When his keener agony was over, on his knees, before my old friend Père Celestine (once curé of St. Solidore, and now coadjutor Bishop of Paris), with tears of blood and agony the unhappy Monjoy retracted all that had been wrung from him under torture; but it was too late.
On his accusation and confession she too was tried, and sentenced to death, and then both were committed to the Conciergerie du Palais, and to the care of that grim governor, the kinsman of d'Escombas—he of whom Monjoy had such an instinctive dread of old.
The entrance to this frightful old prison is by a low and narrow door, over which might well be carved the well-known line from Dante's "Inferno."
Isabelle was conducted to the greffe or female prison, by that sombre vestibule which is lighted by lamps even at mid-day; but Monjoy was thrust, bleeding and mangled, perspiring in every limb with recent torture, into one of the old and dark dungeons of the Conciergerie, from whence, after a time, they were both conveyed in a tumbril, and clad in sackcloth, to the Place de Greve, where she was hanged by the neck, and he, after making a pathetic declaration of her innocence, underwent the dreadful death of being broken alive upon the wheel!
With his last breath he implored the executioner to see that a blue ribbon, some gift of happier years, which he wore round his neck, should be buried with him.
Such was the miserable fate of this young Frenchman who befriended me so much at Ysembourg, and whom I last saw galloping gallantly along the road from the old ruined schloss, with his epaulettes and gay uniform glittering in the morning sunshine.
And now, with a pardon for this digression, I return to my own more matter-of-fact story.
CHAPTER XII.
THE FROZEN FORD.
By a narrow path between leafless woods, I proceeded for two miles in the direction indicated by Monjoy, and then saw before me the Lahn, a stream which rises in the west of Germany, and, as any Gazetteer will inform us, passes by the hill which is crowned by the castle of Marburg, the old Bailiwick of Giessen, the walled town of Wetzlar, and the city of Nassau (in which and in other places along its banks we had garrisons or outposts), until it flows into the famous Rhine near Upper Lahnstein.