She was about fifty when an executioner pretended to prepare her for another session of torture. They had already hurt her once. They had not yet obtained a confession.
On 23 October 1592, Mengette Estienne was questioned again in Lorraine. By then she had answered her neighbours' accusations, been confronted with witnesses and endured repeated torture. Now the judges were trying the threat of more. They wanted the admission she had still not made.
Her father came from Mazeville, in the Ban de Fraisse. She had married twice. Her first marriage, some twenty years earlier, had lasted about eight years and given her three children, two of whom were still living. About a year after it ended she married Colas Jean Gerard of Le Paire and had three more children with him. Her life had been spent among households, livestock and the neighbours who were now explaining their misfortunes through her.
The accusations reached into ordinary village business: debts, damaged sheaves and quarrels over animals. One neighbour had stood surety for Mengette's husband over a purchase of wheat and held sheaves of wheat as a pledge. Pigs got into the sheaves. Soon afterwards his best pig died, and he believed Mengette had killed it in anger. His wife strongly suspected her too. A dispute over what a household owed had acquired a dead animal, and the dead animal had acquired an explanation.
Other neighbours said their cows lost their milk after passing her house, and described animals that stopped outside it. Even where a cow chose to stand could be brought against her.
Mengette had an explanation for that. The road ran close by her house, and she laid fresh straw in front of it, which the animals liked. She also supplied a less dignified explanation for their interest in the doorpost: her husband urinated against it, and they came to lick it.
It was a remarkably domestic answer to a charge of supernatural power. The neighbours had described an ominous attraction. Mengette described the front of her house.
She did not pretend there had been no quarrels. She admitted arguments and insults with neighbours, and said amends had been made with some of them. She denied harming anyone. She had lost two animals herself one winter, and she put it plainly: "God does indeed permit such misfortune." It would be unreasonable, she said, to lay every misfortune at the door of witches.
She admitted the quarrels. She denied the witchcraft.
Confronted with witnesses in mid-September, she dismissed one witness's reports as hearsay, called one of her accusers a liar and said a neighbour's dead wife had been her friend, whom she had mourned. Her answers were particular: this dispute had happened, that accusation was false, her own household had suffered losses too. But answering the allegations did not end the proceedings. On 20 September Nicolas Remy, Lorraine's prosecutor general, requested torture, and six days later the Change de Nancy, the senior court that reviewed such cases, approved it.
On 9 October she was brought before the duchy's executioner. Before it began, she was warned that the torture could leave her crippled for life if she did not tell the truth. The authorities called what they wanted the truth. Mengette continued to deny the charge.
They put her on the rack. She cried out, "Good prince of Lorraine, I am dying. My God, my Creator, pity, mercy." When they racked her again she cried that she had been wronged, and asked whether there was any pity left in the world, and who would feed her children.
The woman who had explained the straw outside her house was now asking about the people who depended on her. The questions put to her concerned witchcraft. Hers concerned food.
The following morning she was racked again. Still there was no confession. The judges suggested that the devil was protecting her and that she was not feeling the torture. Her refusal to admit witchcraft could itself be made to fit the accusation. She answered that she was a good Christian and had harmed no one.
On 12 October, Remy ordered another interrogation under threat of torture. His reasoning offered little comfort: experience, he said, showed that witches often denied everything under torture and confessed afterwards. Yet the order also provided an end to the proceedings. If she continued to refuse confession and no new grounds for suspicion appeared, she was to be dismissed, with stern warnings to give no further cause for scandal or suspicion. The Change de Nancy approved the order the next day.
The warning left the burden with her. Her accusers did not have to explain their suspicions away; she was to avoid giving them any more. But there was now an instruction under which she could be released, even without the confession the judges had sought.
On 23 October they questioned her once more, and the local executioner went through the motions of preparing her for the rack. She had already been racked on two separate days and had given the same answers each time. The pretence produced nothing the real thing had not. She admitted the quarrels. She denied the witchcraft. And with no confession and nothing new against her, Mengette Estienne was released.
