ns of
France. These unhappy captives, awaiting the hour of their execution,
were not the ignorant, the debased, the degraded, but the noblest, the
purest, the most refined of the citizens of the republic. Josephine was
placed in the chapel of the convent, where she found one hundred and
sixty men and women as the sharers of her captivity.

The natural buoyancy of her disposition led her to take as cheerful a
view as possible of the calamity in which the family was involved. Being
confident that no serious charge could be brought against her husband,
she clung to the hope that they both would soon be liberated, and that
happy days were again to dawn upon her reunited household. She wrote
cheering letters to her husband and to her children. Her smiling
countenance and words of kindness animated with new courage the
grief-stricken and the despairing who surrounded her. She immediately
became a universal favorite with the inmates of the prison. Her
instinctive tact enabled her to approach all acceptably, whatever their
rank or character. She soon became prominent in influence among the
prisoners, and reigned there, as every where else, over the hearts of
willing subjects. Her composure, her cheerfulness, her clear and
melodious voice, caused her to be selected to read, each day, to the
ladies, the journal of the preceding day. From their windows they could
see, each morning, the carts bearing through the streets their burden
of unhappy victims who were to perish on the scaffold. Not unfrequently
a wife would catch a glimpse of her husband, or a mother of her son,
borne past the grated windows in the cart of the condemned. Who can tell
the fear and anguish with which the catalogue of the guillotined was
read, when each trembling heart apprehended that the next word might
announce that some loved one had perished? Not unfrequently a piercing
shriek, and a fainting form falling lifeless upon the floor, revealed
upon whose heart the blow had fallen.

Hortense, impetuous and unreflecting, was so impatient to see her
mother, that one morning she secretly left her aunt's house, and, in a
market cart, traveled thirty miles to Paris. She found her mother's
maid, Victorine, at the family mansion, where all the property was
sealed up by the revolutionary functionaries. After making unavailing
efforts to obtain an interview with her parents, she returned the next
day to Fontainebleau. Josephine was informed of this imprudent act of
a