Servan received his discharge first. “Congratulate me,” he cried when he saw Madame Roland. “I have been put out.”
“I am piqued,” she replied, “that you are the first to have that honor, but I hope it will not be long before it is accorded to my husband.” It was not, for on the 13th Roland followed Servan. He hurried home to tell his wife.
“There is only one thing to do,” she cried with vivacity: “it is to be the first to announce it to the Assembly, sending along a copy of the letter to the King.”
The idea was put into effect at once. They were convinced that both “usefulness and glory” would result.
If this letter to the King began, as Dumouriez says, with a promise of secrecy, then to send it to the Assembly was, considering the position Roland occupied and the oath he had taken, a most disloyal act. But did it begin so? Madame Roland does not speak of such a promise in her Memoirs. The report of the letter given in the Moniteur contains no such opening phrase, though naturally Roland would have cut it out in sending the document to the Assembly. Many of the memoirs and newspapers of the day, however, either quote the promise or assume that the letter was private.
Dumont, in writing of Madame Roland, says that the greatest reproach that could be made upon her conduct during the Revolution was persuading her husband to publish this letter, which commenced, according to him: “Sire, this letter will never be known save to you and me.”
Mathieu Dumas says in his Souvenirs that it was confidential, and declares that it was read in the Council in the presence of the King, “although the minister had promised to keep it a secret between himself and His Majesty.” Of the presentation to the Assembly he adds: “It was a new violation of the secret that the minister had imposed upon himself. After his retreat propriety made the obligation of secrecy much more rigorous.”
The Guardian of the Constitution of June 16th called the letter “criminal” and its reading sufficient cause for delivering Roland to the public prosecutor. Among the pamphlets which the publication of the letter called forth was an anonymous one, in which the author told the minister that he was under the greater obligation to keep the secret, as he had promised, because the letter was an attempt to regulate the King’s private conduct and because it insinuated that His Majesty intended to betray the constitution.
The result Madame Roland had foreseen, followed the presentation of the letter to the Assembly. The reading was interrupted frequently by applause, and it was ordered printed and distributed throughout the eighty-three departments.
“Usefulness and glory” were attained. The Rolands were convinced that the letter would enlighten France; that it would serve as the shock necessary to start the movement which would crush the remnants of monarchical authority. Madame Roland retired to the Rue de la Harpe more jubilant than she had entered the Hôtel of the Interior. She had not been proud of their appointment to the ministry; she was of their dismissal.