to the ground, he had confessed, in
order to get some respite, that his prophecies were nothing mare than
conjectures. If is true that, so soon as he went back to prison, he
protested against the confession, saying that it was the weakness of his
bodily organs and his want of firmness that had wrested the lie from him,
but that the truth really was that the Lord had several times appeared to
him in his ecstasies and revealed the things that he had spoken. This
protestation led to a new application of the torture, during which
Savonarola succumbed once more to the dreadful pain, and once more
retracted. But scarcely was he unbound, and was still lying on the bed
of torture, when he declared that his confessions were the fault of his
torturers, and the vengeance would recoil upon their heads; and he
protested yet once mare against all he had confessed and might confess
again. A third time the torture produced the same avowals, and the
relief that followed it the same retractions. The judges therefore, when
they condemned him and his two disciples to the flames, decided that his
confession should not be read aloud at the stake, according to custom,
feeling certain that an this occasion also he would give it the lie, and
that publicly, which, as anyone must see who knew the versatile spirit of
the public, would be a most dangerous proceeding.

On the 23rd of May, the fire which had been promised to the people before
was a second time prepared on the Piazza del Palazzo, and this time the
crowd assembled quite certain that they would not be disappointed of a
spectacle so long anticipated. And towards eleven o'clock in the
morning, Girolamo Savonarola, Domenico Bonvicini, and Silvestro Maruffi
were led to the place of execution, degraded of their orders by the
ecclesiastical judges, and bound all three to the same stake in the
centre of an immense pile of wood. Then the bishop Pagnanoli told the
condemned men that he cut them off from the Church. "Ay, from the Church
militant," said Savonarola, who from that very hour, thanks to his
martyrdom, was entering into the Church triumphant. No other words were
spoken by the condemned men, for at this moment one of the Arrabbiati, a
personal enemy of Savonarola, breaking through the hedge of guards around
the scaffold, snatched the torch from the executioner's hand and himself
set fire to the four corners of the pile. Savonarola and his disciples,
from the moment when they sa