THE CONCIERGERIE IN 1793.
Prison where Madame Roland passed the last eight days of her captivity, and from which she went to the
guillotine. Pont au Change in the foreground.
The Memoirs, as well as her daily life, her letters, her attitude towards the authorities, show her courage. But they show, too, the anguish which shook her from time to time. More than once her firm, brilliant narrative is broken suddenly—the sentence unfinished—to record some new outrage against her friends, and as she expresses indignantly her horror and her grief at the usurpers who are ruling France, one can almost hear the sob which shook her, but to which she would not yield. Here and there the gray pages of her beautiful manuscript are spotted by tear stains. Even now, a hundred years and more after it all, one cannot read them and see how, in spite of her iron will, her splendid courage, her heart was sometimes so heavy with woe that her tears would fall, without a choking in the throat and a dimness of the eyes.
One crisis after another indeed followed throughout her imprisonment,—the arrest of the Twenty-two; her own release and rearrest; the pursuit of Buzot; her friends and Roland’s declared suspect, imprisoned, driven from Paris, sometimes even guillotined because of their relations to her; the trial in October of the members of the Gironde; her summons to the trial as a witness, but the failure to call her,—a call which she had awaited, “as a soul in pain awaits its liberator,” she said, so did she desire to have the chance to render one last service to these friends, in whom she believed so strongly, whom she deemed so trusty; her anxiety for Eudora; the execution in October of the Twenty-one; above all, her despair for her country, for France, which permits the dishonor and murder not of “her children, but of the fathers of her liberty.”
The saddest phase of this dark side of her imprisonment was the growing conviction that she and the patriots had been wrong. At last she saw what she did when in 1791 she spurned the Assembly. She acknowledged now that she would have disdained the members of the National Assembly less, if she could have had an idea of their successors. She had learned to regret Mirabeau, whose death then had seemed to her well both for his glory and for the cause of liberty. “The counterpoise of a man of that force was necessary to oppose the crowd of puppets and to preserve us from the domination of the bandits.” She had learned that men may profess, but when their interests and ideals are in opposition it is the former which wins. She had discovered, at last, that to demand speedy and immediate regeneration of society is to break the laws of the universe; that to take away from men what the ages have given them is simply to restore them to the primitive state of teeth and claws, to let loose the passions the centuries have tamed. She saw that in politics, in society, in individual relations, the ideal is the inspiration; the realization, the laborious effort of centuries. She acknowledged that in Plutarch she glided over the storms of the Republic, “forgot the death of Socrates, the exile of Aristides, the condemnation of Phocion.” She was willing at last to say with Sully, “C’est très difficile de faire le bien de son pays”; to confess that “if it is permitted to politics to do good through the wicked, or to profit by their excesses, it is infinitely dangerous to give them the honor of the one, or not to punish them for the other.”
Under the pressure of all these woes she sometimes felt her resolution weaken. What wonder that when she heard, in October, that Buzot and his friends, now escaped to the Gascogne, were being tracked so closely that their arrest was sure, she determined to kill herself? “You know the malady the English call heart-break,” she wrote; “I am attacked hopelessly by it and I have no desire to delay its effects.” It seemed to her now that it was weak to await the blow of her tyrants—their coup de grâce she called it—when she could give it to herself. Why should she allow them to see how bravely she could die—they who were incapable of understanding her courage? Three months ago a noble public death might have served for something. To-day it was pure loss. All this she wrote to Bosc. She consented, however, to accept his decision as to whether she ought or not to take her own life, charging him to weigh the question as if it were impersonal.
This letter to Bosc bears the date of October 25th. On October 31st, the condemned Girondins were beheaded. On November 1st, Madame Roland, who because of Bosc’s arguments had abandoned her resolution to suicide, was conveyed to the Conciergerie, a prison which in those days was but a transfer to the cart which led to the guillotine.
