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The Abbot Franciscus’s deposition, which was dated, as we know, a few days later (September 12, 1677), already describes a more complicated state of affairs. It is plausible to assume that the painter had given more precise information in the interval. The deposition relates that the painter had signed two bonds: one in the year 1668 (a date which should also be the correct one according to the letter of introduction), written in black ink, and the other ‘sequenti anno 1669’, written in blood. The bond that he received back on the day of the Nativity of the Virgin was the one written in blood - viz. the later bond, which had been signed in 1669. This does not emerge from the Abbot’s deposition, for there it merely says later ‘schedam redderet’ and ‘schedam sibi porrigentem conspexisset’ as if there could only be a single document in question. But it does follow from the subsequent course of the story, and also from the coloured title-page of the Tropheaum, where what is clearly a red script can be seen on the paper which the demon dragon is holding. The further course of the story is, as I have already related, that the painter returned to Mariazell in May, 1678, after he had experienced further temptations from the Evil One in Vienna; and that he begged that, through a further act of Grace on the part of the Holy Mother, the first document, written in ink, might also be given back to him. In what way this came about is not so fully described as on the first occasion. We are merely told: ‘quâ juxta votum redditâ’; and in another passage the compiler says that this particular bond was thrown to the painter by the Devil ‘crumpled up and torn into four pieces’ on May 9, 1678, at about nine o’clock in the evening.

Both bonds, however, bear the date of the same year - 1669.

This incompatibility is either of no significance or may put us on the following track.

If we take as a starting-point the Abbot’s account, as being the more detailed one, we are confronted with a number of difficulties. When Christoph Haizmann confessed to the village priest of Pottenbrunn that he was hard pressed by the Devil and that the time-limit would soon run out, he could only (in 1677) have been thinking of the bond which he had signed in 1668 - namely, the first one, written in black (which is referred to in the letter of introduction as the only one, but is described there being written in blood). But a few days later, at Mariazell, he was only concerned to get back the later bond, in blood, which was not nearly due to expire then (1669-77), and allowed the first one to become overdue. This latter was not reclaimed till 1678 - that is, when it had run into its tenth year. Furthermore, why are both the bonds dated in the same year (1669), when one of them is explicitly attributed to the following year (‘anno subsequenti’)?