“Then, before he died, for eighteen days he was tortured with excessive cruelty. On the first day he was taken into the public square, where there was a caldron of boiling oil, into which was thrust the arm which had dealt the blow. On the morrow this arm was chopped off, and it fell at his feet. He calmly moved it with his foot, and pushed it before him down from the scaffold. On the third day his breast and the front of his arm were plucked with red-hot pincers; on the following day his back and the back of his arm, and legs, were treated in the same manner. This was continued for eighteen days, and after each torture he was conducted back to prison, he all the while enduring his sufferings with great constancy. The greatest torture of all that he endured, except death, was when he was bound naked in the middle of the square, and around him at a little distance waggon-loads of charcoal were set on fire, and thus he was wrapped in flame. The poor sufferer bore the roasting for a long while, and then at last he lost patience and cried out; whereupon he was removed. For the final torture he was broken on the wheel, but he did not die at once, for they had only broken his legs and arms, so as to make him linger. Thus he lived for six hours, imploring some one to bring him a drop of water, but no one had the courage to give it him. At length the officer was entreated to put an end to this scene, and to strangle him, lest he should die in despair, and so his soul perish. The executioner approached, and when close to him asked how he felt. The tortured man replied, ‘As you left me.’ But when the cord was produced to be put round his neck, he raised himself, as though fearing death, as he had not feared it before, and said to the executioner:—‘Ah! pray leave me alone. Do not torture me any more! Pray let me die as I am!’ So having been strangled, his life closed. Awful were the torments he endured!”
WHAT ARE WOMEN MADE OF?
In the palmy days of childhood we were taught in nursery jingle, and we implicitly believed, that little girls were made of
Sugar and spice
And all that’s nice.
But, growing older, we learned to our disappointment that they were produced from Adam’s rib; and when we asked why woman was made of that particular bone, we were told because it was the most crooked in Adam’s body.
“Observe the result,” preached Jean Raulin, in the beginning of the sixteenth century: “man, composed of clay, is silent and ponderous; but woman gives evidence of her osseous origin by the rattle she keeps up. Move a sack of earth and it makes no noise; touch a bag of bones and you are deafened with the clitter-clatter.”
This observation did not fall to the ground; it was repeated by Gratian de Drusac in his Controversies des Sexes Masculin et Féminin, 1538. The learned in medieval times did not spare women. Jean Nevisan, professor of law at Turin, who died in 1540, is harder still on them in his Sylva Nuptialis. Therein he audaciously asserts that woman was formed by the Author of Good till the head had to be made, and that was a production of the great enemy of mankind. “Permisit Deus illud facere dæmonio.”
But the Rabbis are equally unsparing. They assert that when Eve had to be drawn from the side of Adam she was not extracted by the head, lest she should be vain; nor by the eyes, lest they should be wanton; nor by the mouth, lest she should be given to tittle-tattle; nor by the ears, lest she should be inquisitive; nor by the hands, lest she should be meddlesome; nor by the feet, lest she should be a gadabout; nor by the heart, lest she should be jealous; but she was drawn forth by the side; yet, notwithstanding these precautions, she has every fault specially guarded against, because, being extracted sideways, she was perverse.