“Yes, but this day is lucky for the Valenod who has got me convicted.... I am watched too well for Mathilde to manage to save me like madame de Lavalette saved her husband.... So in three days’ time, at this very hour, I shall know what view to take about the great perhaps.”
At this moment he heard a cry and was called back to the things of this world. The women around him were sobbing: he saw that all faces were turned towards a little gallery built into the crowning of a Gothic pilaster. He knew later that Mathilde had concealed herself there. As the cry was not repeated, everybody began to look at Julien again, as the gendarmes were trying to get him through the crowd.
“Let us try not to give that villain Valenod any chance of laughing at me,” thought Julien. “With what a contrite sycophantic expression he pronounced the verdict which entails the death penalty, while that poor president of the assizes, although he has been a judge for years and years, had tears in his eyes as he sentenced me. What a joy the Valenod must find in revenging himself for our former rivalry for madame de Rênal’s favors! ... So I shall never see her again! The thing is finished.... A last good-bye between us is impossible—I feel it.... How happy I should have been to have told her all the horror I feel for my crime!
“Mere words. I consider myself justly convicted.”
[CHAPTER LXXII] [1]
When Julien was taken back to prison he had been taken into a room intended for those who were condemned to death. Although a man who in the usual way would notice the most petty details, he had quite failed to observe that he had not been taken up to his turret. He was thinking of what he would say to madame de Rênal if he had the happiness of seeing her before the final moment. He thought that she would break into what he was saying and was anxious to be able to express his absolute repentance with his very first words. “How can I convince her that I love her alone after committing an action like that? For after all, it was either out of ambition, or out of love for Mathilde, that I wanted to kill her.”
As he went to bed, he came across sheets of a rough coarse material. “Ah! I am in the condemned cell, he said to himself. That is right.
“Comte Altamira used to tell me that Danton, on the eve of his death, would say in his loud voice: ‘it is singular but you cannot conjugate the verb guillotine in all its tenses: of course you can say, I shall be guillotined, thou shalt be guillotined, but you don’t say, I have been guillotined.’