Simplicissimus (18 page)

After that I had an enjoyable breakfast and soon found a spring where I refreshed myself and counted my ducats. Even if my life depended on it I couldn’t say in which country or district I was then. I only ate sparingly of my provisions and I stayed in the forest as long as they lasted. When my knapsack was empty, however, hunger drove me to the farms. I crept into cellars and kitchens at night, took what food I found that I could carry and bore it off to the wildest part of the woods. There I led the life of a hermit, just as I had before, except that I stole a lot and prayed very little. Nor did I live in one place alone, but roamed here and there. The good thing was that it was the beginning of summer; however, I could also use my musket to light a fire with whenever I wanted.

While I was roaming the woods I met various country people, but they always ran away from me. I don’t know exactly what the reason was. Perhaps the war had made them timid, driving them away from their homes and never leaving them in peace? Or perhaps the robbers had spread the story of their encounter with me throughout the countryside and those who saw me believed, like them, that the Evil One was abroad in the area? This made me begin to worry that my provisions might run out and I would be faced with starvation unless I ate herbs and roots, which I was no longer used to.

Plagued by these thoughts, I was glad one day to hear two woodcutters at work. I followed the sound of their axes and when I saw them I took a handful of ducats out of my satchel, showed them the gleaming gold and said, ‘If you men will look after me I will give you this handful of gold.’ But the moment they saw me and my gold they took to their heels, leaving their mallets and wedges behind, and their bread and cheese too. I filled my knapsack with the latter and headed back into the woods, despairing of ever enjoying human company again.

I spent a long time thinking this over and concluded, ‘Who knows what will happen to you. You’ve got money and if you can deposit it in security with honest people you can live on it for a long time.’ At that it occurred to me that I ought to sew it up. I made two armbands out of the donkey’s ears that frightened people off so, filled them with the ducats I had saved in Hanau and the ones I had taken from the robbers and put them on my arms above the elbows. Now that I had my money secure, I went back to breaking into the farms, taking what I needed from whatever stores I could find there. I may have been simple-minded, but I was cunning enough never to go back to any place where I had already stolen something, however little. In this way I was very successful as a thief and was never caught at my pilfering.

One evening towards the end of May I had once again entered a farm in my usual, though unlawful quest for food. As I went into the kitchen I realised that there were still people up (by the way, I never went to houses where there were dogs). I left the door leading out into the yard wide open, so that if there was any threat of danger I could make a quick getaway, then sat, quiet as a mouse, to wait until I felt sure the people had gone to bed. While I was waiting I noticed a crack in the hatch into the living room. I crept over to it, to see if the people were anywhere near ready to go to bed, but my hopes were dashed when I saw that they had only just got dressed. Instead of a candle they had a sulphurous blue lamp on the bench by the light of which they were greasing sticks, brooms, pitchforks, stools and benches. Then, one after the other, they flew out of the window on them.

I was amazed and felt a shiver of terror. Since, however, I had become accustomed to even greater horrors and, anyway, had never read or heard of witches, I thought little of it, especially as everything had happened so quietly. After they had all left I went into the room myself, thinking about what I wanted to take and where I should start looking for it. Mulling this over in my mind, I sat down astride one of the benches. Hardly was I seated than the bench, with me on it, shot out of the window. My satchel and musket, which I had put down on the floor, I left behind, as payment for the magic grease, so to speak. Sitting down, flying off and landing all happened in a trice. At least it seemed to me that I was instantaneously transported to a large crowd of people. (Of course, it is possible I was so terrified I didn’t register the time the journey took.)

They were all involved in a strange dance, the like of which I have never seen before or since. They were holding hands in several rings, one inside the other, and they all had their backs to each other, as in pictures of the Three Graces, that is with their faces turned towards the outside. The innermost ring consisted of some seven or eight people, the next probably twice that many, the third more than both of them put together and so on until the outer ring which had more than two hundred in it. One ring or circle was dancing round to the left, the next to the right, making it impossible for me to see exactly how many rings there were nor what it was in the middle that they were dancing round. The way all the heads wound in and out was funny and at the same time strangely eerie.

And the music was just as strange as the dance. It seemed to me that each dancer was singing his or her own song, which produced a bizarre harmony. The bench I came on had landed close to the musicians, who were standing outside the circles. Instead of pipes, flutes and shawms some of them were merrily blowing away on grass-snakes, adders and slow-worms. Others were holding cats, blowing up their backsides and fingering their tails, producing a sound like bagpipes. There were some fiddling away on horses’ skulls as if they were the finest violins and others playing the harp on cows’ skeletons such as you see lying around the knacker’s yard, and there was even one holding a bitch under his arm, grinding away with her tail and playing on her dugs with his fingers. And all the time the demons were trumpeting through their noses so that the woods resounded with their din. As soon as the dance was over the whole hellish crew started bawling and bellowing, ranting and raging, screaming, stamping and storming as if they had all gone raving mad. You can imagine how terrified I was.

In the midst of all this racket a man came up to me. He was carrying a gigantic toad under his arm, easily as big as a side drum; its intestines had been pulled out through its rear end and stuffed back into its mouth, which I found so disgusting it made me want to puke. ‘Come on, Simplicius’, he said, ‘I know you can play the lute very well. Why don’t you give us a nice tune.’ I almost fell over with the shock when the man addressed me by my name and was struck dumb. I imagined I must be dreaming and silently begged that I would wake up. However, the man with the toad, whom I was staring at fixedly, kept thrusting his nose out and in like a turkeycock until he was pressing down on my chest so that I was almost suffocating. Then I cried out loud to God, at which the whole crew vanished. In a trice it was pitch dark and I was so overcome with terror that I fell to the ground and must have made the sign of the cross at least a hundred times.

