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]