When she came out from the tribunal the cart awaited her in the prison court.
Standing on the Pont au Change and looking down the Seine, is one of those fascinating river views of Paris where a wealth of associations disputes with endless charm the attention of the loiterer. The left of the view is filled by the Norman Towers of the Conciergerie, the façades of the prison, the irregular fronts of the houses facing on the Quai de l’Horloge, and ends in an old house of Henry IV.’s time. It is the house where Manon Phlipon passed her girlhood. When the cart drove across the Pont au Change, Madame Roland had before her the window from which, as a girl, she had leaned at sunset, and “with a heart filled with inexpressible joy, happy to exist, had offered to the Supreme Being a pure and worthy homage.”
She faces death now as she faced life then. The girl and the woman, in spite of the drama between, are unchanged: the same ideals, the same courage, the same faith. Not even this tragic last encounter with the home of her youth moves her calm; for she passed the Pont Neuf, writes one who saw her, “upright and calm,—her eyes shining, her color fresh and brilliant,—a smile on her lips, trying to cheer her companion, a man overwhelmed by the terror of approaching death.”
It was a long and weary jolt in the rough cart from the Pont Neuf, where M. Tissot saw her passing, “erect and calm,” by the Rue Saint Honoré to the Place de la Concorde, then Place de la Guillotine. The hideous, howling crowd followed and cursed her. But nothing earthly could reach the heights whither she had risen. At the foot of the guillotine, so tradition goes, she asked for a pen to write the thoughts which had arisen in this awful journey to death, but it was refused. Sanson, the headsman, in a hurry, pressed her to mount the short ladder which led to the platform; for there was a grim guillotine etiquette which gave her the right to die first, but she asked him to give her place to her cringing companion and spare him the misery of seeing her die. Sanson demurred. It was against his orders. “Can you refuse a lady her last request?” she said, smiling, and he, a little shamefaced, consented.
Then her turn came. As they fastened her to the fatal plank, her eyes fell on a colossal statue of liberty erected to celebrate the first anniversary of the 10th of August. “O liberté,” she cried, “comme on t’a jouée.” Then the axe dropped, the beautiful head fell; Madame Roland was dead.
XIV
THOSE LEFT BEHIND
Madame Roland was dead, but she had left behind the three beings dearest and closest to her,—her husband, her child, and her lover.
Roland fled from Paris, as we have seen, on the night of May 31st. He succeeded in reaching Amiens, where he had lived many years and where he had many friends; but though more than one home was opened to him the surveillance of the Mountain was such that he thought it wise to leave the town. From Amiens he went westward to Rouen, where he easily found shelter. He was here on June 22d, when Madame Roland wrote her first letter to Buzot. The life he led there was miserable in the extreme. He constantly feared to be arrested; he felt that he was jeopardizing the lives of his hosts by his presence; he fretted under the contempt and false accusations which the Mountain continued to rain upon him; and, above all, he was tortured by his inability to do anything to insure the future of his child or to effect the release of his wife.
This anxiety had not grown less with time. The events of the summer and the fall of 1793 only increased day by day his misery and apprehension. The news of the death of the twenty-one Girondins in October seemed to turn to bitterness the last drop of his hope. A heavier blow awaited him. That happened which must have seemed to his simple soul the impossible,—his wife was guillotined. When the fatal word reached him, she had been dead for several days. As the news was given him he fell, stricken with a blessed unconsciousness. When he recovered himself, his distress was so great that he resolved to put an end to his days. In vain did the friends who had sheltered and cared for him all these months urge him to give up his resolution. He would not listen to them, but with perfect serenity laid before them two plans which he felt he might follow. The first savored strongly of Madame Roland’s influence: it was to go incognito to Paris, appear in the Convention, make an unexpected speech in which he should tell them the truths he felt they ought to hear, and then ask them to kill him on the guillotine where his wife had lost her life. The second was to kill himself.
