The guards began to unlock the portmanteaus which lay about my dressing room. Some of the boxes I did not recognize and I could not help but think of the haste with which Lucy had been made to fill them in my absence. I knew not what any of them contained, so that opening them was as much a revelation to me as it proved to the guards. All five were unsealed at once and I watched how the soldiers’ interested hands rifled through my goods: my bandboxes and shoes, handkerchiefs, linens, feathers, ribbons, and then assorted books, papers, writing implements, paints, brushes and necessaries, jars, wax . . . I grimaced at the indelicacy of this intrusion. How they delighted in fingering the fine lace trim of the sleeves I wore upon my flesh, the bandeaus of silk which ran through my hair, the stockings that held my calves. Soon, all was a disorder, my effects strewn upon the floor in a litter. I remarked to myself how clever I had been in never saving one of Mrs Elliot’s letters to me, and then it occurred to me. All at once my face ran white.

‘Madam,’ Lucy called to me, bereft of breath, ‘Thérèse cannot be found. She is not in the kitchens nor in the courtyard . . .’

As Lucy spoke, I raised my eyes to see that the guards had alighted upon just that which I had recalled. They drew forth my three small pocketbooks, those aides-memoires into which I had scribbled for more than twelve months. In them I had recorded not only my own thoughts, deeds and actions, but importantly those of Madame de Buffon. Her private hopes and personal confessions, my discussions with Orléans and those of his household, in addition to my interactions with Mrs Elliot and my note of Allenham’s travels from Brussels all lay within, concealed in careful code. My mouth fell wide with horror as I observed them thumb through the pages.

After a spell, the captain addressed me. ‘Pray, citizeness, what are these books?’

‘They are no more than my diaries, captain.’

‘These words are not French.’

‘I am an Englishwoman.’

The guard examined me and then the pocketbooks with a hard eye.

‘Where is your correspondence, citizeness? Your letters from England, from your friends.’

‘I do . . . not keep a regular correspondence . . . with anyone, captain.’

He laughed at this.

‘Where do you keep your correspondence?’

‘I do . . . not know . . . I do not keep letters, captain. I dispose of them . . .’

The captain did not make a single movement but, like a toad following a fly, held me in his unflinching gaze.