hat
such awful orgies could be enacted within any short distance of the
sovereigns' palace, or their subjects' homes. She stood in the centre
of a large vaulted subterranean hall, which, from the numerous arched
entrances to divers passages and smaller chambers that opened on every
side, appeared to extend far and wide beneath the very bowels of the
earth. It was lighted with torches, but so dimly, that the gloom
exaggerated the horrors, which the partial light disclosed.
Instruments of torture of any and every kind--the rack, the wheel, the
screw, the cord, and fire--groups of unearthly-looking figures, all
clad in the coarse black serge and hempen belt; some with their faces
concealed by hideous masks, and others enveloped in the cowls, through
which only the eyes could be distinguished, the figure of the cross
upon the breast, and under that emblem, of divine peace, inflicting
such horrible tortures on their fellow-men that the pen shrinks from
their delineation. Nor was it the mere instruments of torture Marie
beheld: she saw them in actual use; she heard the shrieks and groans
of the hapless victims, at times mingled with the brutal leers and
jests of their fiendish tormentors; she seemed to take in at one view,
every species of torture that could be inflicted, every pain that
could be endured; and yet, comparatively, but a few of the actual
sufferers were visible. The shrillest sounds of agony came from the
gloomy arches, in which no object could be distinguished.

Whatever suffering meets the sight, it does not so exquisitely affect
the brain as that which reaches it through the ear. At the former the
heart may bleed and turn sick; but at the latter the brain seems,
for the moment, wrought into frenzy; and, even though personally in
safety, it is scarcely possible to restrain the same sounds from
bursting forth. How then must those shrill sounds of human agony have
fallen on the hapless Marie, recognizing as she did with the rapidity
of thought, in the awful scene around her, the main hall of that
mysterious and terrible tribunal, whose existence from her earliest
infancy had been impressed upon her mind, as a double incentive to
guard the secret of her faith; that very Inquisition, from which her
own grandfather, Julien Heuriquez, had fled, and in which the less
fortunate grandfather of her slaughtered husband, had been tortured
and burnt.

For a second she stood mute and motionless, as turned to stone; then,