"A diverting spectacle in its way," wrote one sarcastic prisoner, "to see arriving in a miserable hackney-coach two marquises, a duchess, a marchioness, and a count; all ready to faint on alighting, and all seized with the megrims on entering." Dames of great rank came with their brisk femmes de chambre, old noblemen with their valets, youths separated from their governors and tutors,—children even; whole battalions of the most distinguished suspects, the very flower of the aristocracy of France. The dungeons were not requisitioned, but hasty preparations had been made for them. Under concierge Benoît's polite and sympathetic conduct, they mounted the splendid staircase—up which had flitted in a costume of no weight at all the unblushing guests of De Berri—to the splendid chambers, picture-gallery, ball-room, salon, dining-room, and the whole sumptuous suite, which rude partitions of naked lath and timber had converted into some semblance of prison lodgings. The wide windows had been armed with iron bars, and guards were posted at every story. The gallant company of French suspects found some of the chambers in the occupation of a party of English suspects, who had been placed under arrest some weeks earlier, "as a response to the insults offered by the English government to the Republic" (_pour répondre aux insultes dirigées par le gouvernement anglais contre la République_). Amongst them were Miss Maria Williams, who had gone to France, pen in hand, to see what liberty, equality, and fraternity were like in practice (and who returned to write one of the dullest books on record); and Thomas Paine, who was studying "The Rights of Man" under alarming aspects. This was the first Battue; the royalist suspects of Republican France were the second. The salons of the palace, made into prison chambers, were named afresh. Miss Williams and her sister occupied the chamber of _Cincinnatus_; hard by were the chambers of _Brutus_, _Socrates_, and _Solon_; and the derisive name of _Liberty_ was given to the room in which nobles under special guard were confined in the strictest privacy. High personages, whose titles but a little while before might have made their gaolers tremble, were lodged in every quarter of the palace. In this cabinet were Marshal de Mouchy and his wife, "rigorous observers of courtly etiquette"; a little way off, in chambers no bigger than prison cells, the Comte de Mirepoix, the Marquis de Fleury, President Nicolai, M. de Noailles, and the Duc de Lévi.