Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

by Ida M. Tarbell

There is a much more natural and simple side to Madame Roland’s five months in prison than this one of exaltation and endurance, which, when viewed apart, sometimes becomes a little fatiguing. If one regards only the heroine, her self-sufficiency is a bit irritating at moments, much as one must admire it. It is the arrangement of her life, her occupations, her amusements, which appeal most to ordinary minds, and which perhaps are a better index to her real force of character than her exalted periods and professions.

When first taken to the Abbaye she was obliged to be alone in her cell, to take a tiny room with dirty walls and a heavily grated window. It opened on a disagreeable street, and below she could hear by night the cries of the sentry; by day, the hawking of Père Duchesne’s journal, and the rudeness of the market people, cries sometimes directed against herself. Nevertheless she decorated the little cell so gayly with flowers and books that her jailers called it Flora’s Pavilion.

At the Abbaye about fifty cents a day were allowed each prisoner for his expenses, although he could spend more if he had it. Madame Roland decided to amuse herself by making an experiment,—to see to what she could reduce her fare. Bread and water was served her for her déjeuner; for dinner (one hundred years ago the French dined at noon) she ate only one kind of meat, with a salad; in the evening, a little vegetable, but no dessert. After a time she got on without wine or beer. “This régime,” she explained, “had a moral end, and as I should have had as much aversion as contempt for a useless economy, I commenced by giving a sum to the poor, in order to have the pleasure, when eating my dry bread in the morning, of thinking that the poor souls would owe it to me that they could add something to their dinners.”

When she went to Sainte Pélagie, she found her life a little different. There the State gave nothing in money for the prisoners, who even paid for their beds. All that was furnished them was a pound and a half of bread and a dish of beans each day. She made arrangements with the concierge of the prison to furnish her meals which were about as simple as at the Abbaye. The prison itself she found most disagreeable. In fact, Sainte Pélagie, which exists to-day, though condemned to destruction, is the most gloomy and forbidding building in Paris. Its mere presence in the quarter where it stands gives a dreary and hopeless air to the street. The inmates of the prison at the period when Madame Roland was confined there were of such a character that she was subjected to the most disgusting annoyances. In the corridor from which her cell opened, their rooms separated from one and another only by thin partitions, were numbers of abandoned and criminal women. So obscene and revolting were they that she rarely left her room, though she could not shut out their noise.

From this pandemonium the concierge succeeded in saving her for a time, giving her a large chamber near her own, where she even had a piano; but the inspectors, once aware of the favor, ordered her back into the noisy corridor. Even there, however, she had her pleasures,—her flowers and her books. The first Bosc supplied her; the second she bought, or begged from her friends. She had Thompson, Shaftesbury, an English dictionary, Tacitus, and Plutarch. She bought pencils and drew a little every day; altogether it was a busy life. Her day was arranged regularly. In the morning she studied English, the essay of Shaftesbury on virtue, and Thompson; after that she drew until noon. Then she had serious work, for, conscious that her imprisonment might end in her death, she resolved at its outset to set down as fully as she should have time to, the facts in the political life of Roland, and to explain her own relations to him. It is from the material that she was able to write in this five months and get to her friends, that most of what we know of her life comes.

The first undertaken was her Historical Notes, written at the Abbaye. These she did, so rapidly, she says, and with such pleasure, that in less than a month she had manuscript for a volume. It was a summary of her public life, and an estimate on the people she had known during it. She had, herself, a very good opinion of the production: “I wrote it with my natural freedom and energy, with frank abandon and with the ease of one who is free from all private considerations, with pleasure in painting what I had felt and seen, and, finally, with the confidence that in any case it would be my moral and political testament. It had the originality which circumstances lent it, and the merit of reflections born from passing events, and the freshness which belongs to such an origin.”

The manuscript was confided to Champagneux, who was still in the Department of the Interior, but he, arrested, confided it to a person who, frightened lest it should fall into the hands of the inspectors, threw it into the fire. “I should have preferred to have been thrown there myself,” said Madame Roland, when she heard of this disaster.

Not all of the Historical Notes were destroyed, however, the account of her own and her husband’s arrest, of her first days at the Abbaye, and a brief sketch of their official life being saved.

It was more than a month after she was imprisoned at Sainte Pélagie before she determined to do over the task. The new undertaking included a series of portraits and anecdotes drawn from her political life, an account of her second arrest, and of the first and second ministries. At the same time that she wrote this, she prepared her private Memoirs,—a detailed history of her life up to 1777,—and notes on the time between her marriage and the Revolution. She intended to add to her Memoirs the story of her relations with Buzot, giving the origin and progress of her passion, but she was never able to finish it.

To this literary budget, already large, she afterwards added several short manuscripts,—a set of “Last Thoughts,” a number of letters, and a comment on the accusation made by the Mountain against the Gironde, that it was guilty of a conspiracy against the unity and the indivisibility of the Republic, and the liberty and safety of the French people.