enth century be tried by this criterion, the conclusion is
inevitable that for her the age of barbarism had not yet completely
passed away. The catalogue of crimes to which death was affixed as the
penalty is frightfully long; some of them were almost trivial offences.
A boy less than sixteen years of age was hung for stealing jewelry from
his master.[74] On the other hand, with flagrant inconsistency, a
nobleman, Rene de Bonneville, superintendent of the royal mint, for the
murder of his brother-in-law, was dragged to the place of execution on a
hurdle, but suffered the less ignominious fate of decapitation. A part
of his property was given to his sister, and the rest confiscated to the
crown, with the exception of four hundred livres, reserved for the
purchase of masses to be said for the benefit of the soul of his
murdered victim.[75]

[Sidenote: Especially for heresy.]

For other culprits extraordinary refinements of cruelty were reserved.
The _aventuriers_, when so ill-starred as to fall into the hands of
justice, were customarily burned alive at the stake.[76] The same fate
overtook those who were detected in frauds against the public treasury.
More frightful than all the rest was the vengeance taken by the law upon
the counterfeiter of the king's coin. The legal penalty, which is said
to have become a dead letter on the pages of the statute-book long
before the French revolution, was in the sixteenth century rigidly
enforced: on the 9th of November, 1527, a rich merchant of Paris, having
been found guilty of the crime in question, was boiled alive before the
assembled multitude in the _Marche-aux-pourceaux_.[77] Heresy and
blasphemy were treated with no greater degree of leniency than the most
infamous of crimes. Even before the reformation a lingering death in the
flames had been the doom pronounced upon the person who dared to accept
or promulgate doctrines condemned by the church. But when the bitterness
of strife had awakened the desire to enhance the punishment of dissent,
new or extraordinary tortures were resorted to, of the application of
which this history will furnish only too many examples. The forehead was
branded, the tongue torn out, the hand cut off at the wrist, or the
agonies of death prolonged by alternately dropping the wretched victim
into the fire and drawing him out again, until exhausted nature found
tardy release in death.

But if we can to some extent account for the excess of cruelty w