"I persist in maintaining that the errors imputed to the Templars are absolutely false, though I have confessed some of them myself, overcome by the tortures which G. de Marcillac and Hugh de Celle, the king's knights, ordered to be inflicted on me. I have seen the fifty-four knights led in carts to be committed to the flames because they would not make the confessions which were required of them. I have heard that they were burnt; and I doubt if I could, like them, have had the noble constancy to brave the terrors of the pile. I believe that, if I were threatened with it, I should depose on oath before the commission, and before any other persons who should interrogate me, that these same errors imputed to the order are true. _I would kill God himself if it was required of me._" He then earnestly implored the commissioners and the notaries who were present not to reveal to the king's officers, and to the keepers of the Templars, the words which had escaped him, lest they should deliver him also to the flames. Ought not these simple honest words, the very accents of truth, to prevail with us against all the confessions procured by torture, or by promises or threats, and satisfy us as to their value? The commissioners, whose conduct throughout the whole affair was regulated by humanity and justice, declared that the evening before one of the witnesses had come to them and implored of them to keep his deposition secret, on account of the danger which he ran if it should be known; and, judging that in their present state of terror it would not be just to hear the witnesses, they deliberated on proroguing their session to a future period. We thus see that even the papal commission could not protect against the king such of the witnesses as were honest and bold enough to maintain the innocence of the order. Strict justice was therefore out of the question, Philip _would_ have the order guilty of the most incredible crimes, and death awaited the witness who did not depose as he wished. Meantime his agents were busily engaged in tampering with the prisoners; and by threats and promises they prevailed on forty-four of them to give up their design of defending the order. On the 21st May the commissioners met, in the absence of the Archbishop of Narbonne and the Archdeacon of Trent, and, declaring their labours suspended for the present, adjourned to the 3d November.