She had soon a more serious task than administering gratuitous rebukes and repeating high-sounding maxims. It was in defending herself against calumnies and accusations. She did it with spirit and clear-headedness, as was to be expected, and frequently in a tone of contemptuous asperity and superiority that could not fail to be exasperating.
It was on June 12th that she was questioned. She was asked if she knew anything about the troubles of the Republic during and after Roland’s ministry, or of the plan to make a Federal Republic; who were the persons who came to her salon; if she knew any traitors, or was allied with friends of Dumouriez; what she knew of Roland’s Public Opinion Bureau and his plan for corrupting the provinces; and lastly where was Roland. The committee got very little satisfaction out of their victim. They accused her of sharpness and evasion, and probably the accusation was just. The interview indicated to Madame Roland the complaint of the Commune against her, and showed her more clearly than before that there was no definite reason for her arrest. She was a suspect; that explained all.
To vague accusations was added direct calumny. Père Duchesne had not forgotten la reine Roland, and one morning she heard cried under her cell window: Visit of Père Duchesne to the citoyenne Roland in the prison of the Abbaye. The details of the pretended visit were cried so that she could hear them and at the same time the people collected in the market of Saint Germain, held by the side of the prison, were exhorted to avenge the wrongs Madame Coco had done them. The article was in Hébert’s most offensive and ribald style and told how its author, visiting the prison, was taken by Madame Roland for a brigand from La Vendée; how she rejoiced with him over the losses of the Republic; told him that aid was coming from Coblentz and England, and assured him that the contra-revolution had been brought about through Roland.
At first, hot with indignation at these calumnies, she tried to defend herself, but she soon saw that to besiege the Revolutionary authorities any longer was not only useless, but humiliating. It was better suited to her proud courage to ignore them, and she found in her silence and disdain a source of inspiration and strength.
While natural courage, long schooling in self-denial, submission to necessity, superiority to material considerations, intense patriotism, a desire to vindicate herself to posterity, explain her remarkable fortitude in her imprisonment, they do not her triumph. The exaltation she found in her prison was that of love, a love which duty had thus far forbidden her even to think of, but which now she felt she dared yield to. Her jailers had become her liberators.
In the documents which Madame Roland addressed from her prison to “posterity” there are frequent allusions to her passion for one whose name she concealed. In the collection of letters she left for friends, under the head of “Last Thoughts,” is a passionate and exultant farewell addressed to one whom “I dare not name, to one whom the most terrible of passions has not kept from respecting the barriers of virtue.” She bids him not to mourn that she precedes him to a place where “fatal prejudices, arbitrary conventions, hateful passions, and all kinds of tyranny are ended, where one day they can love each other without crime, and where nothing will prevent their being united.”
That Buzot was meant, remained a secret of the family for seventy years after Madame Roland’s death. Her biographers frequently speculated as to whom the object of her passion was. Lairtullier, writing in 1840, quotes her portrait of Barbaroux and apostrophizes her thus: “Femme, voilá ton secret trahi.” Servan and Vergniaud have been named as possibly her hero. The truth came out in 1864, when a bouquiniste of the Quai Voltaire advertised for sale a quantity of French Revolution papers among which were mentioned five letters of Madame Roland to Buzot. He had bought them from a young man whose father was an amateur of bouquins. Evidently they had been wandering among lovers of old papers since the day they had been taken from the dead body of Buzot. Those letters offered for sale were bought by the Bibliothèque Nationale.
They paint, as no published letters, the exultation of love, its power to lift the soul above all ordinary influences, free it from accepted laws and conventionalities, to strengthen it until it glories in suffering, if by that suffering it can yield itself to love. They show, too, how noble and pure a conception of such a passion Madame Roland had. It must not interfere with duty. Neither Roland must be betrayed, nor the country neglected; if either happened, the crown of their passion would be broken. Its glory and joy was not in abandon, but in endurance.
It was three weeks after she was confined in the Abbaye before she heard from Buzot. Her first letter to him bears the date of June 22d. Buzot was at that time at Evreux, exhorting the people to take part in a movement of federalism to arouse the departments to act against the usurpation of Paris. She wrote in response to the first letters from him which her friends had been able to get to her.
“How often have I re-read them! I press them to my heart; I cover them with kisses; I had ceased to hope for them!... I came here proud and calm, praying and still hoping in the defenders of Liberty. When I learned of the decree against the Twenty-two, I cried, ‘My country is lost!’ I was in the most cruel anguish until I was sure of your escape. It was renewed by the decree against you; they owed that atrocity to your courage. But when I found that you were at Calvados, I recovered my calm. Continue your generous efforts, my friend. Brutus on the fields of Philippi despaired too soon of the safety of Rome. So long as a republican breathes and is free, let him act. He must, he can, be useful. In any case, the South offers you a refuge; it will be an asylum for the country. If dangers gather around you, it is there that you must turn your eyes and your steps; it is there that you must live, for there you can serve your fellow-men and practise virtue.