Chapter XIV: Those Left Behind 303 (8)

At first the alarm was so great on her account that she yielded to her friends’ wishes, but she hated the idea of flight. One evening the danger was such that every one insisted on her disguising herself and leaving the hotel. She consented, but the wig they brought did not fit, and in a burst of impatience she flung the costume, wig and all, into the corner and declared she was ashamed of herself; that if any one wanted to assassinate her, he might do it there; that she ought to give an example of firmness and she would. And from that day she never left the hotel until Roland resigned on January 22d.

The little apartment in the Rue de la Harpe was waiting them. To leave the Hôtel of the Interior was no trial to them privately. No one could have been more indifferent to considerations of position and surroundings. Their convictions of their own right-doing made them superior to all influences which affect worldly and selfish natures. It is impossible for such people as the Rolands to “come down” in life. Material considerations are so external, so mere an incident, that they can go from palace to hut without giving the matter a second thought. But retirement did not mean relief. Roland’s reports which he had made to the Convention, and which he felt justly were a complete answer to the charges against him, were unnoticed. He begged the body repeatedly to examine them. He urged his ill-health and his desire to leave Paris as a reason, but no notice was taken of him. To Roland this neglect seemed insolence. He felt that he deserved honorable recognition. He craved it, and was irritated and discouraged when he did not receive it.

It was evident, too, that his retirement from office had not made his enemies forget him. They followed him as they had priests, _émigrés_, and nobles, and Marat repeatedly denounced him as connected with the opposition to the Mountain.

It was horrible for them to watch day after day the struggle going on in the Convention between Gironde and Mountain. Day by day the condition of the former grew more desperate, their defeat and the triumph of the policy of vengeance more certain. The most tragic part of the gradual downfall of the Gironde was not defeat, however. It was disillusion—the slow-growing and unconfessed suspicion that their dream had been an error. It was Buzot who felt this most deeply. In his Memoirs he confesses that gradually he grew convinced that France was not fitted for the Republic they had dared to give it, and that often he had been at the point of owning his mistake:

“My friends and I kept our hope of a Republic in France for a long time,” he writes; “even when everything seemed to show us that the enlightened class, either through prejudice or guided by experience and reason, refused this form of government. My friends did not give up this hope even at the period when those who governed the Republic were the most vicious and the vilest of men, and when the French people could be least counted on.... For myself, I avow that I despaired several times of the success of this project so dear to my heart. Before my expulsion from the Convention, not wishing to betray my conscience or my principles, I was on the point, several times, of retiring from a position where all the dangers, even that of dishonoring my memory, left me no hope of doing good; where even our obstinate and useless resistance did nothing but increase the error of good citizens on the true situation of the National Convention. A kind of self-love which was honored by the name of duty kept me at my post in spite of myself. My friends desired it and I stayed.... It is useless to deny it—the majority of the French people sighed after royalty and the constitution of 1790. There were only a few men with noble and elevated souls who felt worthy of having been born republicans, and whom the example of America had encouraged to follow the project of a similar institution in France, who thought in good faith to naturalize it in the country of frivolities and inconstancy. The rest—with the exception of a crowd of wretches without intelligence, without education, and without resources, who vomited injuries on the monarchy as in six months they will on the Republic, without knowing any reason why—the rest did not desire it, wanted only the constitution of 1791, and talked of the true republicans as one talks of extremely sincere fools. Have the events of the 20th of June, the suffering, the persecution, the assassinations which have followed them, changed the opinion of the majority in France? No; but in the cities they pretend to be _sans-culottes_; those that do not are guillotined. In the country the most unjust requisitions are obeyed, because those who do not obey them are guillotined; on all sides the young go to war, because those who do not go are guillotined. The guillotine explains everything. It is the great weapon of the French government. This people is republican because of the guillotine. Examine closely, go into families, search the hearts if they dare open to you; you will read there hate against the government that fear imposes upon them. You will see there that all desires, all hopes, turn towards the constitution of 1791.”

The prison, called the Abbaye, where Madame Roland passed the first
twenty-four days of her imprisonment.
]

That Buzot should have remained until the end with the Gironde, when convinced, as he here says, that their efforts for a Republic were contrary to the will of the country, and when, too, he was revolted against the excesses its establishment was causing, he explained fully, when he wrote: “My error was too beautiful to be repented of;” and again, when he says: “Our dream was too beautiful to be abandoned.”

The terrible whirlpool had dragged away hopes, ambitions, dreams, from them. Into it went, too, some of their most valued friends; men whom they had raised to positions of importance, but who now that they saw the party defeated abandoned them through fear and disillusion. At the same time that they were experiencing all the force of their disillusion, the relation between Roland and his wife was becoming terribly tense and painful. They felt that they must bring it to an end in some way, must get away from Buzot, and they resolved to go to the country. In May Roland wrote, for the eighth time, to the Convention, begging that the report on his administration be examined. His letter was not even read to the body. It became more and more probable that threats which had followed them a long time would take effect soon, and Roland be arrested. Madame Roland decided that she ought not to remain in Paris with her daughter any longer, as Roland could escape more easily if they were at Le Clos. Her health, too, sadly altered by the storm of emotions which she had passed through, demanded a change.

