Madame Roland (Blind 1886)/Chapter 18
IN OUTLAWRY.
On the eve of the 14th of July, the fourth anniversary of the storming of the Bastile, from which the year of Liberty dated, a tall, beautiful girl, in Normandy cap and simple white dress, stopped at a sombre-looking house in the Rue des Cordeliers, and asked for Marat. She had come from Caen, where she had seen the proscribed Girondins, but without coming into personal relations with them, though she had spoken to Barbaroux, without revealing her purpose.
Marat—who knows not the tragic tale?—received Charlotte Corday sitting in a medicated bath, covered by a board for writing, when she, pretending to bring him news of the traitors at Caen, plunged her knife into his heart.
On the day of Marat's funeral, at which the whole Convention assisted, Champagneux was on his way to Madame Roland in her prison. The honours paid to Marat filled her with violent indignation, succeeded by hopeless gloom. "I shall never leave this place," said she, "but for the scaffold. However, I suffer less concerning my own fate than for the calamities which will overwhelm my country; it is ruined!" After this she was silent, but roused herself to give Champagneux a message for Brissot, whom she urged in glowing terms to enlighten his countrymen as to the principles and motives of his political career. She knew that nothing else remained; and the leader of the Girondins, discovered and arrested at Moulins, confined in the identical room which Madame Roland had occupied at the Abbaye, set about composing his Testament Politique. This work, according to Champagneux the most forcible of all Brissot's writings, Robespierre managed to destroy. Champagneux seized the occasion of the message to impress upon Madame Roland the importance of continuing her own private and political Memoirs, already begun, but left off again in discouragement.
So Madame Roland resumed her pen, and with her usual rapidity filled in the gray, small-sized sheets of paper with her strong, clear handwriting. How she contrived to hide her manuscript from the gaolers is a mystery. But she had succeeded in taming even the ruffianly keepers of Sainte Pélagie, and to her they were full of little attentions. Two-thirds of her Historical Notices had already been entrusted to a friend, who had burned them, under apprehensions of a domiciliary visit. The author, on learning their fate, could not help exclaiming, "I wish they had thrown me into the fire instead!" Standing on the edge of the grave, not knowing from day to day whether she would have time to finish her story, she entrusted to these frail leaves the justification of her political life. Undismayed by the trying miscarriage of her first MS., she wrote so rapidly that her Notices were finished in the space of a month, and the rest of her Memoirs in about three weeks.
These Mémoirs, now one of the French classics, contain the narrative of Madame Roland's private life from infancy to the date of her marriage. Modelled on Rousseau's Confessions, they yet bear the impress of a strong, original nature. Terse and limpid in style, they are free from that academic sententiousness characteristic of Manon's youthful letters, uniting shrewdest criticism and description of character with the idyllic sentiment so dear to the eighteenth century—a book with a life crushed out on its leaves: the life of a woman in the plenitude of existence, yet already practically cut off from it. The circumstances under which this autobiography was written, give it the strangest pathos. These fresh pictures of child-life, these vernal hours of youth, that seem to scent the pages containing them, are painted on the dark background of a prison. Leaning against the bars of her window, the captive author sees again the bowers and avenues of Meudon, the pleasant garden, in whose arbour of honeysuckle she has sat with her parents on the long-past summer days. As she recalls the convent, with its sacred chaunts and solemn organ-peals, the vision is cruelly dispelled by the oaths and curses with which thieves and forgers interlard their speech. Even while describing those tranquil months passed under her grandmother's roof on the Île St. Louis, she breaks off abruptly with the remark, "I feel the resolution of continuing my undertaking grow weaker. The miseries of my country torment me; the loss of my friends affects my spirits; an involuntary sadness benumbs my senses, darkens my imagination, and weighs heavy on my heart. France is become a vast amphitheatre of carnage, a bloody arena, in which her own children are tearing one another to pieces."
