her skeins of wool and whispering to her while her father was asleep, he fell so deeply in love again that he lost his head.  I do not wish to be too hard on him, poor creature! and I fancy his right place is in the asylum rather than on the scaffold.  He used to shout and groan all night long; and the letters he wrote her were so stupid that she used to smile as she read them and then put them in her pocket without answering them.  Here is one of these letters that I found upon her when I undressed her after the horrible deed; a bullet has gone through it, and it is stained with blood, but enough may still be read to show that monsieur frequently intended to kill mademoiselle.”

So saying, she put down on the table a sheet of paper half burnt and half covered with blood, which sent a shudder through the spectators—­genuine with some of them, mere affectation with many others.

Before this letter was read, she finished her deposition, and ended it with some assertions which perplexed me considerably; for I could no longer distinguish the boundary between truth and perfidy.

“Ever since her accident,” she said, “mademoiselle has been hovering between life and death.  She will certainly never recover, whatever the doctors may declare.  I venture to say that these gentlemen, who only see the patient at certain hours, do not understand her illness as well as I, who have never left her for a single night.  They pretend that her wounds are going on well and that her head is deranged; whereas I say that her wounds are going on badly, and that her head is better than they say.  Mademoiselle very rarely talks irrationally, and if by chance she does, it is in the presence of these gentlemen, who confuse and frighten her.  She then makes such efforts not to appear mad that she actually becomes so; but as soon as they leave her alone with me or Saint-Jean or Monsieur l’Abbe, who could quite well have told you how things are, if he had wished, she becomes calm again, and sweet and sensible as usual.  She says that she could almost die of pain, although to the doctors she pretends that she is scarcely suffering at all.  And then she speaks of her murderer with the generosity that becomes a Christian; a hundred times a day she will say: 

“’May God pardon him in the next life as I pardon him in this!  After all, a man must be very fond of a woman to kill her!  I was wrong not to marry him; perhaps he would have made me happy.  I drove him to despair and he has avenged himself on me.  Dear Leblanc, take care never to betray the secret I have told you.  A single indiscreet word might send him to the scaffold, and that would be the death of my father.’

“The poor young lady is far from imagining that things have come to this pass; that I have been summoned by the law and my religion to make known what I would rather conceal; and that, instead of going out to get an apparatus for her shower-baths, I have come here to confess the truth.  The only thing that consoles me is that it will be easy to hide all this from M. le Chevalier, who has no more sense now than a babe just born.  For myself, I have done my duty; may God be my judge!”