--People, respectable both for their rank and character, were
employed to clean the prisons and privies, while their low and
insolent tyrants looked on and insulted them. On an occasion when
one of the Maisons d'Arrets was on fire, guards were planted round,
with orders to fire upon those that should attempt to escape.--My
memory has but too faithfully recorded these and still greater
horrors; but curiosity would be gratified but too dearly by the
relation. I added the above note some months after writing the
letter to which it is annexed.
Nov. 20.
Besides the gentry and clergy of this department, we have likewise for
companions a number of inhabitants of Lisle, arrested under circumstances
singularly atrocious, even where atrocity is the characteristic of almost
every proceeding.--In the month of August a decree was passed to oblige
all the nobility, clergy, and their servants, as well as all those
persons who had been in the service of emigrants, to depart from Lisle in
eight-and-forty hours, and prohibiting their residence within twenty
leagues from the frontiers. Thus banished from their own habitations,
they took refuge in different towns, at the prescribed distance; but,
almost as soon as they were arrived, and had been at the expence of
settling themselves, they were arrested as strangers,* and conducted to
prison.
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