Amèneront dans cette enceinte,
Respectez, protégez cet arbre généreux.
Il consolait la peine, il rassurait la crainte;
Sous son feuillage on fut heureux.
After reading these lines, Fanny relapsed into a thoughtful mood. She mentally reviewed her life, calm and even, her loveless marriage, the state of her own mind, interested in music and poetry, inclined to friendship, sober, untroubled; and then she thought of the love lavished on her by a gallant gentleman, which had wrapped her in its protective folds, yet been accepted unresponsively, as she was better able to realize in the silence of her prison. And, recognizing that she was about to die, she broke down. A sweat of mortal agony rose to her forehead. In her anguish she raised her burning eyes to the star-strewn sky, and wringing her hands murmured—
“Ah, God, give back to me one little gleam of hope!”
At this moment a light footstep approached. It was Rosine, the turnkey’s daughter, coming for a surreptitious talk with her.
“Citizeness,” the pretty girl said to her, “to-morrow evening a man who loves you will be waiting on the Avenue de l’Observatoire with a carriage. Take this parcel; it contains clothes like those I am wearing; during supper you will put them on in your bedroom. You are of the same height and fair colouring as myself. In the dusk we might easily be taken one for the other. A warder who is in love with me, and who has engaged in the plot with us, will come up to your room and bring you the basket which I take when I go marketing.
“With him you will descend the staircase (of which he carries a key) leading to my father’s lodge. On that side of the prison the outer gate is neither locked nor guarded. You will only have to avoid being seen by my father. My lover will place himself with his shoulder against the little window of the lodge and say, as if he were talking to me: 'Au revoir, Citizeness Rose, and don’t be so mischievous!' You will then go quietly into the street. Whilst this is going on I shall leave by the main gate, and we shall join one another in the carriage which is to carry us away.”