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“And mine near my husband,” said I, throwing my arms around Abner’s neck.

My father, like my husband, had refused positively to leave the king, and it was decided that mamma should go alone. She began by visiting the shops, and bought stuffs, ribbons, and laces. It was I who helped her pack her trunks, which she sent in advance to Morainville. She did not dare go to get her diamonds, which were locked up in the Bank of France; that would excite suspicion, and she had to content herself with such jewelry as she had at her residence. She left in a coach with my father, saying as she embraced me that her absence would be brief, for it would be easy enough to crush the vile mob. She went down to Morainville, and there, thanks to the devotion of Guillaume Carpentier and of his sons, she was carried to England in a contrabandist vessel. As she was accustomed to luxury, she put into her trunks the plate of the chateau and also several valuable pictures. My father had given her sixty thousand francs and charged her to be economical.

Soon I found myself in the midst of terrible scenes that I have not the courage, my dear girls, to recount. The memory of them makes me even to-day tremble and turn pale. I will only tell you that one evening a furious populace entered our palace. I saw my husband dragged far from me by those wretches, and just as two of the monsters were about to seize me Bastien took me into his arms, and holding me tightly against his bosom leaped from a window and took to flight with all his speed.

Happy for us that it was night and that the monsters were busy pillaging the house. They did not pursue us at all, and my faithful Bastien took me to the home of his cousin Claudine Leroy. She was a worker in lace, whom, with my consent, he was to have married within the next fortnight. I had lost consciousness, but Claudine and Bastien cared for me so well that they brought me back to life, and I came to myself to learn that my father and my husband had been arrested and conveyed to the Conciergerie.

My despair was great, as you may well think. Claudine arranged a bed for me in a closet [cloisette] adjoining her chamber, and there I remained hidden, dying of fear and grief, as you may well suppose.

At the end of four days I heard some one come into Claudine’s room, and then a deep male voice. My heart ceased to beat and I was about to faint away, when I recognized the voice of my faithful Joseph. I opened the door and threw myself upon his breast, crying over and over:

“O Joseph! dear Joseph!”

He pressed me to his bosom, giving me every sort of endearing name, and at length revealed to me the plan he had formed, to take me at once to Morainville under the name of Claudine Leroy. He went out with Claudine to obtain a passport. Thanks to God and good angels Claudine was small like me, had black hair and eyes like mine, and there was no trouble in arranging the passport. We took the diligence, and as I was clothed in peasant dress, a suit of Claudine’s, I easily passed for her.

Joseph had the diligence stop beside the park gate, of which he had brought the key. He wished to avoid the village. We entered therefore by the park, and soon I was installed in the cottage of my adopted parents, and Joseph and his brothers said to every one that Claudine Leroy, appalled by the horrors being committed in Paris, had come for refuge to Morainville.

Then Joseph went back to Paris to try to save my father and my husband. Bastien had already got himself engaged as an assistant in the prison. But alas! all their efforts could effect nothing, and the only consolation that Joseph brought back to Morainville was that he had seen its lords on the fatal cart and had received my father’s last smile. These frightful tidings failed to kill me; I lay a month between life and death, and Joseph, not to expose me to the recognition of the Morainville physician, went and brought one from Rouen. The good care of mother Catharine was the best medicine for me, and I was cured to weep over my fate and my cruel losses.