of his tent mates had also seen him fling himself violently and
repeatedly on his knees (to procure those questionable bruises), and on
the whole there seemed little doubt that the fellow was shamming. All
the surgeons who had examined him concurred in that view, and the case
was finally referred to his commanding officer, General Colloredo. The
impostor was carried to a field hospital in a little Bohemian border
town and watched for a couple of weeks, during which he had been twice
seen moving his feet in his sleep. Still, the witnesses were not
prepared to swear that those changes of position might not have been
effected by a movement of the whole body. The suspect stuck to his
assertion, and Colloredo, in a fit of irritation, finally summoned a
surgeon, who actually placed the feet of the professed paralytic in
"aqua fortis," but even this rigorous method availed the cruel surgeon
nothing, and he was compelled to advise dismissal from the service.

"The martyrdom of Rohatzek, however, was a mere trifle compared with
the ordeal by which the tribunal of Paris tried in vain to extort a
confession of the would-be regicide, Damiens. Robert Damiens, a native
of Arras, had been exiled as an habitual criminal, and returning in
disguise made an attempt upon the life of Louis XV, January 5, 1757.
His dagger pierced the mantle of the King, but merely grazed his neck.
Damiens, who had stumbled, was instantly seized and dragged to prison,
where a convocation of expert torturers exhausted their ingenuity in
the attempt to extort a confession implicating the Jesuits, a
conspiracy of Huguenots, etc. But Damiens refused to speak. He could
have pleaded his inability to name accomplices who did not exist, but
he stuck to his resolution of absolute silence. They singed off his
skin by shreds, they wrenched out his teeth and finger-joints, they
dragged him about at the end of a rope hitched to a team of stout
horses, they sprinkled him from head to foot with acids and seething
oil, but Damiens never uttered a sound till his dying groan announced
the conclusion of the tragedy."

The apparent indifference to the pain of a major operation is sometimes
marvelous, and there are many interesting instances on record. When at
the battle of Dresden in 1813 Moreau, seated beside the Emperor
Alexander, had both limbs shattered by a French cannon-ball, he did not
utter a groan, but asked for a cigar and smoked leisurely while a
surgeon amputated o