As the killing progressed, they threw their victims, the living, dead and wounded, into the Trouillas Tower, some sixty feet, down into the pit. The men were thrown in first, and the women later. The assassins wanted time to violate the bodies of those who were young and pretty. At nine in the morning, after twelve hours of massacre, a voice was still heard crying from the depths of the sepulchre:
“For pity’s sake, come kill me! I cannot die.”
A man, the armorer Bouffier, bent over the pit and looked down. The others did not dare.
“Who was that crying?” they asked.
“That was Lami,” replied Bouffier. Then, when he had returned, they asked him:
“Well, what did you see at the bottom?”
“A queer marmalade,” said he. “Men and women, priests and pretty girls, all helter-skelter. It’s enough to make one die of laughter.”
“Decidedly man is a vile creature,” said the Count of Monte-Cristo to M. de Villefort.
Well, it is in this town, still reeking with blood, still warm, still stirred by these last massacres, that we now introduce two of the principal personages of our story.