ABSTRACT
WHEN the Count de Bellegarde and Willoughby met the next morning, the former seemed perfectly composed, but pensive and melancholy. It was early – he proposed walking towards the convent; ‘and as we go,’ said he, ‘I will conclude, as briefly as I can, my mournful history. I will not dwell upon the nature of my sufferings in the Bastile: of much of the time I passed there I have no perfect recollection; and for the rest, suffice it to say that, by the orders of my inflexible father, I endured all the rigours of imprisonment in its most hideous form, for several months, during which I made some attempts to escape – Attempts, the failure of which only served to convince me of the impossibility of effecting it; and in the impotency of rage, I cursed my existence, and, I fear, reproached Heaven itself for permitting such horrors on earth. The idea of Jacquelina, abandoned to the inhuman vengeance of a man capable of acting with such malignity towards his own son; the thoughts of the misery in which I had probably been the means of involving Ormond and Genevieve, hardly suffered me to attend to my own wretchedness, when I was capable of feeling it; but many weeks passed in wild ravings about them and then for myself I felt nothing.
