able and for the most part unknown, I shall confine myself to treating of the more obvious of them.
And first there is the powder which they use. This is sometimes black, sometimes white or of an ashen colour, and sometimes of some other colour. They use it when they produce hail, as we saw in the last chapter; and they also use it against persons or cattle, to kill them or make them ill. When Jacques Bocquet and Françoise Secretain wished to kill Loys Monneret they made her eat a crust of bread dusted with a white powder which their master had given them. When Thievenne Paget wanted to be revenged on Claude Roy she mixed the powder in a cheese which she made him eat, and he died immediately afterwards. Michel Udon and Pierre Burgot confessed that their masters, who were named Moyset and Guillemin, gave them an ashen powder with which they rubbed their left arms and hands, and that by this means they killed every animal that they touched.
There are others who bury some of this powder under the threshold of a door or in some other place, and those who pass over that spot are taken ill. This is what Groz-Jacques did to a man of Mi-joux, of whom we shall speak later. Some have thought that the powder thus given to witches is veritable poison, and others have not held this opinion. But my own belief is that both these opinions may be right. For since the Devil has knowledge of the properties of every herb, it is easy for him to compound a poison and give it to his disciples to cause, by this means, the death or illness of a person or beast. And it is likely that the bread which Loys Monneret ate was
