Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/185

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PRISONERS.
165

minent, for his cheeks were lantern-jawed. She gave the correspondent a piece of the black silk velvet which enveloped the body. In Notes and Queries for 1850 appeared a rather fuller account, taken down ten years previously at Toulouse from the lips of an octogenarian Irishman, Fitzsimons, doubtless the Gerard Luther Fitzsimons, born at Quilca, County Cavan, in 1765, who retired from the French army in 1821 on a pension of 2400 francs. He states that there was a wooden coffin, enclosed in lead, and this again in a wooden case. The lead was wanted for bullets, and the body lay exposed nearly a whole day. It was swaddled like a mummy, and tied with garters. When the Jacobins took it out of the coffin, there was a strong smell of vinegar and camphor. The corpse was quite perfect, and the hands and nails very fine. Fitzsimons moved and bent every finger. The teeth were the finest set he had ever seen. A young lady prisoner wishing for a tooth, he tried to pull one out for her, but they were too firmly fixed. The feet were very beautiful, and the face and cheeks as though alive. He rolled the eyes, and the eyeballs were quite firm under his finger. The French and English prisoners gave money to the Jacobins for permission to see the body. The Jacobins said James was a good sans-culotte, and they were going to put him into a hole in the churchyard, like other sans-culottes. The body was