[Cinq Mars by Alfred de Vigny]@TWC D-Link book
Cinq Mars

CHAPTER V
9/13

Its two great doors were thrown open; and by the light of an infinite number of flambeaux, appeared all the judges and ecclesiastics, surrounded by guards.

Among them was Urbain, supported, or rather carried, by six men clothed as Black Penitents--for his limbs, bound with bandages saturated with blood, seemed broken and incapable of supporting him.

It was at most two hours since Cinq-Mars had seen him, and yet he could hardly recognize the face he had so closely observed at the trial.

All color, all roundness of form had disappeared from it; a livid pallor covered a skin yellow and shining like ivory; the blood seemed to have left his veins; all the life that remained within him shone from his dark eyes, which appeared to have grown twice as large as before, as he looked languidly around him; his long, chestnut hair hung loosely down his neck and over a white shirt, which entirely covered him--or rather a sort of robe with large sleeves, and of a yellowish tint, with an odor of sulphur about it; a long, thick cord encircled his neck and fell upon his breast.

He looked like an apparition; but it was the apparition of a martyr.
Urbain stopped, or, rather, was set down upon the peristyle of the church; the Capuchin Lactantius placed a lighted torch in his right hand, and held it there, as he said to him, with his hard inflexibility: "Do penance, and ask pardon of God for thy crime of magic." The unhappy man raised his voice with great difficulty, and with his eyes to heaven said: "In the name of the living God, I cite thee, Laubardemont, false judge, to appear before Him in three years.


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