The indulgence thus ostentatiously proclaimed by the father-inquisitor
was not exactly to my taste. Finding that all the energy of mind I
could apply to my defence was vain, I determined to have recourse to
a different mode of proceeding. I received three admonitions, as they
call them, the substance of which I have already recited, in the course
of the first ten days of my confinement, and I then for some time
heard of the inquisitor no more. I understood that it was frequently
the practice, after three admonitions, not to bring up the prisoner
for further hearing during a whole year; and it appeared sufficiently
probable from the last words addressed to me by my judge, that this
policy was intended to be employed in my case. Without further delay
therefore I resolved to recur to the expedient in the use of which my
power was unbounded, and by a brilliant offer at once to subdue the
scruples, and secure the fidelity, of the person or persons upon whom
my safe custody might be found to depend. All that was necessary was to
convince the party to whom I should propose the assisting me, of the
reality of my powers; and then to put _carte blanche_ into his hands,
or rather to ascertain at once the extent of his hopes and demands, and
by a spirited and peremptory conduct to yield them all. In the period
which, immediately previous to my present imprisonment, I had devoted
to the meditation of my future plans and the review of my past, I had
severely accused myself of half measures, and had determined to abjure
all hesitation and irresoluteness for the time to come. It is not
indeed to be wondered at, that, possessing a power so utterly remote
from common ideas and conceptions, and which, speaking from experience,
I do not hesitate to affirm no mere effort of imagination is adequate
to represent, I should have acted below the prerogatives and demands
of my situation. This mistake I would make no more. I would overwhelm
opposition by the splendour of my proceedings, and confound scruples by
the dignity and princely magnificence of my appearance. Unshackled as
I was with connections, and risking no one’s happiness but my own, I
proposed to compel the human species to view me from an awful distance,
and to oblige every one that approached me to feel his inferiority. It
would be to the last degree disgraceful and contemptible in me, being
raised so far above my peers in my privileges, if I were to fall below
the ordinary standard of a gallant man in the decision and firmness of
my system of conduct. Decision and firmness were the principles to be
exercised by me now; dignity and magnificence must await their turn
hereafter.
It was not long before I embraced an opportunity of speaking to the
man who waited on me with my daily allotment of provisions, and I
designed as shortly as possible to proceed to that species of argument,
in which I principally confided to engage him in my cause. But he
did not suffer me to utter a sentence before with a very expressive
gesture he interrupted me. I had remarked already the silence which
seemed for ever to pervade this dismal abode; but I had not ascribed
importance enough to this circumstance, to suppose that it could
materially interfere with the project I had formed. I now perceived the
countenance of my attendant to be overspread with terror and alarm. He
put his hand upon my mouth, and by his attitude seemed earnestly to
insist upon my conforming to the rules of the prison. I was not however
to be thus diverted from my purpose. I seized his hands, and began
again to pursue the discourse I had meditated. This proceeding on my
part induced him to break the silence he had hitherto preserved. He
told me that if I did not instantly set him at liberty, he would alarm
the prison. I loosed his hands. I then by every gesture I could devise
endeavoured to prevail on him to approach me, to suffer me to confer
with him in the lowest whisper, and assured him that he should have no
reason to repent his compliance. I might as well have addressed myself
to the walls that inclosed me. He would not stay an instant; he would
yield in nothing. He burst from me abruptly, and, closing the door of
my cell, left me in solitude and darkness.
In the evening of the day of this attempt the keeper of the prison
entered my apartment. When he appeared, I began to flatter myself that
in this man I should find a better subject for my purpose than in
the poor turnkey who had given me so unfavourable a prognostic of my
success. I lost no time in saying to him that I had something important
to communicate; but he peremptorily commanded me to be silent, and
listen to what he was about to say to me. He told me that I had already
been complained against for speech, and I was now repeating my offence.
