On Christmas day, 1794, when the Réaumur thermometer fell to eighteen degrees, I sat in the Rue Montorgueil, near Montmartre, through the whole of the office, the sermon, vespers, and the benediction. I found myself on the Pont Neuf at six o'clock in the evening, and the north wind cut my face like a knife. I had formed the habit, after leaving prison, of going out into the streets alone; I continued to do so, and found it very convenient. I never took cold once during that severe winter. I met my old acquaintances from time to time, and always felt deeply moved. We invariably talked about the treatment in the different prisons, and the sufferings we had endured. Almost all the prominent persons had been imprisoned, or at least under arrest in their own houses, which was substituted only as a great favour in the case of the infirm or aged. We found a certain variety in the horrors; but on comparison the Conciergerie and the Plessis proved to have been the most terrible of all the prisons, on account of the treatment and the great number of victims who were constantly taken from them to the scaffold.
Madame Doudeauville very kindly persuaded me to spend a few days with her at her country-house. Her loveliness, the attractions of her home, the sincere sorrow she had felt at the death of my parents, and her goodness to me, cheered me somewhat, though I was so overcome with grief. I had almost forgotten how to write an ordinary letter, and had long been entirely out of the habit of doing so. The carelessness of the style of this memoir and its dullness are proof of what I have stated.
At last I received news from my son, and this restored me to life.
The latter part of the winter was terribly hard, on account of both the scarcity of food and the cold. It was almost impossible to procure wood, candles, or bread. We sent thirty and forty leagues, for them. I carried something in my pocket when I went out to dine, even at the house of Madame la Duchesse d'Orleans, who lodged in the Rue de Charonne, near the barrier at the Faubourg St. Antoine. She boasted of having a farmer who sent her a loaf of bread weighing four pounds, every week. She had wretched fare; her dishes were what are commonly called _culs-noirs_. A dwarf served her as butler and valet. She endured her poverty nobly, and joked about it. I remember hearing a lady say to the queen, the wife of Louis XVI., while she was at the Tuileries, that she knew one woman more unfortunate than she, and that was the Duchess of Orleans. She had inherited a hundred and twenty millions from Monsieur le Duc de Penthièvre, of which the nation took possession, and did not even give her enough out of it to support life.