No means of flight.  He felt all the doors round his prison successively.  One of them at length opened.  This appeared to him like a miracle.  Whoever could have forgotten to shut the door?  Providence, doubtless.  He hid himself behind it, and remained there for more than an hour, standing motionless, scarcely breathing.  He no longer heard any sound; he ventured out.  The sentinel was no longer there.  The detachment had rejoined the battalion.

One of his old friends, a man to whom he had rendered services such as are not forgotten, lived in this very Passage du Saumon.  Jeanty Sarre looked for the number, woke the porter, told him the name of his friend, was admitted, went up the stairs, and knocked at the door.  The door was opened, his friend appeared in his nightshirt, with a candle in his hand.

He recognized Jeanty Sarre, and cried out, “You here!  What a state you are in!  Where hove you come from?  From what riot? from what madness?  And then you come to compromise us all here?  To have us murdered?  To have us shot?  Now then, what do you want with me?”

“I want you to give me a brush down,” said Jeanty Sarre.

His friend took a brush and brushed him, and Jeanty Sarre went away.  While going down the stairs, Jeanty Sarre cried out to his friend, “Thanks!”

Such is the kind of hospitality which we have since received in Belgium, in Switzerland, and even in England.

The next day, when they took up the bodies they found on Charpentier a note-book and a pencil, and upon Denis Dussoubs a letter.  A letter to a woman.  Even these stoic souls love.

On the 1st of December, Denis Dussoubs began this letter.  He did not finish it.  Here it is:—­

  “MY DEAR MARIE,

“Have you experienced that sweet pain of feeling regret for him who regrets you?  For myself since I left you I have known no other affliction than that of thinking of you.  Even in my affliction itself there was something sweet and tender, and although I was troubled, I was nevertheless happy to feel in the depths of my heart how greatly I loved you by the regret which you cost me.  Why are we separated?  Why have I been forced to fly from you?  For we were so happy!  When I think of our little evenings so free from constraint, of our gay country chats with your sisters, I feel myself seized with a bitter regret.  Did we not love each other clearly, my darling?  We had no secret from each other because we had no need to have one, and our lips uttered the thoughts of our hearts without our thinking to keep anything back.

  “God has snatched away from us all these blessings, and nothing will
  console me for having lost them; do you not lament with me the evils
  of absence?