An old man was lately taken from his house in the night, and brought here, because he was said to have worn the cross of St. Louis.—­The fact is, however, that he never did wear this obnoxious distinction; and though his daughter has proved this incontrovertibly to Dumont, she cannot obtain his liberty:  and the poor young woman, after making two or three fruitless journeys to Paris, is obliged to content herself with seeing her father occasionally at the gate.

The refectory of the convent is inhabited by hospital nuns.  Many of the hospitals in France had a sort of religious order annexed to them, whose business it was to attend the sick; and habit, perhaps too the association of the offices of humanity with the duties of religion, had made them so useful in their profession, that they were suffered to remain, even after the abolition of the regular monasteries.  But the devastating torrent of the revolution at length reached them:  they were accused of bestowing a more tender solicitude on their aristocratic patients than on the wounded volunteers and republicans; and, upon these curious charges, they have been heaped into carts, without a single necessary, almost without covering, sent from one department to another, and distributed in different prisons, where they are perishing with cold, sickness, and want!  Some people are here only because they happened to be accidentally at a house when the owner was arrested;* and we have one family who were taken at dinner, with their guests, and the plate they were using!

     * It was not uncommon for a mandate of arrest to direct the taking
     “Citizen Such-a-one, and all persons found in his house.”

A grand-daughter of the celebrated De Witt, who resided thirty leagues from hence, was arrested in the night, put in an open cart, without any regard to her age, her sex, or her infirmities, though the rain fell in torrents; and, after sleeping on straw in different prisons on the road, was deposited here.  As a Fleming, the law places her in the same predicament with a very pretty young woman who has lived some months at Amiens; but Dumont, who is at once the maker, the interpreter, and executor of the laws, has exempted the latter from the general proscription, and appears daily with her in public; whereas poor Madame De Witt is excluded from such indulgence, being above seventy years old—­ and is accused, moreover, of having been most exemplarily charitable, and, what is still worse, very religious.—­I have given these instances not as any way remarkable, and only that you may form some idea of the pretexts which have served to cover France with prisons, and to conduct so many of its inhabitants to the scaffold.