“Death!” replied Talleyrand, in his fine, deep voice.  “Adieu, my good friend.”

“That is the man,” said the Marquis de Chargeboeuf entering the room after Corentin was dismissed; “but we have nearly killed the countess.”

“He is the only man I know capable of playing such a trick,” replied the minister.  “Monsieur le marquis, you are in danger of not succeeding in your mission.  Start ostensibly for Strasburg; I’ll send you double passports in blank to be filled out.  Provide yourself with substitutes; change your route and above all your carriage; let your substitutes go on to Strasburg, and do you reach Prussia through Switzerland and Bavaria.  Not a word—­prudence!  The police are against you; and you do not know what the police are—­”

Mademoiselle de Cinq-Cygne offered the then celebrated Robert Lefebvre a sufficient sum to induce him to go to Troyes and take Michu’s portrait.  Monsieur de Grandville promised to afford the painter every possible facility.  Monsieur de Chargeboeuf then started in the old berlingot, with Laurence and a servant who spoke German.  Not far from Nancy they overtook Mademoiselle Goujet and Gothard, who had preceded them in an excellent carriage, which the marquis took, giving them in exchange the berlingot.

Talleyrand was right.  At Strasburg the commissary-general of police refused to countersign the passport of the travellers, and gave them positive orders to return.  By that time the marquis and Laurence were leaving France by way of Besancon with the diplomatic passport.

Laurence crossed Switzerland in the first days of October, without paying the slightest attention to that glorious land.  She lay back in the carriage in the torpor which overtakes a criminal on the eve of his execution.  To her eyes all nature was shrouded in a seething vapor; even common things assumed fantastic shapes.  The one thought, “If I do not succeed they will kill themselves,” fell upon her soul with reiterated blows, as the bar of the executioner fell upon the victim’s members when tortured on the wheel.  She felt herself breaking; she lost her energy in this terrible waiting for the cruel moment, short and decisive, when she should find herself face to face with that man on whom the fate of the condemned depended.  She chose to yield to her depression rather than waste her strength uselessly.  The marquis, who was incapable of understanding this resolve of firm minds, which often assumes quite diverse aspects (for in such moments of tension certain superior minds give way to surprising gaiety), began to fear that he might never bring Laurence alive to the momentous interview, solemn to them only, and yet beyond the ordinary limits of private life.  To Laurence, the necessity of humiliating herself before that man, the object of her hatred and contempt, meant the sacrifice of all her noblest feelings.

“After this,” she said, “the Laurence who survives will bear no likeness to her who is now to perish.”