What I Actually Remember

What I actually remember, stripped as far as decades of subsequent reflection allow me to strip it of the interpretive framework everyone around me insisted upon at the time, is smaller and more mundane than the dramatic public spectacle our eventual testimony became. I remember real physical discomfort whose actual medical cause I still cannot fully explain, though I have come, across many subsequent years, to suspect explanations far more mundane than demonic possession: the physical and psychological strain of convent life conducted under conditions of real deprivation, compounded by whatever private vulnerabilities my own particular temperament and my own unexamined desires for significance had already established in me before Grandier's name ever entered our community's local gossip.

I remember, too, a specific moment I have turned over more than any other single memory from that entire period across my subsequent decades of reflection: an early session with the exorcists, before my own testimony had fully developed into the elaborate performance it eventually became, when one of the presiding clergymen asked me a leading question about Grandier's specific involvement that I answered, in that early moment, with real uncertainty rather than the confident accusation my testimony would eventually provide. I remember the clergyman's visible dissatisfaction with this uncertain answer, and I remember, with a clarity that troubles me more than almost any other detail from that entire period, my own gradual learning of exactly what answers would satisfy rather than disappoint the authorities whose approval I had been trained, my entire life, to seek above almost any other consideration.

This is the detail I have never fully shared with anyone, in whatever partial confessions and partial explanations I have offered various confessors across the decades since. It was not, in that early crucial moment, that I consciously decided to lie in order to satisfy my questioners. It was something harder to examine honestly: that I gradually, almost imperceptibly, learned which of my own confused sensations to emphasize and which to minimize, based entirely on which specific responses my questioners visibly welcomed and which specific responses visibly disappointed them, a process of unconscious shaping that I could not, at the time, and can barely now, fully distinguish from either conscious fraud or unshaped testimony.

I do not offer this confession as an excuse for my role in Grandier's eventual execution. I understand, with whatever moral clarity my subsequent decades of reflection have provided me, that my testimony helped condemn a man whose actual guilt I have come to seriously doubt, examining the entire affair with the honest distance that only many years removed from the original overwhelming pressure of that specific moment could ever have provided me. I bear real responsibility for that outcome, regardless of how thoroughly the surrounding authorities also shaped and directed my testimony toward its devastating eventual conclusion.

What I hope, writing this confession in what remain of my final years, is not absolution, which I do not believe any human account, however honest, has the power to grant for harm this serious and this final. I hope, instead, for something more modest: an honest record, existing somewhere beyond my own private and increasingly unreliable memory, of what I actually experienced and understood, separate from what decades of subsequent official Church accounts and popular retellings have made of the entire Loudun affair.

I was a frightened, confused young woman, with a real private need for significance that made me more susceptible than I wish I had been to authorities who had already decided, before my own testimony fully developed, exactly what conclusion that testimony needed to support. I do not know, even now, precisely where authentic experience ended and learned performance began in my own testimony. I suspect the honest answer is that no clean line ever existed, that the two were entangled from nearly the earliest moment in ways my own limited self-understanding, at the time, made it truly impossible for me to properly separate. I know only that a man died as a result, whose actual guilt I now seriously doubt, and that I carry my own share of that outcome's weight, honestly acknowledged at last, in whatever years remain to me before I face whatever final accounting awaits us all.