The passports permitting them to leave Paris had been delayed some days, and just as she received them she fell ill. She was not herself again when the 31st of May came. This day was for the Gironde what the 10th of August had been for the King.

During the latter half of May the Convention had been the scene of one of the maddest, awfulest struggles in the history of legislative bodies, and the victory had throughout leaned towards the Terrorists. They were decided, and audacious. The indecision, the platitudes, the disgust, of the Gironde weakened the party constantly. The struggle was ended by the riot of May 31st. Before the contest was over the Convention had voted the expulsion and trial of twenty-two members of the Gironde. Again the stick was out of the wheel, and the Republic was to roll.

Roland was not in the number that the Mountain could strike through the Convention. It had a much more direct and simple, a more _legal_, method of reaching him. Its Revolutionary committee had already been in operation some time. Its work was arresting those who stood in the way of the Republic. That Roland did, Marat had proved time and again, and now that the time had come to rid the country of the Gironde _in toto_, it would never do to let him escape.

It was on the afternoon of May 31st that the arrest of Roland was made at their apartment in the Rue de la Harpe. Arrests at this period were so arbitrary a matter, the sympathy or resentment of the officers and spectators had so much to do with their execution or non-execution, that it is not surprising that Roland by his own protestations and arguments, and by the aid of the good people of the house who were friendly to him, was able to induce the officer in charge to leave his colleagues and go after further orders.

Madame Roland took advantage of the delay to attempt a _coup d’état_, go to the Convention, secure a hearing, present Roland’s case, and trust to her beauty, her wit, and her eloquence to obtain his release. In her morning gown, for she was only just off her sick-bed, she sprung into a cab and drove to the Carrousel. The front court was filled with armed men; every entrance was guarded. With the greatest difficulty she reached the waiting-room and attempted to get a hearing from the president. A terrible uproar came from the Assembly, and after a long wait she learned what it meant,—the demand for the arrest of the twenty-two was being made.

She sent for Vergniaud and explained the situation. She could hope for nothing in the condition of affairs in the Assembly,—he told her the Convention was able to do nothing more. “It can do everything,” she cried; “the majority of Paris only asks to know what ought to be done. If I am admitted, I shall dare say what you could not without being accused. I fear nothing in the world, and if I do not save Roland, I shall say what will be useful to the Republic.” But what use to insist in this chaos? Not Vergniaud, not Buzot, not the Gironde as a body, had the power at this final moment to secure a hearing. She was forced to give it up and retire; not so easy a matter through the suspicious battalions guarding the approaches to the château. She was even obliged to leave her cab at last and go home on foot.

Back in the apartment she found that Roland had escaped. She went from house to house until she found him. They talked over the situation, he concluded to fly, she decided to go again to the Convention, and they parted.

In spite of weakness and fatigue Madame Roland made, that night, another attempt to reach the Convention. But when she reached the palace the session was closed. After infinite difficulty from the citizens who guarded the Tuileries she reached her home again. She had seated herself to write a note to Roland when, about midnight, a deputation from the Commune presented itself, asking for Roland. She refused to answer their questions, and they retired, leaving a sentinel at the door of the apartment and at that of the house. She finished her letter and went to bed. In an hour she was awakened. Her frightened servant told her that delegates from the section wanted to see her. With perfect calm she dressed herself for the street and passed into the room where the commissioners waited.

“We come, Citoyenne, to arrest you and put on the seals.”

“Where are your orders?”

“Here,” says a man drawing an order of arrest from the Revolutionary committee of the Commune. No reason of arrest is assigned in the document, which still exists, and the order given is to place her in the Abbaye to be questioned the next day. She hesitated. Should she resist? But what was the use? She was in their eyes _mise hors de la loi_ and she submitted, not sorry at heart perhaps, to be put into a position where she could resist publicly the tyranny of her enemies. Reinforced by officers from the section, and by fifty to a hundred good _sans-culottes_ come to see that the officers do their duty according to their sovereign will, the commissioners placed seals on boxes and doors, windows and wardrobes. One zealous patriot wanted to put one on the piano. They told him it was a musical instrument. Thereupon he contented himself with pulling out a yardstick and taking its dimensions.

In this ignorant, vulgar, and violent crowd she came and went serenely, preparing for her imprisonment. She even noted with amusement their curiosity and stupidity. It was morning when she left her weeping household. “These people love you,” said one of the commissioners, as they went downstairs. “I never have any one about me who does not,” she replied proudly.

Two rows of armed men extended from the doorway across the Rue de la Harpe to the carriage, waiting on the other side of the street. She looked about as she came out, at all this display of force, at the crowd of curious Parisian _badauds_ who watched the scene, and with conscious dignity she advanced “slowly considering the cowardly and mistaken troop.” It is a short five minutes’ walk from where Madame Roland lived to the prison of the Abbaye and she soon was within the walls.

