He had however played his part so well that the imprisoned Pécolat was exasperated not against him but against his most intimate friend Berthelier. His black fit came over him. He said to himself that although a man of the most inoffensive character, he seemed destined to expiate the faults of all his party. With what had they to reproach him? Mere jokes and laughter.... Berthelier was the real conspirator, and he was at large.... On the 3rd of April Pécolat was removed from the dungeon into which he had been thrown, and conducted to the top of the castle, under the roof. The bishop had ordered him ‘to be examined and forced to speak the truth;’ and the torture-room was at the top of the castle. After the usual preliminaries the examination began. The plot of the non videbit and the salt fish was too absurd; M. de Thoire, the examining judge, dwelt but little upon it, and endeavoured particularly (for that was the object of the arrest) to obtain such admissions as would ruin Geneva and her principal citizens. As Pécolat deposed to nothing that would inculpate them, he was tied by one hand to the rope, and, as he still refused to answer, was hoisted four feet from the floor. The poor fellow groaned deeply and speaking with difficulty[109] said: ‘Cursed be Berthelier for whom I am shut up!’ He made no confession, however.
The next day they resorted to another expedient. The bishop gave himself the pleasure of keeping the wretched man hanging to the cord while he was at dinner. The servants, as they passed backwards and forwards waiting on their master, said to Pécolat: ‘You are very stupid to let yourself be put to such torture: confess everything. What will your silence help you? Maule has told everything; he has named So-and-so ... the Abbot of Bonmont, for instance, whom you want to make your bishop after you have done for my lord.’ All these traps were useless—he made no confession. It was next determined to expose Pécolat to a more cruel torture: the executioners tied his hands behind his back, and then pulled the rope so as to raise his arms above his head; lastly they lifted him five or six feet from the floor, which was enough to dislocate his shoulders. Pécolat suffered horribly, and he was not a Regulus. ‘Let me down! let me down!’ he cried, ‘and I will tell all.’ ... The judges, delighted at having vanquished the obstinate rebel at last, ordered him to be lowered. Terror was in his heart, and his features betrayed the trouble of his mind. The man, usually so gay and so witty, was now pale, affrighted, his eyes wandered, and he fancied himself surrounded by hungry dogs. He said all that they wanted him to say. To the falsest imputations against the noblest of his friends he answered ‘Yes, yes!’ and the satisfied judges sent him back to his dungeon.[110]
This was no comfort to the unhappy Pécolat: more terrible anguish awaited him there. The thought that he had deposed against his best friends and even incurred the guilt of bearing false witness, alarmed him seriously: the fear of God’s judgment surpassed all the terrors which men had caused him. ‘Gentlemen,’ said he to the noble F. de Thoire and others standing round him, ‘my declarations were extorted from me only by the fear of torture. If I had died at that moment, I should have been eternally damned for my lies.’[111]
The bastard, not liking to feel himself within the same walls as his victim, had removed to St. Joire, two leagues from Thiez, and there attentively watched the examination and the torture. He had acquired a taste for it; and accordingly on the 5th of August he ordered another prisoner to be put to the question. ‘I have some here who say plenty of good things,’ he wrote to Geneva.[112] These ‘good things’ were the false witness extorted by pain and which permitted the imprisonment of the innocent. The terror increased in Geneva every day. People kept themselves indoors, the streets were deserted: a few labourers only could be seen in the fields. Bonivard, who feared, and not without cause, that the bishop and the duke wished to carry him off also, did not leave St. Victor’s. ‘Things are in such a state,’ he said, ‘that no one dares venture into the country lest he should be treated like Pécolat.’ Many of the citizens quitted Geneva. One day two friends happened to meet in a room of the hostelry of St. Germain on the Jura. ‘Where are you going?’ asked one of them who had just come from Lyons. ‘I am leaving Geneva,’ answered the other, by name Du Bouchet. ‘They have so tortured Pécolat that his arms remained hanging to the rope, and he died upon the rack.’ Du Bouchet added: ‘The Church not having the right of putting men to death, my lord of Geneva will have to send somebody to Rome to get him absolved. He weeps greatly about it, they say; but I place no trust in such crocodile’s tears!... I am going to Lyons.’[113]
The bishop had no notion of excusing himself to the pope: on the contrary, he thought only of pursuing his revenge. The decoy was in the cage and some small birds with him; he wished now at any cost to catch the large one,—Berthelier. Most of the youth of Geneva were either out of the way or disheartened; the league Who touches one touches all was nearly dissolved, at the moment when it ought to have been ready to save its founder. The bishop thought it superfluous to resort to stratagem or violence and simply required the syndics to surrender the great agitator to him. At eight o’clock in the evening of the 28th of July, 1517, the council was sitting, when the president who was on the bishop’s side said: ‘It is my lord’s pleasure that we take up one of his subjects against whom he possesses sufficient informations which he will communicate in proper time and place; and that when the said subject is in prison, the syndics shall execute justice, if the affair requires it.’[114] At these words every one looked at a seat which was empty for the first time. Berthelier’s friends were uneasy; and as the bishop had adopted a lawful course, the council answered the prelate that they would take up the accused, provided that on his part he maintained the liberties of Geneva.
