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.