When he awoke, on the new stone by the pitcher was the toad, staring full at him with topaz eyes.  He lay still this time and did not move, for the animal showed no intention of spitting, and he was puzzled by its tameness.

“It seems to like the sight of a man,” he thought.  “Is it possible that any former inmate of this wretched prison can have amused his solitude by making a pet of such a creature? and if there were such a man, where is he now?”

Henceforward, sleeping or waking, whenever Monsieur the Viscount lay down upon his pallet, the toad crawled up on to the stone, and kept watch over him with shining lustrous eyes; but whenever there was a sound of the key grating in the lock, and the gaoler coming his rounds, away crept the toad, and was quickly lost in the dark corners of the room.  When the man was gone, it returned to its place, and Monsieur the Viscount would talk to it, as he lay on his pallet.

“Ah!  Monsieur Crapaud,” he would say, with mournful pleasantry, “without doubt you have had a master and a kind one; but, tell me, who was he, and where is he now?  Was he old or young, and was it in the last stage of maddening loneliness that he made friends with such a creature as you?”

Monsieur Crapaud looked very intelligent, but he made no reply, and Monsieur the Viscount had recourse to Antoine.

“Who was in this cell before me?” he asked at the gaoler’s next visit.

Antoine’s face clouded.  “Monsieur le Cure had this room.  My orders were that he was to be imprisoned in secret.’”

Monsieur le Cure had this room.  There was a revelation in those words.  It was all explained now.  The priest had always had a love for animals (and for ugly, common animals), which his pupil had by no means shared.  His room at the chateau had been little less than a menagerie.  He had even kept a glass beehive there, which communicated with a hole in the window through which the bees flew in and out, and he would stand for hours with his thumb in the breviary, watching the labours of his pets.  And this also had been his room!  This dark, damp cell.  Here, breviary in hand, he had stood, and lain, and knelt.  Here, in this miserable prison, he had found something to love, and on which to expend the rare intelligence and benevolence of his nature.  Here, finally, in the last hours of his life, he had written on the fly-leaf of his prayer-book something to comfort his successor, and, “being dead, yet spoke” the words of consolation which he had administered in his lifetime.  Monsieur the Viscount read that paper now with different feelings.