Two days later, June 2d, the arrest of Buzot was decreed by the Convention. He was seized but escaped from his guards, and fled from Paris to Evreux, where he was well received by the department which believed that the Convention had been forced into its decree against the twenty-two. Roland in the meantime had reached Amiens. The three were never to see one another again. The cause which brought them together had separated them forever.

XII
IN PRISON

It was the morning of the first day of June, 1792, that Madame Roland was taken to the Abbaye. The imprisonment then begun lasted until November 8th, the day of her death. The record we have of her life during these five months is full and intimate.

Separated from her child, her husband in flight, her friends persecuted by the Commune, she herself only just off a sick-bed, confined in a prison which had been from the beginning of the Revolution a centre of riot and the floors of whose halls and courts were still warm with the blood of the massacre of September, the cries of _à la Guillotine_ following her from the street, it would not have been strange if her courage had failed, if she had paled before the fate which she knew in all probability awaited her. But from the beginning to the end of her long durance she showed a proud indifference to the result, an almost reckless audacity in braving her enemies, a splendid courage in suffering. She was serene, haughty, triumphant, a man, not a woman.

She declared that she would not exchange the moments which followed her entrance into the Abbaye for those which others would call the sweetest of her life. Indifferent to her surroundings, she sank into a revery, reviewing her past: there was nothing to make her blush, she felt, even if her heart was the scene of a powerful passion. She calculated the future and with pride and joy felt that she had the courage to accept her lot, to defy its rigors. “What can compare to a good conscience, a strong purpose,” she cries. There is nothing in her situation which is worth an instant of unrest. Her enemies shall not prevent her loving to the last, and if they destroy her she will go from life as one enters upon repose. And this high serenity endured even when, twenty-four days later, she suffered one of the most cruel and unnecessary outrages of the Revolution. On June 24th, she was freed. Hurrying home to the Rue de la Harpe, she flew into the house “like a bird,” calling a gay good-day to her concierge. She had not mounted four steps of her staircase before two men who had entered at her heels called:

“Citoyenne Roland.”

“What do you want?”

“In the name of the law we arrest you.”

That night she slept in the prison of Sainte Pélagie, only a stone’s throw from the convent where as a girl she had prepared for her first communion.

The bitter disappointment of reimprisonment did not bend her spirit. “I am proud,” she wrote, some hours after her rearrest, “to be persecuted at a moment when talent and honor are being proscribed. I am assuredly more tranquil in my chains than my oppressors are in the exercise of their unjust power. I confess that the refinement of cruelty with which they ordered me to be set at liberty in order to rearrest me a moment afterwards, has fired me with indignation. I can no longer see where this tyranny will go.” This indignation was so bitter that the first night in her new prison she could not sleep. It was only the first night, however. To allow herself to be irritated by the injustice of her enemies was to be their dupe. She would not give them that satisfaction, and this intrepidity endured to the end.

There are several reasons for her really phenomenal fortitude. At the bottom of it was no doubt the fact that material considerations had no influence on her when they came into conflict with sentiments and enthusiasms. An ordinary woman would have paled with fear at the sound of women shouting into her carriage _à la guillotine_; the crowded halls of the Abbaye, the tocsin sounding all night, the brutality of the officers and guards, would have sickened her soul; the narrow and dirty staircases, the bare and foul-smelling rooms, would have revolted her delicacy; the dreadful associations filled her with shame and disgust. But Madame Roland found inspiration in the thought of enduring all this. She would not allow her soul to be moved by filth and noise, and she moved serenely among the lowest outcasts. These things were externals, mere incidents in life. They had no real importance in themselves. She would use them to school her soul to more steadfast endurance,—certainly she would never allow them to interfere with her soul’s life.

A stolid and unimaginative mind might have endured her position with equal calm; a dull and sluggish nature might have been equally indifferent to the revolting sights; but never was an imagination more responsive, a nature more vibrant and sensitive than hers. It was no lack of life and vigor. She was brave and indifferent because the fact of being so stirred her imagination. This sort of endurance seemed to her worthy of a hero of antiquity. Her whole nature was kindled by the thought of being superior to circumstances, of thwarting her enemies by her courage.

The training of her whole life helped her to carry out this idea. Rousseau never drilled and trained Émile more rigidly in the doctrine of submitting to necessity than she had herself. The more severe her trial, the higher her courage rose. This she felt was a supreme test, a martyrdom worthy of a Greek. Her classic conception of patriotism was satisfied by the thought that she, like the ancients, was in prison for the country and would undoubtedly die for it.

Her imprisonment made her a prominent actor, too, in the tragedy. Hitherto she had been behind the scenes, an influence recognized, to be sure, by all parties, but acting through others. A woman’s place was not in public, she believed, and she conformed carefully to her idea. But in serious natures, feeling deeply their individual responsibility, there is a demand for action. So long as Roland was minister she had ample chance to satisfy her patriotic longings for helping. But after his retirement and since the Gironde had been so demoralized that Buzot could do little or nothing, she had felt bitterly her impotence.