He advised me to ponder well the consequences of what I was doing. The
orders of the inquisition were rigorous and inflexible. The cells were
not so substantially separated but that a voice might be heard from one
to the other; yet it had happened more than once, that a husband and
wife, a father and child, had for years been lodged next to each other,
without the smallest suspicion on either part of the proximity of
their situation. He was astonished at the pertinacity of my behaviour.
There was no government on the face of the earth, he would venture to
say, that had subjects more obedient, more dutiful and exemplary than
the holy inquisition. Not a murmur was ever heard; not a discontent
ever expressed. All was humbleness, thankfulness, and gratitude. He
recommended to me to conform myself to my situation, and let him hear
no further complaints of me. He had no sooner finished his harangue,
than he left me as abruptly as his servant had done. It is not possible
to impart any adequate image of the inflexibility of his features, or
the stern composure of his demeanour.
I now saw my situation in a different point of view. Bribery was of no
use, where all intercourse was denied. Great God! into what position
was I got? In the midst of a great and populous city, at this time
perhaps the metropolis of the world, I heard occasionally from beyond
the limits of my prison the hum of busy throngs, or the shouts of a
tumultuous populace. Yet I was myself in the deepest solitude. Like
the wretched mariners I have somewhere read of, shipwrecked upon a
desert shore, I might remain encaged, till I lost all recollection
of European language, and all acquaintance with the sound of my
own voice. A jailor from time to time entered my apartment; but to
me he was simply a moving and breathing statue, his features never
moulded into the expression of a meaning, nor his mouth opened for
the utterance of a sound. From the first I had been struck with the
extreme and death-like silence that characterised the place of my
confinement; but my mind was occupied with other thoughts, and I had
not adverted to the cause of the phenomenon. I had then felt little
inclination to the converse of a jailor; my natural disposition was
somewhat singular for a Frenchman, and inclined to taciturnity: I had
resolved to make a fair and ample trial of the power of a just defence,
where my innocence was so complete and I was entirely disengaged from
those unfavourable appearances which had constituted my misfortune at
Constance; and I even rejoiced, that a silence, which I regarded as
casual and individual, delivered me from all fear of impertinence in my
attendant. With how different a temper do we contemplate an incident
which, we persuade ourselves, continues to operate only because we
want inclination to remove it; and an incident which is violently
imposed, and to which, with the utmost exertion of our strength, we
cannot succeed to impart the slightest shock! The external object
is the same; its picture in the intellectual sensorium how unlike!
What a profound and inconceivable refinement in the art of tyranny is
this silence! The jailor might well tell me, that beneath his roofs
there was neither complaint nor murmur, that the very soul of its
inhabitants was subdued, and that they suffered the most unheard of
oppressions without astonishment or indignation. This is the peculiar
prerogative of despotism: it produces many symptoms of the same general
appearance as those which are derived from liberty and justice. There
are no remonstrances; there is no impatience or violence; there is a
calm, a fatal and accursed tranquillity that pervades the whole. The
spectator enters, and for a time misinterprets every object he sees;
he perceives human bodies standing or moving around him; and it is
with the utmost surprise, if he has leisure and opportunity to observe
a little further, that he finds at last the things he sees to be the
mere shades of men, cold, inert, glaring bodies, which the heaven-born
soul has long since deserted. Wonderful, I hesitate not to affirm, is
the genuine and direct power of such a situation as that in which I
was now placed, upon the human imagination. What was it then to me, to
whom speech was not merely one of those things, misnamed indulgences,
misnamed luxuries, upon which the desirableness and the health of human
existence depend; but who had looked to it as the only and the assured
means of my rescue from this scene of horrors! I intreat the reader to
pardon me, when I confess, that the operation of the discovery I made
was so overwhelming and apparently desperate, that it was some weeks, I
might say months, before my mind recovered its wonted bias and activity.