But while the recollection of early friendships rose from the past "like an old half-forgotten legend," these friends proved the strength of their attachment by coming, at imminent risk to themselves, to visit the prisoner. Now it was the faithful Agatha, poor fluttered nun, driven from her convent, but still roosting near it, that came to lament over her darling. Now it was Henriette, most generous and devoted of souls, who sought her old friend, not merely to console but to offer to take her place. She, a royalist, had seen nothing of Roland's wife since the Revolution had swept them asunder. But misfortune is a great peace-maker. Madame de Vouglans was a widow and childless; the prisoner had an old, suffering husband who needed her care and a young, interesting daughter. What more simple than to propose to die for her—save a useful at the expense of a useless life! Henriette wanted to exchange clothes with Manon, and tried to convince her that, by the time the trick was discovered, she could have made good her escape: a perfectly feasible plan, provided the captive were willing. "But they would kill you, my good Henriette!" cried Madame Roland. "Your blood would be upon my head! Better suffer a thousand deaths than have to reproach myself with yours!" Tears and prayers were of no avail. The thing was impossible. She had no illusions as to her own fate, though she often made light of it to others.
Heroism is very catching. Nothing commoner in the Revolution than this sublime disregard of life. The wave of emotion leaped so high that timid women, who in ordinary times would hide from a thunderstorm, were ready to face the most imminent perils. We have heard quite enough of the horrors of this French Revolution; we can never hear half enough of the greatness it engendered. The lofty deeds of antiquity fade beside these modern ones; the devotion of martyrs is more than matched by those of republicans; nor does the history of man keep a higher record than that of Condorcet serenely composing his work, On the Progress of the Human Mind, while the pursuers were on his track.
So Manon remained at Sainte Pélagie, and the two friends parted never to meet again. But as long as history reserves a niche in her Pantheon for the great French woman, let Henriette keep a place beside her. Passing rich, indeed, Madame Roland was in the love of friends. Champagneux's constant visits had also rendered him a suspect, and he was by this time himself a prisoner. Alarmed for Bosc's safety, Madame Roland entreated him not to come so often, and to take greater precautions when he did so. To his care were entrusted the leaves that held the imperishable part of Madame Roland's life, and he took them at the peril of his own, keeping them hidden for a time in the hollow trunk of a tree in the forest of Montmorency. Proscribed himself, later on, a fugitive in the depth of winter, he carried the precious charge with him, and thus rescued both her children: the offspring of her body and that of her brain.
What, by this time, had become of Buzot and his comrades, whom we left enrolled in the company of Breton volunteers, well provided with fire-locks and oartridge-boxes? Madame Roland followed them in thought; lived in hope that they had taken ship to America. "Oh, my friends!" she wrote, "Heaven grant that you may reach the United States—that last refuge of liberty—in safety! My hopes follow you thither, and I entertain some hopes that you are now sailing towards its shores. But, alas! I am doomed. I shall never see you more!" Describing the impression made on her in youth by a novice who, on taking the veil, had sung the customary verse, "Here have I chosen my abode, and will establish it for ever," she now writes: "I have not forgotten the notes of this little passage, but can repeat them as accurately as if I had heard them only yesterday. Good God! with what emphasis I should utter them now in America!"
Alas! the little band of outlaws was not on the broad Atlantic, sailing westward. Far from it. Would it, indeed, have been possible for Buzot to leave the country where the woman he loved was immured with no prospect but the guillotine before her? He would much have preferred death. But they all of them loved France so dearly, it seemed as though they could not tear themselves from their natal soil. They had left the brave Breton volunteers to strike across country to Quimper, under the escort of six tried guides, thence to take ship to Bordeaux. Nineteen men in all they were, mostly tall and vigorous, armed to the teeth; and, to be the better disguised, clad in those white smocks bordered with red worn by common soldiers on the march. Already the departments had been filled with Jacobin proclamations against the "traitors," "conspirators," "federalists"; descriptions of their persons having been sent to all the Municipalities; popular feelings with the desperate instinct of national self-preservation, had turned dead against them.
Buzot, Barbaroux, Pétion, Salles, Louvet, Cussy, Girey-Dupré, and a young man named Riouffe, who joined them from sheer sympathy, were among the eleven now starting on this memorable retreat. Across desert moors, along lonely bye-ways, sinking knee-deep in bogs, struggling through brakes and briars, the outlawed republicans for security's sake tramped through the night, sometimes beneath the quiet stars, or under wild skies, where the moon, flying before the hurrying rack, seemed like them to fly from its hunters.
