He answered: “I do not hold, and have not held this opinion of Copernicus since the command was intimated to me that I must abandon it; for the rest, I am here in your hands,—do with me what you please.” Being once more bidden to speak the truth, otherwise recourse will be had to torture, the terrified old man answered with the resignation of despair: “I am here to obey, and I have not held this opinion since the decision was pronounced, as I have stated.” In the protocol of the trial the concluding sentence follows immediately after this last answer of Galileo’s: “And as nothing further could be done in execution of the decree (of 16th June), his signature was obtained to his deposition, and he was sent back to his place.”[391] There is not in this document, nor in any other extant, the slightest trace that torture was actually applied to Galileo, as has long and even recently been fabled. Since the publication of it by Epinois has acquainted us with the decree of 16th June, none such can be expected ever to be found. In that decree the course of the final legal proceedings was precisely indicated. But it was only the _threat_ of torture that was prescribed, after which recantation and sentence of imprisonment were to follow. The execution of this threat, then, would have been a gross, and under the circumstances, incredible violation of the decrees of the Holy Office itself. Moreover, the assumed torture of Galileo is opposed, as we shall see by and by, to various historical facts. When the whole course of the trial is unrolled before our eyes, we shall go more deeply into the region of fable and malicious fabrication. But as we pursue the path of history, we come upon an error which Mgr. Marini’s peculiar mode of interpretation has given rise to. He takes the concluding words of the protocol of the trial of 21st June, “remissus fuit ad locum suum,” to mean that Galileo was sent back to the Tuscan embassy.[392] Now, it is indisputable, from a despatch of Niccolini’s to Cioli of 26th June, 1633, that after the hearing of the 21st June, the accused was detained in the buildings of the Holy Office, and did not leave them till the 24th.[393] We have no information whatever as to the treatment he met with this time in the buildings of the Holy Office. Was he put into the apartments he had occupied before, or was he confined in a prisoner’s cell? From the considerate treatment in outward things which Galileo met with during his trial at Rome, it may perhaps be concluded _that he never was thrown into the dungeons of the Inquisition_. CHAPTER IX. _THE SENTENCE AND RECANTATION._