It was towards the close of the period I have named, that a new
incident, concurring with that familiarity which serves in some measure
to disarm every mischief of its sting, restored and re-awakened my
mind. I had vegetated now for some time, if the metaphor can with
propriety be applied to existence in a noxious and empoisoned air,
by which all vegetation would have been undermined, and which the
vital principle in man is scarcely competent to surmount; and in
all this period had encountered nothing from without, nor received
any intimation, that could in the slightest degree interrupt the
progressive destruction and waste of the soul. One day, at the
customary hour of my being attended by my warder, I was surprised to
see him bring with him a visiter to my cell. The unknown was a man
with grey hairs and a silver beard: though once tall, he now stooped
considerably, and supported himself with a staff: his dress was simple
and neat, and his whole appearance prepossessing. A sweet serenity was
diffused over his countenance; yet there were occasionally a fire,
and a contemplative grasp of thought, expressed in his eyes, which
sufficiently proved to me that his serenity was not the result of
vacancy. All this I discerned by the faint and uncertain light of a
small lamp which the warder had brought with him, and placed upon my
table. The introduction was performed in silence, and the warder left
us alone. The unknown beckoned me to be seated, for the first emotion
of surprise at the entrance of a stranger had caused me to start on my
feet; and, opening a folding stool he had received from my attendant,
he placed himself beside me.
He then addressed me in a low voice, and told me, that the humanity
of the fathers of the inquisition had given him permission to visit
me, and that, if I would be so obliging, in conformity to the
regulations of the prison, as to lower my voice to the standard of
his, we were at liberty to confer together. He hoped the conference
would be some relief to my solitude, if not lead to my complete
liberation. He then unfolded to me his story. He told me that he, like
myself, had been committed to the prisons of the inquisition upon an
accusation of sorcery. Having advanced thus far, he stopped. He talked
miscellaneously and digressively of wizards and their familiars, of
possessions and demons, of charms, spells, talismans and incantations,
even of the _elixir vitæ_ and the philosopher’s stone. Sometimes in
the progress of this discourse I could perceive him observing me
with the utmost narrowness, as if he would dive into my soul; and
again, particularly when he caught a glance of suspicion in my eye,
with infinite address changing his attitude and tone, and assuming
a surprising air of ingenuousness and gaiety. In a word he was a
consummate actor. It was evident, whether his designs were hostile or
friendly, that his purpose was to make himself master of my secret. I
asked him whether the accusation of sorcery which had been preferred
against him, were well founded or a calumny. He evaded that question,
and was only influenced by it to talk more copiously and fluently on
other topics, with the apparent design of making me forget the enquiry
I had made. He avoided anticipation, lest he should miscalculate and
take wrong ground in my affair; and, though superficially he seemed
communicative, I found that he scarcely told me respecting himself any
one thing definite and clear. He celebrated the clemency of the fathers
of the inquisition. He said, they seemed to regard themselves as the
adoptive parents of those they held in their custody, and were anxious
solely for the restoration of souls. In their exterior they were
austere, and had unfortunately contracted a forbidding manner; but he
had soon found, upon a closer inspection of their character, that the
only way to deal successfully with them was to repose in them a perfect
confidence. This panegyric was not resorted to till he had exhausted
the various topics by which he had hoped himself to extort my secret
from me. I asked him, whether the effect of his reposing confidence
had been an abjuration of sorcery, and reconciliation to the church?
But this question experienced the fate of every other that I addressed
to him. He only told me generally, that he had every reason to be
satisfied with, and to speak well of, the treatment he had experienced
in the house of the inquisition. He possessed, or rather, as I
believed, affected, a character of thoughtless garrulity and loquacity,
well adapted to cover the strange deviations and abrupt transitions
that marked his discourse. It was certainly singularly contrasted with
that close and penetrating air which from time to time I remarked in
him.
The reader may deem it surprising and unaccountable; but certain it is
I took uncommon delight in this man’s company. I pressed him earnestly
to repeat his visits, and would scarcely suffer him to depart, till he
had promised to come to me again the next day or the day after. Yet I
looked on him as my mortal enemy, and had no doubt that he was one of
the infamous wretches, employed by the policy of the inquisition, and
well known beneath those hated roofs by the appellation of _moscas_.
