r.
There, as she lay in her own filth, she suffered alike from pain and
want of cleanliness. The whole night long she was disturbed by the
running to and fro of ravenous rats, those terrors of every prison,
who were wont to nibble men's ears and noses.

But all these horrors fell short of those which her tyrant, the
Penitentiary, dealt out to her himself. Day after day he would come
into the upper vault and speak to her through the mouth of her pit,
threatening her, commanding her, and making her, whether she would or
no, confess to this or that crime as having been wrought by others. At
length she ceased to eat. Fearing that she might die at once, he drew
her for a while out of her _In Pace_, and laid her in the upper vault.
Then, in his rage against Yvelin's memoir, he cast her back into her
sewer below.

That glimpse of light, that short renewal and sudden death of hope,
gave the crowning impulse to her despair. Her wound was closing, so
that her strength was greater. She was seized with a deep and violent
thirst for death. She swallowed spiders, but instead of dying, only
brought them up again. Pounded glass she swallowed, but in vain.
Finding an old bit of sharp iron, she tried to cut her throat, but
could not. Then, as an easier way, she dug the iron into her belly.
For four hours she worked and bled, but without success. Even this
wound shortly began to close. To crown all, the life she hated so
returned to her stronger than before. Her heart's death was of no
avail.

She became once more a woman; still, alas! an object of desire, of
temptation for her jailers, those brutish varlets of the bishopric,
who, notwithstanding the horror of the place, and the unhappy
creature's own sad and filthy plight, would come to make sport of
her, believing that they might do all their pleasure against a Witch.
But an angel succoured her, so she said. From men and rats alike she
defended herself. But against herself, herself she could not protect.
Her prison corrupted her mind. She dreamed of the Devil, besought him
to come and see her, to restore to her the shameful pleasures in which
she had wallowed at Louviers. He never deigned to come back. Once more
amidst this corruption of her senses, she fell back on her old desire
for death. One of the jailers had given her a drug to kill the rats.
She was just going to swallow it herself, when an angel--an angel, was
it, or a devil?--stayed her hand, reserving her for other crimes.