Upon Roland the effect of the atrocities of September, and the consciousness of his own powerlessness, was terrible. His health was undermined; he could not eat; his skin became yellow; he did not sleep; his step was feeble, but his activity was feverish; he worked night and day. Having a chance to become a member of the new legislative body, the Convention to meet September 21st, he sent in his resignation as Minister of the Interior. The resignation raised a cry from the Gironde, and hosts of anxious patriots urged him to remain.

In the session of September 29th, the question came up in the Convention of inviting Roland, and those of his colleagues who had resigned with him, to remain in office. His enemies did not lose the opportunity to attack him. Danton even went so far as to say: “If you invite him, invite Madame Roland too; everybody knows that he has not been alone in his department.”

This discussion, and the discovery that his election as deputy would be illegal, persuaded Roland to withdraw his resignation. He announced his decision in an address which was an unmistakable arraignment of the Commune and the Mountain, an announcement that the Minister of the Interior, in remaining in office, remained as their enemy. He abandoned in this same address an important point of his old policy. Formerly it had been to Paris that he had appealed. She alone had the energy, the fire, the daring to act. The rest of the country was apathetic, passionless; but now he says Paris has done all that is necessary. She must retire, “must be reduced to her eighty-third portion of influence; a more extensive influence would excite fears, and nothing would be more harmful to Paris than the discontent or suspicion of the departments—no representations, however numerous, should acquire an ascendency over the Convention.”

At that particular moment no policy could have been more antagonistic to the Parisian populace. They were “saving the country.” None but a traitor would oppose their efforts. Roland not only declared that they must cease their work; he called for an armed force drawn from all the departments and stationed about Paris to prevent the city from interfering with the free action of the Convention. The suspicion which before the 10th of August he had applied to the constitutional party he now turned upon the party which had produced that day; the measure he had proposed to prevent the treason of the Court, he now proposed as a guard against the excesses of the patriots.

He ran a Bureau of Public Opinion, which scattered thousands of documents filled with the eloquent and vague teachings of the Gironde schools. He urged the pastors to stop singing the Domine Salvum fac Regnum, and to translate their services into French; he discoursed upon how and when the word citizen should be used, advised a national costume, suggested that scenes from the classics be regularly reproduced in public to stir to patriotism, that fÊtes celebrating every possible anniversary be instituted; but chiefly he defended himself against the charges of his antagonists, extolling his own impeccability and the exactness of his accounts. No sadder reading ever was printed than the campaign of words Roland carried on during the four months he struggled against the Mountain. Fearless, sincere, honest, disinterested as he was, he was still so pitifully inadequate to the situation, so ridiculously subjective in his methods, that irritation at his impotence is forgotten in the compassion it awakens.

While Roland carried on his Bureau of Public Opinion and defended his character, Buzot, in the Convention, fought the Mountain more openly and more bitterly. He had no excuse whatever for the excesses of September; no veil to draw over the first twenty-four hours, no patience, no thought of compromise with Robespierre and Danton, the leaders of the Commune. To his mind they were murderers pure and simple, and the country was not worth saving, if it could not be saved without them. In Roland’s case there is always the feeling that if the Commune had regarded him as necessary, obeyed his directions, let him run his Public Opinion Office to suit himself, and ceased maligning his character, he would have condoned their massacre as one of the unhappy but necessary means of insuring the Revolution; that if these “misled brothers,” as he called them, had recognized their mistake, he would have opened his arms to them. Never so with Buzot. Sensitive, idealistic, indifferent to public applause, from the first he took a violent and pronounced position against the Mountain, and refused to compromise with them. It was not hatred alone of the excesses. It was sympathy with Madame Roland, who had revolted against the Revolution. From the day at Evreux, when he received a letter from her, telling of her disgust and disillusion, and setting up a new cause,—the purification of the country of agitators and rioters,—Buzot’s ideas on the policy of Terror changed. When he came up to the Convention he immediately made a violent attack on Robespierre, declared that the Mountain was the most dangerous foe of the country, that Paris was usurping the power of France, and he never ceased his war.

