Madame Roland (Blind 1886)/Chapter 17
LOVE IN A PRISON.
On the 31st of May, Madame Roland had sat at home listening with a thrill of excitement to the now familiar sounds of insurrection. She heard the beating of the rappel and the générale in the faubourgs; she saw armed men quickly tramping through the streets; the ill-omened tocsin sounded lugubriously. She was still in Paris, although long prepared to leave it. Having returned to private life, she considered herself free to go, and judged that, in case of danger, Roland would be more unencumbered if she and Eudora were out of the way. But, although she had come to this decision for the sake of Roland, of her own health, and "many other good reasons," she did not carry it out with her usual promptitude. Was she quite serious in her wish to go, or were there not still stronger reasons which kept her lingering in Paris? Her passports had also been purposely delayed, for had not she, too, become suspect? During this state of suspense she was prostrated by violent spasmodic colic—the only ailment she suffered from—usually brought on by overexcitement.
Able to sit up after a week's illness, she was disturbed at half-past five by a loud knocking, and the entrance of armed men, sent by the Revolutionary Committee to arrest Roland. On his declaration that only violence should force him thence, seeing he did not recognise the legality of their orders, the spokesman went back to the Council-General of the Commune.
No sooner had the men gone than Madame Roland formed a daring plan. She would go herself, expose the iniquity of this proceeding, and rouse the Convention to a sense of its duty. So she left her husband in the society of a friend, and, closely veiled, with a black shawl thrown over her morning gown, she hurriedly stepped into a hackney coach and drove full speed to the Place du Carousel. The courtyard of the Tuileries was filled with National Guards; the doors were closed and guarded by sentinels. With the greatest difficulty she obtained entrance to the petitioners' hall, and there paced up and down for over an hour, listening with a beating heart to the dreadful sounds of tumult which from time to time reached her from the Assembly. The final struggle was raging there. All day long deputations had been pouring in, demanding—nay, commanding—the arrest of the Girondin chiefs. Robespierre, denouncing them for the thousandth time, urged on their destruction; Chabot could exult at having "put the rope round their neck."
Whenever the door opened, the heroine of the Gironde, while impatiently awaiting Vergniaud, caught a confused vision of the wild scene within. She burned to be admitted to the bar of the Convention. Strung to the highest pitch of exaltation, she felt a force within herself to sway this turbulent Assembly, to move their hearts, to save at this, the eleventh hour, those most dear to her.
Vergniaud hurried out at last, but gave her little hope of admittance; even should she obtain a hearing, he told her, no hope was to be placed in the Convention. "Ah!" she exclaimed, "it could do what it pleased, for the majority of Paris only aspire to know how to act!" Warned of the peril she was running herself, she scouted danger, saying that, even if powerless to save Roland, she might at least tell those within some home-truths not useless to the Republic . . . and by her courage set others an example. . . . Vergniaud assured her that a motion of six articles was going to be discussed; that petitioners, deputed by the sections, were waiting at the bar—an age for her to wait! Well, she would go home, see what was happening there, and return immediately, if he would inform their friends of it. . . . Most of them were absent, Vergniaud informed her, for, though brave enough, they were wanting in assiduity. "Too true, unfortunately," she admitted, and left him, to fly to Louvet's house, leave a note for him, and then take a hackney coach home. In her fevered impatience the horses seemed to crawl, impeded, as they were, by detachments of National Guards; so she jumped out again to make her way home on foot.
Roland had already left his house when she reached it. The bearers of the warrant, unable to obtain a hearing at the Council, had left him in peace for that night. His wife, seeing him safely hidden at a friend's house, after informing him of her plans, proceeded once more to the Convention. She found it silent and deserted; the armed force had disappeared, two cannon and a few men being all that remained of it. "What!" she exclaimed, "on the day of an insurrection, when only two hours before forty thousand men in arms surrounded the Convention, while petitioners threatened its members from the bar, the Assembly is not permanent! Then assuredly it must be subjugated!"