As the councillors left the Hôtel de Ville in the dark, they said to one another: ‘It is Berthelier.’ The friends he had among them ran off to tell him the news, conjuring him to escape the vengeance of the prince by flight. Bonivard joined his entreaties to theirs: ‘The sword is over your head,’ he said.—‘I know it,’ answered Berthelier, ‘yes, I know that I shall die, and I do not grieve at it.’ ‘Really,’ said Bonivard, ‘I never saw and never read of one who held life so cheap.’ The friends of the noble-minded citizen redoubled their entreaties. They represented to him that there remained in Geneva only a small number of civic guards, imperfectly trained to arms;[115] that one part of the burgesses would assent through fear to the plots of the Savoyard party, and that another part would aid them. Berthelier still resisted: ‘God,’ said he, ‘will miraculously take away their power.’[116] His friends resorted to another argument. There happened to be just then in Geneva some envoys from Friburg; Berthelier’s friends begged him to depart with them. ‘Out of Geneva,’ they said, ‘you will serve the city better than within.’ That consideration decided him. He went during the night to the hostelry of the Friburgers. ‘We leave to-morrow,’ they told him; ‘here is a livery cloak with the arms of Friburg; put it on, and thus disguised you shall come with us, like one of the state riders. If you are not recognised at the gates of Geneva or in the Pays de Vaud, you are safe.’ The Friburgers left the city very early: the guard looked at them for a moment as they passed the gate, but without suspecting that the great republican was with them. He was safe.
The next day the syndic Nergaz having delivered the message of the council to the bastard of Savoy, the latter was exasperated because instead of seizing Berthelier, they simply told him that they intended doing so. ‘Do you mean to give him time to escape?’ he asked. The council immediately ordered a great display of force to arrest the liberal leader. His friends the councillors, who knew him to be already far away in the country, let his enemies go on. ‘Shut all the city gates,’ said they. ‘Assemble the tithing men and the tens; summon the vidame to assist in executing the law; let the syndics preside in person over the search for the culprit.’[117] ‘Bravo!’ whispered some aside, ‘shut the cage ... the bird has flown.’ The most zealous of the bishop’s partisans hurried off to close the gates. The syndics and tithing men set out, followed by a great number of citizens, and all went towards Berthelier’s house. They searched every chamber, they sounded every hiding-place, but found nobody. Some were angry, others laughed in their sleeves; the most violent, supposing he had escaped to one of his friends, put themselves at the head of the troop and searched every house that Berthelier was in the habit of frequenting. As a six days’ search led to nothing, they were forced to rest satisfied with summoning the accused by sound of the trumpet. No one had any more doubts about his escape: the liberals were delighted, but anger and vexation prevailed at the castle.
CHAPTER IX.
BERTHELIER CALLS THE SWISS TO THE AID OF GENEVA; HUGUENOTS AND MAMELUKES; THE BISHOP’S VIOLENCE.
Berthelier’s flight was more than a flight. He went to Switzerland; and from that day Switzerland turned towards Geneva, and held out the hand to her.
Disguised in the livery of an usher of the city of Friburg, the faithful citizen arrived there without hindrance. No one there felt more affection for Geneva than Councillor Marty, governor of the hospital, who by his energy, rank, and intelligence, possessed great influence in the city. Berthelier went to his house, sat down at his hearth, and remained for some time sorrowful, silent, and motionless. It was thus that an illustrious Roman had formerly sat with veiled head at the hearth of a stranger; but Coriolanus sought among the Volsci the means of destroying his country, Berthelier sought at Friburg the means of saving his. A great idea, which had long since quickened in the hearts of himself and some other patriots, had occupied his mind while he was riding through the Vaudois territory. Times had changed. The long conspiracy of Savoy against Geneva was on the point of succeeding. The obstinate duke, the dishonoured bishop, the crafty count—all united their forces to destroy the independence of the city. Switzerland alone, after God, could save it from the hands of the Savoyards. Geneva must become a canton, or at least an ally of Switzerland. ‘For that,’ said Berthelier, ‘I would give my head.’ He began to discourse familiarly with his host. He told him that he had arrived in Friburg, poor, exiled, persecuted, and a suppliant; not to save his life, but to save Geneva; that he had come to pray Friburg to receive the Genevans into citizenship. At the same time he described with eloquence the calamities of his country. Marty greatly moved held out his hand, told him to take courage and to follow him into the ‘abbeys’ where the guilds assembled. ‘If you gain them,’ he said, ‘your cause is won.’