In the same month, if not on the same day, were sent to Sainte-Pélagie the Comte de Laval-Montmorency, and the Marquis de Pons. In August of the same year went to join them (not now with popular acclamation, as when, in 1765, Mademoiselle Clairon and her fellow players were haled to the Châtelet) nine ladies of the Théâtre-Français. After the 9th Thermidor (July 27, 1794), which saw the sudden downfall and death of Robespierre, Sainte-Pélagie received most of the victims of the reaction,—the _Tail_ of Robespierre,—including the Duplaix family. ------- Madame Roland had known the indignities of a revolutionary prison before her sojourn at Sainte-Pélagie. Imprisoned first in the Abbaye, it was from there that she wrote: "I find a certain pleasure in enforcing privations on myself, in seeing how far the human will can be employed in reducing the 'necessaries' of existence. I substituted bread and water for chocolate, at breakfast; a plate of meat with vegetables was my dinner; and I supped on vegetables, without desert." But having "as much aversion from as contempt for a merely useless economy" (_autant d'aversion que de mépris pour une économie inutile_), Madame Roland goes on to say that what she saved by the retrenchments of her own cuisine she spent in procuring extra rations for the pauper prisoners of the Abbaye; and adds: "If I stay here six months I mean to go out plump and hearty [_je veux en sortir grasse et fraîche_] wanting nothing more than soup and bread, and with the satisfaction of having earned certain _bénédictions incognito_."