Now all was changed; she was in the fight, not as the amanuensis of her husband, the inspirer of her friend, but as an independent actor. She must show an example of how a patriot should endure and die, and she must strike a blow for truth whenever she had a chance. What she did and said would not only have its influence to-day, it would be quoted in the future. This conviction of her obligation to help the cause and make herself a figure in history, exalted her mind. She took a dramatic pose, and she kept it to the end. If there was a shade of the theatrical in it,—and there is almost always such a shading in Madame Roland’s loftiest moods and finest acts,—there is so much indifference to self, hatred of despotism, contempt of injustice, courage before pain, that the lack of perfect naturalness is forgotten.

From the beginning of her imprisonment she lost no opportunity to give a lesson in civism to those about her. To the guard who brought her to the Abbaye, and who remarked on leaving her that if Roland was not guilty it was strange that he absented himself, she said that Roland was _just_, like Aristides, and severe, like Cato, and that it was his virtues which had made his enemies pursue him. “Let them heap their rage on me. I can brave it and be resigned; he must be saved for his country, for he may yet be able to render great service.”

She neglected no opportunity of obtaining her liberty, not so much for the sake of liberty as that it gave her a means of expressing her opinions. By the advice of Grandpré, an inspector of prisons, protected formerly by Roland, and who hurried to her aid the first day of her imprisonment, she wrote to the Convention. In a haughty tone she described her arrest, the fact that no motive for it was given, the indignities and illegalities she had suffered, and demanded justice and protection.

So severe was the letter that Grandpré, after consulting Champagneux, brought it back to her to soften a little. After reflection she consented. “If I thought the letter would be read,” she told Grandpré, “I would leave it as it is, even if it resulted in failure. One cannot flatter himself that he will obtain justice of the Assembly. It does not know how to practise to-day the truths addressed to it, but they must be said that the departments may hear.”

Grandpré did his best to have her letter read at the Convention, but in the turmoil of the early days of June there was nothing to be obtained from this body save through fear or force. Madame Roland, hearing that the section in which she lived had taken her and Roland under its care, wrote to thank them, and to suggest that they try to secure a reading of the letter. But she took care that they should feel that she was no tearful suppliant: “I submit this question to your _judgment_; I add no _prayer_; truth has only one language; it is to expose _facts_; citizens who desire _justice_ do not care that _supplications_ should be addressed to them, and _innocence_ does not know how to make them.”

The letter was read at the section and debated, but the Terrorists from other quarters filled the hall, and by their menaces prevented any effectual interference by those disposed in Madame Roland’s favor. Grandpré insisted that she should write to the ministers of justice and of the interior. She despised the weakness and mediocrity of both, and declared she would write nothing unless she could “give them severe lessons.” Grandpré found the letters she prepared humiliating, and persuaded her to change them. Even after the changes they were intensely hostile and contemptuous, anything but politic.

The “lessons” she gave in her letters she never failed to put into any conversation she had with public officials. One of these conversations she relates. It was with a committee of five or six persons who had come to look after the condition of the prisoners.

“Good-day, Citoyenne.”

“Good-day, sir.”

“Are you satisfied with your quarters? Have you any complaints to make of your treatment. Do you want anything?”

“I complain because I am here and I ask to be released.”

“Isn’t your health good? Are you a little dull?”

“I am well and I am never dull. _L’ennui_ is a disease of an empty soul and a mind without resources, but I have a lively sense of injustice. I complain because I have been arrested without reason, and am detained without being examined.”

“Ah, in a time of revolution there is so much to do that one cannot accomplish everything.”

“A woman to whom King Philip made about the same answer told him, ‘If you have not the time to do justice you have not time to be king.’ Take care that you do not force oppressed citizens to say the same thing to the people, or rather to the arbitrary authorities who are misleading them.”

“Adieu, Citoyenne.”

“Adieu.”

She had soon a more serious task than administering gratuitous rebukes and repeating high-sounding maxims. It was in defending herself against calumnies and accusations. She did it with spirit and clear-headedness, as was to be expected, and frequently in a tone of contemptuous asperity and superiority that could not fail to be exasperating.

It was on June 12th that she was questioned. She was asked if she knew anything about the troubles of the Republic during and after Roland’s ministry, or of the plan to make a Federal Republic; who were the persons who came to her salon; if she knew any traitors, or was allied with friends of Dumouriez; what she knew of Roland’s Public Opinion Bureau and his plan for corrupting the provinces; and lastly where was Roland. The committee got very little satisfaction out of their victim. They accused her of sharpness and evasion, and probably the accusation was just. The interview indicated to Madame Roland the complaint of the Commune against her, and showed her more clearly than before that there was no definite reason for her arrest. She was a suspect; that explained all.

