at the
vintage, eats the rich, ripe clusters of the grape. Her pleasant
household cares, her dairy, the domestic fowls recognizing her voice,
and fed from her own hand; her library and her congenial intellectual
pursuits rise before her, an entrancing vision, and she mourns, like
Eve, the loss of Eden. The days of celebrity and of power engross her
thoughts. Her husband is again minister of the king. The most
influential statesmen and brilliant orators are gathered around her
chair. Her mind is guiding the surging billows of the Revolution, and
influencing the decisions of the proudest thrones of Europe.

The slightest movement dispels the illusion. From dreams she awakes to
reality. She is a prisoner in a gloomy cell of stone and iron, from
which there is no possible extrication. A bloody death awaits her. Her
husband is a fugitive, pursued by human blood-hounds more merciless
than the brute. Her daughter, the object of her most idolatrous love,
is left fatherless and motherless in this cold world. The guillotine
has already consigned many of those whom she loved best to the grave.
But a few more days of sorrow can dimly struggle through her prison
windows ere she must be conducted to the scaffold. Woman's nature
triumphs over philosophic fortitude, and she finds momentary relief in
a flood of tears.

The Girondists were led from their dungeons in the Conciergerie to
their execution on the 31st of October, 1793. Upon that very day
Madame Roland was conveyed from the prison of St. Pelagie to the same
gloomy cells vacated by the death of her friends. She was cast into a
bare and miserable dungeon, in that subterranean receptacle of woe,
where there was not even a bed. Another prisoner, moved with
compassion, drew his own pallet into her cell, that she might not be
compelled to throw herself for repose upon the cold, wet stones. The
chill air of winter had now come, and yet no covering was allowed her.
Through the long night she shivered with the cold.

The prison of the Conciergerie consists of a series of dark and damp
subterranean vaults situated beneath the floor of the Palace of
Justice. Imagination can conceive of nothing more dismal than these
somber caverns, with long and winding galleries opening into cells as
dark as the tomb. You descend by a flight of massive stone steps into
this sepulchral abode, and, passing through double doors, whose iron
strength time has deformed but not weakened, you enter upon the