" [Footnote: "Memoires sur l'Imperatrice
Josephine," ch. xxxiii.]
Therese de Fontenay, now Citoyenne Tallien, kept her word. Three
days after obtaining her liberty, she came herself to fetch
Josephine out of prison. Her soft, mild disposition had resumed its
old spell over Tallien, whom the Convention had appointed president
of the Committee of Safety. The death-warrants signed by Robespierre
were annulled, and the prisons were opened, to restore to hundreds
of accused life and liberty. The bloody and tearful episode of the
revolution had closed with the fall of Robespierre, and on the ninth
Thermidor the republic assumed a new phase.
Josephine was free once more! With tears of bliss she embraced her
two children, her dear darlings, found again! In pressing her
offspring to her heart with deep, holy emotion, she thought of their
father, who had loved them both so much, who had committed to her
the sacred trust of keeping alive in the hearts of his children love
for their father.
Encircling still her children in her arms, she bowed them on their
knees; and, lifting up to heaven her eyes, moist with tears, she
whispered to them: "Let us pray, children; let us lift up our
thoughts to heaven, where your father is, and whence he looks down
upon us to bless his children.
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