“Ordering one of the turnkeys to take charge of me, I was hurried along and thrust into a damp and dismal cell, in which were more than a hundred and fifty unfortunate wretches, half starved, scantily clothed, and many suffering from disease; robbing the guillotine, as our vile gaoler said when any died, of its just dues. I was young, not too young to think; but I will not pain you with minutely detailing my thoughts or my sufferings. This frightful cell was not more than thirty-five feet long and ten broad, and so feebly lighted from above from a slit in the wall, that until well accustomed to the place I could scarcely see. After some eight or ten days’ incarceration, three of our number died, and for four days their bodies were left by those accursed wretches before they were removed. One day I was made to approach the wretch Marachat; a gaoler held a lantern till its light fell upon my features. “‘Ah!’ said the savage, ‘I see my cook takes care you shall not grow too fat. I have to tell you that your friend, Collet d’Herbois, has taken care of your worthy mother and sister; the glorious guillotine has cut their dainty heads off!’ “I shrieked in agony, and maddened, flew at my gaoler, but, with a blow of the heavy keys he carried, he struck me bleeding to the ground. Oh, what I suffered! when a kind old man, one of the prisoners, restored me to life and sense by bathing my face with his scanty allowance of water. “‘My poor boy! My poor boy!’ sobbed the old man, ‘just the age of my poor Philip!’ “‘Surely, surely!’ I exclaimed, ‘they could not murder a child. My loved sister was but a child!’ “‘Not murder a child!’ repeated the old man, hysterically; ‘Eh, mon Dieu! babes in the arms are butchered by those fiends Herbois and Ronsin. When they entered the city with two thousand of their blood-stained followers, did not those two wretches stand gazing with frightful exultation upon two hundred victims tied to trees, whom cannons loaded with grape tore to pieces? and when their soldiers bayoneted those that survived, they laughed madly with joy. Oh, merciful God!’ exclaimed the old man, waving his skeleton arms wildly in the air, ‘wilt thou permit such sin to triumph?’ The old man’s head sank upon his breast. “The next day he was relieved from his misery by death. The third morning from that event half our number were led out, more dead than alive, to be shot down like dogs, and for no earthly crime. Thirty only, besides myself, remained five days afterwards, when one morning Marachat entered the cell with some turnkeys.