She had no option but to return home again. By this time the streets, though illuminated, were almost deserted. At the Pont Neuf the coach was stopped by the sentry asking "Who goes there? Some parley there was with him; but she got off at last, and was glad indeed to reach home in safety. As she was ascending the stairs, a man who had slipped through the gate unperceived by the porter accosted her with an inquiry about Citizen Roland. Madame Roland, arrived at last in her room, bathed in perspiration and worn out with fatigue, kissed her sleeping daughter, and was just dashing off a note to her husband when again startled by a loud knocking.
It was near midnight. The tramp of heavy feet resounded on the stairs. The pen remained suspended in her hand as a numerous deputation of the Commune entered her room. They asked for Roland, and, on her replying that he was not in, exclaimed roughly that she must be perfectly aware of his whereabouts. "I know not," she said, whether your orders authorise you to ask such questions, but I know that nothing can oblige me to answer them."
After a whispered consultation the men withdrew, but the sentinel left at her door and the guard before the house apprised Roland's wife what to expect. She ordered some supper, finished her note, and then, thoroughly exhausted after a day of unprecedented excitement, went to bed, and slept as soundly as if no dangers encompassed her. She had not been asleep above an hour when a servant roused her to say that gentlemen from the Section wished to speak with her. While she was carefully dressing herself, the maid seemed astonished at her mistress putting on more than a dressing-gown. "It is well to be decent when one is going out, my child," said Madame Roland, calmly. The poor woman looked at her and burst into tears.
"We have come to arrest you," said one of the men on her appearance. After protesting against the illegality of the order, she judged it more prudent to acquiesce than to expose herself to any violent proceedings by a refusal. A Justice of the Peace had arrived, and now affixed seals to every article of furniture, even to the chest of drawers. She begged to be allowed to take out her daughter's clothes, made up a small bundle for herself, and wrote to commend Eudora to the care of a friend, but when the bearer of the warrant asked to see the address, she tore the epistle into shreds for fear of compromising her friend.
In the meanwhile a promiscuous crowd had invaded the premises. The pale reflection of dawn mixing with the candle-light showed sinister faces peering about. The fœtid atmosphere, caused by the press of unwashed intruders, forced Madame Roland to throw open a window and inhale the morning air. Her daughter clung sobbing about her. The servants stood round scared and helpless. The loving mother, the kindly mistress, was to be torn from them, dragged to prison; and as she bade them farewell, entreating them to be calm, the tears and lamentations of her household impressed even these officers of the Commune, inured as they were to the most tragic scenes.
"You have people there who love you," said one of the Commissioners.
"I never had any about me who did not," replied Madame Roland, and she followed them down-stairs.
The street was full of people and guarded by armed men. Erect and fearless, the great Citoyenne stepped through the crowd, towards the carriage that was to bear her to prison, as proudly as, three short summers ago, she had walked towards the Altar of the Federation. It was seven in the morning of the 1st of June. Women of the markets, glaring and shaking their fists at her, shouted, "To the guillotine!" Some of the Commissioners obligingly offered to pull down the blinds.
"No, gentlemen," she replied; "innocence, however oppressed, should not assume the attitude of guilt. I fear the eyes of no one, and do not even wish to escape from those of my enemies."
"You have much more character than many men," they said. "You can calmly await justice."
"Justice!" cried she. "If it existed I should not now be in your power. I would go to the scaffold as calmly if sent there by iniquitous men. I only fear guilt, and despise injustice and death."
They reached the prison. The heavy gates of the Abbaye closed on her. She crossed that courtyard, those corridors still reeking with bloodshed and haunted by the spectres of September. Over that door might have been inscribed
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Madame Roland was invulnerable to the shafts of misfortune. Locked into her room, she sat down, covered her face with her hands, and saying, "Well, here I am in prison!" fell into a profound reverie. There she was, calm as to her own fate, inexpressibly anxious concerning that of her country and her friends, when, on the 2nd of June, the familiar sounds of insurrection reached her in captivity. Marat himself that day sounded the tocsin to call the people to arms; Henriot, the ruffianly commander, was investing the Tuileries, and behold the Convention itself actually a prisoner in Paris!
After a feeble show of resistance, the Right and the Centre, cowed by Henriot's cannon, agreed to the expulsion of the twenty-two Girondins, who, to smooth matters, were only to be put under arrest at home. So fell the Gironde, and it is refreshing to find among the list of the proscribed the heroic name of Ducos, that martyr to friendship, who, when Marat would have saved him because of his extreme youth, scorned his mercy and cast in his lot with Fonfrède, be his fate what it might.
