All at once a new contraction marked her features. She had just noticed Desgrez riding near her, the man who had arrested her at Liége, and subjected her to some rough treatment. She asked the executioner to move so as to hide this man from her; then she felt remorse for this 'delicacy,' and asked the executioner to return to his former position. 'It was the last time her countenance showed any grimace,' says Pirot. From that moment she was wholly under the fortifying influence of the priest who assisted her. Hope arose in her soul, more and more clear and radiant, and gave strength to her heart. She knelt down on the step of the great door of Notre Dame, and there repeated with docility the formula dictated by the executioner, in which she publicly confessed her crimes. 'Some people say that she hesitated in saying her father's name,' observes Pirot; 'but I noticed nothing of the sort.' Then they remounted the cart to wend towards the Place de Grève. 'Not a word of reproach or complaint against any one escaped her; she showed no sign of vulgar fear. If she dreaded death, it was only in anticipation of the judgment of God, and neither the sight of the Grève, the proximity of the scaffold, nor the appearance of all the terrible apparatus used in this kind of execution gave her the least shadow of fright.' The cart stopped. The executioner said to her: 'Madam, you must persevere: it is not enough to have come here and to have responded hitherto to what this gentleman has been saying, you must go on to the end as you have begun.' 'This he said in a noticeably humane manner,' observes Pirot, 'and I was edified by it. It is true that she answered never a word, but she courteously bent her head as though to show that she took well what he had said and that she meant to continue in the temper in which he saw her. He confessed to me that he was surprised at her firmness.' At this moment a clerk of the Parlement appeared. The commissaries were sitting in the Hôtel de Ville ready to receive any declaration Madame de Brinvilliers might still have to make about her accomplices. 'Sir,' she replied, 'I have no more to say; I have told all I know.' She renewed the declaration whereby she freed Briancourt and Desgrez from the accusations fabricated against them at her torture.