The Bookseller of Loudun

"Another pamphlet about the possessions," his apprentice said, setting the latest printing on the counter. "Third one this month."

"Sell it to whoever asks. Say nothing about what you actually think of it."

"Do you think it's real? The possessions?"

Mathurin glanced toward the shop door before answering, a habit twenty years in the trade had made automatic whenever a question edged toward dangerous territory. "I think I've sold enough accounts of similar cases elsewhere in France to notice a pattern, and the pattern rarely has much to do with demons."

What troubled him, turning the matter over privately in the evenings after closing, was how neatly the convent's accusations against Grandier lined up with the priest's own well-documented list of local and even national enemies: men whose considerable influence, Mathurin suspected, was shaping this investigation's direction rather more than any evidence the exorcists claimed to be witnessing.

He never said this aloud to his regular customers. A bookseller who questioned a matter the whole town had already invested itself in emotionally risked being taken for either irreligious or, worse, secretly sympathetic to whatever demonic influence everyone had decided was loose in Loudun. He'd built twenty years of goodwill selling books to every faction in town. He wasn't willing to spend it on an opinion no one wanted to hear.

"You've gone quiet on this whole business," his apprentice observed, months into the affair's escalation.

"I sell books. I don't sell opinions about demons."

"You used to have an opinion about everything."

"I still do. I've simply stopped saying most of them aloud." Mathurin kept, instead, a private accounting in his own hand, tucked among his ordinary business ledgers: the suspicious timing of each new accusation, the particular eagerness of Grandier's known enemies to amplify the convent's testimony, the slow transformation of what had begun as a narrow religious matter into a town-wide spectacle that served considerably more political purposes than spiritual ones.

When Grandier's execution finally concluded the affair, Mathurin sold his customers exactly the pamphlets they wanted, on either side of the matter, and said nothing publicly about what his own private ledger had recorded across the preceding months.

"You're not celebrating, like the rest of the square," his apprentice noted, on the day itself.

"No."

"Why not?"

Mathurin considered how much of the truth was safe to give even his own apprentice. "Because I don't believe this town consumed a man's life over demons. I believe it consumed him over grievances that had almost nothing to do with anything the exorcists actually claimed to witness. I can't prove that to anyone's satisfaction, and saying it aloud would cost me considerably more than it would ever accomplish. So I keep the accounting privately, and I sell my books, and I let the town believe whatever it needs to believe about what actually happened here."