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Updated: May 27, 2025
For five months Captain Wright had seen only gaolers, spies, tyrants, executioners, fetters, racks, and other tortures; and for five weeks his food had been bread and his drink water. The man who, thus situated and thus perplexed, preserves his native dignity and innate sentiments, is more worthy of monuments, statues, or altars than either the legislator, the victor, or the saint.
As the poets' tables at the Cafe de Seville had been for some time transformed into beds of torture upon which Amedee Violette's poems were stretched out and racked every day from five to seven, the amiable Paul Sillery, with a jeering smile upon his lips, tried occasionally to cry pity for his friend's verses, given up to such ferocious executioners.
"I will die for her!" cried Agias, his despair mingled with a ray of hope. "Where is your master?" "At the Forum, I think, soliciting votes," replied the boy. "Well then, follow me," said Drusus, "our road leads back to the Forum. We may meet him. If I can arrange with him, your executioners have nothing to fear from Valeria. Come along." Agias followed, with his head again in a whirl.
But though they writhed and fainted under the pincers of the executioners, they confessed nothing. Indeed, they preserved a silence which left the people amazed, for the people lacked the explanation. The Grand Justiciary, Hugh des Baux, had seen to it that the Pope's injunctions should be obeyed.
Much as this bloody roll, swelling from day to day and amounting at last to 4700 names, excited the just horror of the multitude, it at any rate checked in some degree the mere caprice of the executioners.
To all thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, to all priests of established religions, to the officials of every kind of government, to the Ministers, whether of parliaments or despots, to all naval and military officers, to all lawyers, judges, jurymen, policemen, gaolers, and executioners, to all tax-collectors, speculators, and financiers, Tolstoy was, indeed, the devil in human form.
From day to day he received reports that his commands were being carried out. The land was filled with weeping, for the cruel butchery was worse than war. None could defend themselves. Mere suspicion was enough for the executioners. They wasted no time with doubts, but slew all who were said to belong to the House of David. The Shah looked over the list each night and chuckled.
You compared Saint Teresa just now to a flower in wrought iron; he too is such, but he is the lily of tortures, the royal flower which the executioners were wont of old time to stamp on the heraldic flesh of convicts. Like red-hot iron, he is at the same time burning and sombre.
The executioners expose to the flies the martyrs whose bodies are covered with honey; they make them walk with bare feet over broken glass or red-hot coals, put them in ditches with reptiles; chastise them with whips, whose thongs are weighted with leaden balls; nail them when alive in coffins, which they throw into the sea; hang them by their hair, and then set fire to them; moisten their wounds with quicklime, boiling pitch, or molten lead; make them sit on red-hot iron stools; burn their sides with torches; break their bones on wheels, and torture them in every conceivable way.
"Sire," said he, "your majesty has kindly remembered that I lent assistance to the very noble and very unfortunate Charles I., when his executioners conducted him from St. James's to Whitehall." "Yes, certainly, I do remember it, and always shall remember it."
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