To vague accusations was added direct calumny. _Père Duchesne_ had not forgotten _la reine Roland_, and one morning she heard cried under her cell window: _Visit of Père Duchesne to the citoyenne Roland in the prison of the Abbaye_. The details of the pretended visit were cried so that she could hear them and at the same time the people collected in the market of Saint Germain, held by the side of the prison, were exhorted to avenge the wrongs Madame Coco had done them. The article was in Hébert’s most offensive and ribald style and told how its author, visiting the prison, was taken by Madame Roland for a brigand from La Vendée; how she rejoiced with him over the losses of the Republic; told him that aid was coming from Coblentz and England, and assured him that the contra-revolution had been brought about through Roland.

At first, hot with indignation at these calumnies, she tried to defend herself, but she soon saw that to besiege the Revolutionary authorities any longer was not only useless, but humiliating. It was better suited to her proud courage to ignore them, and she found in her silence and disdain a source of inspiration and strength.

While natural courage, long schooling in self-denial, submission to necessity, superiority to material considerations, intense patriotism, a desire to vindicate herself to posterity, explain her remarkable fortitude in her imprisonment, they do not her triumph. The exaltation she found in her prison was that of love, a love which duty had thus far forbidden her even to think of, but which now she felt she dared yield to. Her jailers had become her liberators.

In the documents which Madame Roland addressed from her prison to “posterity” there are frequent allusions to her passion for one whose name she concealed. In the collection of letters she left for friends, under the head of “Last Thoughts,” is a passionate and exultant farewell addressed to one whom “I dare not name, to one whom the most terrible of passions has not kept from respecting the barriers of virtue.” She bids him not to mourn that she precedes him to a place where “fatal prejudices, arbitrary conventions, hateful passions, and all kinds of tyranny are ended, where one day they can love each other without crime, and where nothing will prevent their being united.”

That Buzot was meant, remained a secret of the family for seventy years after Madame Roland’s death. Her biographers frequently speculated as to whom the object of her passion was. Lairtullier, writing in 1840, quotes her portrait of Barbaroux and apostrophizes her thus: “Femme, voilá ton secret trahi.” Servan and Vergniaud have been named as possibly her hero. The truth came out in 1864, when a _bouquiniste_ of the Quai Voltaire advertised for sale a quantity of French Revolution papers among which were mentioned five letters of Madame Roland to Buzot. He had bought them from a young man whose father was an amateur of _bouquins_. Evidently they had been wandering among lovers of old papers since the day they had been taken from the dead body of Buzot. Those letters offered for sale were bought by the Bibliothèque Nationale.

They paint, as no published letters, the exultation of love, its power to lift the soul above all ordinary influences, free it from accepted laws and conventionalities, to strengthen it until it glories in suffering, if by that suffering it can yield itself to love. They show, too, how noble and pure a conception of such a passion Madame Roland had. It must not interfere with duty. Neither Roland must be betrayed, nor the country neglected; if either happened, the crown of their passion would be broken. Its glory and joy was not in abandon, but in endurance.

It was three weeks after she was confined in the Abbaye before she heard from Buzot. Her first letter to him bears the date of June 22d. Buzot was at that time at Evreux, exhorting the people to take part in a movement of federalism to arouse the departments to act against the usurpation of Paris. She wrote in response to the first letters from him which her friends had been able to get to her.

“How often have I re-read them! I press them to my heart; I cover them with kisses; I had ceased to hope for them!... I came here proud and calm, praying and still hoping in the defenders of Liberty. When I learned of the decree against the Twenty-two, I cried, ‘My country is lost!’ I was in the most cruel anguish until I was sure of your escape. It was renewed by the decree against you; they owed that atrocity to your courage. But when I found that you were at Calvados, I recovered my calm. Continue your generous efforts, my friend. Brutus on the fields of Philippi despaired too soon of the safety of Rome. So long as a republican breathes and is free, let him act. He must, he can, be useful. In any case, the South offers you a refuge; it will be an asylum for the country. If dangers gather around you, it is there that you must turn your eyes and your steps; it is there that you must live, for there you can serve your fellow-men and practise virtue.

“As for me, I know how to wait patiently for the return of the reign of justice, or to undergo the last excesses of tyranny in such a way that my example shall not be vain. If I fear anything, it is that you may make imprudent efforts for me. My friend, it is by saving your country that you deliver me. I do not want my safety at its expense, but I shall die satisfied if I know you are working for your country. Death, suffering, sorrow, are nothing to me. I can defy all. Why, I shall live to my last hour without spending a single moment in unworthy agitation.”

She went over life in the Abbaye, and told him what she knew of her family and friends. Of Roland she said:

“The unfortunate Roland has been twenty days in two refuges in the houses of trembling friends, concealed from all eyes, more of a captive than I am myself. I have feared for his mind and his health. He is now in your neighborhood. Would that were true in a moral sense! I dare not tell you, and you alone can understand, that I was not sorry to be arrested.... I owe it to my jailers that I can reconcile duty and love. Do not pity me. People admire my courage, but they do not understand my joys. Thou who must feel them, savest their charm by the constancy of thy courage.”

