Editing The Pit and the Pendulum (section)

==Historical authenticity==
Poe makes no attempt to describe accurately the operations of the Spanish Inquisition, and takes considerable dramatic license with the broader history premised in this story. The rescuers are led by [[Napoleon]]'s General [[Antoine Charles Louis Lasalle|Lasalle]] (who was not, however, in command of the French occupation of Toledo) and this places the action during the [[Peninsular War]] (1808–14), centuries after the height of the Spanish Inquisition. The elaborate tortures of this story have no historic parallels in the activity of the Spanish Inquisition in any century, let alone the nineteenth when under Charles III and Charles IV only four persons were condemned. The Inquisition was, however, abolished during the period of French intervention (1808–13).

The original source of the pendulum torture method is one paragraph in the preface of the 1826 book ''The history of the Inquisition of Spain'' by the Spanish priest, historian and activist [[Juan Antonio Llorente]],<ref name="Llorente">{{cite book | last1 = Llorente | first1 = Juan Antonio | title = The history of the Inquisition of Spain. Abridged and translated by George B. Whittaker | publisher = Oxford University
 | date = 1826 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=oZS63BNSlLMC&pg=PR20}}</ref> relating a second-hand account by a single prisoner released from the Inquisition's Madrid dungeon in 1820, who purportedly described the pendulum torture method. Most modern sources dismiss this as fantasy.<ref name="Roth">{{cite book | last  = Roth | first = Cecil | title  = The Spanish Inquisition | publisher = W. W. Norton and Company | date = 1964 | pages = [https://archive.org/details/spanishinquisiti00ceci/page/258 258] | url = https://archive.org/details/spanishinquisiti00ceci | url-access = registration | isbn = 0-393-00255-1
 }}</ref><ref name="Mannix">{{cite book | last  = Mannix | first = Daniel P. | title = The History of Torture
 | publisher = eNet Press | date = 2014 | pages = 76 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=ktX9AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA76 | isbn = 978-1-61886-751-3}}</ref><ref name="Pavlac">{{cite book | last1 = Pavlac | first1 = Brian | title = Witch Hunts in the Western World: Persecution and Punishment from the Inquisition through the Salem Trials | publisher = ABC-CLIO | date = 2009 | pages = 152 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=cOmyAcgxFgAC&pg=PA152 | isbn   = 978-0-313-34874-7 }}</ref> One theory is that Llorente misunderstood the account he heard; the prisoner was actually referring to another common Inquisition torture, the ''[[strappado]]'' (garrucha), in which the prisoner has his hands tied behind his back and is hoisted off the floor by a rope tied to his hands.<ref name="Pavlac" /> This method was also known as the "pendulum".

Poe places a Latin [[epigraph (literature)|epigraph]] before the story, describing it as "a quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be erected upon the site of the [[Jacobin Club]] House at [[Paris]]". The epigraph was not Poe's invention; such an inscription had been reported, no later than 1803, as having been composed with the intention (possibly facetious) of having it placed on the site,<ref>{{cite web| url = https://archive.org/details/moorianaorselec01moorgoog/page/n172| title = <!-- pg=166 --> Internet Archive| year = 1803}}</ref> and it had appeared, without attribution, as an item of trivia in the 1836 ''[[Southern Literary Messenger]]'', a periodical to which Poe contributed.<ref>{{cite web| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=kU4FAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA581| title = The Southern literary messenger| year = 1836}}</ref> It does not appear, however, that the market was ever built as intended. [[Charles Baudelaire]], a French poet who translated Poe's works into French and who viewed Poe as an inspiration, said that the building on the site of the Old Jacobin Club had no gates and, therefore, no inscription.<ref>Sova, Dawn B. ''Edgar Allan Poe: A to Z''. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001. {{ISBN|0-8160-4161-X}} p. 188-9</ref>