choice, and was at last obliged to assert, in opposition to the domineering abbe, her right to judge and decide in her own affairs.  With seeming politeness, he begged ten thousand pardons for his conscientious interference.  No more was said upon the subject; and as he did not totally withdraw from her society till the revolution broke out, she did not suspect that she had anything to fear from his resentment.  His manners and opinions changed suddenly with the times; the mask of religion was thrown off; and now, instead of objecting to Sister Frances as not being sufficiently strict and orthodox in her tenets, he boldly declared that a nun was not a fit person to be intrusted with the education of any of the young citizens—­they should all be des eleves de la patrie.  The abbe, become a member of the Committee of Public Safety, denounced Madame de Fleury, in the strange jargon of the day, as “the fosterer of a swarm of bad citizens, who were nourished in the anticivic prejudices de l’ancien regime, and fostered in the most detestable superstitions, in defiance of the law.”  He further observed, that he had good reason to believe that some of these little enemies to the constitution had contrived and abetted Monsieur de Fleury’s escape.  Of their having rejoiced at it in a most indecent manner, he said he could produce irrefragable proof.  The boy who saw Babet tear down the placard was produced and solemnly examined; and the thoughtless action of this poor little girl was construed into a state crime of the most horrible nature.  In a declamatory tone, Tracassier reminded his fellow-citizens, that in the ancient Grecian times of virtuous republicanism (times of which France ought to show herself emulous), an Athenian child was condemned to death for having made a plaything of a fragment of the gilding that had fallen from a public statue.  The orator, for the reward of his eloquence, obtained an order to seize everything in Madame de Fleury’s school-house, and to throw the nun into prison.

CHAPTER IX

   “Who now will guard bewildered youth
   Safe from the fierce assault of hostile rage?—­
   Such war can Virtue wage?”

At the very moment when this order was going to be put in execution, Madame de Fleury was sitting in the midst of the children, listening to Babet, who was reading AEsop’s fable of The old man and his sons.  Whilst her sister was reading, Victoire collected a number of twigs from the garden:  she had just tied them together; and was going, by Sister Frances’ desire, to let her companions try if they could break the bundle, when the attention to the moral of the fable was interrupted by the entrance of an old woman, whose countenance expressed the utmost terror and haste, to tell what she had not breath to utter.  To Madame de Fleury she was a stranger; but the children immediately recollected her to be the chestnut woman to whom Babet had some years ago restored certain purloined chestnuts.