oland pushed Sir John into a
perfectly square cell measuring ten or twelve feet each way.

"Oh, oh!" exclaimed Sir John, "this is lugubrious."

"Do you think so? Well, my dear friend, this is where my mother, the
noblest woman in the world, and my sister, whom you know, spent six
weeks with a prospect of leaving it only to make the trip to the Place
de Bastion. Just think, that was five years ago, so my sister was
scarcely twelve."

"But what crime had they committed?"

"Oh! a monstrous crime. At the anniversary festival with which the town
of Bourg considered proper to commemorate the death of the 'Friend of
the People,' my mother refused to permit my sister to represent one of
the virgins who bore the tears of France in vases. What will you! Poor
woman, she thought she had done enough for her country in giving it
the blood of her son and her husband, which was flowing in Italy and
Germany. She was mistaken. Her country, as it seems, claimed further the
tears of her daughter. She thought that too much, especially as those
tears were to flow for the citizen Marat. The result was that on the
very evening of the celebration, during the enthusiastic exaltation,
my mother was declared accused. Fortunately Bourg had not attained the
celerity of Paris. A friend of ours, an official in the record-office,
kept the affair dragging, until one fine day the fall and death of
Robespierre were made known. That interrupted a good many things, among
others the guillotinades. Our friend convinced the authorities that the
wind blowing from Paris had veered toward clemency; they waited fifteen
days, and on the sixteenth they told my mother and sister that they were
free. So you understand, my friend--and this involves the most profound
philosophical reflection--so that if Mademoiselle Teresa Cabarrus had
not come from Spain, if she had not married M. Fontenay, parliamentary
counsellor; had she not been arrested and brought before the pro-consul
Tallien, son of the Marquis de Bercy's butler, ex-notary's clerk,
ex-foreman of a printing-shop, ex-porter, ex-secretary to the Commune
of Paris temporarily at Bordeaux; and had the ex-pro-consul not become
enamored of her, and had she not been imprisoned, and if on the ninth
of Thermidor she had not found means to send a dagger with these words:
'Unless the tyrant dies to-day, I die to-morrow'; had not Saint-Just
been arrested in the midst of his discourse; had not Robespierre, on
that day, ha