Five hours elapsed before the vessel got under way; she did so at last, however, and after sailing for an hour, she stopped in the open roadstead. It was nearly midnight.
Then there was a great commotion on deck. Among the innumerable threats which greeted the exiles at Rochefort, cries of "Into the water!" and "Drink out of the great cup!" had been most frequent, and had reached the prisoners' ears. No one expressed his thought, but they each expected to find the end of their tortures in the bed of the Charente. The vessel to which they had been transferred was doubtless one of those which had a movable plug an ingenious invention of Nero's to rid himself of his mother, and utilized by Carrier to drown the royalists.
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