But could she not have been saved? She had friends who would have gladly dared death for her. All Paris knew of her imprisonment—was there no lover of justice to intercede? Her friends had tried to save her. Buzot and Roland both contrived many plans; she repulsed them all. They were too foolhardy to succeed; they might implicate those who would interest themselves in carrying them out, or perhaps ruin guardians who had been kind to her—of these she would hear nothing. Her old friend, Henriette Cannet, then a widow, came from Amiens, succeeded in reaching her in prison, insisted on changing garments with her and on remaining in her place. She would not consent; she would rather “suffer a thousand deaths” than run the risk of causing that of a friend. And then what did release mean? Merely the taking on of her old chains. “Nothing would stop me if I braved dangers only to rejoin you,” she wrote Buzot; “but to expose my friends and to leave the irons with which the wicked honor me, in order to take on others that no one sees—there is no hurry for that.”
Madame Roland, throughout her imprisonment, had hoped for a popular uprising, a revolt against tyranny, coming from Paris or the departments, which would release her and her friends. She never got thoroughly over her illusion that the people, as a mass, were the ones that were to reconstruct France; never realized fully how the people are simply a passive unit, asking only to be let alone, to be allowed to live as they can without interference; that they have no initiative, that when they act it is because they have been aroused by leaders working on them systematically, appealing to their wants, their desires, their reason sometimes, but more often inflaming their passions. She never appreciated, save dimly, the fact that throughout the Revolution, so far, the revolt of the people had been prepared by agitators,—prepared as she and her friends wished to make the 20th of July, did make the 10th of August. The people know she is imprisoned; if they reflect at all, they know that probably it is unjust, but they are cautious. They have seen, ever since the Revolution commenced, that he who tries to prevent outrage is sure to be the first to be punished. They have concluded wisely that the only safe plan is to let the belligerents fight it out, to follow as well as they can their usual occupations, and to say nothing. The mass of the Parisians go on as usual. The Terror has become a part of daily discussion, a part of the city’s spectacles,—that is all. People buy and sell as usual, the theatres do not close, not even the Sunday promenade is omitted. They even take advantage of events to give a livelier interest to their amusements. The theatres, the fairs, the cafés chantants, the maker of songs and engravings, draw their subjects from the quarrels of the Assembly, the persecutions of the Commune, the events of the prisons and of the guillotine. They even use it to advertise their wares: The real estate agents announce, “in the new state of Kentucky, and the ancient state of Virginia, lands in a country free from despotism and anarchy.” The potter improves the chance, and turns out plates and cups and saucers by the thousands, suitable for all the varying tastes and shades of opinion; there is elegant Sèvres with a bonnet rouge for the rich patriot; there is a vive le roi, with a sceptre, for the monarchist; there is a guillotine for the bloodthirsty; there is a coarse and vulgar joke for the ribald. The cloth-maker prints patriotic scenes on his curtain stuff; the handkerchief-maker decorates with transcriptions of the droits des hommes; the hat-maker turns out idealized bonnets rouges suitable for the street or opera; the fan-maker illuminates with king or sans-culottes, according to taste; the very manufacturer of playing-cards takes off the time-honored king and queen and knave, and replaces them with heroes, philosophers, and Revolutionary emblems. Cabinet-maker, jeweller, shoemaker, weaver, all turn the Revolution to account. For whether justice reign or fall, the world must go on, and while the few wrestle with the pains of progress, of achievement, of aspiration, the mass looks on and calculates what effect the struggle will have on the price of bread.
XIII
DEATH ON THE GUILLOTINE
The inmates of the Conciergerie were still shivering under the horror of the death of the twenty-one Girondins when Madame Roland appeared among them. Her coming was an event which awakened the liveliest interest. For eight months she had been the most influential woman in France. She was the recognized inspiration of the party which had wrecked the monarchy and established the Republic, which had been conquered by the force it had called to life. To the majority she was but a name. They all knew that her death was a foregone conclusion. They felt that she, too, knew it, and they watched, many of them with curiosity—for numbers of the inmates were of constitutional and royalist sympathies—for signs of revolt and of weakness. Never, however, had she been calmer, never more serene.