The person answered in the blandest tones that ever soothed the human ear, that he was, like myself, a prisoner in the Inquisition;—that, by its indulgence, he had been permitted to visit me, and hoped—
“And is hope to be named here?” I could not help exclaiming.
He answered in the same soft and deprecatory tone; and, without adverting to our peculiar circumstances, suggested the consolation that might be derived from the society of two sufferers who were indulged with the power of meeting and communicating with each other.
This man visited me for several successive nights; and I could not help noticing three extraordinary circumstances in his visits and his appearance. The first was, that he always (when he could) concealed his eyes from me; he sat sideways and backways, shifted his position, changed his seat, held up his hand before his eyes; but when at times he was compelled or surprised to turn their light on me, I felt that I had never beheld such eyes blazing in a mortal face—in the darkness of my prison, I held up my hand to shield myself from their preternatural glare. The second was, that he came and retired apparently without help or hindrance—that he came, like one who had a key to the door of my dungeon, at all hours, without leave or forbiddance—that he traversed the prisons of the Inquisition, like one who had a master-key to its deepest recesses. Lastly, he spoke not only in a tone of voice clear and audible, totally unlike the whispered communications of the Inquisition, but spoke his abhorrence of the whole system—his indignation against the Inquisition, Inquisitors, and all their aiders and abettors, from St. Dominic down to the lowest official—with such unqualified rage of vituperation, such caustic inveteracy of satire, such unbounded license of ludicrous and yet withering severity, that I trembled.
You know, sir, or perhaps have yet to know, that there are persons “accredited” in the Inquisition, who are permitted to solace the solitude of the prisoners, on the condition of obtaining, under the pretence of friendly communication, those secrets which even torture has failed to extort. I discovered in a moment that my visitor was not one of these—his abuse of the system was too gross, his indignation too unfeigned. Yet, in his continued visits, there was one circumstance more, which struck me with a feeling of terror that actually paralyzed and annihilated all the terrors of the Inquisition.
He constantly alluded to events and personages beyond his possible memory—then he checked himself—then he appeared to go on, with a kind of wild and derisive sneer at his own absence. But this perpetual reference to events long past, and men long buried, made an impression on me I cannot describe. His conversation was rich, various, and intelligent, but it was interspersed with such reiterated mention of the dead, that I might be pardoned for feeling as if the speaker was one of them. He dealt much in anecdotical history, and I, who was very ignorant of it, was delighted to listen to him, for he told everything with the fidelity of an eyewitness. He spoke of the “Restoration” in England, and repeated the well-remembered observation of the queen-mother, Henriette of France—that, had she known as much of the English on her first arrival, as she did on her second, she never would have been driven from the throne; then he added, to my astonishment, I was beside her carriage, it was the only one then in London.24 He afterwards spoke of the superb fêtes given by Louis Quatorze, and described, with an accuracy that made me start, the magnificent chariot in which that monarch personated the god of day, while all the titled pimps and harlots of the court followed as the rabble of Olympus. Then he reverted to the death of the Duchesse d’Orleans, sister to Charles II—to Père Bourdalone’s awful sermon, preached at the deathbed of the royal beauty, dying of poison (as suspected); and added, I saw the roses heaped on her toilette, to array her for a fête that very night, and near them stood the pyx, and tapers, and oil, shrouded with the lace of that very toilette. Then he passed to England; he spoke of the wretched and well-rebuked pride of the wife of James II who “thought it scorn” to sit at the same table with an Irish officer who informed her husband (then Duke of York) that he had sat at table, as an officer in the Austrian service, where the Duchess’s father (Duke of Modena) had stood behind a chair, as a vassal to the Emperor of Germany.
These circumstances were trifling, and might be told by anyone, but there was a minuteness and circumstantiality in his details, that perpetually forced on the mind the idea that he had himself seen what he described, and been conversant with the personages he spoke of. I listened to him with an indefinable mixture of curiosity and terror. At last, while relating a trifling but characteristic circumstance25 that occurred in the reign of Louis the Thirteenth, he used the following expressions: “One night that the king was at an entertainment, where Cardinal Richelieu also was present, the Cardinal had the insolence to rush out of the apartment before his Majesty, just as the coach
