The mothers, sisters and wives of those young men came to look after them in the mornings and to do their rooms. One day, as I was passing along the dark corridor which led to M. Carrel's room, I heard a bewitching voice issue from a neighbouring den: a beautiful woman, hatless, with her hair hanging loose, was sitting on the edge of a pallet-bed, mending the tattered clothes of a kneeling prisoner, who seemed less the captive of Philip than of the woman at whose feet he was chained. M. Carrel, delivered from his captivity, came, in his turn, to see me. A few days before his fatal hour had struck, he came to bring me the number of the _National_ in which he had taken the trouble to insert an article on my _Essais sur la littérature anglaise_, in which article he had, with too much praise, quoted the concluding pages of those Essays. After his death, they gave me that article written entirely in his own hand, and I keep it as a token of his friendship. "After his death:" what words I have just written without noticing it! [Sidenote: Armand Carrel's duel.] Though forming a necessary supplement to laws which take no cognizance of offenses against honour, the duel is a horrible thing, especially when it destroys a life full of hopes and robs society of one of those rare men who came only after the labour of a century, in the concatenation of certain ideas and certain events. Carrel fell in the wood that saw the Duc d'Enghien fall: the shade of the grandson of the Great Condé served as a witness to the illustrious plebeian and took him with it. That fatal wood has twice made me weep: at least I cannot reproach myself for having, in those two catastrophes, failed in what I owed to my sympathies and my grief. M. Carrel, who, in his other meetings, had never dreamt of death, thought of it before this one: he employed the night in writing his last wishes, as though he had been warned of the result of the combat. At eight o'clock in the morning, on the 22nd of July 1836, he went with a quick, light step to those shadows where the roebuck gambols at that hour. Placed at the distance measured out, he moved swiftly forwards, fired without turning sideways, as was his custom: it would seem as though there were never enough danger for him. Wounded to the death and supported in the arms of his friends, as he passed before his adversary[315], who was himself wounded, he said to him: "Are you in great pain, sir?" Armand Carrel was as gentle as he was fearless.