Strange Ulysses wanderings these for men bred up to peaceful professions—authors, barristers, students of arts and science. Afraid to ask shelter at country inn or cottage, they once stretched their tired limbs in a hay-loft, to be summoned, in the name of the law, by a patriotic villager at the dead of night, while flickering torch-light, cast its reflection, now on the National Guards without, now on these desperate men within, determined dearly to sell their lives. A curious colloquy, recorded by Louvet, then occurred between the suspected and suspecting parties. "What are you doing here?" asked the Mayor, tentatively, to whom Barbaroux replied, "We were sleeping." "But why in a hay-loft?" "We should have preferred your bed," quoth Louvet briskly. "And who may you be, my lively gentleman?" persisted the Mayor, whom Riouffe answered laughingly, "Why, a tired volunteer, who did not expect to be called so early." More parley ensued, and while they looked to their fire-locks, a more enterprising inquirer wished to know why they carried such loads of arms. "Because we know that this district is infested by brigands," replied Buzot, bent on annoying the departmental force, "and we wished they should at least learn to respect what they dislike." The upshot of it was that they all set off amicably enough for Roternheim, not without lurking misgivings; but the snoring citizens of that quiet country town, not in the mood for catching rebels at such hours, suffered them to leave its precincts in peace.
But oh, the weariness of the long march! One of them suffered tortures from gout; Barbaroux, limping with a sprained ankle, leant his heavy weight on his companions; Riouffe, bare-foot and blistered, left a bloody trail as he tripped on tip-toe to save his grazed heels; Buzot plodded along heavily, "carrying in his heart such bitter griefs," as Louvet knew from "his chère Lodoïska," who had carried the solace of Buzot's letters to Madame Roland, and is called by her, "angel of goodness and beauty." Lodoïska, whose heroic devotion to Louvet is so thrillingly described by him, was even now following closely in the wake of the outlaws, risking arrest as suspect, driving mysteriously it seemed to the Argus-eyed officials, but able to save herself by tact and presence of mind.
Hunger had added its pangs to the sufferings of the wayworn wanderers. No sooner did they approach a human dwelling, than shutters were barred, doors locked, and people shrank from them as though they were plague-stricken. At last, after dragging along for thirty-one hours at a stretch, they reached the neighbourhood of Quimper, and hid themselves in a woody brake till nightfall. By way of climax to their misery, they were drenched by a thunderstorm, literally bedded in water, and too weary to rise. Even the cheerfullest of them, Girey-Dupré, Riouffe, and the lion-hearted Barbaroux, lost heart for jesting, and had only faint smiles left. Pétion alone remaining imperturbable, steeled against all misadventures.
But some respite to their sufferings was at hand. Charitable friends hid them in their homes. A favourable opportunity having offered, the ex-deputies took ship for Bordeaux, which the ever-rash Guadet, gone off by himself, had depicted as devoted to the Girondins. Alas! their heaviest trials awaited them there. Reaching Gascony at the end of September, they found the Jacobins masters of Bordeaux and of the whole country. The capitulation of Valenciennes, the troubles in La Vendée, the surrender of Toulon to the English, by exasperating the people, flung them perforce into the arms of the Jacobins, who followed a clear if terrible policy of their own. A new Constitution, made under their influence, had been given to the nation, which rallied round it as its last chance of union and security. The proscribed deputies, illegally turned out of the Convention, were now themselves regarded as illegal and unconstitutional, and the Gironde rejected its Girondins.
Ignorant of this state of opinion at first, they had not taken the precaution to hide their identity, but soon found out their mistake. Discovered at an inn at Bec D'Ambez, they just escaped falling into the hands of the Jacobins, for the house had been invested, and, as the report said, their beds were found to be still warm. There seemed no safety now but for the little band to dissolve, and so put the hunters off the scent. With sorrowful hearts they bade each other farewell. This great blessing was vouchsafed them, that danger borne in common had tightened the bonds of friendship. Pétion and Buzot, who never left each other "till death did them part," remained roaming about the Gironde, now retired beneath some friendly roof, now hidden in the caverns near St. Émilion. The others, in groups of twos and threes, vanished along different routes, mostly ending in the guillotine.
