What I Was Told to Feel

I am old now, older than I ever expected to become given how thoroughly my youth was consumed by events I have spent the intervening decades trying, with only partial success, to properly understand. I write this not for any confessor, not for any court, not even, I think, for whatever eventual reader might someday discover these pages after my death. I write it because I find, in these final years, that I can no longer sustain the careful separation I have maintained for decades between what I actually experienced during the Loudun affair and what I was told, at the time and repeatedly since, that I had experienced.

The distinction matters more than most people who have heard some version of my story ever seem to appreciate. Something did happen to me, during those difficult months: real physical sensations, real periods of confusion and distress that I cannot, even now, fully explain through purely rational or purely deliberate fraudulent means. But what those experiences meant, and how much the specific interpretation eventually placed upon them reflected my own honest understanding versus the exorcists' own predetermined conclusions, is a question I spent those original events far too frightened and far too young to properly examine, and that I have spent every subsequent year of my life attempting to honestly answer for myself.

I was young when it began, and uncertain about my own vocation and my own place within a convent hierarchy that offered a girl of my temperament remarkably few avenues for the kind of attention and significance I now recognize, with the clarity only age provides, that I had always secretly craved. I do not say this to excuse what followed. I say it because I believe, examining my own motivations with more honesty than I permitted myself during the actual events, that some private need within my own character made me more susceptible than a more secure young woman might have been to the specific role the exorcists eventually assigned me within their unfolding investigation.

The physical sensations themselves, when they began, felt real to me. I want to be honest about this, decades later, rather than simply reducing the entire affair to conscious fraud, which would itself be a kind of dishonesty about my own actual experience. I felt real distress, real confusion, sensations in my body that I could not, at the time, explain through any framework other than the one the convent's spiritual authorities immediately supplied me: that I was being afflicted by demonic influence, connected somehow to the priest Urbain Grandier, whose reputation for worldly conduct had already made him, before my own experiences ever began, a figure of considerable local suspicion within our community.

What I did not understand, at the time, and have spent years trying to properly untangle, was how thoroughly this framework (supplied to me by authorities whose own judgment I had been trained since childhood never to seriously question) shaped my own subsequent experience and my own subsequent testimony, in ways that made it difficult, even for me, to distinguish between what I actually felt independently and what I gradually learned to feel, and eventually to perform, because the entire investigative apparatus surrounding me had already decided, before my own testimony ever fully developed, exactly what my experiences were supposed to demonstrate.

I do not believe, examining my own memory as honestly as decades of subsequent reflection allow me to manage, that I consciously fabricated my testimony from nothing, in the manner some later accounts of the affair have suggested. I believe something more troubling, and harder to explain to anyone who has not lived through a comparable experience: that real confusion and real distress, filtered through an interpretive framework I had neither the age nor the authority to question, gradually transformed into a performance I could no longer clearly distinguish, even in my own private understanding, from authentic experience, a performance that ultimately helped condemn an innocent man to an agonizing death I have carried, in whatever private conscience decades of subsequent religious life have allowed me to develop, as my own share of responsibility, regardless of how thoroughly the surrounding circumstances also implicated the authorities who shaped and directed my testimony toward its eventual devastating conclusion.