The measure which Madame Roland had suggested a few months before to protect Paris, the patriots, and the Assembly against the aristocrats, he now proposed to thwart the activity of Paris and the Commune,—a guard drawn from all the departments for the defence of the Convention. Naturally, this drew upon him the hatred of the sections and leaders, and he was accounted in the Convention, from the 1st of October, the avowed opponent of the Terrorists.

Nothing intimidated him. He followed up the proposition for a guard by a demand for a decree against those who provoked to murder and assassination. Systematically he refused to believe in the sincerity of Robespierre and Danton,—they were usurpers aiming at dictatorship. When in March they sought to organize a revolutionary tribunal, Buzot, furious and trembling, declared to the Convention that he was weary of despotism. He signalled the abuses that were made all over France by the revolutionary bodies, and violently attacked members of the Jacobin society and of the Mountain, denouncing them as infamous wretches, as assassins of the country. It was not only murder of which he accused them,—it was corruption. “Sudden and scandalous fortunes” were noted among the Terrorists in the Convention,—and he demanded that each deputy give the condition and origin of his fortune.

In all these measures Buzot was in harmony with Roland, and he fought the minister’s cause in the Convention so far as possible. Indeed, it came to be a sort of personal resentment he showed when Roland was attacked in the body, and once he went so far that they cried out to him, “It is not you we are talking about.” It was a lover’s jealousy against anything which harmed his lady.

But while attacking the Terrorists Buzot was obliged to prove his patriotism, to show that he was a republican, and a hater of the monarchy. He did it by radical measures. While insisting on an armed force to protect the Convention, he demanded the perpetual banishment of the ÉmigrÉs, and their death if they set foot in France. A few weeks later he demanded that whosoever should propose the re-establishment of royalty in France, under whatsoever denomination, should be punished by death; afterwards he asked the banishment of all the Bourbons, not excepting Philippe of Orleans, then sitting in the Convention.

When it came to the question of the death of Louis XVI., Buzot wished that the King be heard and not condemned immediately; when he came to vote, it was for his death with delay and a referendum that he decided.

But no amount of violence against the royalists could now prove him a patriot. That which made a patriot in the fall of 1792 was an altogether different thing from what made one in the spring of 1792. Buzot, with the Gironde, was suspected. It was not enough that he opposed the old rÉgime and approved a Republic, he must approve the vengeance of Terrorism and support the Terrorists. But he could not do it. He was revolted by the awful excess, and he underwent a physical repulsion which was almost feminine and made any union with the party impossible, whatever the demands of politics were.

As a matter of fact, the Mountain feared Buzot but little. His irritability, haughtiness, lack of humor, made him of small importance as a leader in the Gironde. He could not move the Convention as Vergniaud; he had none of the wire-pulling skill of Brissot; he was important chiefly as the spokesman of Madame Roland’s measures. Buzot’s intimate relations to the Rolands seem to have been well understood. The contemptuous way in which Marat treated him shows this. Marat called him frÈre tranquille Buzot; and sneered at him for “declaiming in a ridiculous tone”; said the frÈre tranquille had a pathos glacial; called him le pÉdant Buzot; the corypheus of the Rolands.

In this chaotic and desperate struggle neither Roland nor Buzot were more active than Madame Roland. She had become a public factor by Marat’s accusations, and by Danton’s sneers in the Convention. She kept her place. At home she was as active as ever in assisting her husband. Many of the official papers of this period, which have been preserved, are in her hand, or have been annotated by her. Important circulars and reports she frequently prepared, and Roland trusted her implicitly in such work. She was his adviser and helper in every particular of the official work, and at the same time saw many people who were essential to them. This social activity brought down Marat’s abuse. She was “Penelope Roland” for him, and in one number of the journal under the head “Le Trantran de la Penelope Roland,” he wrote: “The woman Roland has a very simple means of recruiting. Does a deputy need her husband for affairs of the department, Roland pretends a multiplicity of engagements and begs to put him off until after the Assembly,—‘Come and take supper with us, citizen and deputy, we will talk of your business afterwards.’ The woman Roland cajoles the guests one after the other, even en portant la main sous le menton de ses favoris, redoubles attention for the new-comer, who soon joins the clique.”

