I visited Madame Lafarge in her prison at the Maison Centrale yesterday. I had to obtain the consent of the préfet and of the prisoner herself, who dislikes very much receiving strangers. In my case, however, she declared herself enchanted, and said a great many complimentary things which I won't repeat. Léon Guillard accompanied me. She received us in the Director's room, prepared on purpose for the bishop's visits to the afflictorum. I was struck, not with her beauty, poor woman, for she is dying slowly of the most terrible of all diseases, consumption! She feels the skein of life's thread unwinding, and to the very last moment she will feel, she will know. It is awful! Better a ball through the poor feeble chest, or that a chimney-pot should fall on her head in a gale.
As the room she received us in was gloomy and depressing, she led us into a smaller one next to it, where we three sat talking. I felt her looking attentively and closely at me. I daresay I showed some of the emotion that I felt. I begged her to believe it was not idle curiosity that had brought me to see her. She interrupted me courteously by saying that she had too good an opinion of my heart and intelligence for that. "I only saw you once," she said, "in Iphigenia in Aulis. I have often regretted since that I did not know you personally." I then offered to come and recite anything she liked. She exclaimed with a sigh, "Ah! no, I do not dare. You would make me regret the world too much, and I am trying to teach myself not to regret life." When we left she kissed me.
Now, if you wish for my opinion of this celebrated prisoner, I will tell you that she strikes me as being a woman of considerable intelligence, who in any society would make her mark, if not by her moral qualities, certainly by her opinions and manner of expressing them.
She asked me if I knew M. Lachaud, the lawyer who conducted her case. I answered that I had only seen him once. "I advise you to make his acquaintance," she said warmly. "He has a good heart, and great talent and eloquence." I left sad and depressed, thinking that, if I had a favour to obtain from a sovereign, it would be the release of this poor creature—married by means of an agency—who is dying slowly and surely of remorse, or by the injustice of men.[1]
Madame Lafarge's words shortly before her death might have been spoken by Rachel. "Adieu tout ce que j'aime! Je légue ma mémoire aux hommes de cœur.
- ↑ She was released three years later by the President of the Republic, but only enjoyed her freedom for a few months.
