owing it well, all other things being equal, than by
scattering our attention in all directions.

As to the merit of contemporaneous narratives, it seems to me very
dubious. Political passions do not allow us to see objects in their real
dimensions, nor in their true forms, nor in their natural colours.
Moreover, have not unpublished and very valuable documents come to shed
bright colours, just where the spirit of party had spread a thick veil?

The account that Riouffe gave of the death of Bailly has almost blindly
led all the historians of our revolution. What does it consist of "at
bottom." The prisoner of la Conciergerie said it himself; of tales
related by executioners' valets, repeated by turnkeys.

I would willingly allow this account to be set against me,
notwithstanding the horrid sewer from which Riouffe had been obliged to
draw, if it were not evident that this clever writer saw all the
revolutionary events through the just anger that an ardent and active
young man must feel after an iniquitous imprisonment; if this current of
sentiments and ideas had not led him into some manifest errors.

Who has not, for example, read with tears in their eyes, in the
_Memoires sur les Prisons_, what the author relates of the fourteen
girls of Verdun? "Of those girls," he said, "of unparalleled fairness,
and who appeared like young virgins dressed for a public fete. They
disappeared," added Riouffe, "all at once, and were mowed down in the
spring of life. The court occupied by the women the day after their
death, had the appearance of a garden that had been despoiled of its
flowers by a storm. I have never seen amongst us a despair equal to that
excited by this barbarity."

Far be from me the intention to weaken the painful feelings which the
catastrophe related by Riouffe must naturally inspire; but every one has
remarked that the report of this writer is very circumstantial; the
author appears to have seen all with his own eyes. Yet he has been
guilty of the gravest inaccuracy.

Out of the fourteen unfortunate women who were sentenced after Verdun
was retaken from the Prussians, two girls of seventeen years of age were
not condemned to death on account of their youth.

This first circumstance was well worth recording. Let us go farther. A
historian having lately consulted the official journals of that epoch,
and the bulletin of the Revolutionary Tribunal, discovered with some
surprise that among the twelve _young g