“So you will not keep your word?”
“No,” I stammered, “I cannot. I cannot. I did not know what I said.”
“Ah!” said she with a cruel disdain on her beautiful lips, “but tell me then that you are afraid! Give me the poison. I will give you back your word. I will die alone. But to have drawn me thus into the snare, you coward! coward! coward!”
Why did I not spring up under this outrage, why did I not take the bottle of poison, why did I not put it to my lips there before her and say: “See if I am a coward?” I do not understand why I did not when I think of it, when I remember the implacable contempt printed on her face. It must be that I was afraid, I who would now go to the scaffold without trembling, I who have had the courage to be silent for three months, thus risking my life. But now an idea sustains me, coldly, intellectually conceived while during that frightful scene there was a confusion of all the forces of my mind, between my surcharged sensations of the last months and those of the present hour, and, sitting down on the carpet, as if I had no longer energy enough to hold myself up, I shook my head, and said: “No, no.”
This time it was she who did not respond. I saw her mass her beautiful hair and twist it into a knot; put her feet into her slippers, and wrap her white robe around her. She sought with her eyes for the dark flask with the red label, and, seeing it no longer on the table, she walked toward the door, then, without even turning her head, she disappeared after darting at me the terrible word:
“Coward! coward!”
I remained there a long time. Suddenly a frightful uneasiness seized my heart. If Charlotte, exasperated as she was, should attempt her life! A prey to the terrors of this new anguish, I dared to cross the corridors and go down the stairs to her room, and then, putting my ear against the door, I heard a noise, a moaning, a sign of what drama was being acted behind this thin rampart of wood which I could have burst open with my shoulder quickly enough to bring help.
The first noises of the château were rising from the basement. The servants were getting up. I must go back to my room. At six o’clock I was in the garden under the young girl’s window.
My imagination had shown me Charlotte, throwing herself from the window, and lying dead on the ground with her limbs broken. I saw her shutters closed, and below, the plat-band in order with its line of rose bushes on which bloomed the last roses of the autumn.
She had told me, this night, of the charm which she tasted, in her hours of distress, when she loved me in silence, in leaning above this bed of roses and inhaling the aroma of these sweet flowers, spread on the breeze.