One would believe it a quotation from a letter of Julie to Saint-Preux. The 3d of July she sent another letter:

“I received your letter of the 27th. I still hear your voice; I am a witness to your resolutions; I share the sentiments which animate you. I am proud of loving you and of being loved by you.... My friend, let us not so forget ourselves as to say evil of that virtue which is bought by great sacrifice, it is true, but which pays in its turn by priceless compensations. Tell me, do you know sweeter moments than those passed in the innocence and the charm of an affection that nature recognizes and that delicacy regulates; which honors duty for the privations that she imposes upon it and gathers strength in enduring them? Do you know a greater advantage than that of being superior to adversity and to death; of finding in the heart something to enjoy and to sweeten life up to the last sigh? Have you ever experienced better these effects than in the attachment which binds us, in spite of the contradictions of society and the horrors of oppression? I have told you that to it I owe my joy in my captivity. Proud of being persecuted in these times when character and honesty are proscribed, I would have supported it with dignity, even without you, but you make it sweet and dear to me. The wretches think to overwhelm me by putting irons upon me—senseless! What does it matter to me if I am here or there? Is not my heart always with me? To confine me in a prison—is it not to deliver me entirely to it? My company, it is my love! My occupation, it is to think of it!... If I must die, very well. I know what is best in life, and its duration would perhaps only force new sacrifices upon me. The most glorified instant of my existence, that in which I felt most deeply that exaltation of soul which rejoices in braving all clangers, was when I entered the Bastille that my jailers had chosen for me. I will not say that I went before them, but it is true that I did not flee them. I had not calculated on their fury reaching me, but I believed that if it did, it would give me an opportunity to serve Roland by my testimony, my constancy, and my firmness. I would be glad to sacrifice my life for him in order to win the right to give you my last sigh.”

She sent for his picture, and writes, July 7th:

“It is on my heart, concealed from all eyes, felt at every moment, and often bathed in my tears. Oh, I am filled with your courage, honored by your affection, and glorying in all that both can inspire in your proud and sensitive soul. I cannot believe that Heaven reserves nothing but trials for sentiments so pure and so worthy of its favor. This sort of confidence makes me endure life and face death calmly. Let us enjoy with gratitude the goods given us. He who knows how to love as we do, carries within himself the principle of the greatest and best actions, the price of the most painful sacrifices, the compensation for all evils. Farewell, my beloved, farewell.”

On July 7th, she wrote Buzot the last letter, so far as we know, that he received from her. In it all the exultation of her ardent passion, all the force of her noble courage, are concentrated.

“My friend, you cannot picture the charm of a prison where one need account only to his own heart for the employment of his moments! No annoying distraction, no painful sacrifice, no tiresome cares; none of those duties so much the more binding on an honest heart because they are respectable; none of those contradictions of law, or of the prejudices of society, with the sweetest inspirations of nature; no jealous look spies on what one feels, or the occupation which one chooses; no one suffers from your inaction or your melancholy; no one expects efforts or demands sentiments which are not in your power; left to yourself and to truth, with no obstacles to overcome, no friction to endure, one can, without harm to the rights and to the affection of another, abandon his soul to its own righteousness, refind his moral independence in an apparent captivity, and exercise it with a completeness that social relations almost always change. I had not looked for this independence.... Circumstances have given me that which I could never have had without a kind of crime. How I love the chains which give me freedom to love you undividedly, to think of you ceaselessly! Here all other occupation is laid aside. I belong only to him who loves me and merits so well to be loved by me.... I do not want to penetrate the designs of Heaven, I will not allow myself to make guilty prayers, but I bless God for having substituted my present chains for those I wore before. And this change appears to me the beginning of favor. If He grants me more, may He leave me here until my deliverance from a world given over to injustice and unhappiness!”

“Do not pity me,” she wrote to Buzot in her letter of June 22. She was not to be pitied. Life and death were kinder to her than to most of those upon whom fall the supreme misfortune of loving where conventionalities and law forbid love to go. It took the struggle from her hand and prevented the disillusion which she must have undergone had she lived. There is no escaping the conclusion that she would have ultimately left Roland for Buzot. Her idealization of all relations, persons, and ideas which stirred her; her imagination from infancy, given full play; her passionate nature, which she knew but poorly, though flattering herself that she was entirely its mistress; her confidence in the superiority of sentiment and in herself,—would have unquestionably pushed her to a union of some sort with Buzot. She was happy to be guillotined when she was, otherwise she must have inevitably suffered the most terrible and humiliating of all the disillusions of a woman,—the loss of faith in herself, in the infallibility of her sentiments, in her incapability to do wrong.

There is a much more natural and simple side to Madame Roland’s five months in prison than this one of exaltation and endurance, which, when viewed apart, sometimes becomes a little fatiguing. If one regards only the heroine, her self-sufficiency is a bit irritating at moments, much as one must admire it. It is the arrangement of her life, her occupations, her amusements, which appeal most to ordinary minds, and which perhaps are a better index to her real force of character than her exalted periods and professions.

