gripped and chilled by what happened whenever one reflects on it.
Caught in the act and brought before the court, she made no
attempt to defend herself, but throughout her trial continually
fainted. Condemned to death and taken back to prison, she
remained, until the day appointed for her execution, motionless, on
the same spot in her cell, and ate nothing. When the suffering one
undergoes is seen by the public, is the subject of other people’s
opinions, no matter whose, there is some compensation in that
suffering, if only in the fact of braving what others think of one.
But in this case it was solitary suffering, treated with disdain by
others who were content to walk past and ignore it as if it were a
completely natural occurrence. That kind of suffering weighs solely
and entirely on the individual victim. Finally, on the day she was to
die, the poor woman allowed herself to be taken to the gallows
without offering any resistance, without appearing to notice what
was happening around her, and the first and last sign of life she
gave was to let out a long scream when she felt the tumbril
disappearing from under her feet. There is in this account such a
picture of human wretchedness—a weak human giving up without
a struggle, not even expecting anyone else to show the slightest
interest, crushed by the iron hand of an implacable society—that it
inspires a particular degree of pity. That pity, while not unmingled
with contempt, nonetheless touches the very bottom of one’s
heart.^21The most awesome, the most terrible thing Constant could conceive of in
his whole existence was silent, lonely, helpless suffering. For a person like
Constant to tell this story must have been like holding his hand in a flame.
And yet it is told with the unflinching directness and with the persuasive
conviction in its observations we associate with the author of Adolphe. It
comes from a man who has journeyed to the bottom of himself, and for
whom the story of the Englishwoman had the intensity of a vision. There
can be little doubt that the Constant who writes thus is identifying himself
with the sufferings of Ann Hurle, the woman in question,
22
and that
Constant learned to sympathize with her absolute and bewildered
defencelessness and her distress ‘which people were content to walk past
and ignore as if it were a completely natural occurrence’, having lived
through such experiences himself and probably at an early age. Such
memories are indelible. The permanent fear that one will one day be
abandoned again received, of course, its most famous and moving
The grief that does not speak 19