Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/91

Rh edition of his "Johnson" the adjective "amiable," which he had originally applied to her. Amiable, strictly speaking, she may not have been—she was too dogmatic for that; but, far from being callous, she was horrified at finding corpses in the Tuileries gardens, whither she had ventured on the assurance of everything being quiet, and hastily retreated. She wrote against the Jacobins in letters to English journals, twice visited Madame Roland in prison, and was intrusted by her with papers which the fear of domiciliary visits compelled her to destroy, together with documents of her own. In October 1793, the author of "Paul and Virginia" was drinking tea with the Williams's, and describing his projected paradise at Essonne—he had married, or was about to marry, Félicité, daughter of Didot, the great printer and typefounder, who had a paper-mill in that village—when a friend rushed in with tidings that all the English were to be arrested as hostages for Toulon. The next day was one of painful suspense. By evening they had heard of the apprehension of most of their English acquaintances, but still hoped their sex might exempt them. At 2, however, commissaries arrived, hurried them out of bed and to the guardhouse—a sort of lock-up—where they passed the rest of the night. Thence they were conveyed to the Luxembourg, where the porter, a Swiss Protestant, who remembered having seen them at church, was kind to them.