"Things are rarely what they seem," says Madame Roland in her Memoirs, "and the periods of my life that have been the sweetest were the reverse of what outsiders would imagine. Happiness, in fact, belongs to a state of feeling, and not to external circumstances." Circumstances were now at their darkest, but hidden in her heart she had a hive of honey. In reviewing her past life she had nothing with which to reproach herself; she had done her duty valiantly. In the very act of securing her husband's liberty she had sacrificed her own. From the beginning of their union all her faculties had been placed at his service, and, reinforcing his powers with hers, she had practically lifted him into the important position which had now ended in ruin. But in this marriage, "the ascendancy of twenty years' seniority, added to a domineering temper," had been a heavy burden, which the wife had still borne with uncomplaining fortitude.
She never ceased to honour and esteem "the virtuous Roland"; she was devoted to him as a daughter, she says; but that love which he had never awakened in her, which her powerful organization could not escape, seized hold of her in the stormiest days of the Revolution, to raise as fierce a storm in her heart, and shake the fabric of her life to its foundations. The fiery trial through which she had passed in finding a man who answered to her ideal by the courage, purity, and elevation of his nature, and who, while reciprocating her passion, recognised as fully as she did herself the inviolability of previous ties, this trial had been so terrible that persecution, imprisonment, the scaffold itself, sank by comparison into insignificance. Yes; when once her conjugal bonds had been forcibly wrenched asunder, she welcomed the prison as a deliverance from her invisible captivity, cherishing the fetters which left her free to love her friend unrestrictedly, and thanking Heaven for having substituted her present chains for those which she had previously borne. Could any words more forcibly express through what a terrible struggle she had passed? and these words would never have left her lips had she not been shut out from the world, and been writing to Buzot under the shadow of the guillotine.
In reading the letters which the captive woman sent to the proscribed republican, we must never lose sight of the unique situation in which they were penned, nor of the improbability of these lovers ever again meeting, which added a childlike openness to the tragic intensity of feelings that seemed already to belong to the departed.
In the eyes of many to whom are thus revealed the inmost recesses of Madame Roland's heart, she may seem reprehensible for having allowed a feeling to take root in her heart opposed to that which she owed to her husband. But the Revolution, by loosening the bonds of custom, by stimulating the vital energies, by communicating her volcanic commotions to her children, prepared the soil for those insurrections of the heart and heroisms of love so pathetically interwoven with its political history. Now it is a Danton, who, convulsed beside the grave of his wife—deceased in his absence—has her dug up, and clasps her inanimate corpse in his arms in transports of despair. Now it is a Vergniaud, for whom to stay in Paris is death, and who stays that he may not shorten by an hour his intercourse with Mademoiselle Candeille, the beautiful actress he adores. Now it is a Lucile, fair young wife of Desmoulins, who glides round the prison like his shadow, and, like his shadow, too, follows uncomplainingly to the guillotine.
That whole generation, while the social fabric was yielding and cracking beneath its feet, and while death encompassed it, was consumed by the thirst for life. Into its brief existence it crammed centuries of thought, action, suffering. It was ready to shatter all obstacles that hindered the current of its passions. The indissolubility of the marriage tie had been cancelled. An interval of a few months sufficed between the rupture of the old union and the formation of the new. In this very month of May, 1793, the records of the Moniteur prove the cases of divorce to have been one-third in proportion to the marriages. Madame Roland no more believed in the indissolubility of the, conjugal tie than did her contemporaries, and the bond which claimed to keep together two people made incompatible by differences of age, temperament, or sentiments, appeared to her both anomalous and cruel; but she never considered the possibility of applying this reasoning to her own situation. Her theories never served her as stepping-stones to licence. The more old foot-holds of custom seemed giving way beneath her, the more frantically she clung to her ideal of Duty, that rock which had hitherto upheld her. When it came to a question of gaining her own happiness or of spoiling the last years of Roland's fretted existence, she never hesitated at the sacrifice. And does not the highest moral worth consist in overcoming temptation rather than in never having been led into it?
