The Count de Morseiul felt that painful tightening of the heart which every man, thus suddenly stopped in the full career of liberty, and destined to be conveyed to long and uncertain imprisonment, to be shut out from all the happy sounds and sights of earth, to be debarred all the sweet intercourses of friendship and affection, has felt and must feel. At the same time all the various points of anxiety and difficulty in his situation rushed through his mind with such rapidity as to turn him dizzy with the whirling numbers of such painful thoughts. Clémence de Marly, whose hand was to have been his that very night, the good old pastor, his friends, his servants, all might, for aught he knew, be kept in utter ignorance of his fate for many days. The hands, too, of the unscrupulous and feelingless instruments of despotic power, would be in every cabinet of his house and his château, invading all the little storehouses of past affections, perhaps scattering to the winds all the fond memorials of the loved and dead. The dark lock of his mother's hair, which he had preserved from boyhood--the few fragments of her handwriting, and some verses that she had composed shortly before her death--all his father's letters to him, from the time that he first sent him forth, a gallant boy girt with the sword of a high race, to win renown, through all that period when the son, growing up in glory, shone back upon his father's name the light that he had thence received, and paid amply all the cares which had been bestowed upon him, by the joy of his great deeds, up to that sad moment, when, with a trembling hand, the dying parent announced to his son the commencement and progress of the fatal malady that carried him to the grave.--All these were to be opened, examined, perhaps dispersed by the cold, if not by the scornful; and all the sanctities of private affection violated. Such and a thousand other such feelings, rapid, innumerable, and, in some instances, contradictory to and opposing each other, rushed through his bosom in a moment at the announcement of the officer's errand. The whole facts of his situation, in short, with every minute particular, were conjured up before his eyes, as in a picture, by those few words; and the first effort of deliberate thought was made while De Cantal went on to say, "As I have said, Monsieur de Morseiul, it is my wish to save you any unnecessary pain, and therefore I have ordered the carriage, which is to convey you to the Bastille, to wait at the further end of the first street. A couple of musketeers and myself will accompany you inside; so that there will be no unnecessary parade about the matter: and I doubt not that you will be liberated shortly."