When some noisier breath than usual left her husband's lips, she was filled with a sudden terror that revived the color driven from her cheeks by her double anguish.
The prisoner reached the prison door in the dead of night and trying to noiselessly turn the key in a pitiless lock, was never more timidly bold.
When the countess had succeeded in rising to her seat without awakening her keeper, she made a gesture of childlike joy which revealed the touching naivete of her nature.

But the half-formed smile on her burning lips was quickly suppressed; a thought came to darken that pure brow, and her long blue eyes resumed their sad expression.

She gave a sigh and again laid her hands, not without precaution, on the fatal conjugal pillow.

Then--as if for the first time since her marriage she found herself free in thought and action--she looked at the things around her, stretching out her neck with little darting motions like those of a bird in its cage.

Seeing her thus, it was easy to divine that she had once been all gaiety and light-heartedness, but that fate had suddenly mown down her hopes, and changed her ingenuous gaiety to sadness.
The chamber was one of those which, to this day octogenarian porters of old chateaus point out to visitors as "the state bedroom where Louis XIII.