The perfect candour of Madame Roland's nature had not suffered her to live in confidential intercourse with another while hiding her thoughts from him. It would have seemed like treason. She had confessed everything, laying her heart bare before Roland. "The knowledge that I am making a sacrifice for him," she says, "has upset his happiness. He suffers in accepting what yet he cannot do without." Roland, if exacting in daily life, could rise to great occasions. He entered magnanimously into his wife's trouble, and there goes a tradition that he had formed a resolution of voluntarily leaving her, should she not succeed in stifling her love; but she would never have consented to this, knowing as she did how closely the fibres of his life were bound up in hers: having so completely fulfilled her maxim—that a woman must make the man's happiness in marriage—that he could not live without her. Truly there seemed no way of disentangling this moral knot, when the Revolution came and cut it in two by throwing Madame Roland into prison.
A sense of unwonted lull came to her behind the iron bars. The reins had been roughly snatched from her hands, and there was nothing for her to do but let the fatality of events carry her whither they would. With her habitual promptitude and love of order, she began arranging her cell, placing a rickety little table near the window ready for writing, and, to avoid disarranging it, having her meals set out on the mantel-piece. These she tried to limit to what was strictly necessary, although she was free to spend what she liked on herself. The allowance of prisoners had been reduced by Roland from 4s. 2d. to 1s. 8d. a day, but the rise in the price of provisions, tripled within a few months, made this sum inadequate, after the deduction of expenses for bed, &c. Retrenching her wants as far as her health permitted, she took bread and water for breakfast, a plain dish of meat and vegetables for dinner, and a few greens for supper; the sum thus economised she spent on the wretches who were lying upon straw, "that while eating her dry bread in the morning she might feel the satisfaction that the poor reprobates would, owing to her, be able to add something to their dinner."
Books and flowers, whose soothing, uncomplaining companionship had been dear to her from childhood, became the solace of her captivity. Thomson's Seasons, a favourite book, had been in her pocket on the night of her imprisonment. She sent for Plutarch, who had made her a republican at eight years of age, and whose Lives might help her to bear with fortitude the reverses of her own; for Hume's History of England, and for Tacitus. To her regret she could not procure Mrs. Macaulay's History of the English Revolution, a work at that time greatly admired by French Republicans, and which she would fain have matched by a rival production in her mother tongue.
The rare beauty of Madame Roland's character and her winning manners could not fail to gain the hearts of all who came in contact with her. The gaoler's wife showed her every kindness, made her sit in her own room, where the air was purer, and where she was able to receive friends. Even the turnkeys, some most villainous of appearance, became humanised in her presence. Her faithful friends rallied round her, Bosc assuring her of the safety of her daughter, placed by him under the protection of a worthy, kind-hearted lady, in whose family she remained like one of her own children. To Champagneux, who had always admired her, she had never appeared so great as now "when she gave to the prison the dignity of a throne." The kindly Grandpré, appointed Inspector of Prisons by Roland to obviate some of their grossest abuses, proposed that she should address the Minister of Justice and the Minister of the Interior to protest against an imprisonment for which no cause had been assigned. She readily consented, more to vent her indignation than from any expectation of a favourable result.
Tranquil on her own account, she was racked by cruel anxieties concerning Roland and her proscribed friends, especially the one dearest of all. Roland had fled, and was now sheltered in the house of some ladies who lavished every care and kindness on him. Some of the Girondins were under arrest at their own homes, having remained in pledge of the good faith of those who had escaped to the provinces, among whom were Barbaroux, Louvet, Pétion, and Buzot. None of the most prominent Girondins had been to the Convention on the 2nd of June: they had, therefore, been able to take flight. But it was only by force that his friends had prevented the determined Buzot from rushing to the tribune, where he would have wished to make his protest and die. He now proceeded to Caen, which became the centre of Girondin agitation.
