But it was neither the gaily dressed officials nor their grim satellites who drew the chief attention of the crowd. All eyes were fixed on a bare-headed, half-stripped figure just behind the men in red, with heavy fetters on its wrists and ankles. This wretched creature lay helplessly heaped together as if paralyzed by weakness, or benumbed with terror; and the deathlike paleness of his coarse face, with the fixed stare of blank, stony horror in his bloodshot eyes, would have told to the most careless observer that this was the man who was doomed to die.
“Mother, mother!” cried a young girl, who stood at a window of a tall corner-house, “hither, hither quickly! The water is nigh to the seething, and it were pity for thee to miss the sight of the punishment.”
“Thou art right, Jeanneton,” said a buxom matron, stepping up beside her, “and the better luck ours that our window looks right down on the scaffold. From hence I can see the fellow’s very face (and marry! ’tis as pale as a spectre!) at mine ease, without being trampled in yon crowd as one treads grapes in the vintage.”
Just then the blast of a trumpet echoed through the still air, and a fantastically dressed man, stepping to the front of the platform, made proclamation as follows:—
“Oyez, oyez, oyez (hearken)! Hereby let all men know that forasmuch as Pierre Cochard, of the town of Dinan-le-Sauveur, in the bishopric of St. Malo, hath been found guilty of sundry crimes and misdeeds, and notably of clipping and debasing the coin of our lord the king, therefore hath the king’s grace ordained, of his great clemency and justice, that even as the said Pierre Cochard hath melted and defaced the good and lawful coin of this realm, so shall he be himself melted and defaced in like fashion, till no trace of him remain; to wit, that he die by water and by fire, being plunged into yon cauldron, and therein boiled alive. God save the king!”
Of all the countless listeners, not one had the least perception of the horrible irony that lurked in this prayer to the God of mercy for the welfare of a king who could doom his fellow-men to a death like this. All they saw in the whole affair was a rogue receiving his due; nor could far more civilized ages triumph over them on that score, since, as much as three centuries later, seven men were hanged and a woman burned for the same offence in England itself.
When the herald’s voice had died away, there sank over that great multitude a dead hush of terrible expectation, amid which the executioner’s harsh tones were plainly heard to the farthest corner of the square, as he said to the governor, with a clumsy obeisance—
“My lord, the water boils, and all is ready!”
At the words, as if that dread signal had broken the spell that paralyzed him, the doomed man sprang to his feet with a long, wild scream of mortal agony, so terrific that even the brutal mob shuddered as they heard it.
But the executioner and his mates, to whom such horrors were a mere everyday matter, remained wholly unmoved, and advanced to their fell work with perfect unconcern. Already they had clutched the victim to hurl him into the boiling cauldron, when his eyes, as they wandered despairingly over the unpitying crowd below, lighted up with a sudden flash of recognition, and, wrenching himself with a mighty effort from the grasp of his tormentors, he flung out his fettered arms wildly, and shrieked, in tones more like the yell of a wounded wild beast than a human voice—