I must have screamed, for I waked in my mother's arms, as she snatched me from bed, covering my face with kisses. Those kisses are still on my face, Thérèse, and I feel now the passionate embrace with which she clasped me to her, and I see the terrible dread on her beautiful pale face. Chapter III THE EMPTY COFFIN Thérèse, do you remember how we were taken to the Assembly, there to pass the day within a grated tribunal and led thence to prison? How from that prison we were afterwards transferred to another more gloomy still? O the tower, the tower! The impressions of sorrow are deeper than those of happiness. Tell me, Thérèse, my companion in that captivity, has greater suffering ever been endured than in that tower? If those walls, so soon after demolished, (for all traces of my history have been obliterated), if those stones that once were walls had a voice, that voice would be a sob. If they might writhe, they would wring out tears. Even their name is a wail. There is no elegy so sad as the towers. The agonies of our family,--you know them as well as I, for they are your own. But what you do _not_ know are mine,--a child torn from his mother's arms as she was led to the guillotine. And though you seek to drive them from your knowledge, you _shall_ hear them. Let me describe this prison to you, that you may realize 'tis your brother who speaks. What detail could I forget of that damp tower flanked by four smaller ones of arched roofs? The roof of the first was sustained in the centre by a heavy pillar and its doors were of strong boards fastened together by nails and guarded by heavy bolts; the interior door was of cast iron; the walls were grey and black, in imitation of a tomb; the white border was garnished with the tricolor on which were traced the words: RIGHTS OF MAN. This was the only decoration of the filthy apartment wherein vulgar and malevolent people constantly watched us. On first entering the tower, I believed myself to be dreaming and that soon I should be rescued from the nightmare, as my mother had snatched me from the wolves. This conviction was doubtless due to the contrast between my past and present condition. My childhood had glided by so sweetly and placidly; my senses had been stimulated by such great beauty and elegance; the epoch upon which my mother stamped her refinement was so poetic and artistic; the gardens in which I had played were so beautiful; my material wants anticipated with so much adulation, that I had grown to comprehend only smiles and beauty. It was considered an honor to touch me, to be near me. No wonder, then, that the transition from palace to prison affected my nervous system to the extent of causing the obsession to possess me that I was two persons in one.