While Madame Roland, behind her bolts and bars, was striving after an inward calm impervious to calamity, she was rudely disturbed in her meditations by loud cries persistently repeated under her windows. They were those of the newsmonger proclaiming to the people "La grande colère, the great rage of the Père Duchesne against that woman Roland imprisoned at the Abbaye, and the discovery of the great conspiracy of the Rolandists, Buzotins, Pétionists, Girondins, in league with the rebels of the Vendée and the agents of England." Obscene language, conveying the foulest abuse, was persistently shouted in the hearing of the captive. Hébert, the vulture of journalism, marked the destined victim, hovering round her in ever-narrowing circles, ready to strike his talons into her heart. These persistent asseverations of the presence of Roland's wife at the Abbaye seemed calculated to incite the mob to a repetition of their September exploits; but the reprobation with which the Girondins had not ceased to brand them had had its effect. They themselves were destined to benefit by that impulse of humanity. Stung to the quick by the infamy of Hébert's calumnies, Madame Roland wrote to Garat, the Minister of the Interior, with a pen that knew how to stab.
"Garat! to you I report this insult. It is due to your cowardice; and if still worse things should happen, it is on your head I invoke the vengeance of heaven. . . . Yes, I know what events usually follow on those outrageous provocations. What matter? I have long been ready. In any case, accept this farewell which I send to prey on your heart like a vulture."
While still sore from the revolting infamies of the Père Duchesne there came to her the sweetest consolation fate could still vouchsafe, a letter from Buzot. She replied to it on the 22nd of June.[1]
"How often have I not read it, pressed it to my heart, covered it with kisses! . . . I felt calm and resolute on coming here, not without hopes for the defenders of liberty; but when I heard the decree of arrest against the Two-and-twenty I cried—My country is lost!—I have suffered tortures till assured of your safety. . . . Continue your noble efforts, my friend; Brutus despaired too soon of his country's safety on the plains of Philippi. As long as a single determined republican is free, he must and can be useful.
"As for me, I shall calmly await the return of justice, or endure the last excesses of tyranny in such a way that my example may not prove useless. What I feared most was that you might take some imprudent steps on my account. My friend, it is by saving France that you can ensure my safety, nor do I care for safety at its cost; but shall die contentedly if I know that you are of use to your country. Death, sorrow, torments are nothing to me, I can defy them; believe me, I shall live to my last hour without wasting an instant in ignoble fears. . . .
"Certain privileges, due to my humane keepers, I am forced to keep secret for fear of compromising them; but kind actions are more binding than chains, and supposing I could save myself to-morrow, I would not, for fear of ruining the honest gaoler who does his best to soften my captivity. . . . I have my Thomson (dear to me on more accounts than one), Shaftesbury, an English dictionary, Tacitus, and Plutarch; I lead the same life as in my study at home, at the Ministerial dwelling, or elsewhere, . . . I have prevented R from addressing himself to the Convention since the 2nd of June. It is no longer the National Assembly to persons of high principles. I know of no constituted authority now in Paris from which I should care to solicit anything; I would prefer rotting in my chains to such humiliation. The tyrants may oppress, but degrade me? never, never! . . . The unfortunate R has been in hiding with several timorous friends within the last twenty days, screened from all eyes—more of a captive than I. I am anxious about the state of his head and health; he is now in your neighbourhood—ah! would he were so morally speaking. I hardly dare tell you, what you only will understand, that I was not over sorry at being arrested. They will be less furious, less eager in R's pursuit, said I to myself, and should they proceed to a trial I may be able to meet it in a way most creditable to his reputation. It seemed to me I was thus acquitting myself of a debt due to his sufferings; but do you not see that in being alone it is with you I abide? Thus I sacrifice myself to my husband by a captivity that gives me more to my friend, and I owe it to my persecutors to have reconciled duty and love: do not pity me! . . .
"Mon ami, in yours of the 15th I have recognised the manly tone of a proud and independent spirit, occupied with lofty plans, triumphing over fate, capable of generous resolutions and sustained effort. How vividly it called up the feelings which unite us! But how sad is yours of the 19th—how sombre its conclusion! A great matter, forsooth, to know whether a woman will survive you or not! What does matter is to preserve your life so as to be of use to your country; the rest will follow."
The rest will follow! With those few scornful words the prisoner puts aside the consideration of her personal lot, to invite her lover to concern himself solely about that of his country. Here we surprise the most intimate movements of Madame Roland's heart, when she had left the world behind her and was speaking to one only, and that one for ever separated from her. Is it possible for a noble nature to express intenser affection than by rendering thanks to the dungeon for having at last reconciled duty and love? And yet love itself is subordinated to her country, ever first with her.
