From the very first, Madame Roland had distrusted Danton. It was not long before her intuitions proved correct, for Danton soon showed his jealousy and dislike of the minister, whom he found too honest to tamper with. He feared, too, the penetration, frankness, and genius of Roland's wife. Men who saw the insidious, selfish qualities of Danton, began to cultivate and conciliate him out of fear of his enmity.
Robespierre, whom Madame Roland had at first believed in as an honest friend to liberty, became an ally of Danton and Marat, and Roland soon realized that it was not the monarchists he had to contend against, but the new party headed by these dissenting Girondists, who were savage with a thirst for human blood.
The Rolands were accused of trying to establish an aristocracy of talent on the ruins of a monarchical aristocracy; their semi-weekly dinners were represented as sumptuous feasts where, like a new Circe, Madame Roland strove to corrupt the unfortunates who partook of her banquets.
She was called before the Convention December 7th, to listen to the charges against her; her eloquence won the admiration of even her enemies. But her safety was in danger, and she was obliged to sleep with a pistol under her pillow for fear of the outrages of desperadoes who lurked about her house.
The strife between the two parties grew more bitter, and the downfall of Roland had been determined upon by his savage opponents, once his fawning friends and colleagues. An attempt was made to arrest Roland by six armed men, deputies of the Insurrectionists. He replied that he did not recognize their authority, and refused to follow them. Madame Roland at once set off for the Tuileries, where the Insurrectionists, more cruel and blood-thirsty than the deposed Monarchists, were in session. At the door the sentinels forbade her to enter. Obliged to return home without having been enabled to address the Convention, as she hoped to do, she found that her husband had taken refuge in the house of a friend.
She sought him out, embraced him, and returned once more to the Tuileries in another vain hope of arousing their former friends to resolute action. But she was obliged to return to her apartment in the evening, without having accomplished anything. Late that night she was torn from her child and her home, and cast into the Prison of the Abbaye, from which she was set at liberty a month later, and wild with happiness, allowed to reach her own door; but as she attempted to enter she was again seized and conveyed to the Prison of Sainte Pélagie. The respite had only been given in malice to render her second incarceration more bitter.
Under the same roof were murderers and women of the town; and in the morning, when the cell-doors were opened, the scum of the earth, as one authority tells us, collected in the corridor. On each side of this corridor (the only place where the prisoners could take exercise) were small cells, and one of these, separated only by thin walls from the most depraved beings, whose vile language was constantly audible to her ears, this refined and elegant woman was forced to occupy. She suffered acutely from this proximity to depravity and vulgarity at first; but ere long she transformed the vicinity in which her cell was situated "from an inferno to an oasis of peace." When she walked in the corridor, where at first she was pointed at, abused and reviled, she was now surrounded by wretched beings who clung to her skirts and regarded her as a divinity. Her sweet voice soothed brawls, her words of courage inspired the most hopeless. Everybody loved her, everybody desired her acquittal.
Meantime she was writing her famous "Memoirs," and the touching letters to her husband, her child, and to Buzot. After an imprisonment of more than six months, she was finally called before the judge and the prosecution, and accused of being the wife of Roland, the conspirator, the friend of his accomplices. Twenty-one Girondists had already been executed, and she could not hope to escape. She was condemned to death as guilty of traitorous relations with conspirators. She heard the sentence proudly, and replied, "You consider me worthy to share the fate of the great men whom you have assassinated. I shall try to carry to the scaffold the courage they have shown."
Robespierre signed her death-warrant. He had been her friend, guest, and correspondent. She had helped him when he was unknown, defended him when he was in need of a defender. But he sent her to the scaffold; and on November 9, 1793, the tumbril came to convey her to the guillotine. It had taken many others on that same day; and now her only companion on that fatal ride was a trembling old man named La Marche. He wept bitterly, but Madame Roland cheered him with words of courage and strength.
When they arrived at the Place de la Concorde, she begged the executioner to permit the "etiquette of the scaffold" to be waived, and to allow La Marche to die first, that the sight of her death might not accentuate his fear and misery. So to the last moment of her life she was true to her religion of thoughtfulness for others.