Page:The Rise and Fall on the Paris Commune in 1871.djvu/554

 Rochefort is now confined in the prison of the Rue Saint-Pierre awaiting his trial; he occupies one of the cells usually given to persons condemned to death; it is small, narrow, and very obscure, receiving light only from the corridor outside, which is itself only dimly lighted. Since his entrance into prison he has been anxious, pre-*occupied, and taciturn, showing at times a fear of the fate which awaits him. He was shortly taken quite ill, owing, as he said, to a recent affliction in his family. This bereavement, however, was no other than the death of his father, which occurred on the 12th of April, and whose funeral Rochefort had himself attended. The poor old man died in a state of great misery, almost of starvation, although, as Henri Rochefort himself stated, the publication of the Mot d'Ordre brought to his son the sum of $200 daily.

At the time of his death, the Marquis de Rochefort was living almost upon charity, at a house in the Faubourg St. Antoine, which was filled with aged persons who brought here what little furniture they had, and who paid, some $240, others $160, yearly. M. Rochefort was one of these last, but the poor old man's payments were very rare. His furniture consisted of an old bureau and four cane-bottomed chairs, a broken and torn old arm-chair, a small library containing about thirty volumes, and an iron bedstead. This was all pressed into a room about six yards, but it did not even belong to him. He owed it to the charity of persons almost as poor as himself, who had come to the aid of the old man whose children had abandoned him. Two years ago M. Rochefort became possessed of $240 by selling two entrances for life to the theatres Des Variétés and Vaudeville.

At this period, Henri Rochefort, for whom his father had made every sacrifice in order to procure him a good education, was forced by the outcries of the Paris journals,