her, and did wisely, for he might otherwise have already danced his last jig, or at the very least be rusticating in the shade of the walls of the Luxembourg prison.' Happily, our two guards combined with the lofty sentiments of which I have just given an idea a passionate fondness for money; and this was our salvation."
XIV.
A PRISON SCENE.
Pasquier and his wife were confined for some days in a house in Paris before they were sent to the prison of Saint-Lazare; this was done with a view of abstracting from them all their remaining money; and official avarice saved their lives.
"Had I been imprisoned there two days earlier, I might possibly have been taken away in one of those carts which, during those two days, carried over eighty people from the prison to the foot of the scaffold. Every one connected with the Paris Parliament, one of my brothers-in-law, and several of my friends, perished on the day of my entering the prison. Had I arrived earlier, I could not have escaped their fate."
This is a sufficiently terrible picture, but a sentence that follows is even more terrible as a revelation of how families were swept off by the guillotine. "In this prison," says Pasquier, "were
