Londoners may remember the frail, thin, shabby little Woman who denounced social injustices in a dingy hall in a back street off Tottenham Court Road some ten years ago. In appearance she was nothing—until she spoke. And when Louise Michel spoke, ah dear me, how one realised the miseries grimly and heroically endured by the poor of this topsy-turvy world! The shabby, frail little figure, with the big, inspired eyes, became galvanised. From London to Paris, from Paris to every European capital, travelled the “Red Virgin”—incomparably eloquent—the woes and sufferings of her fellow-creatures at once crushing and supporting her. Herself, she cared nothing for. The same old threadbare black dress; eternal dim attics and meagre food; the same old self-sacrifice, the pity to the verge of despair, the same old breakdowns from weakness and exhaustion. Rochefort—Victor Henri Marquis de Rochefort-Luçay—sought her out in her attic. When the “Red Virgin” was travelling and lecturing abroad, Rochefort instructed his foreign correspondents to look after her. He bought her a country house: which she promptly sold; he gave her an annuity: which she mortgaged; he arranged that his tradespeople should serve her in his name; but house, annuity, provisions—everything went to the poor. “I can do nothing with her,” Rochefort once told me. “She is at once sublime and adorable and ridiculous! When I tell her she is killing herself, she replies: ‘Tant pis, mon petit Henri. But you yourself will die one of these days.’” A week later Louise Michel expired suddenly, from exhaustion, at Marseilles.[8] Sallow-faced, white-headed, red-eyed old Rochefort was the chief mourner at the funeral. As he walked, bent, trembling, behind the hearse of the “Red Virgin”—crack, crack went the lozenges. The month of June, 1912. Rochefort’s daily article in the _Patrie_ missing; and again missing the next day, and the day after that—the first time octogenarian Rochefort had “missed” his daily lurid article for fifty-two years! On the fourth day there appears in the _Patrie_ the following intimation:—“I shall soon reach my eighty-second year, and it is now half-a-century since I have worked without a rest even in prison or in exile, at the hard trade of a journalist, which is the first and the most noble of all professions—when it is not the lowest. I think I have earned the right to a rest. But it will only be a short one. My old teeth can still bite.” However, the “rest” in the country is prolonged: and the teeth don’t “bite” again. Eyesight becomes misty. Hearing next fails. Behold Rochefort in a dressing-gown, stretched on an invalid’s chair in a drowsy country garden, whence he is transported, as a last hope, to Aix-les-Bains,—where he dies.