Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/171

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PRISONERS.
151

where, the English were kept in a guardhouse, men and women having to sleep as well as eat in one room. A baronet and a groom, a fashionable young lady and a cook, were thus companions for many weeks before they were drafted off into prisons. A secret police report, indeed, describes the English of the Section du Roule as lying, men and women, on straw, straw itself being scarce, and as lacking even water to drink. The Comtesse de Bohm, too, saw forty Englishwomen brought to Plessis, cooped at night in a room so small that their beds touched, and spending the day on the stairs, utterly impassive and torpid. Perry was at first sent to Madelonnettes, where the keeper was a humane man, and on a relaxation of rigour was transferred to the Luxembourg. Many English without means might, he says, have obtained release, but preferred remaining prisoners. Teachers, grooms, and domestic servants must obviously have been deprived of their livelihood by the exodus of the rich. Perry believed himself to be in imminent peril when, on the trial of the Dantonists, Hérault de Séchelles proposed calling him as a witness to the innocency of his negotiations with English Whigs; but the defence, as we know, was suppressed, and Perry after fifteen months' detention was released. He bore no grudge against his gaolers,—he wrote in his "Appeal," dated "the felons' side of Newgate, March 25th, 1795,"—