they returned to their employer satisfied for once
without doing any mischief; but Citizen Tracassier was of too vindictive
a temper to suffer the objects of his hatred thus to elude his vengeance.
The next day Madame de Fleury was summoned before his tribunal and
ordered to give up the nun, against whom, as a suspected person, a decree
of the law had been obtained.

Madame de Fleury refused to betray the innocent woman; the gentle
firmness of this lady's answers to a brutal interrogatory was termed
insolence--she was pronounced a refractory aristocrat, dangerous to the
state; and an order was made out to seal up her goods, and to keep her a
prisoner in her own house.

CHAPTER X

"Alas! full oft on Guilt's victorious car
The spoils of Virtue are in triumph borne,
While the fair captive, marked with many a scar,
In lone obscurity, oppressed, forlorn,
Resigns to tears her angel form."--BEATTIE.

A close prisoner in her own house, Madame de Fleury was now guarded by
men suddenly become soldiers, and sprung from the dregs of the people;
men of brutal manners, ferocious countenances, and more ferocious minds.
They seemed to delight in the insolent display of their newly-acquired
power. One of those men had formerly been convicted of some horrible
crime, and had been sent to the galleys by M. de Fleury. Revenge
actuated this wretch under the mask of patriotism, and he rejoiced in
seeing the wife of the man he hated a prisoner in his custody. Ignorant
of the facts, his associates were ready to believe him in the right, and
to join in the senseless cry against all who were their superiors in
fortune, birth, and education. This unfortunate lady was forbidden all
intercourse with her friends, and it was in vain she attempted to obtain
from her gaolers intelligence of what was passing in Paris.

"Tu verras--Tout va bien--Ca ira," were the only answers they deigned to
make; frequently they continued smoking their pipes in obdurate silence.
She occupied the back rooms of her house, because her guards apprehended
that she might from the front windows receive intelligence from her
friends. One morning she was awakened by an unusual noise in the
streets; and, upon her inquiring the occasion of it, her guards told her
she was welcome to go to the front windows and satisfy her curiosity. She
went, and saw an immense crowd of people surrounding a guillotine that
had been erected the preceding night. Mada