Mash, mash, mash! An endless routine
of heavy hammers. Mash, mash, mash! upon the sufferer's limbs.
See the stone trough! says Goblin. For the water torture! Gurgle,
swill, bloat, burst, for the Redeemer's honour! Suck the bloody
rag, deep down into your unbelieving body, Heretic, at every breath
you draw! And when the executioner plucks it out, reeking with the
smaller mysteries of God's own Image, know us for His chosen
servants, true believers in the Sermon on the Mount, elect
disciples of Him who never did a miracle but to heal: who never
struck a man with palsy, blindness, deafness, dumbness, madness,
any one affliction of mankind; and never stretched His blessed hand
out, but to give relief and ease!
See! cries Goblin. There the furnace was. There they made the
irons red-hot. Those holes supported the sharp stake, on which the
tortured persons hung poised: dangling with their whole weight
from the roof. 'But;' and Goblin whispers this; 'Monsieur has
heard of this tower? Yes? Let Monsieur look down, then!'
A cold air, laden with an earthy smell, falls upon the face of
Monsieur; for she has opened, while speaking, a trap-door in the
wall. Monsieur looks in. Downward to the bottom, upward to the
top, of a steep, dark, lofty tower: very dismal, very dark, very
cold. The Executioner of the Inquisition, says Goblin, edging in
her head to look down also, flung those who were past all further
torturing, down here. 'But look! does Monsieur see the black
stains on the wall?' A glance, over his shoulder, at Goblin's keen
eye, shows Monsieur--and would without the aid of the directing
key--where they are. 'What are they?' 'Blood!'
In October, 1791, when the Revolution was at its height here, sixty
persons: men and women ('and priests,' says Goblin, 'priests'):
were murdered, and hurled, the dying and the dead, into this
dreadful pit, where a quantity of quick-lime was tumbled down upon
their bodies. Those ghastly tokens of the massacre were soon no
more; but while one stone of the strong building in which the deed
was done, remains upon another, there they will lie in the memories
of men, as plain to see as the splashing of their blood upon the
wall is now.
Was it a portion of the great scheme of Retribution, that the cruel
deed should be committed in this place! That a part of the
atrocities and monstrous institutions, which had been, for scores
of years, at work, to change men's nature, should in its last
service, tempt them with the ready means of gratifying their
furious and beastly rage! Should enable them to show themselves,
in the height of their frenzy, no worse than a great, solemn, legal
establishment, in the height of its power! No worse! Much better.
They used the Tower of the Forgotten, in the name of Liberty--their
liberty; an earth-born creature, nursed in the black mud of the
Bastile moats and dungeons, and necessarily betraying many
evidences of its unwholesome bringing-up--but the Inquisition used
it in the name of Heaven.
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