Those three months were the happiest of my life.

In the meantime I was making some interesting experiments suggested by one of the guillotiniers.  I had obtained permission to make certain scientific tests with the bodies and heads of those who perished on the scaffold.  Sad to say, available subjects were not wanting.  Not a day passed but thirty or forty persons were guillotined, and blood flowed so copiously on the Place de la Revolution that it became necessary to dig a trench three feet deep around the scaffolding.  This trench was covered with deals.  One of them loosened under the feet of an eight-year-old lad, who fell into the abominable pit and was drowned.

For self-evident reasons I said nothing to Solange of the studies that occupied my attention during the day.  In the beginning my occupation had inspired me with pity and loathing, but as time wore on I said:  “These studies are for the good of humanity,” for I hoped to convince the lawmakers of the wisdom of abolishing capital punishment.

The Cemetery of Clamart had been assigned to me, and all the heads and trunks of the victims of the executioner had been placed at my disposal.  A small chapel in one corner of the cemetery had been converted into a kind of laboratory for my benefit.  You know, when the queens were driven from the palaces, God was banished from the churches.

Every day at six the horrible procession filed in.  The bodies were heaped together in a wagon, the heads in a sack.  I chose some bodies and heads in a haphazard fashion, while the remainder were thrown into a common grave.

In the midst of this occupation with the dead, my love for Solange increased from day to day; while the poor child reciprocated my affection with the whole power of her pure soul.

Often I had thought of making her my wife; often we had mutually pictured to ourselves the happiness of such a union.  But in order to become my wife, it would be necessary for Solange to reveal her name; and this name, which was that of an emigrant, an aristocrat, meant death.

Her father had repeatedly urged her by letter to hasten her departure, but she had informed him of our engagement.  She had requested his consent, and he had given it, so that all had gone well to this extent.

The trial and execution of the queen, Marie Antoinette, had plunged me, too, into deepest sadness.  Solange was all tears, and we could not rid ourselves of a strange feeling of despondency, a presentiment of approaching danger, that compressed our hearts.  In vain I tried to whisper courage to Solange.  Weeping, she reclined in my arms, and I could not comfort her, because my own words lacked the ring of confidence.

We passed the night together as usual, but the night was even more depressing than the day.  I recall now that a dog, locked up in a room below us, howled till two o’clock in the morning.  The next day we were told that the dog’s master had gone away with the key in his pocket, had been arrested on the way, tried at three, and executed at four.