Marat professes to have this from a deputy who had visited her. It is abusive and false, but it is well to remember that a year before Madame Roland had not hesitated to believe and repeat equally ridiculous stories of Marie Antoinette. Indeed, Madame Roland had the same place in the minds of the patriots of the fall of 1792, that the Queen had a year before in the minds of the Gironde. “We have destroyed royalty,” says PÈre Duchesne, “and in its place we have raised a tyranny still more odious. The tender other half of the virtuous Roland has France in leading-strings to-day, as once the Pompadours and the Du Barrys. She receives every evening at the hour of the bats in the same place where Antoinette plotted a new Saint Bartholomew with the Austrian committee. Like the former Queen, Madame Coco (the name PÈre Duchesne usually gives Madame Roland), stretched on a sofa, surrounded by her wits, reasons blindly on war, politics, supplies. It is in this gambling-den that all the announcements posted up are manufactured.”

In December she was even obliged to appear before the Convention. Roland had been accused of being in correspondence with certain eminent ÉmigrÉs then in England, and to be plotting with them the re-establishment of the King. One Viard was said to be the go-between, and to have had a meeting with Madame Roland. Roland was summoned to answer the charge and, having responded, demanded that his wife be heard. Her appearance made a sensation in the Convention, and she cleared herself so well of the charges that she was loudly applauded, and was accorded the honors of the session. The spectators alone were silent and Marat remarked, “See how still the people are; they are wiser than we.”

At the beginning of the year 1793, the danger of mob violence was added to the incessant slanders by HÉbert and Marat. “Every day,” says Champagneux, who was then employed by the minister, “a new danger appeared. It seemed as if each night would be the last of her life, as if an army of assassins would profit by the darkness to come and murder her as well as her husband. The most sinister threats came from all sides. She was urged not to sleep at the HÔtel of the Interior.”

At first the alarm was so great on her account that she yielded to her friends’ wishes, but she hated the idea of flight. One evening the danger was such that every one insisted on her disguising herself and leaving the hotel. She consented, but the wig they brought did not fit, and in a burst of impatience she flung the costume, wig and all, into the corner and declared she was ashamed of herself; that if any one wanted to assassinate her, he might do it there; that she ought to give an example of firmness and she would. And from that day she never left the hotel until Roland resigned on January 22d.

The little apartment in the Rue de la Harpe was waiting them. To leave the HÔtel of the Interior was no trial to them privately. No one could have been more indifferent to considerations of position and surroundings. Their convictions of their own right-doing made them superior to all influences which affect worldly and selfish natures. It is impossible for such people as the Rolands to “come down” in life. Material considerations are so external, so mere an incident, that they can go from palace to hut without giving the matter a second thought. But retirement did not mean relief. Roland’s reports which he had made to the Convention, and which he felt justly were a complete answer to the charges against him, were unnoticed. He begged the body repeatedly to examine them. He urged his ill-health and his desire to leave Paris as a reason, but no notice was taken of him. To Roland this neglect seemed insolence. He felt that he deserved honorable recognition. He craved it, and was irritated and discouraged when he did not receive it.

It was evident, too, that his retirement from office had not made his enemies forget him. They followed him as they had priests, ÉmigrÉs, and nobles, and Marat repeatedly denounced him as connected with the opposition to the Mountain.

It was horrible for them to watch day after day the struggle going on in the Convention between Gironde and Mountain. Day by day the condition of the former grew more desperate, their defeat and the triumph of the policy of vengeance more certain. The most tragic part of the gradual downfall of the Gironde was not defeat, however. It was disillusion—the slow-growing and unconfessed suspicion that their dream had been an error. It was Buzot who felt this most deeply. In his Memoirs he confesses that gradually he grew convinced that France was not fitted for the Republic they had dared to give it, and that often he had been at the point of owning his mistake:

