When at last I awakened, I was told that I had suffered from opisthotonus, brought on by tetanus. Indeed, my sufferings were such that Seiffert had believed I was not long for this earth.

‘I own, mademoiselle, I am most astonished by your recovery, though it will require some time yet before you are entirely restored to health,’ he confided. It cost me a great effort even to hear him, but I listened and took each of his words in slowly, as I had my teaspoons of nourishment. I attempted to recall those incidents that had transpired prior to my misfortune. I reached through the haze.

‘Madame de Buffon?’ I enquired. ‘Has . . . has she delivered safely?’

‘Yes.’ The physician nodded. ‘Some time ago, near to a month, now. She has been brought to bed of a boy. It was a difficult labour, but she has recovered. The infant is small, but well.’

‘I pray to God that he will thrive.’

‘I shall inform her of your sentiments,’ he replied, smiling gently.

It had been some time since I had spoken with any person in Monsieur d’Orléans’s household beyond Seiffert and those maids who had ministered to me. Although my illness had ravaged me and rendered me as limp and thin as a candlewick, I longed very much for company. Monsieur Seiffert had prohibited La Buffon from nursing me for fear that she might communicate some disease to her child. He advised against her visiting me until I presented at least a semblance of health. However, this did not prevent me from receiving others.

Orléans appeared at my bedside regularly and displayed such proofs of tenderness and concern that whatever doubts I had possessed in the past about the sincerity of his character were soon dispelled. He kissed me upon the brow as if I were a sickly relation and hung about my thin, pale neck a pendant of emeralds. He delivered to me books in my native tongue: Mr Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson and a novel by Mrs Smith, which he instructed Monsieur Barrois, young Beaujolais’s tutor, and the boy, to read to me. These two unlikely well-wishers came frequently to my bedchamber and from them I discovered a great many things. Barrois described in some detail those terrible events which had transpired in the prisons, how the people had broken their way inside and slaughtered thousands. I listened with awful disbelief at what he recounted to me: how parents were murdered before their children; how bodies were dismembered and paraded about the city for days on end. They had piled the corpses outside the prisons, where the sun heated them and created an intolerable stink. When he concluded his account, I lay in a state of shock. I could not conceive of how such things could have occurred in the name of revolution and told him as much.