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The reader will long ago have judged this whole discussion superfluous and the details concerned in it too unimportant. But the matter gains a new interest if it is pursued in a certain direction.

I have just expressed the view that, when the painter was disagreeably surprised by the course taken by his illness, he invented an earlier bond (the one in ink) in order to be able to maintain his position with the reverend Fathers at Mariazell. Now I am writing for readers who, although they believe in psycho-analysis, do not believe in the Devil; and they might object that it was absurd for me to bring such an accusation against the poor wretch - hunc miserum, as he is called in the letter of introduction. For, they will say, the bond in blood was just as much a product of his phantasy as the allegedly earlier one in ink. In reality, no Devil appeared to him at all, and the whole business of pacts with the Devil only existed in his imagination. I quite realize this: the poor man cannot be denied the right to supplement his original phantasy with a new one, if altered circumstances seem to require it.

But here, too, the matter goes further. After all, the two bonds were not phantasies like the visions of the Devil. They were documents, preserved, according to the assurances of the copyist and the deposition of the later Abbot Kilian, in the archives of Mariazell, for all to see and touch. We are therefore in a dilemma. Either we must assume that both the papers which were supposed to have been given back to the painter through divine Grace were written by him at the time when he needed them; or else, despite all the solemn assurances, the confirmatory evidence of witnesses, signed and sealed, and so on, we shall be obliged to deny the credibility of the reverend Fathers of Mariazell and St. Lambert. I must admit that I am unwilling to cast doubts on the Fathers. I am inclined to think, it is true, that the compiler, in the interests of consistency, has falsified some things in the deposition made by the first Abbot; but a secondary revision’ such as this does not go much beyond what is carried out even by modern lay historians, and at all events it was done in good faith. In another respect, the reverend Fathers have established a good claim to our confidence. As I have said already there was nothing to prevent them from suppressing the accounts of the incompleteness of the cure and the continuance of the temptations. And even the description of the scene of exorcism in the Chapel, which one might have viewed with some apprehension, is soberly written and inspires belief. So there is nothing for it but to lay the blame on the painter. No doubt he had the red bond with him when he went to penitential prayer in the Chapel, and he produced it afterwards as he came back to his spiritual assistants from his meeting with the Demon. Nor need it have been the same paper which was later preserved in the archives, and, according to our construction, it may have borne the date 1668 (nine years before the exorcism).