Madame Roland at Sainte-Pélagie was not altogether ignorant of these events. She knew now that the proscribed Girondins, those who were not already imprisoned in Paris, would never reach America. This conviction, harder to her than her own impending fate, filled her with despair. She resolved to commit suicide. Several considerations urged her to take this step. She would foil her executioners and escape the last indignity of mounting the scaffold. A most powerful motive with her was that, by doing so, she hoped to secure her personal property to Eudora, which, were she condemned, would be legally confiscated. Having come to this conclusion, she wrote a letter to Roland, asking him "to forgive her for disposing of a life which should have been devoted to him, but that she, having now been deprived of the power of doing so, he would lose nothing but a shadow."
Two months ago, the Citoyenne Roland had declared that she would proudly have ascended the scaffold; then the victim, still able to speak, could bear witness to the truth. Now, deprived of this right, also, she considered it a degradation to submit. A paper to which she committed her last thoughts on this occasion, contains a striking proof of her calmness and minute attention to her daughter's interests. After giving a business-like account of the little property she could claim in virtue of marriage settlements and legacies, she directs that a small sum of ready money shall be laid out in buying her daughter the harp which had hitherto only been hired for her; "and they shall get it from Koliker," she says, "an honest, fair-dealing man, who will, perhaps, abate something of the hundred crowns (£12 10s.) which he has asked for it. Nobody can tell," she added, "the relief that music affords in solitude and misfortune, nor from how many temptations it may be a safeguard in prosperity. Let the teacher of the harp be kept a few months longer; by that time the dear little girl, by making good use of her time, will know enough for her own amusement. Her drawing, also, should by no means be neglected. It is an essential article of education, to which Eudora's care and attention ought to be directed." Taking leave of her in a few lines into which all her tenderness is condensed, she added that proud legacy, "Do what they will, they cannot rob you of my example, and I feel, and I will venture to say, upon the very brink of the grave, that it is a rich inheritance."
The "dear little girl" was not suffered to remain long with the kind family of Madame Creuzé la Touche. How many were the good Samaritans sent to the scaffold in those stormful days for harbouring a suspect or a suspect's helpless offspring! Blue-eyed Eudora must go forth from the hospitable roof—whither was not so clear. Poor little black lamb! who would gather it to the fold, with that Girondin brand upon it? Every schoolmistress shrank from the charge. One at last consented to admit the gentle child, if for the dreaded name of Roland another were substituted. Even that did not suffice for long in the eyes of quaking citizens, haunted by visions of the guillotine. Eudora, in those months of terror, was passed from hand to hand. But her mother's devoted friends, to whom she had bequeathed Eudora, watched over her. She flourished in secret, although deprived of every sou of her parents' property, and it may as well be added here that she developed into a sweet and noble woman, such as would have gladdened her mother's heart, that she married the son of the worthy Champagneux, and returned ultimately to the solitary vineyards of La Platière.
Could Madame Roland have foreseen this, perhaps it would have assuaged some of the anguish which she devoured in silence. Serene though she was in the presence of others, the woman who attended her told one of the prisoner's friends that she mustered up all her courage before them, but that, when alone, she would sometimes stand leaning against the bars of her window and weep for hours together.
The idea of suicide was abandoned at the instance of Bosc. He succeeded in convincing his friend that she owed it to herself and her cause to die grandly in the face of all, leaving an example such as must inevitably make its mark on the public.
The year 1793 was on the wane. In the distant Gironde, where the sunny vintage was over, Buzot, still hidden in cellars or caves, was indulging—what survived all shocks of fate with the men of that generation—the passion of writing Memoirs. In pleasure-loving Paris, where the theatres had never been more crowded with elegantly-clad women, hair mostly dressed à la Titus, the remnant of the Girondins lingered in close confinement, awaiting their trial.
Much they still hoped of this trial; Madame Roland, also, who was to be called as a witness, indulged in favourable anticipations. In these swift, impressionable times, how might not opinion be turned by the suasive tongues of the eloquent Gironde? She herself would strike sympathy from the stoniest hearts by the fervour of her appeal.
