“Alas, no!” replied Alain.  “The unfortunate little woman, not twenty-one years old, perished on the scaffold.  After reading Bordin’s appeal, the Emperor answered very much in these terms:  ’Why be so bitter against the spy?  A spy is no longer a man; he ought not to have feelings; he is a wheel of the machinery; Bryond did his duty.  If instruments of that kind were not what they are,—­steel bars,—­and intelligent only in the service of the power employing them, government would not be possible.  The sentences of criminal courts must be carried out, or the judges would cease to have confidence in themselves or in me.  Besides, the women of the West must be taught not to meddle in plots.  It is precisely in the case of a woman that justice should not be interfered with.  There is no excuse possible for an attack on power?’ This was the substance of what the Emperor said, as Bordin repeated it to me.  Learning a little later that France and Russia were about to measure swords against each other, and that the Emperor was to go two thousand miles from Paris to attack a vast and desert country, Bordin understood the secret reason of the Emperor’s harshness.  To insure tranquillity at the West, now full of refractories, Napoleon believed it necessary to inspire terror.  Bordin could do no more.”

“But Madame de la Chanterie?” said Godefroid.

“Madame de la Chanterie was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment,” replied Alain.  “As she was already transferred to Bicetre, near Rouen, to undergo her punishment, nothing was attempted on her behalf until every effort had been made to save Henriette, who had grown dearer than ever to her mother during this time of anxiety.  Indeed, if it had not been for Bordin’s assurance that he could obtain Henriette’s pardon, it is doubtful if Madame could have survived the shock of the sentence.  When the appeal failed, they deceived the poor mother.  She saw her daughter once after the execution of the other prisoners, not knowing that Madame Bryond’s respite was due to a false declaration of pregnancy, made to gain time for the appeal.”

“Ah!  I understand it all now,” exclaimed Godefroid.

“No, my dear child, there are things that no one can imagine.  Madame thought her daughter living for a long time.”

“How was that?”

“When Madame des Tours-Minieres learned from Bordin that her appeal was rejected and that nothing could save her, that sublime little woman had the courage to write twenty letters, dating them month by month after the time of her execution, so as to make her poor mother in her prison believe she was alive.  In those letters she told of a gradual illness which would end in death.  They covered a period of two years.  Madame de la Chanterie was therefore prepared for the news of her daughter’s death, but she thought it a natural one.  She did not know until 1814 that Henriette had died on the scaffold.  For two years Madame was herded among the most depraved of her sex, but thanks to the urgency of the Champignelles and the Beauseants she was, after the second year, placed in a cell by herself, where she lived like a cloistered nun.”