242 BAILLY. 
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ments and ideas had not led him into some manifest 
errors. 
Who has not, for example, read with tears in their 
eyes, in the Mémoires 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 féte. They disap- 
peared,” 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 ex- 
cited 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 sen- 
tenced 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 ! 
Contemporary accounts then, even those of Rionffe, 
may be submitted without irreverence to earnest discus- 
sion. When a tenth part of the funds annually devoted 
