“As for me, I know how to wait patiently for the return of the reign of justice, or to undergo the last excesses of tyranny in such a way that my example shall not be vain. If I fear anything, it is that you may make imprudent efforts for me. My friend, it is by saving your country that you deliver me. I do not want my safety at its expense, but I shall die satisfied if I know you are working for your country. Death, suffering, sorrow, are nothing to me. I can defy all. Why, I shall live to my last hour without spending a single moment in unworthy agitation.”
She went over life in the Abbaye, and told him what she knew of her family and friends. Of Roland she said:
“The unfortunate Roland has been twenty days in two refuges in the houses of trembling friends, concealed from all eyes, more of a captive than I am myself. I have feared for his mind and his health. He is now in your neighborhood. Would that were true in a moral sense! I dare not tell you, and you alone can understand, that I was not sorry to be arrested.... I owe it to my jailers that I can reconcile duty and love. Do not pity me. People admire my courage, but they do not understand my joys. Thou who must feel them, savest their charm by the constancy of thy courage.”
One would believe it a quotation from a letter of Julie to Saint-Preux. The 3d of July she sent another letter:
“I received your letter of the 27th. I still hear your voice; I am a witness to your resolutions; I share the sentiments which animate you. I am proud of loving you and of being loved by you.... My friend, let us not so forget ourselves as to say evil of that virtue which is bought by great sacrifice, it is true, but which pays in its turn by priceless compensations. Tell me, do you know sweeter moments than those passed in the innocence and the charm of an affection that nature recognizes and that delicacy regulates; which honors duty for the privations that she imposes upon it and gathers strength in enduring them? Do you know a greater advantage than that of being superior to adversity and to death; of finding in the heart something to enjoy and to sweeten life up to the last sigh? Have you ever experienced better these effects than in the attachment which binds us, in spite of the contradictions of society and the horrors of oppression? I have told you that to it I owe my joy in my captivity. Proud of being persecuted in these times when character and honesty are proscribed, I would have supported it with dignity, even without you, but you make it sweet and dear to me. The wretches think to overwhelm me by putting irons upon me—senseless! What does it matter to me if I am here or there? Is not my heart always with me? To confine me in a prison—is it not to deliver me entirely to it? My company, it is my love! My occupation, it is to think of it!... If I must die, very well. I know what is best in life, and its duration would perhaps only force new sacrifices upon me. The most glorified instant of my existence, that in which I felt most deeply that exaltation of soul which rejoices in braving all clangers, was when I entered the Bastille that my jailers had chosen for me. I will not say that I went before them, but it is true that I did not flee them. I had not calculated on their fury reaching me, but I believed that if it did, it would give me an opportunity to serve Roland by my testimony, my constancy, and my firmness. I would be glad to sacrifice my life for him in order to win the right to give you my last sigh.”
She sent for his picture, and writes, July 7th:
“It is on my heart, concealed from all eyes, felt at every moment, and often bathed in my tears. Oh, I am filled with your courage, honored by your affection, and glorying in all that both can inspire in your proud and sensitive soul. I cannot believe that Heaven reserves nothing but trials for sentiments so pure and so worthy of its favor. This sort of confidence makes me endure life and face death calmly. Let us enjoy with gratitude the goods given us. He who knows how to love as we do, carries within himself the principle of the greatest and best actions, the price of the most painful sacrifices, the compensation for all evils. Farewell, my beloved, farewell.”
On July 7th, she wrote Buzot the last letter, so far as we know, that he received from her. In it all the exultation of her ardent passion, all the force of her noble courage, are concentrated.
“My friend, you cannot picture the charm of a prison where one need account only to his own heart for the employment of his moments! No annoying distraction, no painful sacrifice, no tiresome cares; none of those duties so much the more binding on an honest heart because they are respectable; none of those contradictions of law, or of the prejudices of society, with the sweetest inspirations of nature; no jealous look spies on what one feels, or the occupation which one chooses; no one suffers from your inaction or your melancholy; no one expects efforts or demands sentiments which are not in your power; left to yourself and to truth, with no obstacles to overcome, no friction to endure, one can, without harm to the rights and to the affection of another, abandon his soul to its own righteousness, refind his moral independence in an apparent captivity, and exercise it with a completeness that social relations almost always change. I had not looked for this independence.... Circumstances have given me that which I could never have had without a kind of crime. How I love the chains which give me freedom to love you undividedly, to think of you ceaselessly! Here all other occupation is laid aside. I belong only to him who loves me and merits so well to be loved by me.... I do not want to penetrate the designs of Heaven, I will not allow myself to make guilty prayers, but I bless God for having substituted my present chains for those I wore before. And this change appears to me the beginning of favor. If He grants me more, may He leave me here until my deliverance from a world given over to injustice and unhappiness!”
“Do not pity me,” she wrote to Buzot in her letter of June 22. She was not to be pitied. Life and death were kinder to her than to most of those upon whom fall the supreme misfortune of loving where conventionalities and law forbid love to go. It took the struggle from her hand and prevented the disillusion which she must have undergone had she lived. There is no escaping the conclusion that she would have ultimately left Roland for Buzot. Her idealization of all relations, persons, and ideas which stirred her; her imagination from infancy, given full play; her passionate nature, which she knew but poorly, though flattering herself that she was entirely its mistress; her confidence in the superiority of sentiment and in herself,—would have unquestionably pushed her to a union of some sort with Buzot. She was happy to be guillotined when she was, otherwise she must have inevitably suffered the most terrible and humiliating of all the disillusions of a woman,—the loss of faith in herself, in the infallibility of her sentiments, in her incapability to do wrong.