to sleep and it is time to awaken them, break into the Court House, drag the accused forth into the market-place, and presently bring hither the rack.
On the evening of February 17, Carnival. Hell let loose:—a weird farrago of gibbering masks, and wailing ghosts, and gorgeous dresses; a veritable pandemonium of obscene songs and lecherous yells and hysterical laughter; a drunken whirlwind of mad furies shrieking vengeance, whilst, to the strains of delirious music, they wildly dance around the headsman’s block and bloody axe, and, a still ghastlier thing, a rack of new and improved fashion, which has never yet been used, but soon will be, set out in grim array before the Halles. Suddenly the air grows thick with smoke, the Belfry gleams out roseate against the black sky, and great tongues of flame dart up to heaven. Somehow or other the venders of fruit and fried fish and cheap finery have managed to fire their booths, and thus, during the small hours of Ash-Wednesday morning, the fierce orgies are fittingly brought to a close with a fiercer conflagration.
The tumult of Monday night seems to have had the desired effect. When the Court re-assembled on Ash-Wednesday morning the judges were wide awake, and one after another in rapid succession the accused were found guilty and condemned to death. Before, however, the sentences which had been passed were carried out, it was deemed prudent to change the place of Maximilian’s imprisonment. On more than one occasion he had almost effected his escape, and the Craenenburg was not thought to be sufficiently secure. Moreover, it was not roomy enough to accommodate the numerous retinue of gaolers with which, under the guise of attendants, it was deemed necessary to surround him. Perhaps too the burghers wished to spare Maximilian the pain of seeing his friends die. During the whole period of his captivity they seem to have treated him with the utmost consideration, regarding him not so much as a criminal as an amiable but dangerous lunatic, whom, indeed, for the sake of the public weal, they were bound to put under restraint, but whom, at the same time, they were no less bound to make as comfortable as possible. When he passed through the Grande Place on his way to his new prison and in trembling accents besought the people to see that no harm befell him, ‘have no fear,’ they cried, ‘we bear you no grudge, your counsellors alone are to blame,’ and the palace to which they led him, in the rue St. Jacques—it had recently been occupied by Jean Gros, Chancellor of the Golden Fleece—was in all probability hardly less spacious and no less luxuriously furnished than the Princenhof itself.