I did not expect to find what I did upon our arrival at the Conciergerie: despite the early hour, the room was entirely filled with clerks and those awaiting their trials. It was, as I recall, a forbidding, dark Gothic antechamber which vibrated with murmuring echoes; conversation, commands, coughs, sobs and clatter rose into the high, vaulted ceilings. The clink of keys jangled like a hundred little bells. Amidst this, small pools of light fell upon the stone floor from the grated windows above. At the end of this hall was a narrow stair and a gallery, which I was to learn led to the halls of Liberté and Égalité, the rooms where the trials were heard.

It was here, before a clerk, that my name was committed to a register. When I was asked it, I found myself so choked that I could scarcely speak the words. Indeed, I was forced to pause for a moment to think what name I would use.

‘Henrietta Katherine Lightfoot.’ That was the name which I had taken when I entered into my current life, and so it should be the one I bore when I quit it. With little more ceremony than that, I was then directed to take my seat upon the benches beside a collection of twenty or so of the most wretched souls I had ever glimpsed.

My friends, have you ever looked into the eye of a condemned man? Then you will understand the character of true desperation. There is to be found an ocean of remorse here, an endless depth of sorrow, a black fear as broad as the night sky. Women wept into their handkerchiefs; men too muttered and bawled into their hands. Others could not bear to sit in their final hours and paced mournfully or silently mouthed their prayers. In the corner, upon a filthy mattress, lay two men, too weak with illness to sit upright. Beneath the benches were scattered all manner of remnants: plates, bottles, crumbs of bread and the gristle of meat, provisions brought to them as they waited by suffering wives or children. All within that room bore faces etched with an understanding of their doom. Scarcely a word passed between us. Without uttering so much as a syllable to me, the thin, drawn lady who sat at my left reached for my hand. I permitted her to take it and hold it in hers as she shed tears.