Since I came out of the Infirmary a vivid idea has occupied me,--a thought which affects me to madness; namely, that I might have escaped, had they left me there! Those Physicians, those Charity Sisters seemed to take an interest in me. “To die so young! and by such a death!” One would have imagined they pitied me by their pressing round my bed. Bah! it was curiosity! I have no chance now! My plea will be rejected, because all was legal; the witnesses gave correct evidence, the counsel pleaded well, the Judges decided carefully. I do not reckon upon it, unless--No! folly; there is no hope. The plea is a cord which holds you suspended over an abyss, and which you feel giving way at each instant until it breaks. It is as if the axe of the Guillotine took six weeks to fall. If I could obtain my pardon!--my pardon! From whom, for what, and by what means? It is impossible that I should be pardoned. They say _an example is requisite_. SIXTEENTH PAPER. During the few hours I passed at the Infirmary, I seated myself at a window in the sunshine (for the afternoon had become fine), and I enjoyed all the sun which the gratings of the window would allow me. I sat thus, my heavy and fevered head within my hands, my elbows on my knees, my feet on the bar of the chair; for dejection had made me stoop, and sink within myself, as if I had neither bone nor muscular power. The stifling air of the prison oppressed me more than ever; I still fancied the noise from the convicts’ chains rung in my ears; I was almost overcome. I wished that some guardian spirit would take pity on me, and send even a little bird to sing there, opposite, on the edge of the roof. I know not if it were a spirit of good or evil which granted my wish; but almost at the moment I uttered it, I heard beneath my window a voice,--not that of a bird, but far better,--the pure, fresh, _velvet_ voice of a young girl of fifteen! I raised my head with a start; I listened with avidity to the song she sung. It was a slow and plaintive air,--a sad yet beautiful melody. As I gathered the sense of the words, I cannot describe my pain and disappointment, while the following stanzas of prison-dialect marred the sweet music.[6] I heard no more. I could listen to no more. The meaning, half-hidden, half-evident, of this horrible lament,--the struggle between the felon and the police; the thief he meets and despatches for his wife; his dreadful explanation to her: “I have sweated an oak” (“I have assassinated a man”) the wife who goes to Versailles with a petition, and the King indignantly exclaiming that he “will make the guilty man dance where there is no floor!”--and all this sung to the sweetest air, and by the sweetest voice that ever soothed human ear! I was shocked, disgusted, overcome. It was a repulsive idea that all these monstrous words proceeded from a fresh rosy mouth: it was like the slime of a snail over a rosebud!