Sentimentalists have made it ridiculous; sensualists have derided it as a sublime dupery; austere moralists have stigmatised it as a specious hypocrisy. Yet, dangerous chimera though it may be, it is not the dream of vulgar minds. If proof were wanting of Madame Roland's sincerity of purpose, it would be found in her almost joyful acceptance of captivity. It is more than probable that, like the greater number of her contemporaries in France, she believed neither in the indissolubility nor in the inviolability of the marriage-tie. Those were days in which most duties were considered as oldfashioned prejudices. During that very month of May in which she entered the Abbaye, the number of divorces in Paris fell short of that of marriages by one-third only. From her education and the circle she moved in, we have every reason to suppose that Madame Roland would have been indulgent to the frailties of others, yet towards herself she remained inexorable, and never once admitted the possibility of forsaking her old husband, or becoming a faithless wife, save in heart. This inconsistency, so completely the reverse of that which is generally practised, may, we think, be counted to such a woman as a virtue.

After the vote of the National Assembly, some of the proscribed Girondists took refuge in the western and southern provinces in the hopes of kindling an insurrectionary movement to overawe the capital. Buzot was one of the fugitives, but he found means of conveying letters to the prisoner. The four letters which M. Dauban has published are her answers. The first, dated from the prison of the Abbaye, June 22nd, is evidently a reply to some proposed plan of escape:—

'I am indebted to the humanity of my keepers for many indulgences, which I hide in order not to bring them into trouble; but kindness binds more firmly than chains of adamant, and, could I escape, I would not, lest I should ruin the honest jailer who takes so much trouble to lighten my captivity.'

After a cheerful description of her room and occupations, and some details about her husband, her child, and her faithful servant, she adds:

'I scarcely dare own, and you alone can comprehend, that I am not sorry to have been arrested.

I fancy that they will, in consequence, be less violent against R. (Roland). If they bring me to trial, I will go through it so as to do him honour. It seems to me that by this means I am making him some amends for his sorrows; but do not you see likewise that in remaining alone, I remain with you? Thus, thanks to my captivity, I am enabled to sacri ***yself to my husband while I keep myself

to my friend, and I owe to my persecutors the possibility of combining love and duty. Ah! do not pity me! Others may admire my courage, but they do not know my joys: you alone can appreciate them...

The same idea recurs in the second letter:-
:-

'The wicked think to oppress me by captivity. Fools that they are! what matters it whether I am here or elsewhere? Have I not my heart always with me? and to shut me up in a prison is to give me up undividedly to my own heart.... My love bears me company; my only care is to think of it.... I know too well what the ordinary course of events would have imposed upon me to complain of the violence which has turned it aside. If I must die, I know of life its best; and its prolongation would probably only compel me to fresh sacrifices.'

6

To all plans of escape she resolutely refused to listen. The chains she bears,' she says, are less heavy than those from ' which her prison has released her, and which no one knew 'of.' From the passage in her Memoirs which we quoted some pages back, it is evident that she had either confessed to her husband her love for Buzot, or, at any rate, had not dissembled it, and that all conjugal peace had been destroyed in consequence. Madame Roland never felt either remorse or shame at her love. As Monmouth in his prison could not be brought to confess that it was wrong to love his Henrietta, so Madame Roland would never have admitted that love such as her's was not the source of all noble deeds. We will transcribe one passage in French; it gives a good idea of the tone of these letters, and shows how far Madame Roland was from considering her love as a guilty or a shameful passion :--

'Je ne m'étois pas même permis de chercher cette indépendance et de me décharger ainsi du bonheur d'un autre qu'il m'étoit si difficile de faire; les événements m'ont procuré ce que je n'eusse pu obtenir sans une sorte de crime. Comme je chéris les fers où il m'est libre de t'aimer sans partage et de m'occuper de toi sans cesse ! .... Poursuis généreusement ta carrière, sers ton pays, sauve la liberté; chacune de tes actions est une jouissance pour moi, et ta conduite est mon triomphe. Je ne veux point pénétrer les desseins du ciel, je ne me permettrai point de former de coupables vœux; mais je le remercie d'avoir substitué mes chaînes présentes à celles que je portois auparavant, et ce changement me paroît un commencement de faveur; s'il ne doit pas m'accorder davantage, qu'il me conserve cette situation jusqu'à mon entière délivrance d'un monde livré à l'injustice et au malheur. . . . Je suis où l'a voulu la destinée ; on dirait qu'attendrie sur mes maux, touchée des combats qu'ellemême m'avoit imposés, elle a préparé les événements qui devoient me procurer quelque relâche et me faire goûter le repos; elle s'est servie de la main des méchants pour me conduire dans un port; elle

les a employés à faire du bien malgré eux, et à dévoiler toute leur noirceur de manière à inspirer cette haine avant-coureur de leur chute; elle offre à mon courage l'occasion d'être utile à la gloire de celui avec qui elle m'avoit liée, elle cède à ma tendresse la liberté de se développer en silence et de s'épancher dans ton sein.'

On the whole, these letters may be reckoned among the most curious love-letters extant. The extracts we have given convey a very incomplete notion of their contents. Patriotism holds a great place in them-perhaps as great a place as love itself. Madame Roland expresses deep anxiety about the movement in the provinces, and gives her advice and even directions like a politician. All personal considerations are secondary to the love of country and of liberty. In answer to some fears for her safety she writes: The question is not whether a woman may or may not survive you. The first object is to preserve your life in order to make it useful to your country; all 'else must come after.'

