Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/176

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156
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

little foresaw the ordeal in store for them, yet they were comparatively fortunate in remaining at their convent. They would have been buffeted about like others but for the overcrowding of the prisons and the spaciousness of their heterogeneous buildings, so graphically described by George Sand, afterwards a boarder there. Their journal, which the present chaplain, the Abbé Cédoz, has allowed me to inspect, has a gap of several years, followed by a brief statement of the cause.

A motley throng of prisoners, good and bad, rich and poor, occupied the convent. They included several actresses; Malesherbes's daughter, Madame de Rosanbo, guillotined with eleven other inmates; George Sand's grandmother, Madame Dupin; and the birdseller's daughter, Victoire Delaborde. Curiously enough, these two did not then make each other's acquaintance, and Maurice Dupin, then a boy living at Auteuil, who agreed with his mother that at a certain hour in the day both should fix their eyes on the dome of the Pantheon, had no presentiment that his destined wife, Victoire, might also be gazing at it. Disparity of station kept the two women apart.

A number of British subjects were detained there, among them the Abbé Edgeworth's sister, Betty, who was "dragged from prison to prison." His mother, too, was probably there also, for she was arrested while he was still in concealment in Paris,