CHAPTER XXXI.

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 defense 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 splendor 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 endeavored 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 enclosed 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 unfavorable 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 offense. 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 behavior. 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 demeanor.

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 jailer from time to time entered my apartment; but to me he was simply a moving and breathing statue, his features never molded 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 characterized 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 jailer; 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 defense, where my innocence was so complete and I was entirely disengaged from those unfavorable 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 jailer 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 tranquility 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 gray 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 dove 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 inquiry 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 fagot 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 defense. 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 mold 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 tranquility 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 fagot 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 driveling 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 favorable 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 practiced 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 favorite 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 philosophizing 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 humor 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!