Various reasons may be assigned for my conduct in this particular.
Let it first be remembered that I was alone, and for months had not
heard the sound of my own voice. No incident marked my days; no object
arrested my attention. A dull, heavy, pestilential, soul-depressing
monotony formed the history of my life. If in this situation I had
been visited by a mouse or a rat, I should indefatigably have sought
to get within reach of it, I should have put it to my bosom, and have
felt with exultation the beat of an animal pulse, the warmth of animal
life pressing responsively on my heart. With what eager appetite I
should have mixed in scenes of calamity and cruelty, intolerable to any
other eye, glad for myself that even upon such terms I could escape
the frostbound winter of the soul! How I should have rejoiced, like
king Richard of England, to see four grim and death-dealing assassins
enter my cell, like him to struggle and wrestle and contend with my
murderers, though, as in his case, wounds and a fatal end should be the
result! Thus feeling then, it is little wonderful that I should have
hailed with pleasure the visit of the _mosca_.
But this was not all. While I conferred with, or rather listened to my
visiter, that pride and self complacency, which I suspect to be the
main, or at least the indispensable, ingredient of all our pleasures,
revived in my heart. I believed that he was set upon me by these
insatiable bloodsuckers of the inquisition, that he might ensnare
me with his questions, and treacherously inveigle me to the faggot
and the stake. I felt a last, lambent intimation of pride within me,
when my heart whispered me, “This man shall not attain his ends.” I
secretly defied his arts, and amused myself with baffling his most
cunning devices. I had now some one with whom to measure myself. The
comparison, I own, for a descendant of the counts of St. Leon, was a
humble one; but it is not permitted a prisoner in the jails of the
inquisition to be fastidious in his pleasures. This man I played with
at my ease, and laughed at his stratagems. I therefore felt that I
was his superior, and, which was a sensation I had not lately been
accustomed to, that I was somebody. These feelings recommended to me
his visits.
But what was much more material, I looked further, and proposed an
ultimate end to this occurrence. Let it be recollected what was my
unhappiness, when I found myself, if I may be allowed the expression,
suddenly deprived of speech, and then it will easily be understood
how sincerely I rejoiced to have this faculty restored to me. Speech,
as I have already said, I had regarded as the only and assured means
of my deliverance from this scene of horrors. I therefore doubted
not that from this miserable tool of my oppressors I would obtain my
enlargement. I stood firmly on my guard. I permitted him to run out the
whole length of his own project without interruption. By this delay I
should better understand his character, and finally seize it with a
more decisive grasp. Thus purposing, I allowed three or four visits
to pass before I opened to the _mosca_ my own proposal. I designed
unexpectedly to turn the tables upon him, to surprise and finish with
him at once. I knew not that all this precaution was necessary, but I
played for too deep a stake, not to be anxious to omit nothing, which
hereafter in retrospect I might reproach myself that I had omitted.
The time was at length come, at which I judged it convenient to execute
what I had planned in my mind. I began with an attempt to mortify and
humble my guest in his own eyes, that he might lose the pride to make
the smallest resistance to my proposal.
“Do you think, my good sir,” cried I, “that I have not perfectly
understood your intentions all this while? You have pretended to be
my friend, and to come to me for my good. I know that every secret I
reposed in your fidelity, every word that I might unguardedly have
dropped, every look and gesture that could have been interpreted to my
disadvantage, would have been instantly reported to the fathers of the
inquisition. Why, what a poor and miserable fool must you have imagined
me to be! How came you into my cell? Had you a secret key by which
you found your way hither unknown? Could you ever have come into my
apartment, if you had not been employed? You fawn upon me, and are the
tame and passive agent of my merciless destroyers! Shame on such base
and perfidious proceedings! Is this religion, that you should flatter
and cajole and lie to a man, purely that you may have the gratification
at last of burning him alive? If you or your masters can make out any
thing to my disadvantage, let them make it out in the way of fair and
open trial, by the production of direct evidence, and calling on me
for my defence. They style themselves the champions of Christendom and
ornaments of our holy faith; they pretend to an extraordinary degree
of sanctity, and would have all men bow down in mute reverence and
astonishment at their godliness; and yet they have recourse to means
so base, that the most profligate and abandoned tyrant upon record
would have disdained to employ them. But, base as are the judges and
assessors of the court in whose prison I stand, even they scorn the
meanness of the perfidious task in which you have engaged.”
