, soliciting an interview. Once I saw him.
After a short conversation, I perceived that he was a spy, and
dismissed him with the contempt he deserved."

The calm dignity of her replies, the ingenuous frankness of her
manners, and the manifest malice and falsehood of Viard's accusation,
made even her enemies ashamed of their unchivalrous prosecution.
Briefly, in tremulous tones of voice, but with a spirit of firmness
which no terrors could daunt, she entered upon her defense. It was the
first time that a female voice had been heard in the midst of the
clamor of these enraged combatants. The Assembly, unused to such a
scene, were fascinated by her attractive eloquence. Viard, convicted
of meanness, and treachery, and falsehood, dared not open his lips.
Madame Roland was acquitted by acclamation. Upon the spot the
president proposed that the marked respect of the Convention be
conferred upon Madame Roland. With enthusiasm the resolution was
carried. As she retired from the hall, her bosom glowing with the
excitement of the perfect triumph she had won, her ear was greeted
with the enthusiastic applause of the whole assembly. The eyes of all
France had been attracted to her as she thus defended herself and her
friends, and confounded her enemies. Marat gnashed his teeth with
rage. Danton was gloomy and silent. Robespierre, vanquished by charms
which had so often before enthralled him, expressed his contempt for
the conspiracy, and, for the last time, smiled upon his early friend,
whom he soon, with the most stoical indifference, dragged to the
scaffold.

The evening after the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment
of the Republic, when there was still some faint hope that there might
yet be found intelligence and virtue in the people to sustain the
Constitution, the Girondists met at Madame Roland's, and celebrated,
with trembling exultation, the birth of popular liberty. The
Constitution of the United States was the _beau ideal_ of the
Girondists, and, vainly dreaming that the institutions which
Washington and his compatriots had established in Christian America
were now firmly planted in infidel France, they endeavored to cast the
veil of oblivion over the past, and to spread over the future the
illusions of hope. The men here assembled were the most illustrious of
the nation. Noble sentiments passed from mind to mind. Madame Roland,
pale with emotion, conscious of the perils which were so portentously
rising a