Was it likely that she or her friends would wish to ruin France by fomenting a civil war? Their mistake really lay in miscalculating the extent of their influence and the spirit of the departments. They had fancied that their first summons would electrify the provinces, rally the country round the Girondins, and deliver Paris from what they considered the despotism of a small terrorist faction. They argued in their indignation that they would defend the unity and indivisibility of the Republic from the encroaching violence of the capital. Buzot, in his Memoirs, gives a succinct statement of the plan they had proposed to themselves. This plan consisted in effecting a junction between the troops of the departments and the inhabitants of Paris; of re-establishing the Convention in its integrity, and of ensuring its liberty of action by a guard to be chosen from all the departments; and to have the members of the Convention tried by judges, to be likewise elected by the departments. This was the extent of Girondin federalism. A proclamation was drawn up at Caen for the purpose of raising a national force. Eight departments of Brittany and Normandy became the centre of the coalition, but in other parts of France, at Bordeaux, Rennes, Limoges, Marseilles, Besançon, Dijon, &c. there were symptoms of insurrection. The Girondins had entrusted their fate to the hands of General Wimpfen, who had served under Dumouriez—an excellent soldier, who put his sword at their disposal. While collecting troops, he issued an address to the Metropolis, proclaiming that his intention was to march towards not against Paris, for the sake of Paris itself and that of the Republic.
However fair-seeming these threats, veiled under an appearance of good intentions, civil war must have inevitably followed them, but for one insuperable obstacle, that of the sincere republicanism of the Girondins. Rage might have blinded them for an instant to the consequences of their proceedings; but they had no sooner clearly realised them than they gave up all thought of fomenting the insurrection. If their enemies could only be reached by striking at the Revolution first, then let their enemies triumph. Mountain and Gironde equally shrank from the terrible conflict; and the consequence was, that when Puisaye, appointed second in command by General Wimpfen, marched his five or six hundred men, chiefly from the remotest parts of Brittany, towards Vernon, near Évreux, to meet the forces of the Mountain coming from Paris, the combatants had so little confidence in their cause that, without striking a blow, they took to flight, leaving neither wounded nor killed. The Mountain, with generous sagacity, had gone on the tack of treating the insurrection in the Calvados as a pardonable error, born of the intrigues of a few conspirators, and the result was that the inhabitants were only too eager to testify their adhesion to the ruling powers.
Under these distressing circumstances, General Wimpfen dropped the mask of semi-Republicanism with which he had hitherto deluded the Girondins, showed himself under his true Royalist colours, and informed them bluntly that there remained only one means of promptly and effectively attaining their object, that was to open negotiations with England, for which he already possessed the necessary facilities, if they would entrust matters to his hands. The founders of the Republic were horror-stricken. Without consulting with each other, they rose as one man, and broke up the Conference in indignant silence. If they erred in not carrying out to the letter Vergniaud's heroic proposal, they speedily retrieved their error, and so saved France from impending ruin. But they themselves were now effectually ruined; there was no longer any abiding for them in Calvados. The decree of the Convention, which declared them Hors la loi, outlawed, had been placarded on the Intendance Mansion at Caen. Buzot's house at Évreux had been razed to the ground and a gallows erected in its place, with the inscription, "Here dwelt the traitor Buzot." The earth seemed to recede from beneath them. Disguised as soldiers in the ranks of the company of the Breton National Guards returning to their homes, they left Caen behind them.
Some three weeks earlier, on the morning of the 24th of June, the Citoyenne Roland was informed, to her surprise, that she was set at liberty, nothing having been found against her to warrant her detention. She lost no time in collecting her few things, getting into a coach, and driving to her apartments in the Rue de la Harpe. Light as a bird she flew down the step, was joyfully welcomed by the woman of the house, and intended, after leaving a few directions, to hurry to the kind family who had adopted her child, when two men, who had followed at her heels, stopped her on the stairs, crying, "Citoyenne Roland!"
"What do you want?" asked she, looking back.
"We arrest you in the name of the law!"
