This was one side of prison society. On the other a group of devout persons kept up the forms of convent life, just as the coterie of Mme de Matigny did those of the salon. The Abbé de Nérac, the Abbé Constantin, and half a dozen nuns were the nucleus of this second group, but not all were ecclesiastics or religious. M. de Maurepas, the young soldier, with the ugly rugged face and good brown eyes, was of their number, and devout ladies not a few, who spent their time between encouraging one another in the holy life, and hours of silent prayer for those in the peril of trial and the agony of death. Their conversations may still be read, and breathe a piety as exquisite as it is natural and touching. To both these groups came daily the Abbé Loisel, bringing to the one news of the outside world, and to the other the consolations of religion. Mass was said furtively, the Host elevated, the faithful communicated, and Loisel would pass out again to his life of hourly peril, moving from hiding-place to hiding-place, and from plot to plot, risking his safety by day to comfort the prisoners, or to bless the condemned on their way to the scaffold, and by night to give encouragement to some little band of aristocrats who thought they could fight the Revolution. Singular mixture of conspirator and saint, his courage was undoubted. The recorded heroisms of the times are many, those unrecorded more, and his strange adventures have never found an historian. Outside the Gironde rocked, tottered, and fell. Imprisoned Hébert was loose again. Danton struck for the Mountain, and struck right home. First arrest, then prison, and lastly death came upon the men who had dreamed of ruling France. The strong man armed had kept the house, until there came one stronger than he. So passed the Girondins, first of the Revolution’s children to fall beneath the Juggernaut car they had reared and set in motion. CHAPTER XVI AN UNWELCOME VISITOR Mlle de Rochambeau shared a small, unwholesome cell with three other women. One of them, Mme de Coigny, a young widow, had lately given birth to a child, a poor, fretful little creature whose wailings added to the general discomfort. Mme Renard, the linen draper’s wife, tossed her head, and complained volubly to whoever would listen, that she got no sleep at nights, since the brat came. She had been a great man’s mistress, and was under arrest because he had emigrated. Terrified to death, she bewailed her lot continually, was sometimes fawning, sometimes insolent to her aristocratic companions, and always very disdainful of the fourth inmate, a stout Breton peasant, with a wooden manner which concealed an enormous respect for the company in which she found herself. She told her rosary incessantly, when not occupied with the baby, who was less ill at ease in her accustomed arms than with its frail, young mother.