Without wasting time in fruitless lamentation, she resolved to quit the life which a few hours had made so desolate.  She had almost succeeded in hanging herself with a massive gold chain which she wore, when her captor entered the apartment.  Inflamed, not with lust, but with avarice, excited not by her charms, but by her jewelry; he rescued her from her perilous position.  He then took possession of her chain and the other trinkets with which her wedding-dress was adorned, and caused her; to be entirely stripped of her clothing.  She was then scourged with rods till her beautiful body was bathed in blood, and at last alone, naked, nearly mad, was sent back into the city.  Here the forlorn creature wandered up and down through the blazing streets, among the heaps of dead and dying, till she was at last put out of her misery by a gang of soldiers.

Such are a few isolated instances, accidentally preserved in their details, of the general horrors inflicted on this occasion.  Others innumerable have sunk into oblivion.  On the morning of the 5th of November, Antwerp presented a ghastly sight.  The magnificent marble Town-house, celebrated as a “world’s wonder,” even in that age and country, in which so much splendour was lavished on municipal palaces, stood a blackened ruin—­all but the walls destroyed, while its archives, accounts, and other valuable contents, had perished.  The more splendid portion of the city had been consumed; at least five hundred palaces, mostly of marble or hammered stone, being a smouldering mass of destruction.  The dead bodies of those fallen in the massacre were on every side, in greatest profusion around the Place de Meer, among the Gothic pillars of the Exchange, and in the streets near the Town-house.  The German soldiers lay in their armor, some with their heads burned from their bodies, some with legs and arms consumed by the flames through which they had fought.  The Margrave Goswyn Verreyck, the burgomaster Van der Meere, the magistrates Lancelot Van Urselen, Nicholas Van Boekholt, and other leading citizens, lay among piles of less distinguished slain.  They remained unburied until the overseers of the poor, on whom the living had then more importunate claims than the dead, were compelled by Roda to bury them out of the pauper fund.  The murderers were too thrifty to be at funeral charges for their victims.  The ceremony was not hastily performed, for the number of corpses had not been completed.  Two days longer the havoc lasted in the city.  Of all the crimes which men can commit, whether from deliberate calculation or in the frenzy of passion, hardly one was omitted, for riot, gaming, rape, which had been postponed to the more stringent claims of robbery and murder, were now rapidly added to the sum of atrocities.  History has recorded the account indelibly on her brazen tablets; it can be adjusted only at the judgment-seat above.