touching sensibility, (He is a husband and a father.) was shut up in the
little battlemented tower of Liebenfeld, where the wind whistles
terribly through all the loopholes.

The night of the 11th and 12th of November was one of the severest of
that terrible winter. My self-registering thermometer, which hung
outside my window with a southeast exposure, marked nineteen degrees
below zero, centigrade. I went early in the morning to bid the Colonel a
last farewell, and met Sergeant Garok, who said to me in bad German:

"We won't have to kill the Frantzouski, he is frozen to death."

I ran to the prison. The colonel was lying on his back, rigid. But I
found after a few minutes' examination, that the rigidity of the body
was not that of death. The joints, though they had not their ordinary
suppleness, could be bent and extended without any great effort. The
limbs, the face, and the chest gave my hands a sensation of cold, but
very different from that which I had often experienced from contact with
corpses.

Knowing that he had passed several nights without sleep, and endured
extraordinary fatigues, I did not doubt that he had fallen into that
profound and lethargic sleep which is superinduced by intense cold, and
which if too far prolonged slackens respiration and circulation to a
point where the most delicate physiological tests are necessary to
discover the continuance of life. The pulse was insensible; at least my
fingers, benumbed with cold, could not feel it. My hardness of hearing
(I was then in my sixty-ninth year) prevented my determining by
auscultation whether the beats of the heart still aroused those feeble
though prolonged vibrations which the ear continues to hear some time
after the hand fails to detect them.

The colonel had reached that point of torpor produced by cold, where to
revive a man without causing him to die, requires numerous and delicate
attentions. Some hours after, congelation would supervene, and with it,
impossibility of restoration to life.

I was in the greatest perplexity. On the one hand I knew that he was
dying on my hands by congelation; on the other, I could not, by myself,
bestow upon him the attentions that were indispensable. If I were to
administer stimulants without having him, at the same time, rubbed on
the trunk and limbs by three or four vigorous assistants, I would revive
him only to see him die. I had still before my eyes the spectacle of
that lovely young girl asphyx