Had ingenious persecutors laid their heads together to concoct a plan for more effectually tormenting their victim, they could not have devised a more successful one. The door of the cage had hardly been opened—the resignation of the prisoner had hardly given place to a thrill of joy at her freedom, and to the delightful anticipation of again clasping her daughter to her heart—when she was recaptured. In her vivid description of this event Madame Roland herself gives up attempting a description of the disappointment she suffered.
Once more dragged to prison, she did not submit to this second incarceration without a protest addressed to the section of Beaurepaire; its only result being that of leading to the imprisonment and death of the younger Cauchois, son of her landlord, who made some efforts to save her. Taken to Sainte Pélagie this time—a sinister prison, situated in a low, remote quarter of Paris—the great citoyenne was lodged in a narrow cell, only separated by a thin partition from that of assassins and prostitutes, where it was impossible to avoid hearing the foulest language and seeing the most revolting sights, the building where the men were kept facing the wing occupied by the women, who between them kept up a perpetual fire of ribald jokes and indecencies. As she had no option between taking exercise in a filthy room in the company of those miscreants, or of remaining shut up in her cell, she preferred the latter, vainly trying to mitigate the stifling heat of July by wrapping paper and leaves round the bars, glowing with the sun. But her mental suffering rendered her almost oblivious to these trials. The hope of seeing her daughter again, so cruelly foiled, had struck her a heavy blow, and she dared not even indulge in the luxury of sending for her occasionally, lest the girl should attract the attention of the Argus-eyed Hébert and company, and be thrown into prison as the offspring of "conspirators." Such cases were not unknown, and alarmed her indescribably. Grief overwhelmed her; but only for a moment. In her next letter to Buzot, of the 3rd of July, there is no trace of weakness. She says:—
My friend, do not let us transgress so far as to strike the bosom of our mother in speaking ill of that virtue which we buy by cruel sacrifices, it is true, but which in turn repays us by such precious rewards. . . . Tell me, do you know a greater gain than that of rising superior to adversity and death, and of finding something in your heart capable of sweetening and embellishing existence to its latest breath? Tell me, did anything ever give you this experience more fully than the knowledge of our mutual attachment, in spite of the contradictions of society and the horrors of oppression? . . . I will not gainsay that I am indebted to it for being pleased with captivity. Proud of persecution at a time when virtue and character are proscribed, I would have borne it with dignity, even apart from you; but you endear it to me. The wicked think to crush me with their chains. Madmen! what care I whether I am here or there? Does not my heart go with me everywhere? and is it not in prison that I am free to follow its dictates? . . . From the moment I am alone my duties are restricted to good wishes for what is just and honest, and even so you still claim the first place. Nay, I know too well what would have been my duty in the natural course of things to complain of the violence which has snatched me from it. If I must die . . . well, I know of life the best it contains, while its continuance would probably only exact fresh sacrifices. . . . The moment in which I gloried most in my existence, when I felt most vividly that exaltation of soul which dares all dangers and rejoices in facing them, was the one on which I entered this Bastile to which the executioners have sent me. . . . It seemed to give me an occasion of serving Roland by the firmness with which I could bear witness; and it seemed sweet to be of some use to him, while, at the same time, my seclusion loft me more entirely yours. I should like to sacrifice my life to him, that I might have the right of giving my last breath to you alone.
It was no fine-sounding phrase, when the wife of Roland said she would sacrifice her life for him! She had effectually done so! And, though several persons were sent at intervals, both by Roland and Buzot, to help her to escape—a not impracticable scheme, especially from the Abbaye—she persistently refused to avail herself of this chance, partly from fear lest the pursuit of her unhappy husband would be carried on with greater zeal when she could no longer act as scapegoat for him, and partly, as we have seen, not to risk the liberty of the good gaoler who should connive at hers; so she remained, making lighter of her position than she felt it to be, to allay the anxieties of the proscribed Buzot, to whom she wrote again on the 6th of July:—
Calm yourself, my friend; this new captivity has not aggravated my state so much that we should risk anything to change it. . . . Fourteen days ago I sent for this dear picture[2] which hitherto, by a kind of superstition, I would not place in a prison. But why deny myself this poor and precious consolation in the absence of the original? It is next to my heart, hidden from all eyes, felt at all moments, and often bathed with my tears. Yes; I admire your courage, I am honoured by your attachment, and glory in the efforts with which these sentiments may inspire your proud and sensitive soul. . . . Whoever is capable of loving as we do feels within himself the root of all great and good actions, the reward of the heaviest sacrifices, a consolation in all trials. Adieu, my best beloved, adieu!
