We went to
see the ruins of the dreadful rooms in which the Inquisition used to sit.
A little, old, swarthy woman, with a pair of flashing black eyes--proof
that the world hadn't conjured down the devil within her, tho it had had
between sixty and seventy years to do it in--came out of the Barrack
Cabaret, of which she was the keeper, with some large keys in her hands,
and marshaled us the way that we should go. How she told us, on the way,
that she was a Government Officer (concierge du palais apostolique), and
had been, for I don't know how many years; and how she had shown these
dungeons to princes; and how she was the best of dungeon demonstrators;
and how she had resided in the palace from an infant--had been born there,
if I recollect right--I needn't relate.
But such a fierce, little, rapid, sparkling, energetic she-devil I never
beheld. She was alight and flaming, all the time. Her action was violent
in the extreme. She never spoke, without stopping expressly for the
purpose. She stamped her feet, clutched us by the arms, flung herself into
attitudes, hammered against walls with her keys, for mere emphasis: now
whispered as if the Inquisition were there still; now shrieked as if she
were on the rack herself; and had a mysterious, hag-like way with her
forefinger, when approaching the remains of some new horror--looking back
and walking stealthily and making horrible grimaces--that might alone have
qualified her to walk up and down a sick man's counterpane, to the
exclusion of all other figures, through a whole fever.
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