His death, however, was not so speedy as his wretched mistress prophesied that it would be. The love of life prevailed, and in the hope of gaining time which he might turn to account in effecting his escape, he promised to make revelations of importance to the state. The authorities soon found out that he was trifling with them, and the _procureur-général_, after having caused him to be submitted to the most excruciating torture, left him to be broken on the wheel alive. He was executed with all the accursed refinement of barbarity which disgraced the times; and his tormenters, at last, put the finishing stroke to his prolonged agonies, by throwing him alive into the fire that blazed at his feet. Nothing can justify such penal atrocities. If any thing could, Poulailler, it must be admitted, had wrought hard to bring down upon himself the whole sharpness of the law of retaliation. Upwards of one hundred and fifty persons had been murdered by him and his band. Resistance seemed to rouse in him and them the fury of devils. Nor was it only on such occasions that his murderous propensities were glutted. At the village of St. Martin, he caused the father, the mother, two brothers, a newly-married sister, her husband, and four relations, or friends, to be butchered in cold blood. One of his band was detected in an attempt to betray him. Poulailler had him led to a cellar. The traitor was placed upright in an angle of the wall, gagged, and there they built him in alive. Poulailler, with his own hand, wrote the sentence and epitaph of the wretch on the soft plaster; and there it was found some years afterward, when the cellar in which this diabolical act of vengeance was perpetrated passed into the hands of a new proprietor. It was current in the country where Poulailler first saw the light, and where his father, mother, brethren, and sisters, still lived an honorable life, embittered only by the horrible celebrity of their relation, that, on the night which followed the day of Pierre's execution, the isolated tower, which had been uninhabited since its last occupant had so mysteriously disappeared, seemed all on fire, every window remaining illuminated by the glowing element till morning dawned. During this fearful nocturnal spectacle, it was affirmed that infernal howlings and harrowing cries proceeded from the apparently burning mass, and some peasants declared that they heard Pierre Poulailler's name shouted from the midst of the flames in a voice of thunder. The dawn showed the lonely tower unscathed by fire; but a fearful tempest arose, and raged with ceaseless fury for thrice twenty-four hours. The violence of the hurricane was such, that it was impossible during that time for any vessel to keep the sea; and when at length the storm subsided, the coast was covered with pieces of wreck, while the waves continued for many days to give up their dead at the base of the rock, from whose crest frowned _La Tour Maudite_.