BOOK EIGHTH.
CHAPTER 2. CONTINUATION OF THE CROWN WHICH WAS CHANGED INTO A DRY LEAF.
(continued)
"You persist?" said Jacques Charmolue. "Then it grieves
me deeply, but I must fulfil my office."
"Monsieur le Procureur du Roi," said Pierrat abruptly,
"How shall we begin?"
Charmolue hesitated for a moment with the ambiguous grimace of
a poet in search of a rhyme.
"With the boot," he said at last.
The unfortunate girl felt herself so utterly abandoned by
God and men, that her head fell upon her breast like an inert
thing which has no power in itself.
The tormentor and the physician approached her simultaneously.
At the same time, the two assistants began to fumble among
their hideous arsenal.
At the clanking of their frightful irons, the unhappy child
quivered like a dead frog which is being galvanized. "Oh!"
she murmured, so low that no one heard her; "Oh, my Phoebus!"
Then she fell back once more into her immobility and
her marble silence. This spectacle would have rent any other
heart than those of her judges. One would have pronounced
her a poor sinful soul, being tortured by Satan beneath the
scarlet wicket of hell. The miserable body which that frightful
swarm of saws, wheels, and racks were about to clasp in
their clutches, the being who was about to be manipulated by
the harsh hands of executioners and pincers, was that gentle,
white, fragile creature, a poor grain of millet which human
justice was handing over to the terrible mills of torture to
grind. Meanwhile, the callous hands of Pierrat Torterue's
assistants had bared that charming leg, that tiny foot, which
had so often amazed the passers-by with their delicacy and beauty,
in the squares of Paris.
"'Tis a shame!" muttered the tormentor, glancing at these graceful
and delicate forms.
Had the archdeacon been present, he certainly would have
recalled at that moment his symbol of the spider and the fly.
Soon the unfortunate girl, through a mist which spread before
her eyes, beheld the boot approach; she soon beheld her foot
encased between iron plates disappear in the frightful apparatus.
Then terror restored her strength.
|