The vehemence I put into the suppressed and under-tone with which I
delivered these reproaches, seemed to produce no emotion in my guest.
He dropped his staff upon his shoulder; he meekly folded his arms
upon his bosom, and answered, that he had long since learned to bear
every contumely for the cause of God and the Redeemer: they were
heaven-directed chastisements, which his manifold sins and iniquities
had amply deserved.
“Hypocrite!” replied I, “would you make me believe that a conscientious
motive can prompt such conduct as yours, can mould your features into a
treacherous expression of kindness, and fill your mouth with lies and
deceptions innumerable?”
“No proceedings,” rejoined he, with an unaltered air, “are base, that
God and his church prescribe. I take up the cross with cheerfulness,
and glory in my shame. The more ignominious in the eyes of an
unregenerate world is my conduct, the more entire and implicit does it
prove my obedience to be.”
My heart swelled within me as he talked. I could lend no attention
to such despicable cant, and was ashamed to see the most profligate
conduct assuming to itself the pretensions to an extraordinary degree
of sanctity and disinterestedness.
“Come, come,” said I, “dissembler; I know that nothing could buy a man
to so loathsome an office but money. You are some galley-slave, some
wretch, who by your complicated crimes have forfeited your life to the
community, and are now permitted to earn a miserable existence by lying
in wait for the unfortunate, and engaging in arts at which humanity
shudders. I take you upon your own terms; you are the man I want.
Assist me to escape; go with me to some safer and less cruel country;
I will reward you to the extent of your wishes. Give me your hand; an
estate of six thousand pistoles per annum, without further condition,
waits your acceptance. I invoke all the powers, sacred to truth and
punishers of deceit, to witness, that I have ability to make good the
whole of what I promise.”
While I spoke, I could perceive an extraordinary revolution taking
place in my guest. The meekness and tranquillity of his countenance
subsided; his eye became animated and alive. I hailed the auspicious
omen; I urged my proposal with all the impetuosity I could exert and
all the arguments I could devise. At length I paused. I looked again
at the countenance of the _mosca_; I was less pleased than before. The
expression did not seem to be that of assent and congratulation; it was
rather of horror and alarm.
“St. Jago, and all the saints and angels of heaven, protect me!”
exclaimed he. “What do I hear? A full confession of guilt! And art
thou then the confederate of the prince of the powers of darkness? If
we were not here, in the holy house of inquisition, I should die at
this moment with fear that the roof would fall and crush us together.
I should expect hell to swallow me alive, for being found in thy
unhallowed society.” He trembled with every expression of the sincerest
terror and aversion.
“‘Thy money perish with thee,’ thou second Elymas, like him ‘full
of all subtlety and mischief, child of the devil, enemy of all
righteousness!’ Blasted be thy offers! Have I for this devoted myself
to the service of God, assiduously sought out the basest and vilest
offices of that service, and loaded myself with ignominy here, that I
might obtain a crown of glory hereafter? and am I now to be assaulted
with the worst of Satan’s temptations? Even so, Lord, if such be thy
will! Oh, poor, miserable, deluded victim of the arch-deceiver of
mankind, what has the devil done for thee? He has persuaded thee that
thou art rich; and thou wantest every joy and every necessary of life.
He has promised to be thy friend; and he brings thee to the faggot and
flames in this world, as an earnest of thy eternal damnation hereafter.”
