were on the point of quitting France, and had sent off their luggage to Calais, when Consul Lebrun's sympathy, and his good offices with Bonaparte, enabled them to remain. Removing in 1860 to Neuilly, just outside Paris, they celebrated in 1884 their fifth jubilee.
The Benedictine convent was likewise converted into a prison, with a brutal gaoler who delighted to threaten his captives with death—no empty threat, for the Princess of Monaco, Madame Sainte Amaranthe, and others, left the nunnery for the Conciergerie, and the latter for the guillotine. The nuns not only witnessed distressing partings, but anticipated a like fate. Stonyhurst College possesses a manuscript, which, evidently written after their return to England, depicts in an artless way the alarms, insults, and privations undergone by them.[1]After several domiciliary visits they were declared prisoners in October 1793. Their street was called the Rue de Alouette, from the ground having been formerly frequented by larks. They were now themselves caged birds, if indeed they had the heart to sing. Commissaries next came to fit up the convent as a prison, but to tranquillise the nuns promised that the captives should be only Englishwomen, a promise which was not long kept.
The prison became so full—Foignet found eighty inmates, two-thirds of them men—that in the work-
- ↑ See Appendix B.
