past at which we could be admitted, and, as Jewesses, my mother and sisters could not be allowed to stay in the city; they were to go into the Jewish quarter, a part of the suburb set apart for Jews, in which it was scarcely possible to obtain a lodging tolerably clean.  My father, on the next day, we found, to our horror, at the point of death.  To my mother he did not tell the worst of what he had endured.  To me he told that, driven to madness by the insults offered to him, he had upbraided the court-martial with their corrupt propensities, and had even mentioned that overtures had been made to him for quashing the proceedings in return for a sum of two millions of francs; and that his sole reason for not entertaining the proposal was his distrust of those who made it.  ‘They would have taken my money,’ said he, ’and then found a pretext for putting me to death, that I might tell no secrets.’  This was too near the truth to be tolerated; in concert with the local authorities, the military enemies of my father conspired against him—­witnesses were suborned; and, finally, under some antiquated law of the place, he was subjected, in secret, to a mode of torture which still lingers in the east of Europe.

“He sank under the torture and the degradation.  I, too, thoughtlessly, but by a natural movement of filial indignation, suffered the truth to escape me in conversing with my mother.  And she—­;but I will preserve the regular succession of things.  My father died; but he had taken such measures, in concert with me, that his enemies should never benefit by his property.  Meantime my mother and sisters had closed my father’s eyes; had attended his remains to the grave; and in every act connected with this last sad rite had met with insults and degradations too mighty for human patience.  My mother, now become incapable of self-command, in the fury of her righteous grief, publicly and in court denounced the conduct of the magistracy—­taxed some of them with the vilest proposals to herself—­taxed them as a body with having used instruments of torture upon my father; and, finally, accused them of collusion with the French military oppressors of the district.  This last was a charge under which they quailed; for by that time the French had made themselves odious to all who retained a spark of patriotic feeling.  My heart sank within me when I looked up at the bench, this tribunal of tyrants, all purple or livid with rage; when I looked at them alternately and at my noble mother with her weeping daughters—­these so powerless, those so basely vindictive, and locally so omnipotent.  Willingly I would have sacrificed all my wealth for a simple permission to quit this infernal city with my poor female relations safe and undishonored.  But far other were the intentions of that incensed magistracy.  My mother was arrested, charged with some offense equal to petty treason, or scandalum magnatum, or the sowing of sedition; and, though what she said was true, where, alas! was she