A True Account of a Female Galley Slave Under the Tyrant King Louis XIV

My hands were bound to the arms of the chair, my feet to the legs, and I looked down at myself and then around the room, seeing it full of machines to help in the asking of questions. Pinching tools, ropes for binding and twisting, flogs and rods, a brazier for the heating of hooks, and more things whose purposes, though mysterious, filled my heart with divers fears, and I thought no longer on the girl or anything else except that I must soon perish.“What is your name?” asked the intendant’s officer.“I am Genevieve Beaulieu,” I replied.“You have always lived here, in Chantilly?” he asked.“I have.”“How long has that been?”“Nineteen years,” I replied. “I was born at the Feast of St. Benedict.”“How many times have you gone to assembly?”“Never.”“You were seen there on the Sabbath just past,” he said.“I went to honor my mother,” said I. “She was English and told me I should go.”“Your mother was Reformed?”“No, she was Catholic, as was my father, who also worked in the intendant’s office.”“What was his name?” asked the intendant’s officer.“Marcel Beaulieu. Did you know him?”“I’ve heard the name,” the officer said. “Where is your mother now?”“She is just dead. They both are.”“You wasted little time then, to join a faithless church.”“I did not join,” said I, “I merely went.”“You said earlier you had not gone.”“My mother sent me,” I said. “It was her wish, spoken from her last bed.”“We do not ask why one goes,” said he. “We ask only if you went or not, and so you did, and you have displeased your king.”“He thinks of me then?” I asked.“If you confess and make to rejoin the one true church, you will go 10 years confined in the king’s bastille,” he said. “Do you confess?”Until this moment, I had only fear of nameless things, but now it was all set before me, ten years in that dreaded place. I had heard of it, twenty leagues away, and none who go there ever come back. Pestilence, starvation, the madness of such a place are all too strong even for the bodies of men. How would I fare any better?“I do not confess,” said I, the words coming from my mouth before I could think of them.“You shall go to the bastille for trial,” said the intendant’s man. “And you shall confess there.”“I can’t confess if I am blameless, Sir,” I said.“And yet you will confess,” he said. “It is what they do there. And you will wish you had confessed with me here before it is all finished.”“I shall die there,” I said, thinking in my great innocence that he would care. “I cannot submit myself to death for a crime I did not commit.”“Very well,” said he, surprising me with the speed of his verdict. “I find I can do nothing with her.”“You care so little for your eternal soul?” asked the Jesuit, speaking for the first time.