Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/92

72 The prisoners, mostly English, took turns in making the fire and sweeping the rooms, and those who could not afford to send out for dinner cooked their own. The Williams's had family prayers at night in which Lasource, the eloquent Protestant pastor, and Madame de Genlis's husband, both destined to the guillotine, joined. They had also joined in composing "a little hymn set to a sweet solemn air," which formed part of these devotions. Many, however—of the French prisoners, at least—were less serious, and were addicted to cards, music, and even love-making. Indeed, a scandal in which an outsider and a female prisoner were concerned occasioned an order for the separation of the sexes, and, while the men remained at the Luxembourg, forty Englishwomen were sent to the English Conceptionist Convent. The Blue Nuns, themselves prisoners in their own house, and compelled to convert their flowing robes into gowns and their veils into bonnets, were very kind to their distressed countrywomen, and Sister Thérèse struck Helen as the nearest approach to angelic purity she had ever seen. Exercise in the garden was allowed, and friends could speak to them through the grating, whereas at the Luxembourg they could not stir beyond the threshold, and could be seen by friends only at the common-room window.

Athanase Coquerel, a native of Rouen, settled in business at Paris, and already engaged to Helen's