uest. It was too late, the father having been arrested on
suspicion, and afterwards guillotined, with many other persons, for a
pretended conspiracy in prison, the very day on which his son had fallen
in the performance of an act of uncommon bravery.

Were I writing from imagination, I should add, that Madame de St. E__m__d
had been unable to sustain the shock of these repeated calamities, and
that her life or understanding had been the sacrifice. It were, indeed,
happy for the sufferer, if our days were always terminated when they
became embittered, or that we lost the sense of sorrow by its excess: but
it is not so--we continue to exist when we have lost the desire of
existence, and to reason when feeling and reason constitute our torments.
Madame de St. E__m__d then lives, but lives in affliction; and having
collected the wreck of her personal property, which some friends had
concealed, she left the part of France she formerly inhabited, and is now
with an aunt in this neighbourhood, watching the decay of her eldest
sister, and educating the youngest.

Clementine was consumptive when they were first arrested, and vexation,
with ill-treatment in the prison, have so established her disorder, that
she is now past relief. She is yet scarcely eighteen, and one of the
most lovely young women I ever saw. Grief and sickness have ravaged her
features; but they are still so perfect, that fancy, associating their
past bloom with their present languor, supplies perhaps as much to the
mind as is lost by the eye. She suffers without complaining, and mourns
without ostentation; and hears her father spoken of with such solemn
silent floods of tears, that she looks like the original of Dryden's
beautiful portrait of the weeping Sigismunda.

The letter which condemned the father of these ladies, was not, it seems,
written to himself, but to a brother, lately dead, whose executor he was,
and of whose papers he thus became possessed. On this ground their
friends engaged them to petition the Assembly for a revision of the
sentence, and the restoration of their property, which was in consequence
forfeited.

The daily professions of the Convention, in favour of justice and
humanity, and the return of the seventy-three imprisoned Deputies, had
soothed these poor young women with the hopes of regaining their paternal
inheritance, so iniquitously confiscated. A petition was, therefore,
forwarded to Paris about a fortnight ago; and t