o you deny them?"

"All!"

"Proceed," said Charmolue to Pierrat.

Pierrat turned the handle of the screw-jack, the boot was contracted,
and the unhappy girl uttered one of those horrible cries which have no
orthography in any human language.

"Stop!" said Charmolue to Pierrat. "Do you confess?" he said to the
gypsy.

"All!" cried the wretched girl. "I confess! I confess! Mercy!"

She had not calculated her strength when she faced the torture. Poor
child, whose life up to that time had been so joyous, so pleasant, so
sweet, the first pain had conquered her!

"Humanity forces me to tell you," remarked the king's procurator, "that
in confessing, it is death that you must expect."

"I certainly hope so!" said she. And she fell back upon the leather bed,
dying, doubled up, allowing herself to hang suspended from the strap
buckled round her waist.

"Come, fair one, hold up a little," said Master Pierrat, raising her.
"You have the air of the lamb of the Golden Fleece which hangs from
Monsieur de Bourgogne's neck."

Jacques Charmolue raised his voice,

"Clerk, write. Young Bohemian maid, you confess your participation in
the feasts, witches' sabbaths, and witchcrafts of hell, with ghosts,
hags, and vampires? Answer."

"Yes," she said, so low that her words were lost in her breathing.

"You confess to having seen the ram which Beelzebub causes to appear in
the clouds to call together the witches' sabbath, and which is beheld by
socerers alone?"

"Yes."

"You confess to having adored the heads of Bophomet, those abominable
idols of the Templars?"

"Yes."

"To having had habitual dealings with the devil under the form of a goat
familiar, joined with you in the suit?"

"Yes."

"Lastly, you avow and confess to having, with the aid of the demon, and
of the phantom vulgarly known as the surly monk, on the night of the
twenty-ninth of March last, murdered and assassinated a captain named
Phoebus de Chateaupers?"

She raised her large, staring eyes to the magistrate, and replied, as
though mechanically, without convulsion or agitation,--

"Yes."

It was evident that everything within her was broken.

"Write, clerk," said Charmolue. And, addressing the torturers, "Release
the prisoner, and take her back to the court."

When the prisoner had been "unbooted," the procurator of the
ecclesiastical court examined her foot, which was still swollen with
pain. "Come," said he, "there's no great harm done. You s