_How long Mrs. Please continued on the stage at this time_ (_she returned to it again later_) _is not certain. Probably her engagement was terminated by that famous split in the company, when democratic Talma and Vestris migrated to the Rue de Richelieu, bequeathing the remnant honours of the old house in the Faubourg St. Germain to the royalist Fleury, Dazincourt, and Company. What we_ do _know is that about this critical period a lucky_ coup _in a State lottery established our heroine on her feet, and that thenceforth she flourished. She kept a little salon in those same historic rooms, through which a regular progression of nationalists passed and vanished. There, in their time, were to be seen Brissot, Guadet, Gensonné, the Roman Roland, the handsome Barbaroux, Pétion, Vergniaud, the sweet and indolent, in his ragged coat, Desmoulins, Barrére, Billaud-Varennes, Barras. The order is significant of our lady’s political, or politic, evolution. The life of the State, she came to think, was only to be saved by ruthless amputation; and, unfortunately, the disease was in the head. As the atmosphere thickens, our glimpses of her become rarer and more lurid. She appears once as the proprietress of a sort of_ Mont de piété, _very private and exclusive, in which she amassed good quantity of property, pledged by the proscribed, who never returned to redeem it. Among these, curiously, seems to have been her father, whom, as characteristically as possible, she forgave and attempted to shelter, though without avail, for he was guillotined. It was probably to propitiate the Government for this filial dereliction that she reappeared on the boards, in_ ’93, _in that grotesque monument to the dulness of the Sovereign People_, The Last Judgment of Kings; _and there, so far as we can trace, ended her connection with the stage._ _During all this period, it is only fair to her to say, she seems to have played the inflexible duenna to her little friend and adoratrice, Miss Patty Grant, protecting the child from outside evil and her own kind pliability, and, when she was called away from her side, committing her to the care of that faithful and incorruptible monster, the cripple._ _Towards the end of_ ’93 _she appears to have been so far in favour with the powers that she was despatched on a secret propagandist mission to the Neapolitan States--a portentous departure. She was not back in Paris again until the spring of_ ’95, _when she returned to find the Terror overthrown, its “tail” in process of being docked by Sanson, and the_ jeunesse dorée _patrolling the streets._ _Not much record of this journey remains, beyond the single weighty fact that it brought her acquainted with the young revolutionary enthusiast, Nicola Pissani, who accompanied her home by way of Tuscany and Piedmont, propagating their gospel of Liberty on the road._