Tears checked the dying woman’s voice for an instant; Aline gave her salts to inhale.

“There is no one who has not been better to me than I deserve,” she went on,—­“even the devoted servant who does this last service; she has feigned ignorance of what she knew, but at least she was in the secret of the penances by which I have destroyed the flesh that sinned.  I here beg pardon of the world for the long deception to which I have been led by the terrible logic of society.  Jean-Francois Tascheron was not as guilty as he seemed.  Ah! you who hear me, I implore you to remember his youth, and the madness excited in him partly by the remorse that seized upon me, partly by involuntary seductions.  More than that! it was a sense of honor, though a mistaken honor, which caused the most awful of these evils.  Neither of us could endure our perpetual deceit.  He appealed, unhappy man, to my own right feeling; he sought to make our fatal love as little wounding to others as it could be.  We meant to hide ourselves away forever.  Thus I was the cause, the sole cause, of his crime.  Driven by necessity, the unhappy man, guilty of too much devotion to an idol, chose from all evil acts the one which might be hereafter reparable.  I knew nothing of it till the moment of execution.  At that moment the hand of God threw down that scaffolding of false contrivances—­I heard the cries; they echo in my ears!  I divined the struggle, which I could not stop, —­I, the cause of it!  Tascheron was maddened; I swear it.”

Here Veronique turned her eyes upon Monsieur de Grandville, and a sob was heard to issue from Denise Tascheron’s breast.

“He lost his mind when he saw what he thought his happiness destroyed by unforeseen circumstances.  The unhappy man, misled by his love, went headlong from a delinquent act to crime—­from robbery to a double murder.  He left my mother’s house an innocent man, he returned a guilty one.  I alone knew that there was neither premeditation nor any of the aggravating circumstances on which he was sentenced to death.  A hundred times I thought of betraying myself to save him; a hundred times a horrible and necessary restraint stopped the words upon my lips.  Undoubtedly, my presence near the scene had contributed to give him the odious, infamous, ignoble courage of a murderer.  Were it not for me, he would have fled.  I had formed that soul, trained that mind, enlarged that heart; I knew it; he was incapable of cowardice or meanness.  Do justice to that involuntarily guilty arm, do justice to him, whom God, in his mercy, has allowed to sleep in his quiet grave, where you have wept for him, suspecting, it may be, the extenuating truth.  Punish, curse the guilty creature before you!  Horrified by the crime when once committed, I did my best to hide my share in it.  Trusted by my father—­I, who was childless—­to lead a child to God, I led him to the scaffold!  Ah! punish me, curse me, the hour has come!”