“May I see him with my own eyes?” asked Jacques Collin timidly. “Will you allow a father to weep over the body of his son?”
“You can, if you like, take his room, for I have orders to remove you from these cells; you are no longer in such close confinement, monsieur.”
The prisoner’s eyes, from which all light and warmth had fled, turned slowly from the governor to the doctor; Jacques Collin was examining them, fearing some trap, and he was afraid to go out of the cell.
“If you wish to see the body,” said Lebrun, “you have no time to lose; it is to be carried away to-night.”
“If you have children, gentlemen,” said Jacques Collin, “you will understand my state of mind; I hardly know what I am doing. This blow is worse to me than death; but you cannot know what I am saying. Even if you are fathers, it is only after a fashion—I am a mother too—I—I am going mad—I feel it!”
By going through certain passages which open only to the governor, it is possible to get very quickly from the cells to the private rooms. The two sets of rooms are divided by an underground corridor formed of two massive walls supporting the vault over which Galerie Marchande, as it is called, is built. So Jacques Collin, escorted by the warder, who took his arm, preceded by the governor, and followed by the doctor, in a few minutes reached the cell where Lucien was lying stretched on the bed.
On seeing the body, he threw himself upon it, seizing it in a desperate embrace with a passion and impulse that made these spectators shudder.
“There,” said the doctor to Monsieur Gault, “that is an instance of what I was telling you. You see that man clutching the body, and you do not know what a corpse is; it is stone——”
“Leave me alone!” said Jacques Collin in a smothered voice; “I have not long to look at him. They will take him away to——”
He paused at the word “bury him.”