Since there are some people, scholars in particular, who do not believe that witches exist, never mind fly through the air on broomsticks, I do not doubt there will be those who will accuse Simplicius of making the whole story up. It is not my intention here to argue with people who think that. Indeed, since nowadays making up tall stories is no longer an art but a trade almost everyone has mastered, I cannot deny that I would be a poor writer if I could not do it too.

As for those who deny that witches can fly, I will simply remind them of Simon Magus, who flew through the air with the aid of an evil spirit and was brought crashing to the ground by St. Peter’s prayer. Nicolas Remi, a brave and sensible scholar who had a good number of witches burnt in the Duchy of Lorraine, tells the story of John of Hembach. When he was sixteen his mother, who was a witch, took him with her to their sabbath to play while they danced, as he could play the whistle. So he climbed up into a tree and whistled away, making sure he had a good view of the dance (perhaps because everything seemed so fantastic). Eventually he said, ‘God help us, where does all this crazy rabble come from?’ Hardly had he spoken these words than he fell down from the tree and dislocated his shoulder, but when he called out for help there was no one there. He told people about his experience, but most thought he had made it all up until shortly afterwards Catherine Prevost was arrested for witchcraft. She had attended the same sabbath and confessed to everything, even though she had not heard the rumour Hembach had spread.

Majolus gives two examples of men who attended a witches’ sabbath. One was a farm labourer who rode clinging to his wife’s back, the other an adulterer who took his mistress’s ointment and smeared himself with it. There is another story of a servant who got up early to grease the cart but in the darkness picked up the wrong pot. The cart rose up into the air and had to be pulled back down again. Olaus Magnus tells how King Hading of Denmark, having been driven out by rebels, flew back across the sea to his kingdom on Odin’s spirit that had turned itself into a horse. And it is a well-known fact that both wives and unmarried girls in Bohemia have their lovers brought to them during the night and from a long way off on the backs of goats. The story Antonio de Torquemada tells of the student you can read in his
Jardín de flores curiosas
. Grillandus writes of a respectable burgher who observed that his wife was in the habit of rubbing some ointment on herself then flying out of the house and forced her to take him with her to the sabbath. During the meal there was no salt, so he asked for and, not without difficulty, eventually got some, at which he said, ‘Here comes the salt, thank God.’ Immediately the lights went out and everything disappeared. When it was day again he learnt from some shepherds that he was not far from the town of Benevento in the Kingdom of Naples, that is a hundred miles from his home. Although he was a rich man he had to beg to make his way home. As soon as he did get back he denounced his wife to the authorities as a witch and she was burnt at the stake.

How Doctor Faust and others, who were no magicians, still travelled through the air from one place to another is well enough known. I myself was acquainted with a maid who had a similar experience. (The maid and her mistress are both now dead, although the maid’s father is still alive.) She was greasing her mistress’s boots by the fire. When she had done one she put it down, to do the other, and it flew straight out of the chimney. This story, however, was hushed up. I am only telling it now to convince people that witches and warlocks do sometimes fly to their gatherings and not to get you to accept that I did so myself. I leave that up to you, but if you don’t believe it, you will have to think up some other way in which I went in such a short time from Hersfeld or Fulda (I still don’t know where I was, wandering round in the forest) to the vicinity of Magdeburg.

To get back to my story, I can assure you that I stayed lying on my belly until it was completely light. I did not have the courage to get up; at the same time I was still in doubt as to whether I had dreamt the whole thing or not. Although I was fairly frightened, I was not too frightened to stop myself going to sleep. I presumed I could not be in any worse place than the wild woods, which I was used to since that was where I had spent most of the time since I had been separated from my Da.

It wasn’t until some foragers woke me at about nine the next morning that I saw I was lying in the middle of open fields. They took me with them to some windmills and then, after they had ground their grain, to the camp outside Magdeburg. There I was handed over to the colonel of a foot-regiment who asked me where I came from and what master I had served before. I told him everything, just as it had happened. Since I did not know what to call the Czech arquebusiers, I described their uniforms and imitated their language and told the colonel I had run away from them. I said nothing of my ducats and what I told them about flying through the air and seeing the witches dance they took to be invention and fool’s talk, principally because I got rather carried away when I reached that part of my story.

By this time a large crowd had gathered round (one fool makes a thousand). Among them was a man who had been a prisoner in Hanau the previous year where he had served in the Protestant army before rejoining the Imperial forces. He recognised me and immediately said, ‘Hey, that’s the commandant of Hanau’s calf!’ The colonel questioned him about me, but all the soldier could tell him was that I could play the lute well, that the arquebusiers from Colonel Corpus’s regiment had captured me outside Hanau and that the commandant had been sorry to lose me because I was an amusing fool. At this the colonel’s wife sent to another, who played the lute and always had one with her, to ask to borrow her instrument. When it arrived I was handed it and told to play a tune. I said, however, that they should bring me something to eat first since an empty belly, such as I had, would not harmonise very well with a fat belly such as the lute had. They did this, and once I had eaten my fill and washed it down with some good Zerbst beer I let them hear what I could do, both playing and singing. At the same time I talked gibberish, saying the first thing that came into my head, to make people think I was as big a fool as my outfit suggested. The colonel asked me where I was heading for, and when I answered that I didn’t care we soon agreed I should stay with him and be his page. He wanted to know what had happened to my donkey’s ears. ‘Aha’, I said, ‘if you knew where they were you would find they would suit you pretty well.’ But I was careful to say no more about them, since all my money was hidden in them.