The eager zeal of the woman had, at least, this advantage,—­that it prevented Dionysia from giving way to her painful thoughts.

Night had come.  It was nine o’clock; then it struck ten.  At last, the watch came round to relieve the sentinels.  A quarter of an hour after that, Blangin reappeared, holding a lantern and an enormous bunch of keys in his hands.

“I have seen Trumence to bed,” he said.  “You can come now, madam.”

Dionysia was all ready.

“Let us go,” she said simply.

Then she followed the jailer along interminable passages, through a vast vaulted hall, in which their steps resounded as in a church, then through a long gallery.  At last, pointing at a massive door, through the cracks of which the light was piercing, he said,—­

“Here we are.”

But Dionysia seized his arm, and said in an almost inaudible voice,—­

“Wait a moment.”

She was almost overcome by so many successive emotions.  She felt her legs give way under her, and her eyes become dim.  In her heart she preserved all her usual energy; but the flesh escaped from her will and failed her at the last moment.

“Are you sick?” asked the jailer.  “What is the matter?”

She prayed to God for courage and strength:  when her prayer was finished, she said,—­

“Now, let us go in.”

And, making a great noise with the keys and the bolts, Blangin opened the door to Jacques de Boiscoran’s cell.

Jacques counted no longer the days, but the hours.  He had been imprisoned on Friday morning, June 23, and this was Wednesday night, June 28, He had been a hundred and thirty-two hours, according to the graphic description of a great writer, “living, but struck from the roll of the living, and buried alive.”

Each one of these hundred and thirty-two hours had weighed upon him like a month.  Seeing him pale and haggard, with his hair and beard in disorder, and his eyes shining brightly with fever, like half-extinguished coals, one would hardly have recognized in him the happy lord of Boiscoran, free from care and trouble, upon whom fortune had ever smiled,—­that haughty sceptical young man, who from the height of the past defied the future.

The fact is, that society, obliged to defend itself against criminals, has invented no more fearful suffering than what is called “close confinement.”  There is nothing that will sooner demoralize a man, crush his will, and utterly conquer the most powerful energy.  There is no struggle more distressing than the struggle between an innocent man accused of some crime, and the magistrate,—­a helpless being in the hands of a man armed with unlimited power.

If great sorrow was not sacred, to a certain degree, Dionysia might have heard all about Jacques.  Nothing would have been easier.  She would have been told by Blangin, who was watching M. de Boiscoran like a spy, and by his wife, who prepared his meals, through what anguish he had passed since his imprisonment.