It condemns me to feign a love which I do not feel, to endure caresses which make me shudder, because they are an inheritance from five unfortunate women.

Jane, Jane, do you comprehend what it is to be obliged to embrace a man who has murdered three wives and put away two?
to be obliged to kiss this king whose lips open just as readily to utter vows of love as sentences of death?
Ah, Jane, I speak, I live, and still I suffer all the agonies of death! They call me a queen, and yet I tremble for my life every hour, and conceal my anxiety and fear beneath the appearance of happiness! My God, I am five-and-twenty, and my heart is still the heart of a child; it does not yet know itself, and now it is doomed never to learn to know itself; for I am Henry's wife, and to love another is, in other words, to wish to mount the scaffold.

The scaffold! Look, Jane.

When the king approached me and confessed his love and offered me his hand, suddenly there rose before me a fearful picture.

It was no more the king whom I saw before me, but the hangman; and it seemed to me that I saw three corpses lying at his feet, and with a loud scream I sank senseless before him.