THE SPANISH INQUISITION AS AN ALIENIST. 297 



no associates, and no Frenchmen entered San Felipe with him. 

 During all the stages of graduated torment he screamed and 

 struggled desperately, but he adhered resolutely to this, and re- 

 fused to incriminate any one ; he had never breathed his inten- 

 tion to any save his brother, who threatened to denounce him to 

 the Inquisition. This continued till half past one o'clock, when 

 the inquisitors, finding the torture fruitless, announced its dis- 

 continuance; but next morning they commenced proceedings 

 against Pierre Perrault and Domingo Diaz. What was the re- 

 sult of these we do not know ; but had anything been extracted 

 from them further compromising Rene, it would have appeared 

 in the records of his trial. 



If the torture thus was useless in caput dlienum, it at all 

 events served the more humane purpose of confirming the suf- 

 ferer in the faith. On July 12th word was brought to the inquis- 

 itor Chacon that Rene" desired to return to the Church : he has- 

 tened to the temporary prison where the culprit was confined and 

 found this to be the case. Now that he had nothing further to 

 hope, Rene* said that his first statement was true. He had been 

 misled and tempted by Satan for fifteen days before the crime, 

 and had believed that he was rendering a service to God ; but now 

 God had enlightened him, and he reverted to his former belief in 

 the Trinity, in the passion of Christ, and the transubstantiation 

 of the sacrament, and he desired to be reconciled to the Church. 



On the following Sunday, July 14th, Madrid enjoyed the re- 

 ligious spectacle of an auto da fe, in which Rene' Perrault was 

 burned, but doubtless his recantation obtained for him the priv- 

 ilege of being garroted before the pile was lighted. Thus, if 

 Spain furnished to Geneva the Unitarian Miguel Servet, France 

 returned the favor with Rend Perrault. 



Another case, less tragic in its issue, illustrates a different 

 phase of the subject. At Cobena, a village not far from Alcala 

 de Henares, a poor carpenter of plows named Benito Penas, or de 

 Valdepenas, created scandal by denying that Christ had died on 

 the cross. He was wholly illiterate but devout, and once, when 

 visiting Madrid with a load of corn, he had heard in the church 

 of San Felipe a sermon by a fraile, who spoke of the passion and 

 resurrection as metaphorical.* The idea took possession of his 



* The Spanish preachers of the period allowed themselves the largest license in the 

 effort to attract attention, and shrank from no grotesqueness of irreverence. In the trial 

 in 1592, of Fray Joseph de Sigiienza, a distinguished Jeronymite friar and favorite of Philip 

 II, there is a description of a sermon preached before the king by Fray Cristobal de Lafra, 

 another Jeronymite, on the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin. He said the Minotaur was 

 Christ and the Labyrinth the gospel liber generationis ; Ariadne was Our Lady, and the 

 child she bore to Theseus was Faith ; and that if any one desired to enter the Labyrinth 



