As it would not be possible to sketch the lives and deaths of all these victims of revolutionary violence, it may be well to select the history of the youngest among them, Paul Seigneret.[1] His father was a professor in the high school at Lyons.  Paul was born in 1845, and was therefore twenty-six years old when he met death, as a hostage, at the hands of the Commune.  His home had been a happy and pious one, and he had a beloved brother Charles, to whom he clung with the most tender devotion.  Charles expected to be a priest; Paul was destined for the army, but he earnestly wished that he too might enter the ministry.  Lamartine’s “Jocelyn” had made a deep impression on him, but his father having objected to his reading it, he laid it aside unfinished; what he had read, however, remained rooted in his memory.

[Footnote 1:  Memoir of Paul Seigneret, abridged in the “Monthly Packet.”]

When Paul was eighteen, his father gave his sanction to his entering the priesthood; he thought him too delicate, however, to lead the life of a country pastor, and desired him, before he made up his mind as to his vocation, to accept a position offered him as tutor in a family in Brittany.

Present duties being sanctified, not hampered, by higher hopes and aspirations, Paul gained the love and confidence of the family in which he taught, and also of the neighboring peasantry.  “He was,” says the lady whose children he instructed, “like a good angel sent among us to do good and to give pleasure.”

When his time of probation was passed, he decided to enter a convent at Solesmes, and by submitting himself to convent rules, make sure of his vocation.  But before making any final choice, we find from his letters that “if France were invaded,” he claimed “the right to do his duty as a citizen and a son.”

He entered the convent at Solesmes, first as a postulant, then as a novice.  “The Holy Gospels,” said his superior, “Saint Paul’s Epistles, and the Psalms were his favorite studies,—­the food on which his piety was chiefly nourished.  He also sought Christ in history.”

Still, he was not entirely satisfied with life in a convent; he wished to be more actively employed in doing good.  He therefore became a student for the regular ministry,—­a Seminarist of Saint-Sulpice.  But when the Prussian armies were advancing on Paris, he offered himself for hospital service, as did also his brother.

In a moment of passionate enthusiasm, speaking to that dear brother of the dangers awaiting those who had to seek and tend the wounded on the field of battle, he cried:  “Do you think God may this year grant me the grace of yielding up my life to Him as a sacrifice?  For to fall, an expiatory sacrifice beneath the righteous condemnation that hangs over France, would be to die for Him.”