“Oh, I swear to heaven, my beauty, the executioner won’t stand on such ceremony when he catches hold of your son!... And you give yourself airs! Why, think, it’ll happen in forty hours! Forty hours, no more, and you hesitate . . . and you have scruples, when your son’s life is at stake! Come, come, no whimpering, no silly sentimentality.... Look things in the face. By your own oath, you are my wife, you are my bride from this moment.... Clarisse, Clarisse, give me your lips....”
Half-fainting, she had hardly the strength to put out her arm and push him away; and, with a cynicism in which all his abominable nature stood revealed, Daubrecq, mingling words of cruelty and words of passion, continued:
“Save your son!... Think of the last morning: the preparations for the scaffold, when they snip away his shirt and cut his hair.... Clarisse, Clarisse, I will save him.... Be sure of it.... All my life shall be yours.... Clarisse....”
She no longer resisted. It was over. The loathsome brute’s lips were about to touch hers; and it had to be, and nothing could prevent it. It was her duty to obey the decree of fate. She had long known it. She understood it; and, closing her eyes, so as not to see the foul face that was slowly raised to hers, she repeated to herself:
“My son . . . my poor son.”
A few seconds passed: ten, twenty perhaps. Daubrecq did not move. Daubrecq did not speak. And she was astounded at that great silence and that sudden quiet. Did the monster, at the last moment, feel a scruple of remorse?
She raised her eyelids.
The sight which she beheld struck her with stupefaction.
The sight which she beheld struck her with stupefaction. Instead of the grinning features which she expected to see, she saw a motionless, unrecognizable face, contorted by an expression of unspeakable terror: and the eyes, invisible under the double impediment of the spectacles, seemed to be staring above her head, above the chair in which she lay prostrate.