Day by day I scrutinised the new arrivals in the vague expectation of seeing among them those I loved best.

But they never came.
I made few, if any, acquaintances, for I resolved to keep my mouth shut.
Spies, I knew, infested the prisons as they did the streets, and many a chance word uttered in the confidence of the dungeon was reported and used as evidence against the victim.

Now and again we were thrown into excitement by the arrival in our midst of some notable prisoner, before whose name, a few short weeks since, all Paris, nay, all France had trembled, but who now was marked down and doomed by his rivals in power.
And sometimes rumours of convulsions without penetrated the walls of our cells, and made us hope that, could we but endure a while, the end of "the terror" was not far distant.
I remember one night when a new prisoner whispered to me that the great Robespierre, at whose nod any head in Paris might drop into the dreadful basket, had been blown upon within the walls of the Convention itself.
"Death is marked on his face," said he; "and when he falls there is hope for us, for the people are sick of blood." Alas! this same poor whisperer heard his name called out that very night, and fell grovelling at my side, as if I could help him.
Still my name was held back.

Either they had overlooked it in the crowd, or had marked it through as dead already, or considered it less important than others who had more pressing claims on the executioner's knife.
Hope rose within me.

I became so used to being passed that I ceased to expect anything else, and only counted the days till the blood-red cloud should have drifted past and left me free.
When, therefore, on the very night that news had come in that Robespierre had indeed fallen, and was even then before his judges, I heard the name "Regnier" read off the fatal list, I broke into a cold sweat of amazement and terror, and fancied myself in a dream.
My name was the last on the list.