Meanwhile another gendarme held to the middle of the wretched man's hands the glowing spit. While his flesh was thus burning, the victim shouted out in agony, "For the love of God kill me at once!" Then the executioners, removing the red hot spit from his hands, applied it to his breast, then to his back, his face, his feet, and other parts. After this, they forced open his mouth, and burned his tongue with red hot pincers. During these inhuman operations, Azo fainted several times, but on recovering consciousness maintained the same inflexibility of purpose. Meanwhile, in the adjoining apartment, a heartrending scene was being enacted. The women and the children, terrified by the groans and cries of the tortured man, fainted. When they revived, they endeavored to rush out to call for help, but the gendarmes, stationed at the door, barred their passage, and brutally pushed them back. [1] Nights were passed in such hellish orgies and days in inventing new tortures or refining upon the old, with an ingenuity which reveals unimagined strata of malignity in the human heart. The results throw the most sickening horrors of the Middle Ages into the shade. Some of them cannot be described, nor even hinted at. The shock to people's sensibilities would be too terrible. And yet they were not merely described to, but endured by, men of education and refinement, whose sensibilities were as delicate as ours. And when the prisons in which these and analogous doings were carried on had no more room for new-comers, some of the least obnoxious of its actual inmates were released for a bribe, or, in case of poverty, were expeditiously poisoned off.