During these official proceedings, certain noble-hearted women were greatly agitated. They said to themselves that when it is necessary to touch the heart, the weaker sex is the stronger. It was well known that the haughty Beatrice governed her husband; that she loved the city, its lake and mountains; that everything delighted her in this ‘_buena posada_.’ The ladies who had danced at her balls, and found her all condescension, went on Sunday morning to the ducal residence, and, with tears in their eyes, said to her: ‘Appease his Highness’s wrath, Madam, and save this good man.’ But the Portuguese princess, faithful to her policy as to her pride, refused her mediation. She had hardly done so, when her conscience reproached her; after that refusal, Beatrice found no pleasure in Geneva; and before long, leaving the duke behind her, she went all alone ‘beyond the mountains.’[346] Moreover it would have been too late. On Sunday morning, the 11th of March, three men were in consultation at the castle of Bonne, and preparing to despatch Lévrier. They were Bellegarde, sufficiently recovered from his fall to discharge his commission and simulate a trial; a confessor intrusted to set the accused at peace with the Church; and the executioner commissioned to cut off his head. His Highness’s steward, who had received instructions to have it over ‘in a few hours,’ ordered the prisoner to suffer the cord--‘nine stripes,’ says Michel Roset: ‘not so much from the necessity of questioning him,’ adds Bonivard, ‘as from revenge.’ This ducal groom (we mean Bellegarde) felt a certain pleasure in treating unworthily a magistrate the very representative of justice. ‘Have you no accomplices who conspired with you against my lord’s authority?’ said he to Lévrier, after the scourging. ‘There are no accomplices where there is no crime,’ replied the noble citizen with simplicity. Thereupon the Savoyard provost condemned him to be beheaded, ‘not because he had committed any offence,’ say the judicial documents, but because he was ‘a lettered and learned man, able to prevent the success of the enterprise of Savoy.’[347] After delivering the sentence, Bellegarde left Lévrier alone. He had long been looking death in the face. He did not despise life, like Berthelier; he would have liked to consecrate his strength to the defence of right in Geneva; but he was ready to seal with his blood the cause he had defended. ‘Death will do me no evil,’ he said. He called Berthelier to mind, and the lines written on that martyr of liberty being engraved in his memory, Lévrier repeated them aloud in his gloomy dungeon, and then approaching the wall, he wrote with a firm hand: Quid mihi mors nocuit?... ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘death will kill my body and stretch it lifeless on the ground; but I shall live again; and the life that awaits me beyond the grave cannot be taken from me by the sword of the cruellest tyrant.’ He finished the inscription he had begun, and wrote on the prison wall: