So, in mingled content and hardship, the days passed. The young girls brought a certain amount of gaiety into the gray cell, even of material well-being. After their arrival their father was supplied with his first new clothing since becoming a prisoner, garments of rough cloth, cut out "by guesswork," that his jailer rudely declared were good enough for him. Out of the discarded coat Anastasie contrived shoes to replace the pair that was fairly dropping off his feet; and one of the girls took revenge upon the jailer by drawing a caricature of him on a precious scrap of paper which was hidden and saved and had a proud place in their home many years later. Madame Lafayette, though more gravely ill than she allowed her family to know, devoted herself alternately to her husband and to the education of the girls; and in hours which she felt she had a right to call her own wrote with toothpick and lampblack upon the margins of a volume of Buffon [Pg 244]that biography of her mother, the unfortunate Madame d'Ayen, which is such a marvel of tender devotion. In the evenings, before his daughters were hurried away to their enforced early bedtime, Lafayette read aloud from some old book. New volumes were not allowed; "everything published since 1788 was proscribed," says a prison letter of La tour de Maubourg's, "even though it were an _Imitation of Jesus Christ_." Long after she was grown Virginia, the younger daughter, remembered with pleasure those half-hours with old books. From her account of their prison life we learn that it was the rector of the university who enabled her mother to send and receive letters unknown to their jailers. "We owe him the deepest gratitude. By his means some public news reached our ears.... In the interior of the prison we had established a correspondence with our companions in captivity. Even before our arrival our father's secretary could speak to him through the window by means of a Pan's pipe for which he had arranged a cipher known to M. de Maubourg's servant. But this mode of correspondence, the only one in use for a long time, did not allow great intercourse. We obtained an easier one with the help of the soldiers whom we bribed by the pleasure of a good meal. Of a night, through our double bars, we used to lower at the end of a string a parcel with part of our supper to the sentry on duty under our windows, who would pass the packet in the same manner to Messrs. Maubourg and Pusy, who occupied separate parts of the prison."