Taken aback by this interference, Simon recoiled without a word, and for the time being did not venture to maltreat the Prince any further. On the following day the surgeon again visited his patient, and was greatly surprised and touched when suddenly, as he was passing through the room where the Dauphin was confined, the little prisoner seized his hand and offered him two pears which he had saved from his own meal. “Take them, please, dear sir,” he said in his touching voice; “yesterday you showed that you have an interest in me. I thank you for it, but have no way of proving my gratitude. Will you not take these pears, then? It will make me very happy!” The old man pressed the child’s hand kindly, but did not speak. He accepted the present, and a tear that rolled down his cheek betrayed the emotion he could not find words to express. So noble was the nature of this royal child that even the terrible treatment he had received had not entirely destroyed his sensibilities—at the slightest touch of kindness or sympathy they sprang to life again. Never had he forgotten his mother’s admonitions. Sometimes he even recalled them in his dreams; and once it happened that Simon overheard him when, in his sleep, he knelt with folded hands and prayed fervently to God. Unmoved by this touching sight, the cobbler awakened his wife to look at the strange dreamer; then, seizing a pitcher of water, he suddenly dashed it over the little bowed head, regardless of the danger that the shock of such an ice-cold shower-bath on a January night might kill the child. Instantly seized with a chill, the Prince threw himself back on his bed without uttering a sound. But the dampness of his couch allowed him no rest. He got up again and sought refuge on the floor with his pillow—the only part of his bed that had escaped the deluge. As he crouched there, his teeth chattering with cold, Simon sprang up again in spite of his wife’s efforts to detain him, grasped the child with both hands, and shook him violently, crying: “I will teach you to get up in the night to recite your paternosters, like a Trappist!” Then as if in a frenzy he rushed at the boy with such a malignant expression upon his cruel face that the poor little Prince caught at the arms of his ferocious jailer and cried: “Oh, what have I done that you should want to murder me?” “Murder you! As if that was what I wanted! Don’t you know that, if I wished to murder you, I could take you by the throat and stop your noise in no time?”