There he heard whether he was sentenced to relaxation--in other words, to burning at the hands of the hangman--or to reconciliation by means of penitence.

At the last moment, he might by confession _in extremis_ obtain the commutation of a death sentence into life-imprisonment, or receive the favor of being strangled before he was burned.

A relapsed heretic, however--that is, one who after being reconciled had once again apostatized, was never exempted from the penalty of burning.

To make these holocausts of human beings more ghastly, the pageant was enhanced by processions of exhumed corpses and heretics in effigy.

Artificial dolls and decomposed bodies, with grinning lips and mouldy foreheads, were hauled to the huge bonfire, side by side with living men, women, and children.