“You are aware, Sir, that the tales related in general of the interior
discipline of the Inquisition, must be in nine out of ten mere fables,
as the prisoners are bound by an oath never to disclose what happens
within its walls; and they who could violate this oath, would certainly
not scruple to violate truth in the details with which their
emancipation from it indulges them. I am forbidden, by an oath which I
shall never break, to disclose the circumstances of my imprisonment or
examination. I am at liberty to mention some general features of both,
as they are connected with my extraordinary narrative. My first
examination terminated rather favourably; my contumacy and aversion to
monasticism were indeed deplored and reprobated, but there was no
ulterior hint,--nothing to alarm the peculiar fears of an inmate of the
Inquisition. So I was as happy as solitude, darkness, straw, bread, and
water, could make me, or any one, till, on the fourth night after my
first examination, I was awoke by a light gleaming so strongly on my
eyes, that I started up. The person then retired with his light, and I
discovered a figure sitting in the farthest corner of my cell. Delighted
at the sight of a human form, I yet had acquired so much of the habit of
the Inquisition, that I demanded, in a cold and peremptory voice, who
had ventured to intrude on the cell of a prisoner? 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 every thing with the
fidelity of an eye-witness. 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(9), _it was the only one then in London_. He afterwards
spoke of the superb fetes 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 Pere
Bourdalone’s awful sermon, preached at the death-bed of the royal
beauty, dying of poison, (as suspected); and added, I saw the roses
heaped on her toilette, to array her for a fete that very night, and
near them stood the pix, 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. (9) I have read this somewhere, but cannot believe it. Coaches are
  mentioned by Beaumont and Fletcher, and even glass-coaches by Butler,
  in his “Remains.”

“These circumstances were trifling, and might be told by any one, 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 circumstance that
occurred in the reign of Louis the Thirteenth, he used the following
expressions(10): “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 of the
latter was announced.