This man had between two and three hundred persons enlisted under his banners.  More than half of them were women; there were about fifty children of all ages; and not more than eighty men.  They were mostly drawn from that which, when such distinctions existed, was denominated the lower rank of society.  The exceptions consisted of a few high-born females, who, panic-struck, and tamed by sorrow, had joined him.  Among these was one, young, lovely, and enthusiastic, whose very goodness made her a more easy victim.  I have mentioned her before:  Juliet, the youngest daughter, and now sole relic of the ducal house of L—–.  There are some beings, whom fate seems to select on whom to pour, in unmeasured portion, the vials of her wrath, and whom she bathes even to the lips in misery.  Such a one was the ill-starred Juliet.  She had lost her indulgent parents, her brothers and sisters, companions of her youth; in one fell swoop they had been carried off from her.  Yet she had again dared to call herself happy; united to her admirer, to him who possessed and filled her whole heart, she yielded to the lethean powers of love, and knew and felt only his life and presence.  At the very time when with keen delight she welcomed the tokens of maternity, this sole prop of her life failed, her husband died of the plague.  For a time she had been lulled in insanity; the birth of her child restored her to the cruel reality of things, but gave her at the same time an object for whom to preserve at once life and reason.  Every friend and relative had died off, and she was reduced to solitude and penury; deep melancholy and angry impatience distorted her judgment, so that she could not persuade herself to disclose her distress to us.  When she heard of the plan of universal emigration, she resolved to remain behind with her child, and alone in wide England to live or die, as fate might decree, beside the grave of her beloved.  She had hidden herself in one of the many empty habitations of London; it was she who rescued my Idris on the fatal twentieth of November, though my immediate danger, and the subsequent illness of Idris, caused us to forget our hapless friend.  This circumstance had however brought her again in contact with her fellow-creatures; a slight illness of her infant, proved to her that she was still bound to humanity by an indestructible tie; to preserve this little creature’s life became the object of her being, and she joined the first division of migrants who went over to Paris.

She became an easy prey to the methodist; her sensibility and acute fears rendered her accessible to every impulse; her love for her child made her eager to cling to the merest straw held out to save him.  Her mind, once unstrung, and now tuned by roughest inharmonious hands, made her credulous:  beautiful as fabled goddess, with voice of unrivalled sweetness, burning with new lighted enthusiasm, she became a stedfast proselyte, and powerful auxiliary to the leader of the elect.  I had remarked her in the crowd, on the day we met on the Place Vendome; and, recollecting suddenly her providential rescue of my lost one, on the night of the twentieth of November, I reproached myself for my neglect and ingratitude, and felt impelled to leave no means that I could adopt untried, to recall her to her better self, and rescue her from the fangs of the hypocrite destroyer.