When first taken to the Abbaye she was obliged to be alone in her cell, to take a tiny room with dirty walls and a heavily grated window. It opened on a disagreeable street, and below she could hear by night the cries of the sentry; by day, the hawking of _Père Duchesne’s_ journal, and the rudeness of the market people, cries sometimes directed against herself. Nevertheless she decorated the little cell so gayly with flowers and books that her jailers called it Flora’s Pavilion.

At the Abbaye about fifty cents a day were allowed each prisoner for his expenses, although he could spend more if he had it. Madame Roland decided to amuse herself by making an experiment,—to see to what she could reduce her fare. Bread and water was served her for her _déjeuner_; for dinner (one hundred years ago the French dined at noon) she ate only one kind of meat, with a salad; in the evening, a little vegetable, but no dessert. After a time she got on without wine or beer. “This régime,” she explained, “had a moral end, and as I should have had as much aversion as contempt for a useless economy, I commenced by giving a sum to the poor, in order to have the pleasure, when eating my dry bread in the morning, of thinking that the poor souls would owe it to me that they could add something to their dinners.”

When she went to Sainte Pélagie, she found her life a little different. There the State gave nothing in money for the prisoners, who even paid for their beds. All that was furnished them was a pound and a half of bread and a dish of beans each day. She made arrangements with the concierge of the prison to furnish her meals which were about as simple as at the Abbaye. The prison itself she found most disagreeable. In fact, Sainte Pélagie, which exists to-day, though condemned to destruction, is the most gloomy and forbidding building in Paris. Its mere presence in the quarter where it stands gives a dreary and hopeless air to the street. The inmates of the prison at the period when Madame Roland was confined there were of such a character that she was subjected to the most disgusting annoyances. In the corridor from which her cell opened, their rooms separated from one and another only by thin partitions, were numbers of abandoned and criminal women. So obscene and revolting were they that she rarely left her room, though she could not shut out their noise.

From this pandemonium the concierge succeeded in saving her for a time, giving her a large chamber near her own, where she even had a piano; but the inspectors, once aware of the favor, ordered her back into the noisy corridor. Even there, however, she had her pleasures,—her flowers and her books. The first Bosc supplied her; the second she bought, or begged from her friends. She had Thompson, Shaftesbury, an English dictionary, Tacitus, and Plutarch. She bought pencils and drew a little every day; altogether it was a busy life. Her day was arranged regularly. In the morning she studied English, the essay of Shaftesbury on virtue, and Thompson; after that she drew until noon. Then she had serious work, for, conscious that her imprisonment might end in her death, she resolved at its outset to set down as fully as she should have time to, the facts in the political life of Roland, and to explain her own relations to him. It is from the material that she was able to write in this five months and get to her friends, that most of what we know of her life comes.

The first undertaken was her _Historical Notes_, written at the Abbaye. These she did, so rapidly, she says, and with such pleasure, that in less than a month she had manuscript for a volume. It was a summary of her public life, and an estimate on the people she had known during it. She had, herself, a very good opinion of the production: “I wrote it with my natural freedom and energy, with frank abandon and with the ease of one who is free from all private considerations, with pleasure in painting what I had felt and seen, and, finally, with the confidence that in any case it would be my moral and political testament. It had the originality which circumstances lent it, and the merit of reflections born from passing events, and the freshness which belongs to such an origin.”

The manuscript was confided to Champagneux, who was still in the Department of the Interior, but he, arrested, confided it to a person who, frightened lest it should fall into the hands of the inspectors, threw it into the fire. “I should have preferred to have been thrown there myself,” said Madame Roland, when she heard of this disaster.

Not all of the _Historical Notes_ were destroyed, however, the account of her own and her husband’s arrest, of her first days at the Abbaye, and a brief sketch of their official life being saved.

It was more than a month after she was imprisoned at Sainte Pélagie before she determined to do over the task. The new undertaking included a series of portraits and anecdotes drawn from her political life, an account of her second arrest, and of the first and second ministries. At the same time that she wrote this, she prepared her private Memoirs,—a detailed history of her life up to 1777,—and notes on the time between her marriage and the Revolution. She intended to add to her Memoirs the story of her relations with Buzot, giving the origin and progress of her passion, but she was never able to finish it.

To this literary budget, already large, she afterwards added several short manuscripts,—a set of “Last Thoughts,” a number of letters, and a comment on the accusation made by the Mountain against the Gironde, that it was guilty of a conspiracy against the unity and the indivisibility of the Republic, and the liberty and safety of the French people.

Almost all of this matter was given to Bosc, who, thanks to the concierge of Sainte Pélagie, was allowed to see her twice a week, up to the middle of October. But Bosc was proscribed later, and obliged to flee. Unwilling to trust the treasures he held to another, he hid the manuscripts in the crevice of a rock in the depths of the forest of Montmorency, where they remained eight months. Later, these papers were given to Eudora. They remained in the family until given to the Bibliothèque Nationale, where they now are.

