“Sire!  Give us back our mother!” they sobbed.

The Emperor, much surprised, took the petition from Mme. d’Houel’s hands and read it through.  There were a few moments of painful silence; he raised his eyes to the little girls, asked Ducolombier a few brief questions, then suddenly starting on,

“I cannot,” he said drily.

And he disappeared among the groups humbly bowing in the hall.  Some one who witnessed the scene relates that the Emperor was very much moved when reading the petition.  “He changed colour several times, tears were in his eyes and his voice trembled.”  The Duke of Rovigo asserted that pardon would be granted; the Emperor’s heart had already pronounced it, but he was very angry with the minister of police, who after having made a great fuss over this affair and got all the credit, left him supreme arbiter without having given him any information concerning it.

“If the case is a worthy one,” said Napoleon, “why did he not send me word of it? and if it is not, why did he give passports to a family whom I am obliged to send away in despair?”

The poor children had indeed to return to France, knowing that they took, as it were, her death sentence to their mother.  Each relay that brought them nearer to her was a step towards the scaffold; nothing could now save the poor woman, and she waited in resignation.  Never, since Le Chevalier’s death, had she lost the impassive manner that had astonished the spectators in court.  Whether solitude had altered her ardent nature, or whether she looked on death as the only possible end to her adventurous existence, she seemed indifferent as to her fate, and thought no longer of the future.  Licquet had long abandoned her; he had been “her last friend.”  Of all the survivors of the affair of Quesnay she was the only one left in the conciergerie, the others having gone to serve their terms in Bicetre or other fortresses.

Whilst it had seemed possible that Mme. Acquet’s friends might obtain the Emperor’s interest in her case, she had received great care and attention, but since the return of her daughters from Vienna things had changed.  She had become once more “the woman Acquet,” and the interest that had been taken in her gave place to brutal indifference.  On August 23d (and this date probably accords with the return of the children and their aunt) Chapais-Marivaux, in haste to end the affair, sent three health-officers to examine her, but these good people, knowing the consequence of their diagnosis, declared that “the symptoms made it impossible for them to pronounce an opinion on the state of the prisoner.”

Chapais-Marivaux took a month to find doctors who would not allow pity to interfere with their professional duty, and on October 6th the prefect wrote to Real:  “M. le Procureur-General has just had the woman Acquet examined by four surgeons, three of whom had not seen her before.  They have certified that she is not pregnant, and so she is to be executed to-day.”