Of their having rejoiced at it in a
most indecent manner, he said he could produce irrefragable proof. The
boy who saw Babet tear down the placard was produced and solemnly
examined; and the thoughtless action of this poor little girl was
construed into a state crime of the most horrible nature. In a
declamatory tone, Tracassier reminded his fellow-citizens, that in the
ancient Grecian times of virtuous republicanism (times of which France
ought to show herself emulous), an Athenian child was condemned to death
for having made a plaything of a fragment of the gilding that had fallen
from a public statue. The orator, for the reward of his eloquence,
obtained an order to seize everything in Madame de Fleury's school-house,
and to throw the nun into prison.
CHAPTER IX
"Who now will guard bewildered youth
Safe from the fierce assault of hostile rage?--
Such war can Virtue wage?"
At the very moment when this order was going to be put in execution,
Madame de Fleury was sitting in the midst of the children, listening to
Babet, who was reading AEsop's fable of _The old man and his sons_.
Whilst her sister was reading, Victoire collected a number of twigs from
the garden: she had just tied them together; and was going, by Sister
Frances' desire, to let her companions try if they could break the
bundle, when the attention to the moral of the fable was interrupted by
the entrance of an old woman, whose countenance expressed the utmost
terror and haste, to tell what she had not breath to utter.
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