These questions do not embarrass me at all.  In short, I do not ask that the relation of what seems to me to be the expression of the truth, should be adopted upon my word.  I enumerate my proofs, I express my doubts.  Within these limits there is no one but has claims to bring forward; the discussion is open to all the world, the public will pronounce its definitive judgment.

As a general thesis, I will add that by concentrating our researches on one circumscribed and special object, we have a better chance of seeing it correctly and knowing it well, all other things being equal, than by scattering our attention in all directions.

As to the merit of contemporaneous narratives, it seems to me very dubious.  Political passions do not allow us to see objects in their real dimensions, nor in their true forms, nor in their natural colours.  Moreover, have not unpublished and very valuable documents come to shed bright colours, just where the spirit of party had spread a thick veil?

The account that Riouffe gave of the death of Bailly has almost blindly led all the historians of our revolution.  What does it consist of “at bottom.”  The prisoner of la Conciergerie said it himself; of tales related by executioners’ valets, repeated by turnkeys.

I would willingly allow this account to be set against me, notwithstanding the horrid sewer from which Riouffe had been obliged to draw, if it were not evident that this clever writer saw all the revolutionary events through the just anger that an ardent and active young man must feel after an iniquitous imprisonment; if this current of sentiments and ideas had not led him into some manifest errors.

Who has not, for example, read with tears in their eyes, in the Memoires sur les Prisons, what the author relates of the fourteen girls of Verdun?  “Of those girls,” he said, “of unparalleled fairness, and who appeared like young virgins dressed for a public fete.  They disappeared,” added Riouffe, “all at once, and were mowed down in the spring of life.  The court occupied by the women the day after their death, had the appearance of a garden that had been despoiled of its flowers by a storm.  I have never seen amongst us a despair equal to that excited by this barbarity.”

Far be from me the intention to weaken the painful feelings which the catastrophe related by Riouffe must naturally inspire; but every one has remarked that the report of this writer is very circumstantial; the author appears to have seen all with his own eyes.  Yet he has been guilty of the gravest inaccuracy.

Out of the fourteen unfortunate women who were sentenced after Verdun was retaken from the Prussians, two girls of seventeen years of age were not condemned to death on account of their youth.

This first circumstance was well worth recording.  Let us go farther.  A historian having lately consulted the official journals of that epoch, and the bulletin of the Revolutionary Tribunal, discovered with some surprise that among the twelve young girls who were condemned, there were seven either married or widows, whose ages varied from forty-one to sixty-nine!