On the 24th of October, the imprisoned Girondin deputies appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Twenty-one in all; for, although some of the chiefs had vanished for the present, other accused persons, not originally belonging to them, had been thrown in to make up the orthodox number. Fouquier Tinville's act of accusation contained an elaborate statement of all the errors and crimes which the Mountain laid to their charge, the sum and substance of which was that they were royalists, federalists, formenters of civil war, conspirators against the Republic. Amar did not blush to accuse Brissot of having contemplated the ruin of the French colonies because he had made an attempt to emancipate their slaves; of having provoked the assassination of the patriots at the Champs de Mars because he had given the first Republican impulse; of having wished to stifle liberty because he had declared war against kings. The very acts that most redounded to the glory of the leader of the Gironde were turned into the engines of their ruin by the hatred of party. To what end, in fact, dwell on a trial at which their most determined enemies, Pache, Chaumette, Hébert, and others, appeared as witnesses against the Twenty-one—a trial of which the judgment was a foregone conclusion; nevertheless, much to the disgust of the Montagnards and Municipality, it was prolonged from day to day. Vergniaud, who had promised his friends to be the last to speak, could not contain his indignation at the calumnious evidence of a witness. Suddenly roused, he had one of those inspirations of eloquence whose pathos and sublimity had so often swayed the Assembly. The audience, the very jury, were moved sympathetically; that great voice was answered by tears. A black outlook for the Jacobins, this! They suddenly declared witnesses and legal forms to be perfectly unnecessary; a deputation was sent to the Convention, and the latter, with much dispatch, empowered the jury to cut a trial short when they considered themselves sufficiently enlightened.
At ten o'clock on the night of the 30th of October the accused were summoned for the last time, to learn that the trial was at an end. Madame Roland had not been called. The Jury unanimously returned a verdict of guilty, and the sentence pronounced on the Twenty-one was—Death!
The condemned Girondins could not repress a thrill of indignation, a movement of wrath. It was not so difficult to die, but to die as traitors to the Republic! Valazé stabbed himself to the heart, and fell dead. Lasource, turning upon his judges, cried, "I die on the day when the People have lost their reason. You will die when they recover it! Brissot's arms fell nerveless to his side; his head sank forward; he was not thinking of his own fate, but of the wife, of the three young sons, whom his devotion to the public cause left utterly destitute. Fonfrède flung his arms round Ducos, that young martyr of friendship, who had scorned Marat's mercy, sobbing, "I have brought you to this!" Ducos answered quietly, "Be comforted, friend; do we not die together?" Vergniaud was for taking poison; but there was not enough for all, so he flung it from him, in contempt; he would not be divided from them in his death.
As they left the room where Valazé's corpse lay stretched on the table, one by one the condemned went up to him and kissed him on the forehead, saying, "Till to-morrow!" The prisoners in the Conciergerie, feverishly awaiting the verdict, heard them singing the Marseillaise in chorus on their approach, and recognised the signal of doom. To whatever shade of political opinion the prisoners might belong, the fate of these men, still so young in years—Brissot, the eldest of them being under forty—cut them to the heart.
At midnight a funeral repast was laid out in the dungeon, sent by an unknown friend. Nothing had been forgotten. Delicately prepared dishes, exquisite vines, rare flowers, were lavishly supplied. Sitting there for the last time, the doomed Twenty spent the night together; now conversing with the philosophic calm of a Socrates, now, like true children of Voltaire and Diderot, touching with brief lightning flashes of wit the overhanging cloud of death. Oh! do we not seem to see them sitting there, lit up by bright-burning tapers, passing the wine-cup round, eyes bright with life, still busily talking, singing—breaking off in their songs to talk again of the great passion which makes them one—Republican France! Vergniaud, presiding, surpasses himself in the splendour of his thoughts; the practical Gensonné has nothing at heart but his country's future; leaning shoulder to shoulder, the Ninus and Euryalus of the Revolution feel blest in their friendship; Brissot, graver than the rest, is absorbed in meditation; the republican priest, Fauchet, speaks of that Last Supper seventeen hundred years ago, and of Christ on Calvary; and all the while, like the mummy at the Egyptian banquets, stretched beside them lies the cold corpse of Valazé.
Hark! how quickly the clocks are striking the successive hours of night, and the tapers are burning low, and the feeble light of this last day of October falls through the grating, imparting a wan look to the flushed faces that have watched through the night. Now Vergniaud is heard saying, "Are we not ourselves the best demonstration of immortality?—we who now are here?—we, calm, serene, impassive, beside the corpse of our friend, in face of our own corpses, quietly discussing, like philosophers, the night or the flash of light that will follow our last breath?"
It is striking ten; the door opens; the executioner enters to fetch the victims.