very moment of her arrest.

[Maternal affection prevailed over her religious sentiments; she wished to
preserve the wreck of her fortune for her children. Had she deferred this
fatal act for one day she would have been saved; the cart which conveyed
Robespierre to execution stopped her funeral procession!]

The scaffold awaited Madame Campan, when the 9th of Thermidor restored her
to life; but did not restore to her the most constant object of her
thoughts, her zeal, and her devotion.

A new career now opened to Madame Campan. At Coubertin, surrounded by her
nieces, she was fond of directing their studies. This occupation caused
her ideas to revert to the subject of education, and awakened once more
the inclinations of her youth. At the age of twelve years she could never
meet a school of young ladies passing through the streets without feeling
ambitious of the situation and authority of their mistress. Her abode at
Court had diverted but not altered her inclinations. "A month after the
fall of Robespierre," she says, "I considered as to the means of providing
for myself, for a mother seventy years of age, my sick husband, my child
nine years old, and part of my ruined family. I now possessed nothing in
the world but an assignat of five hundred francs. I had become responsible
for my husband's debts, to the amount of thirty thousand francs. I chose
St. Germain to set up a boarding-school, for that town did not remind me,
as Versailles did, both of happy times and of the misfortunes of France.
I took with me a nun of l'Enfant-Jesus, to give an unquestionable pledge
of my religious principles. The school of St. Germain was the first in
which the opening of an oratory was ventured on. The Directory was
displeased at it, and ordered it to be immediately shut up; and some time
after commissioners were sent to desire that the reading of the Scriptures