When the ceremony of the three first audiences is finished, the procurator-fiscal forms his act of accusation against the prisoner, from the preliminary instruction. Although a semi-proof only exists, he reports the facts in the depositions as if they were proved; and what is still more illegal, he does not reduce the articles of his _requisition_ to the number of facts, but following the practice in forming the extracts of the propositions for the act of _qualification_, he multiplies them according to the variations in the statements; so that an accusation which ought to be reduced to one point, contains five or six charges, which appear to indicate that the accused has advanced so many heretical opinions on different occasions, without any foundation but the different manner in which each witness relates the conversation. This mode of proceeding produces the worst effects; it confuses the prisoner where the charges are read to him, and if he has not coolness and intelligence, he imagines that several crimes are imputed to him, and replies, for instance, to the third article, and relates the facts in different words from those which he employed in answering the second; this variation taking place in each article, he sometimes contradicts himself, and thus furnishes the fiscal with fresh accusations against him, for he is accused of not adhering to truth in his replies. _Torture._ Although the prisoner has confessed all that the witnesses deposed against him in the first audiences, yet the fiscal terminates his _requisition_ by saying, that he is guilty of concealment and denial, that he is, therefore, impenitent and obstinate, and demands that the question shall be applied to the accused. It is true, that it is so long since torture has been inflicted by the inquisitors, that the custom may be looked upon as abolished, and the fiscal only makes the demand in conformity to the example of his predecessors, yet it is equally cruel to make the prisoners fear it. In former times, if the inquisitors judged that the prisoner had not made a full confession, they ordered him to be tortured: the object was to make him confess all that formed the substance of the process. I shall not describe the different modes of torture employed by the Inquisition, as it has been already done by many historians: I shall only say that none of them can be accused of exaggeration. When the accused acknowledged the crimes imputed to them, during the torture, they were obliged the next day to ratify or retract their confession upon oath. Almost all confirmed their first statement, because they were subjected to the torture a second time if they dared to retract. _Requisition._