Mme. de Montivilliers ordered the gates of the prison to be thrown open, which no one but herself would have dared to do against the orders of the Prioress. She gave shelter and a cordial to the brave farmer, and ordered her surgeon to examine the wounded robber, who was a young man dressed in womans clothes, and it was then learned from the farmer that the other criminal was that infernal beggar who had been sheltered beneath the porch of the abbey, before which he now lay on a litter waiting to be put in the dungeon. He had the torso of a giant, but no legs or arms, only a kind of stump of one arm. His head was enormous....A post in one of the royal households was an object of general ambition. Durufl, though a poet and well-known literary man who had received a prize from the Academy, applied for and obtained the appointment of valet e chambre to the young Comte de Provence, second grandson of the King, afterwards Louis XVIII., and was in consequence obliged to put on his stockings, in doing which he accidentally hurt him.
FORE:After the death of the old Marchal de Noailles in August, 1793, the Duchesse dAyen and her eldest daughter moved to Paris with the Marchale, who was old and feeble and whose reason, always very eccentric, as will be remembered, was becoming still more impaired. Had it not been for her and their devoted kindness to her, the lives of both the Duchess and her daughter might have been saved. Everything was prepared for the flight of the Vicomtesse to England, where her husband was waiting for her, intending to embark for America. The Duchess would probably have succeeded in making her escape also, but she would not leave her old mother-in-law, and Louise would not leave her.Mme. de Tess had managed to preserve part of her fortune and was comparatively well off. She had more than once suggested that her niece should come to her, but Pauline would not leave her husband and father-in-law as long as she was necessary to them. Now, she saw that it would, as they were in such difficulty, be better to do so. Mme. de Tess, suspecting that her niece was much worse off than she would tell her, sent her a gold snuff-box that had belonged to Mme. de Maintenon, which she sold for a hundred pounds. M. de Montagu decided to ask for hospitality with his maternal grandfather, the Marquis de la Salle who was living at Constance, and M. de Beaune said he would find himself an abode also on the shores of that lake.
How thankful I was to find myself alone in the room occupied first by my brother, then by Buonaparte, to which I came back after so long an absence: absolute solitude was a necessity to my mind. I prayed and groaned without interruption, which relieved me; then I resolved irrevocably to act in such a manner as never to expose France or my family to the Revolution which had just ended.... I lay down in the bed of Buonaparte, it had also been that of the martyr king, and at first I could not sleep ... like Richard III. I saw in a vision those I had lost, and in the distance enveloped in a sanguinary cloud I seemed to see menacing phantoms.If Trzia had been in immediate danger she would have been sent to the Conciergerie, which was looked upon as the gate of the guillotine; and she knew that the important thing was to gain time. Many had thus been saved; amongst others Mlle. de Montansier, formerly directress of a theatre. She was imprisoned in the Abbaye, and was condemned with a number of others to be guillotined on the following day.[118]There are many, he said in one of his speeches, who accuse me of being a murderer of the 2nd of September, to stifle my voice because they know I saw it all. They know that I used the authority I possessed to save a great number of persons from the hand of the assassin, they know that I alone in the midst of the Commune, dared throw myself before the sanguinary multitude to prevent their violating the dep?ts entrusted to the Commune. I defy any one to accuse me of crime or even of weakness. I did my duty on that occasion.... But the name of septembriseur clung to him for ever in spite of his protestations.
