to my heart, I know how much pain the child must have caused you.  Forgive him, my dear sister; think of his age, and how easy it is to make a child say whatever one wishes, especially when he does not understand it.[15] It will come to pass one day, I hope, that he will better feel the value of your kindness and of your tender affection for both of them.  It remains to confide to you my last thoughts.  I should have wished to write them at the beginning of my trial; but, besides that they did not leave me any means of writing, events have passed so rapidly that I really have not had time.

“I die in the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion, that of my fathers, that in which I was brought up, and which I have always professed.  Having no spiritual consolation to look for, not even knowing whether there are still in this place any priests of that religion[16] (and indeed the place where I am would expose them to too much danger if they were to enter it but once), I sincerely implore pardon of God for all the faults which I may have committed during my life.  I trust that, in his goodness, he will mercifully accept my last prayers, as well as those which I have for a long time addressed to him, to receive my soul into his mercy.  I beg pardon of all whom I know, and especially of you, my sister, for all the vexations which, without intending it, I may have caused you.  I pardon all my enemies the evils that they have done me.  I bid farewell to my aunts and to all my brothers and sisters.  I had friends.  The idea of being forever separated from them and from all their troubles is one of the greatest sorrows that I suffer in dying.  Let them at least know that to my latest moment I thought of them.

“Farewell, my good and tender sister.  May this letter reach you.  Think always of me; I embrace you with all my heart, as I do my poor dear children.  My God, how heart-rending it is to leave them forever!  Farewell! farewell!  I must now occupy myself with my spiritual duties, as I am not free in my actions.  Perhaps they will bring me a priest; but I here protest that I will not say a word to him, but that I will treat him as a person absolutely unknown.”

Her forebodings were realized; her letter never reached Elizabeth, but was carried to Fouquier, who placed it among his special records.  Yet, if in those who had thus wrought the writer’s destruction there had been one human feeling, it might have been awakened by the simple dignity and unaffected pathos of this sad farewell.  No line that she ever wrote was more thoroughly characteristic of her.  The innocence, purity, and benevolence of her soul shine through every sentence.  Even in that awful moment she never lost her calm, resigned fortitude, nor her consideration for others.  She speaks of and feels for her children, for her friends, but never for herself.  And it is equally characteristic of her that, even in her own hopeless situation, she still can cherish