The last letter she sent to the outlaw was penned on the 7th of July. After that date Buzot lost his last ray of comfort in the cessation of all intercourse with her whose picture he, too, carried next his heart:—
You cannot imagine the charms of a prison, mon ami, where we are only responsible to ourselves for what use we make of time! No tiresome interruptions, no painful sacrifices, no petty cares; none of those duties all the more imperious because they appeal to our sense of right; none of those conflicts between the laws or prejudices of society and our dearest impulses; no jealous looks to watch us and everything we do; nobody who suffers from one's melancholy or inaction, or who exacts sentiments beyond one's control. Given back to oneself, with no obstacles to overcome, one may honestly give free play to one's thoughts, without injuring the rights or affections of anyone, and thus recover moral independence in the bosom of captivity. But I would not have allowed myself this kind of independence by disburdening myself of another's happiness which I yet found it so difficult to make. Events have brought about what I could not have achieved myself without a kind of crime. How I cherish the fetters where I am free to love you wholly, and where I may always think of you! . . . Persevere in your generous efforts, serve your country, save liberty; every one of your actions is a delight to me, and your conduct makes my triumph. . . . Oh, you who are as dear as you deserve to be, temper the impatience which torments you; in thinking of my fetters, remember also what I owe to them? . . .
I have cordially approved the resolution of the departments to act only in concert. I know not whether these delays, by giving the enemy so many opportunities for making his preparations, may not prove fatal to the good cause. . . . True, the majority of Parisians would open their arms to their brothers from the departments; they are looking forward to them as deliverers. . . . After so much delay, there should be no partial action; they ought to move in a body now. Their chief aim should be to secure the Post Office, to maintain perfect discipline, to enlighten public opinion by lucid and truthful writings, to attend carefully to the provisions, to the means of defraying the expenses, and their wise regulation. These are the matters to which the deputies should attend, and which require careful consideration. There are nearly always people enough fitted for action, but only a few able to lead. . . .
It seems to me that, even independently of the general interest, every department requires the preservation of unity; for, under the false pretence that they wish to destroy this unity, the Communes, once most favourably inclined, have been set against them. To take any extreme measure, therefore, would be to incur the risk of terrible internal divisions. . . .
But do you know that you speak very lightly of sacrificing your life, and that you seem to have come to this conclusion quite independently of me? How do you expect me to look upon it? Is it decreed that we can only deserve each other by running to destruction? And, if fate should not permit us to be soon reunited, must we, therefore, abandon all hope of ever meeting again, and see only the tomb where our elements may mingle? . . . Adieu, my well-beloved!
Yes; for these two, which the fatality of passion had linked together, while the law of society kept them asunder—who had met in their common love for the Republic, and been flung apart by her—there remained nothing now but the tomb, to which the Revolution was hurrying them with gigantic strides.
- ↑ The four letters written, during her imprisonment, to Buzot, and published for the first time in 1864 by M. Dauban in his Étude sur Madame Roland, came to light in November 1868, when they were sold among a bundle of time-yellowed papers—the unpublished Memoirs of Louvet and Pétion, a copy of the Memoirs of Buzot, a tragedy of Salles, Notes and Memoranda by Barbaroux. The whole lot went for fifty francs. These letters, penned for one only, written without the faintest thought of the public, illuminate with a fresh light the heart of the noble woman whose last confession they were.
- ↑ "This dear picture" is written in English in the original. It was Buzot's miniature, already spoken of, at the back of which Madame Roland had affixed a closely-written sketch of the original. She had given him hers in return, as may be inferred from the allusion in her letter to Servan. This miniature of Buzot, which she probably carried with her to the scaffold, was discovered, in 1863, amid a heap of vegetables at a greengrocer's stall at Batignolles, and came into the possession of M. Vatel, through whom it was made known to M. Dauban.