At meals we affected a pretence of congeniality, though the turnkeys kept close watch over their prisoners and did not look fondly upon flirtation between them. Still, Madame Desenfants pinched her daughter’s cheeks and fussed with her cap, as if the poor girl had some hope of ensnaring a former count or marquis for a husband. At all other times we attempted cheerfulness, though often without much success. At night our door was bolted at ten o’clock. We were then commanded to extinguish the single spitting candle we had each been allocated. No sooner had the darkness and silence sealed us into our frozen beds than the weeping began. At times the sobs were loud and alarming, but mostly the women pressed their faces to their flat straw pillows and wetted them. They cried for their children, for their husbands, their parents and siblings, many of whom languished in some other forlorn cell or had already met their fate upon the scaffold. Others wept with fear, for daylight never failed to bring a guard with a list of names who might swoop down upon any of the prisoners, as unannounced as the angel of death.

As the weeks passed, my spirits continued to sink like a stone dropped to the bottom of a well. In a fit of desperation I attempted to dispatch letters to the Maison Égalité by bribing one of the guards with a small enamel box of scant worth. I pleaded for Madame de Buffon’s forgiveness and Orléans’s intercession, but as I received neither a reply nor a release I assumed my entreaties had never arrived at their intended destination. I did not wish to consider that they had, but had gone unanswered, or, worse still, that I resided precisely where my erstwhile friend intended. I called to mind many times her final words to me, that she could not hazard to be associated with one regarded as a royalist. I grew listless and, I confess, on occasions began to wish for death, that I might awaken that morning or the next to hear my name bellowed out for judgement. Despair had seduced me so thoroughly that I had begun to wish I had never abandoned my father’s home, but embraced the fate he had designed for me. As for love, I eschewed that as no better than a phial of poison.

I did not know March when it arrived. I had long ceased to count days and weeks. The ice still hung in the air; my breath came in clouds even as I lay in my bed. Then one afternoon, as I scrubbed my chemises and stockings in a basin of frigid water, I was summoned into the presence of Monsieur Brudeau, the prison keeper.

‘Your servant who absconded upon the day of your arrest, she was Thérèse Bertrand?’ the short, red-nosed man barked at me.

‘Yes, monsieur.’