or for love of his art, cured an assassin whom justice had broken on the wheel; I will now show thee physicians, who, in pursuit of secrets which they will not discover, skin their fellow-creatures alive. Thou appearest incredulous! Follow me, and I will convince thee. We will represent two doctors.”
He led him to a solitary house. They entered the laboratory, which the rays of the sun never penetrated. Here they saw the surgeons dissecting a miserable being, whose flesh quivered beneath their fratricidal hands, and whose bosom heaved with the most painful agony. They were so engaged with their object, that they never once perceived the Devil and Faustus. The latter, feeling his nerves thrill with horror, rushed out, struck his forehead with his hand, and commanded the fiend to tear down the house upon their heads, and bury them and their deed beneath its ruins.
Devil. Why this rage, O Faustus? Dost thou not perceive that thou art acting, in respect to the moral world, in the same manner as they act in regard to the physical world? They mangle the
flesh of the living; and thou, by my destructive hand, exercisest thy fury upon the whole creation.
Faustus. Outcast fiend! dost thou think my heart is made of stone? Dost thou think that I can see unmoved the torments of yon poor flayed and butchered wretch? But if I can neither dry his tears nor cure his wounds, I can avenge him, and put him out of pain. Away! away! do as I have bid thee, or dread my wrath!
The Devil obeyed with pleasure. He shook the house to its foundation, and down it toppled with a hideous noise, and overwhelmed the wicked doctors. Faustus hurried to Paris, without attending to the look of wild exultation which the Devil cast upon him.
Faustus, having heard much talk of the prisons which the most Christian king had caused to be built for the purpose of receiving those whom he dreaded, had a strong desire to see the interior of them. The Devil willingly undertook to satisfy his curiosity; and although the guards were forbidden, under pain of death, to permit any strangers to enter these habitations of horror, yet
the golden arguments which the Devil used procured him and his companion a ready admittance. They saw there cages of iron, in which it was impossible for a man to stand upright, or sit down, or place himself in any easy posture. The wretches who were compelled to tenant these iron dwellings had their limbs galled by heavy chains. The keeper said, confidentially, that when the king was in good health, he frequently walked in the gallery, in order to enjoy the song of his nightingales; for thus did he call these wretched victims. Faustus asked some of the unfortunates the cause of their captivity; and he heard stories which pierced him to the heart. At last, coming to a cage wherein was a venerable-looking old man, he put the same question to him, and the prisoner answered, in a plaintive tone:
“Whoever you are, let my sad story serve you as a warning never to assist a tyrant in his cruelties. You behold in me the Bishop of Verdun, who first gave to the king the idea of these horrible cages, and was the very first to be shut up in one of them after they were completed.
Here have I, for fourteen years, done penance for my sins, praying daily to God to end my torments by death.”