“My friends and I kept our hope of a Republic in France for a long time,” he writes; “even when everything seemed to show us that the enlightened class, either through prejudice or guided by experience and reason, refused this form of government. My friends did not give up this hope even at the period when those who governed the Republic were the most vicious and the vilest of men, and when the French people could be least counted on.... For myself, I avow that I despaired several times of the success of this project so dear to my heart. Before my expulsion from the Convention, not wishing to betray my conscience or my principles, I was on the point, several times, of retiring from a position where all the dangers, even that of dishonoring my memory, left me no hope of doing good; where even our obstinate and useless resistance did nothing but increase the error of good citizens on the true situation of the National Convention. A kind of self-love which was honored by the name of duty kept me at my post in spite of myself. My friends desired it and I stayed.... It is useless to deny it—the majority of the French people sighed after royalty and the constitution of 1790. There were only a few men with noble and elevated souls who felt worthy of having been born republicans, and whom the example of America had encouraged to follow the project of a similar institution in France, who thought in good faith to naturalize it in the country of frivolities and inconstancy. The rest—with the exception of a crowd of wretches without intelligence, without education, and without resources, who vomited injuries on the monarchy as in six months they will on the Republic, without knowing any reason why—the rest did not desire it, wanted only the constitution of 1791, and talked of the true republicans as one talks of extremely sincere fools. Have the events of the 20th of June, the suffering, the persecution, the assassinations which have followed them, changed the opinion of the majority in France? No; but in the cities they pretend to be sans-culottes; those that do not are guillotined. In the country the most unjust requisitions are obeyed, because those who do not obey them are guillotined; on all sides the young go to war, because those who do not go are guillotined. The guillotine explains everything. It is the great weapon of the French government. This people is republican because of the guillotine. Examine closely, go into families, search the hearts if they dare open to you; you will read there hate against the government that fear imposes upon them. You will see there that all desires, all hopes, turn towards the constitution of 1791.”

That Buzot should have remained until the end with the Gironde, when convinced, as he here says, that their efforts for a Republic were contrary to the will of the country, and when, too, he was revolted against the excesses its establishment was causing, he explained fully, when he wrote: “My error was too beautiful to be repented of;” and again, when he says: “Our dream was too beautiful to be abandoned.”

The terrible whirlpool had dragged away hopes, ambitions, dreams, from them. Into it went, too, some of their most valued friends; men whom they had raised to positions of importance, but who now that they saw the party defeated abandoned them through fear and disillusion. At the same time that they were experiencing all the force of their disillusion, the relation between Roland and his wife was becoming terribly tense and painful. They felt that they must bring it to an end in some way, must get away from Buzot, and they resolved to go to the country. In May Roland wrote, for the eighth time, to the Convention, begging that the report on his administration be examined. His letter was not even read to the body. It became more and more probable that threats which had followed them a long time would take effect soon, and Roland be arrested. Madame Roland decided that she ought not to remain in Paris with her daughter any longer, as Roland could escape more easily if they were at Le Clos. Her health, too, sadly altered by the storm of emotions which she had passed through, demanded a change.

The passports permitting them to leave Paris had been delayed some days, and just as she received them she fell ill. She was not herself again when the 31st of May came. This day was for the Gironde what the 10th of August had been for the King.

During the latter half of May the Convention had been the scene of one of the maddest, awfulest struggles in the history of legislative bodies, and the victory had throughout leaned towards the Terrorists. They were decided, and audacious. The indecision, the platitudes, the disgust, of the Gironde weakened the party constantly. The struggle was ended by the riot of May 31st. Before the contest was over the Convention had voted the expulsion and trial of twenty-two members of the Gironde. Again the stick was out of the wheel, and the Republic was to roll.

Roland was not in the number that the Mountain could strike through the Convention. It had a much more direct and simple, a more legal, method of reaching him. Its Revolutionary committee had already been in operation some time. Its work was arresting those who stood in the way of the Republic. That Roland did, Marat had proved time and again, and now that the time had come to rid the country of the Gironde in toto, it would never do to let him escape.