My visiter had no sooner thus poured out the tumult and agitation of
his soul, than he left me abruptly, and I saw him no more.
Such was the event of my attempt to bribe the officers of the
inquisition. In my first experiment I could not even obtain a hearing;
in what followed, my proposals were rejected with all the transports
of religious abhorrence. What I offered indeed, however dazzling in
the statement, had not in fact the nature of a temptation. He to whom
I addressed it gave no credit to my assertions; he thought that I was
the mere drivelling dupe of him he called the arch-deceiver of mankind,
or that my money, when possessed, would soon change its figure, and
from seeming pieces of solid coin be converted into pieces of horn or
of shells. Even if he had not apprehended such a metamorphosis, he
would yet have regarded every doubloon he received as the price of his
continual adversity here, and damnation hereafter. I gained nothing
favourable for my situation by the trial I had made, but I added a
new chapter to my knowledge of human nature. I found, that to be a
knave, it was not necessary to be an infidel: I corrected the too hasty
conclusion which I had adopted with the rest of my contemporaries,
that he whose conduct was infamous, must inevitably be destitute of
religious impressions and belief; and I became satisfied that a man,
while he practised every vice that can disgrace human nature, might
imagine he was doing God service.
Enough of the interior of the prison of the inquisition. I remained a
tenant of this wretched mansion twelve years. Though the wretch who had
been placed upon me as a spy, was, from my proposal to him, satisfied
of my guilt, his superiors were not so. They found nothing in what he
reported definitive as to the nature of my unlawful practices, and they
could extort from me no further confession. They therefore adhered
to their favourite maxim, to avoid the precipitate mistakes of other
tribunals, and to allow their prisoner full time to develop his guilt,
or, as they pretended, to establish his innocence. Perhaps too the
temper of the prince who now filled the Spanish throne, contributed to
my safety. They could not content themselves with a less punishment for
so obstinate and incorrigible a heretic, than that of the flames; but,
during the reign of the emperor Charles, this species of punishment
for heresy was rarely inflicted, and only one or two contumacious,
at intervals, were delivered over to the executioner at a time. The
institution whose victim I had become, looked for a richer and more
abundant harvest from the well-known piety and zeal of his successor.
I pass over the rest of the years of my tedious imprisonment They had
in them a sad and death-like uniformity. What surprising or agreeable
adventures can be expected from a man closed up within the four walls
of a dungeon? Yet it is not altogether the uniformity of this period
that determines me not to dwell upon and expand it. Twelve years
cannot pass in the life of man without many memorable incidents and
occurrences. He that should be buried alive in the deepest cavern
of the earth, if he were not an idiot, or incapable of the task of
narration, and could subsist twelve years in that situation, could
tell of things that occurred to him, that might fill the busy man of
the world with thoughts and speculation almost to bursting. I might
unfold the secrets of my prison-house, but that I will not. I refuse
the consequences of that story both to my readers and myself. I have no
inclination to drive the most delicate or susceptible of my readers mad
with horrors. I could convince such, if such there are, who suppose my
faculties were altogether benumbed or dead, that it was not so. I did
indeed pass days, perhaps weeks, in a condition of that sort. But at
other times my mind was roused, and became busy, restless, impatient,
and inventive. There was no mode of escape that I did not ruminate
upon or attempt; not to mention that, though my body was restrained,
my mind occasionally soared to the furthest regions of the empyrean,
or plunged into the deepest of the recesses in which nature conceals
her operations. All systems of philosophising became familiar to me. I
revolved every different fable that has been constructed respecting the
invisible powers that superintend the events of the boundless universe;
and I fearlessly traced out and developed the boldest conjectures and
assertions of demonism or atheism. As the humour of the moment led me,
I derived misery or consolation from each of these systems in their
turn.--But memory, bitter memory, unperceived by its lord, is seizing
my pen, and running away with my narrative. Enough, enough of the
interior of the prison of the inquisition!