The last letter to Buzot is dated July 7th, 1793. Madame Roland was destined to remain in prison three months longer, but it is probable that no further communication took place between her lover and herself. Buzot was hiding in the neighbourhood of Bordeaux, and her own captivity was becoming every day more severe. Her friend Champagneux was himself a prisoner, and even the faithful Bosc was obliged from prudence to visit her but rarely. Her first arrest having been considered illegal, even for those times, she had been released from the Abbaye, but at the very door of her own home, and before she could embrace her child, she had been once more seized and confined in Ste. Pélagie. Ste. Pélagie was the receptacle of the lowest order of prisoners. Murderers and prostitutes, the very refuse of the streets of Paris, filled the rooms and the courtyards with their hideous outcries and still more hideous merriment. Yet even there Madame Roland managed to make herself a peaceful solitude.

From the very first days of her captivity at the Abbaye, she had taken up her pen, and under the title of Notices Historiques' had related the events of which she had been an eye-witness. The greater part of that manuscript has been destroyed. Champagneux, to whom it had been entrusted, confided it in his turn, when he was arrested, to a female friend, whose fears induced her to burn it. Madame Roland on this occasion-wrote: I would as lief have been thrown into the fire myself.' Nothing daunted, she resumed her task and wrote the 'Notices,' which have been published, as well as her private Memoirs. This she did in the comparatively happy days when she still

hoped for the ultimate triumph of the Gironde, and believed in the safety of her friends. But time wore on; those she loved were hunted down as fugitives with scarcely a chance of escape; the nation seemed to glory in proscriptions and massacres; and even the opportunity she anticipated that a public trial would afford her of confessing boldly and gloriously her political faith, was to be denied her. A decree of the Convention had authorised the Revolutionary Tribunal to close all trials when' ever the jury considered itself sufficiently enlightened.' No defence henceforward was to be permitted. As long as speech ' was allowed,' she wrote to a friend, I felt a vocation for the guillotine-but now.

. . .

6

She at first resolved to starve herself to death in her prison; but then came the trial of the twenty-two Girondists, and she was summoned as a witness. Once more she hoped she might be useful, and determined to live. She was not called upon to give evidence, however, and the idea of suicide then returned with double force. She applied to Bosc for a strong dose of opium. Her life was, according to her notions, a possession of which she might freely dispose. Bosc's letter in reply has not been preserved, but we have one from Madame Roland in acknowledgment of it. He does not appear to have used any religious arguments against suicide, but to have dissuaded her from her project on the score of patriotism. Her death on the scaffold would, he urged, be a good example, and draw increased hatred on their oppressors. By his own showing, it cost him a great deal to deny his friend her request. Their correspondence on this subject might be that of pagans, but it is not without the grandeur of pagan antiquity.

It was when she had resolved to die, that Madame Roland wrote the truly touching and eloquent pages which have been handed down to us under the title of Mes Dernières Pensées.' They contain indignant invectives against the tyrants of her country, and the tenderest farewell to all those she has loved on earth. Her good and faithful nurse is not forgotten. If the 'chimeras of metempsychosis were a reality, I would wish to ' return to life under some other shape to comfort and console, in my turn, the old age of that excellent and tender being.' But the last words are for Buzot, for him who she dares not ' name.' 6 Adieu,' she writes, adieu . . . . No! from thee adieu... 'alone I do not part; to leave the world is to draw nearer to 'thee.'

On the 1st of November, after five months' imprisonment, Madame Roland was transferred to the Conciergerie: it was but a halting-place on the road to the scaffold. Madame Roland

entered it without a hope of life, for the twenty-two Girondists had been executed the day before her arrival. At the end of a week she was summoned before the Revolutionary Tribunal. During her short stay in the prison she had endeared herself to all her fellow-sufferers, and had especially acquired a singular amount of influence over the wretched women of the lowest class, who had been cast in great numbers into the Conciergerie, and mixed with the political prisoners. The singular charm of her presence has been described by numberless contemporaries, but the testimony of Count Beugnot, her fellow-prisoner, has perhaps most weight, for he was a royalist, and had felt no previous sympathy for the Girondist Minister's wife, with whom indeed he often disagreed, even in prison, when politics were mentioned.*

'We were awakened every night,' he writes in his Memoirs, 'by the screams of infuriated women who were tearing each other to pieces. Madame Roland's room was an asylum of peace in the midst of this hell. If she went down into the court, her mere presence reestablished order, and these unfortunates, upon whom no authority seemed to have any hold, were restrained by the fear of displeasing her.... She walked surrounded by women like some tutelar divinity -very different in this respect from the Dubarry, whom the lost creatures treated with fierce equality.'

The same eye-witness has described Madame Roland's departure from the prison. He had been entrusted with a message for her from a friend, and he went in search of her in the passage through which she must needs pass. He found her waiting at the gate to be called, surrounded by women who pressed round her to kiss the hand she had stretched out to them. With the other hand she held up the long skirt of her gown. She was dressed in white, and her beautiful hair fell thick upon her shoulders. Her countenance was more animated than usual, a smile was on her lips, and a bright youthful colour on her cheek. M. Beugnot gave his message, to which she replied in a firm voice. As she was speaking, the two turnkeys shouted out her name. At this fearful summons, she stopped, pressed his hand, and said calmly Good-bye, let us make friends; it is full time.' Seeing that he was with difficulty repressing his tears, she added:

* I never heard any woman,' wrote Count Beugnot, 'speak with so much accuracy and elegance. The habit of speaking Italian had taught her the art of imparting to French a rhythm and a cadence hitherto unknown.... Every day I felt new pleasure in listening to her, less even for what she said than for the magic charm of her delivery.'