“They never said that,” answered M. Bergeret, “and they never thought it. Victor Hugo did, indeed, believe that Torquemada ordered men to be burnt for their good, in order that their eternal happiness might be secured at the price of a short pain. On this theory he constructed a drama that sparkles with the play of antithesis. But there is no foundation whatever for this idea of his, and I should never have imagined that a scholar like you, fattening, as you have done, on old parchments, would have been led astray by a poet’s lies. The truth is that the tribunal of the Inquisition, in handing the heretic over to the secular arm, was simply cutting away a diseased limb from the Church, for fear lest the whole body should be contaminated. As for the limb thus cut off, its fate was in the hands of God. Such was the spirit of the Inquisition, frightful enough, but by no means romantic. But where the Holy Office showed what you rightly call spiritual philanthropy was in the treatment it meted out to those converted from the error of their ways. It charitably condemned them to perpetual imprisonment, and immured them for the good of their souls. But I was merely referring to the State prisons, just now, such as they were in the Middle Ages and in modern times up to the reign of Louis XIV.” “It is true,” said M. de Terremondre, “that the system of solitary confinement has not produced all the happy results that were expected from it in the reformation of prisoners.” “This system,” said Dr. Fornerol, “often produces rather serious mental disorders. Yet it is only fair to add that criminals are naturally predisposed to troubles of this kind. We recognise to-day that the criminal is a degenerate. Thus, for instance, thanks to M. Ossian Colot’s courtesy, I have been allowed to make an examination of our murderer, this fellow Lecœur. I found many physiological defects in him.... His teeth, for instance, are quite abnormal. I argue from that fact that he is only partially responsible for his acts.” “Yet,” said M. Bergeret, “one of the sisters of Mithridates had a double row of teeth in each jaw, and in her brother’s estimation, at any rate, she was a woman of noble courage. So dearly did he love her that when he was a fugitive pursued by Lucullus, he gave orders that she should be strangled by a mute to prevent her falling alive into the hands of the Romans. Nor did she then fail to live up to her brother’s lofty estimation of her character, but suffering death by the bowstring with joyous calmness, said: ‘I thank the king, my brother, for having had a care to my honour, even in the midst of his own besetting troubles.’ You see from this example that heroism is not impossible even with a row of abnormal teeth.”