The difficulties under which she wrote were, of course, great. It was essential that she should elude her guardians. She had no notes. She was surrounded by a ribald and noisy company. But these disadvantages only acted as spurs. She took delight in carrying on this forbidden work under the eyes of her persecutors. So rapidly did she write that in twenty-four days she produced two hundred pages of manuscript, including all the early part of her Memoirs. The words seemed to flow from her pen. The bulky manuscript of seven hundred pages, preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale, is a marvel of neatness and firmness. The grayish pages are filled evenly from margin to margin in her beautiful characteristic hand, and there is scarcely a blot or erasure, scarcely a correction, save those made by Bosc, who published the first edition of the Memoirs in 1795.

In style, the political writings are always clear and positive; often they rise to a real eloquence. Written as they were under the force of the most powerful emotions, unbiassed judgments cannot be expected. She was defending her husband primarily in this work, and she did it with the more earnestness and warmth because she felt, as she wrote Buzot, that this was one way of compensating him for the sorrow she had caused him.

Her judgments on men are not always just. Indeed, they cannot be called judgments, they are simply her feelings towards those persons at the moment she wrote. Her indignation against the wrongs done her and her party is so intense that often her tone is irritated, contemptuous, impatient. The arrangement is not systematic, as, indeed, it was impossible to be, under the circumstances, and her pen bounds from one character to another,—from hero to agitator, from apostrophe to anecdote,—in a sort of reckless, impassioned hurry. The whole gallery of the Gironde and its opponents, from 1791 to 1793 pass before us, every one stamped with a positive, definite character.

That she poses throughout the narrative is unquestionable. It is to posterity she speaks, and she wished to appear in the eyes of the future as she believed herself to be,—the apostle of the ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the incarnation of patriotism, the most perfect disinterestedness, and the highest fortitude.

It was Madame Roland’s plan, in writing her personal Memoirs, to cover her whole life, and to follow Jean Jacques Rousseau’s _Confessions_. Although the work was never completed, we have the first twenty-five years. The charm of the narrative is irresistible. Never, even in the gayest and most natural of her letters to Bosc and Roland, was Madame Roland’s pen so happy as in these Memoirs of her youth. They sparkle with mirth and with tenderness. Never did any one appreciate better his own youth, nor idealize it more lovingly. To her these souvenirs are radiant pictures, and she sketches them one after another, with a full appreciation of all their attractiveness.

Her early masters, her suitors, her youthful enthusiasm, Sophie, the Convent des Dames de la Congrégation, Meudon, Vincennes, La Blancherie, her mother, the Salon, river, Luxembourg, her toilettes, duties, sorrows, joys, the whole flows in a steady, sparkling stream, vivid with color, pulsating with life. She relives it all, and without reflection or hesitation pours out everything which comes into her mind. So full and natural are these Memoirs that they are really the most attractive material we have of the life of her class in the eighteenth century.

In all Madame Roland’s dramatic life there is no more attractive picture than that which the writing of her Memoirs brings up: this splendid, passionate woman, glorying in her love and her courage, sitting day after day before the little table in her prison cell, oblivious to the cries and oaths which rise about her, indifferent to discomfort, forgetful of everything but the souvenirs which her flying pen records, and which bring smiles and tears by turn to her mobile face. Here we have none of the stilted, prepared style of her early writings, none of the pose of the political memoirs. It is self-complacent, to be sure, and we feel that she is making herself out to have been a most extraordinary young girl, but one cannot help forgiving her, she makes herself out so charming. However, if one is interested in finding out the woman as she really was, he must not trust too fully to her interpretations. She was so interested in herself, idealized herself so thoroughly, was so serious in her self-confidence, so devoid of self-reproach, that she was oblivious to her own inconsistencies and inconsequentialities.

Rousseau’s _Confessions_ were the model of her Memoirs. The result was that she related some experiences which good sense and taste, not to say delicacy, ought to have forbidden her to repeat to any one, above all, to the public. These passages in her Memoirs are due to her slavish following of Rousseau. She was incapable of exercising an independent judgment in a matter of taste, of opinion, of morals, where Rousseau was concerned, so completely had she adopted him. When she came to writing her life, she dragged to light unimportant and unpleasant details because Rousseau had had the bad taste to do the same before her. The naïveté, with which these things are told, will convince any one that cares to examine the Memoirs that they mean nothing but she had taken the foolish engagement to tell everything she could remember about her life.

THE CONCIERGERIE IN 1793.

Prison where Madame Roland passed the last eight days of her
captivity, and from which she went to the
guillotine. Pont au Change in the foreground.
]

The Memoirs, as well as her daily life, her letters, her attitude towards the authorities, show her courage. But they show, too, the anguish which shook her from time to time. More than once her firm, brilliant narrative is broken suddenly—the sentence unfinished—to record some new outrage against her friends, and as she expresses indignantly her horror and her grief at the usurpers who are ruling France, one can almost hear the sob which shook her, but to which she would not yield. Here and there the gray pages of her beautiful manuscript are spotted by tear stains. Even now, a hundred years and more after it all, one cannot read them and see how, in spite of her iron will, her splendid courage, her heart was sometimes so heavy with woe that her tears would fall, without a choking in the throat and a dimness of the eyes.