When I saw the headline in the National Catholic Register, “World Famous Exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth Dies at 91,” I was struck by a coup de foudre. “François,” I remarked to my husband. (His name is Francis, but my Quebec roots were asserting themselves.) “If we assume demonic possession, the mysteries that have surrounded Hillary Clinton all make sense.”

“We don’t assume anything,” replied my very own devil’s advocate. “We insist upon evidence.”

But it ties everything together! We used to think that she was simply dead. Like one of the bodies propped up on the ramparts in Gunga Din to make it look like there were fighters left. Or like in The Cid, where his corpse is tied to his horse and sent out at the head of the army to fool the enemy. But consider the violent jerking of her head where it seems to be attached to her neck by a hinge. Kinda reminds you of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, right?”

“Linda Blair did a 360 degree turn with her head,” replied the devil’s advocate.

“She also spits out streams of green bile,” I insisted. “Just like Linda.”

“Those weren’t ‘streams.’ They were a couple of balls of ordinary phlegm that she spit into a glass of water.”

“But then she drank the water!”

“Dégoûtant, bien sur, but it’s not enough to prove demonic possession.”

“Then there’s the matter of her oversized pants and jackets. Some say she’s sporting a catheter under all that volume. But what if it’s a devil’s tail? And on the beach she wears slippers! Why? Just maybe the cloven feet?”

The devil’s advocate shook his head and returned to his omelette aux fines herbes that I’d cooked for his breakfast.

“What else could explain all untimely deaths?” I shouted. Folks who know too much about her shady affairs have a way of conveniently turning up dead just before they’re about to give testimony.”

That got his attention, for he put down his fork with its tasty morsel and looked at me.

“It started in 1993 with the apparent suicide of Vince Foster, a dashingly handsome 48-year-old attorney who’d been one of Hillary’s partners in the Rose law firm in Arkansas. Devoted to Hillary to a fault, he spent a lot of time destroying the firm’s records that would have incriminated her in the notorious Whitewater land scandal before joining her and Bill as their personal attorney and the White House deputy counsel.

“He’d dutifully dealt with the Madison Guaranty bank scandal, where the Clintons were alleged to have diverted money from a failing bank to fund Bill’s campaign for governor, and to have used their influence with state regulators to keep the bank afloat.

“And there was Travelgate, where the Clintons had summarily fired seven long-term civil servants working in the White House travel office so that Hillary could give their jobs to her friends. One of the fired staffers, Billy Dale, had worked there for 30 years. Having turfed them out unceremoniously, the Clintons followed up with an announcement that they were under criminal investigation by the FBI. When the excrement finally hit the fan, the Clintons, as is their wont, put out at least five exculpatory stories to account for their evil actions.

“Poor Vince knew a lot about these affairs and was being called upon to answer questions when he was found dead in a parked car. Hillary routinely humiliated him in public, often making him cry, according to Bob Woodward. She demanded that Vince clean up the messes she made, and when he didn’t do it fast enough, the abuse that followed “hurt him deeply” as he told a colleague. However you explain it, Hillary had a hand in Foster’s death.

“For some, chronicling the deaths of Clinton associates over the years has become a hobby, for they did tend to unexpectedly shuffle off their mortal coil. Here are only a few of the most recent ones.

“On June 22, John Ashe accidentally crushed his own throat with a barbell a few hours before he was set to testify about Hillary’s links to a Chinese businessman implicated in the China-gate scandal involving the funneling of illegal donations to Bill’s reelection fund in 1996. On March 3, Berta Caceres was murdered in her own bed after naming Hillary as responsible for the Honduran coup that toppled its democratically elected President and caused the country to descend into chaos. On July 3, Shawn Lucas was found dead of still undisclosed causes after serving the DNC and its Chairperson with a class action suit on behalf of Bernie Sanders supporters.

“There’s much more, but I think you get the picture. Being even tangentially involved in Clinton affairs can be fatal. Not that Hillary can be shown to be responsible for these and other similar deaths. But the Devil has minions who know what the big Kahuna wants.”

“Aha!” said François. “You are making a category error. There’s a difference between demonic possession and natural depravity. The first assumes the invasion of a person’s body by a demon that makes the person suffer physically and mentally, and also do bad things. These are the kind of cases Father Amorth dealt with so ably with his exorcisms. In the latter case, the person herself was, is, and always will be, evil. It’s ‘a depravity according to nature,’ as Herman Melville put it.”

I looked at my husband with renewed respect. “Mon cheri,” I said, “go back to your omlette aux fines herbes which I so lovingly prepared for your breakfast. You are right. Hillary has personal ties to Satan. Doctor Carson explained all of this to us on CNN back in July.

“This is still speculative, of course. Only think of her greed, her ruthlessness, her total lack of empathy. What kind of a woman, immediately after collapsing from pneumonia, with which she’d been diagnosed only two days earlier, would pay a visit to her daughter and grandchildren — one of them an infant — and then bend down to hug a child walking on the sidewalk. I’d half expected her to pull an apple out of her commodious pants and cackle, ‘Enjoy this fruit, my lovely.’

“Remember how George Stephanopoulos described his time at the White House:

He reported staffers and officials yelling, crying, shouting swear words and verbally threatening each other. It was a real hothouse. There was a sense the gargoyles had taken over the cathedral. But that wouldn’t become apparent until later.

“George was Bill’s communications director and senior advisor. He’s still an acolyte, and yet what he describes sounds like hell. Hell is wherever Hillary is. In the words of a witness contained in a memo to the White House chief of staff, if staffers didn’t conform to Hillary’s every wish, ‘there would be hell to pay’.”

“Exactement,” François pronounced. “But sadly, mon omelette est devenu froid, and you know how I hate cold eggs. So won’t you please make a fresh one?”