It was on the afternoon of May 31st that the arrest of Roland was made at their apartment in the Rue de la Harpe. Arrests at this period were so arbitrary a matter, the sympathy or resentment of the officers and spectators had so much to do with their execution or non-execution, that it is not surprising that Roland by his own protestations and arguments, and by the aid of the good people of the house who were friendly to him, was able to induce the officer in charge to leave his colleagues and go after further orders.

Madame Roland took advantage of the delay to attempt a coup d’État, go to the Convention, secure a hearing, present Roland’s case, and trust to her beauty, her wit, and her eloquence to obtain his release. In her morning gown, for she was only just off her sick-bed, she sprung into a cab and drove to the Carrousel. The front court was filled with armed men; every entrance was guarded. With the greatest difficulty she reached the waiting-room and attempted to get a hearing from the president. A terrible uproar came from the Assembly, and after a long wait she learned what it meant,—the demand for the arrest of the twenty-two was being made.

She sent for Vergniaud and explained the situation. She could hope for nothing in the condition of affairs in the Assembly,—he told her the Convention was able to do nothing more. “It can do everything,” she cried; “the majority of Paris only asks to know what ought to be done. If I am admitted, I shall dare say what you could not without being accused. I fear nothing in the world, and if I do not save Roland, I shall say what will be useful to the Republic.” But what use to insist in this chaos? Not Vergniaud, not Buzot, not the Gironde as a body, had the power at this final moment to secure a hearing. She was forced to give it up and retire; not so easy a matter through the suspicious battalions guarding the approaches to the chÂteau. She was even obliged to leave her cab at last and go home on foot.

Back in the apartment she found that Roland had escaped. She went from house to house until she found him. They talked over the situation, he concluded to fly, she decided to go again to the Convention, and they parted.

In spite of weakness and fatigue Madame Roland made, that night, another attempt to reach the Convention. But when she reached the palace the session was closed. After infinite difficulty from the citizens who guarded the Tuileries she reached her home again. She had seated herself to write a note to Roland when, about midnight, a deputation from the Commune presented itself, asking for Roland. She refused to answer their questions, and they retired, leaving a sentinel at the door of the apartment and at that of the house. She finished her letter and went to bed. In an hour she was awakened. Her frightened servant told her that delegates from the section wanted to see her. With perfect calm she dressed herself for the street and passed into the room where the commissioners waited.

“We come, Citoyenne, to arrest you and put on the seals.”

“Where are your orders?”

“Here,” says a man drawing an order of arrest from the Revolutionary committee of the Commune. No reason of arrest is assigned in the document, which still exists, and the order given is to place her in the Abbaye to be questioned the next day. She hesitated. Should she resist? But what was the use? She was in their eyes mise hors de la loi and she submitted, not sorry at heart perhaps, to be put into a position where she could resist publicly the tyranny of her enemies. Reinforced by officers from the section, and by fifty to a hundred good sans-culottes come to see that the officers do their duty according to their sovereign will, the commissioners placed seals on boxes and doors, windows and wardrobes. One zealous patriot wanted to put one on the piano. They told him it was a musical instrument. Thereupon he contented himself with pulling out a yardstick and taking its dimensions.

In this ignorant, vulgar, and violent crowd she came and went serenely, preparing for her imprisonment. She even noted with amusement their curiosity and stupidity. It was morning when she left her weeping household. “These people love you,” said one of the commissioners, as they went downstairs. “I never have any one about me who does not,” she replied proudly.

Two rows of armed men extended from the doorway across the Rue de la Harpe to the carriage, waiting on the other side of the street. She looked about as she came out, at all this display of force, at the crowd of curious Parisian badauds who watched the scene, and with conscious dignity she advanced “slowly considering the cowardly and mistaken troop.” It is a short five minutes’ walk from where Madame Roland lived to the prison of the Abbaye and she soon was within the walls.

Two days later, June 2d, the arrest of Buzot was decreed by the Convention. He was seized but escaped from his guards, and fled from Paris to Evreux, where he was well received by the department which believed that the Convention had been forced into its decree against the twenty-two. Roland in the meantime had reached Amiens. The three were never to see one another again. The cause which brought them together had separated them forever.