breast furrowed with wounds, his limbs half warn
through by heavy fetters, he was suspended by the wrists to a branch
of a tree and abandoned. A pariah passing by cut him down and succoured
him, and reports of his martyrdom having spread, the French ambassador
demanded justice with no uncertain voice, so that the King of Siam,
rejoicing that the executioners had stopped short in time, hastened
to send back to M. de Chaumont, the representative of Louis XIV, a
mutilated though still living man, instead of the corpse which had been
demanded.

At the time when Louis XIV was meditating the Revocation of the Edict
of Nantes he felt that the services of such a man would be invaluable
to him, so about 1632, Abbe Duchayla was recalled from India, and a year
later was sent to Mende, with the titles of Arch-priest of the Cevennes
and Inspector of Missions.

Soon the abbe, who had been so much persecuted, became a persecutor,
showing himself as insensible to the sufferings of others as he had been
inflexible under his own. His apprenticeship to torture stood him in
such good stead that he became an inventor, and not only did he enrich
the torture chamber by importing from India several scientifically
constructed machines, hitherto unknown in Europe, but he also designed
many others. People told with terror of reeds cut in the form of
whistles which the abbe pitilessly forced under the nails of malignants;
of iron pincers for tearing out their beards, eyelashes, and eyebrows;
of wicks steeped in oil and wound round the fingers of a victim's hands,
and then set on fire so as to form a pair of five-flamed candelabra; of
a case turning on a pivot in which a man who refused to be converted was
sometimes shut up, the case being then made to revolve rapidly till
the victim lost consciousness; and lastly of fetters used when taking
prisoners from one town to another, and brought to such perfection, that
when they were on the prisoner could neither stand nor sit.

Even the most fervent panegyrists of Abbe Duchayla spoke of him with
bated breath, and, when he himself looked into his own heart and
recalled how often he had applied to the body the power to bind and
loose which God had only given him over the soul, he was seized with
strange tremors, and falling on his knees with folded hands and bowed
head he remained for hours wrapt in thought, so motionless that were it
not for the drops of sweat which stood on his brow he might have been