XII to the connexion of the devil and the witch: “L’accouplement du Demon avec la Sorciere et le Sorcier … 1. Le Demon cognoit toutes les Sorcieres, & pourquoy. 2. Il se met aussi en femme pour les Sorciers, & pourquoy. 3. Autres raisons pour les quelles le Demon cognoit les Sorciers, & Sorcieres.” More than one witch acknowledged that Satan had known her sexually, and in Chapter XIII Boguet decides: “L’accouplement de Satan auce le Sorcier est réel and non imaginaire. … Les uns donc s’on mocquët … mais les confessions des Sorciers que j’ay eu en main, me font croire qu’il en est quelque chose. Lautant qu’ils ont tout recogneu, qu’ils auoient esté couplez auec le Diable, & que la semeuce qu’il iettoit estoit fort froide … Iaquema Paget adioustoit, qu’elle auoit empoigné plusiers fois auec la main le mēbre du Demon, qui la cognoissoit, & que le membre estoit froid comme glace, lōg d’un bon doigt, & moindre en grosseur que celuy d’vn homme: Tieuenne Paget, & Antoine Tornier adioustoient aussi, qui le membre de leurs Demons
