e, she was imprisoned in the
Conciergerie. This prison was the abiding place of assassins, thieves,
and all impurity. It was the anteroom to the scaffold, for incarceration
there was an infallible symptom of death. The inmates were crowded into
rooms with merciless disregard of their relative characters or
antecedents. Madame Roland was first associated with the duchess of
Grammont, with a female pick-pocket, with a nun, with an insane woman,
and with a street-walker. She finally procured a cell to herself, which
she made bloom with flowers. The prison was populous with the most
degraded of her sex. Yet she asserted here the same marvelous ascendancy
which she had always possessed over her associates. The obscene outcries
of lost women died away when she approached. Her cell was an ark of
safety for any dove seeking refuge from that deluge of human sin. When
she went into the courtyard the lost of her own sex gathered around her
with reverence, as around a tutelary and interceding angel, the same
women who inflicted upon Madame Du Barry, that princess of their caste,
every torment which the malice of their sex could inspire. Inmates and
visitors crowded to the door of her cell, and she spoke to them through
its iron bars with eloquence, which increased as inspiring death drew
near, of liberty, country, equality, and of better days for France, but
when they went away she would look through her window to the sky, and,
thinking of her hunted husband and sequestered little daughter, cry and
moan like the simplest wife and mother. Then she would send by
surreptitious conveyance, letters to refugee statesmen, which discussed
the political situation as calmly as if written upon the work-table of a
secure and peaceful home. Calumny now busied itself to defile her.
Hebert, vilest of editors, flung the ordure of Pere Duchesne, vilest of
newspapers, upon this spotless woman, soon to be a saint, and sent the
newsmen to cry the disgusting charges under her prison windows, so that
she heard them rendered in all the villainies of a language whose
under-drains have sources of vileness filthier than any other speech of
man. She did not fear death, but she did fear calumny. She had never
delighted in any public display of her enormous intellectual powers, and
she had never made any such display. She had fixed the sentiment of
Lyons by an anonymous newspaper article, of which sixty thousand copies
had been bought in one day. She had written