Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/236

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216
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

pentier, made her acquaintance. Common sympathy with the royalists and common danger helped to make them attached to each other. Brunel started for America in July 1793, thus escaping imprisonment. Sophia was afterwards arrested, and in a convent found scanty accommodation and fare, but the kind nuns taught her artificial flower-making, a conventual accomplishment. She was released in 1794, and rejecting more brilliant offers on her return to England, waited till 1799 for Brunel's arrival from America. "To you, my dearest Sophia," he wrote after forty-six years of wedlock, "I am indebted for all my success."

Near the eastern frontier of France, at Soult-sous-Forêt in Alsace, the Baron de Bode with his wife and son had to flee for their lives, and his large estate was confiscated. A Franconian nobleman in the French army, he made the acquaintance at Dunkirk in 1775 of Miss Kynnersley, who was yachting with her friend Lady Ferrars, and followed her to Loxley Hall, Staffordshire, where the marriage and the birth of a son took place. His son and grandson—the latter died near Moscow in 1887, aged eighty-one—devoted much time and money to a fruitless attempt to obtain compensation out of the lump sum paid over by Louis XVIII. to England to indemnify the losses of her subjects.

The British convents in the provinces experienced greater brutality than those in Paris, doubtless