Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

by Ida M. Tarbell

XII
IN PRISON

It was the morning of the first day of June, 1792, that Madame Roland was taken to the Abbaye. The imprisonment then begun lasted until November 8th, the day of her death. The record we have of her life during these five months is full and intimate.

Separated from her child, her husband in flight, her friends persecuted by the Commune, she herself only just off a sick-bed, confined in a prison which had been from the beginning of the Revolution a centre of riot and the floors of whose halls and courts were still warm with the blood of the massacre of September, the cries of à la Guillotine following her from the street, it would not have been strange if her courage had failed, if she had paled before the fate which she knew in all probability awaited her. But from the beginning to the end of her long durance she showed a proud indifference to the result, an almost reckless audacity in braving her enemies, a splendid courage in suffering. She was serene, haughty, triumphant, a man, not a woman.

She declared that she would not exchange the moments which followed her entrance into the Abbaye for those which others would call the sweetest of her life. Indifferent to her surroundings, she sank into a revery, reviewing her past: there was nothing to make her blush, she felt, even if her heart was the scene of a powerful passion. She calculated the future and with pride and joy felt that she had the courage to accept her lot, to defy its rigors. “What can compare to a good conscience, a strong purpose,” she cries. There is nothing in her situation which is worth an instant of unrest. Her enemies shall not prevent her loving to the last, and if they destroy her she will go from life as one enters upon repose. And this high serenity endured even when, twenty-four days later, she suffered one of the most cruel and unnecessary outrages of the Revolution. On June 24th, she was freed. Hurrying home to the Rue de la Harpe, she flew into the house “like a bird,” calling a gay good-day to her concierge. She had not mounted four steps of her staircase before two men who had entered at her heels called:

“Citoyenne Roland.”

“What do you want?”

“In the name of the law we arrest you.”

That night she slept in the prison of Sainte Pélagie, only a stone’s throw from the convent where as a girl she had prepared for her first communion.

The bitter disappointment of reimprisonment did not bend her spirit. “I am proud,” she wrote, some hours after her rearrest, “to be persecuted at a moment when talent and honor are being proscribed. I am assuredly more tranquil in my chains than my oppressors are in the exercise of their unjust power. I confess that the refinement of cruelty with which they ordered me to be set at liberty in order to rearrest me a moment afterwards, has fired me with indignation. I can no longer see where this tyranny will go.” This indignation was so bitter that the first night in her new prison she could not sleep. It was only the first night, however. To allow herself to be irritated by the injustice of her enemies was to be their dupe. She would not give them that satisfaction, and this intrepidity endured to the end.

There are several reasons for her really phenomenal fortitude. At the bottom of it was no doubt the fact that material considerations had no influence on her when they came into conflict with sentiments and enthusiasms. An ordinary woman would have paled with fear at the sound of women shouting into her carriage à la guillotine; the crowded halls of the Abbaye, the tocsin sounding all night, the brutality of the officers and guards, would have sickened her soul; the narrow and dirty staircases, the bare and foul-smelling rooms, would have revolted her delicacy; the dreadful associations filled her with shame and disgust. But Madame Roland found inspiration in the thought of enduring all this. She would not allow her soul to be moved by filth and noise, and she moved serenely among the lowest outcasts. These things were externals, mere incidents in life. They had no real importance in themselves. She would use them to school her soul to more steadfast endurance,—certainly she would never allow them to interfere with her soul’s life.