Madame Roland was dead, but she had left behind the three beings dearest and closest to her,—her husband, her child, and her lover.

Roland fled from Paris, as we have seen, on the night of May 31st. He succeeded in reaching Amiens, where he had lived many years and where he had many friends; but though more than one home was opened to him the surveillance of the Mountain was such that he thought it wise to leave the town. From Amiens he went westward to Rouen, where he easily found shelter. He was here on June 22d, when Madame Roland wrote her first letter to Buzot. The life he led there was miserable in the extreme. He constantly feared to be arrested; he felt that he was jeopardizing the lives of his hosts by his presence; he fretted under the contempt and false accusations which the Mountain continued to rain upon him; and, above all, he was tortured by his inability to do anything to insure the future of his child or to effect the release of his wife.

This anxiety had not grown less with time. The events of the summer and the fall of 1793 only increased day by day his misery and apprehension. The news of the death of the twenty-one Girondins in October seemed to turn to bitterness the last drop of his hope. A heavier blow awaited him. That happened which must have seemed to his simple soul the impossible,—his wife was guillotined. When the fatal word reached him, she had been dead for several days. As the news was given him he fell, stricken with a blessed unconsciousness. When he recovered himself, his distress was so great that he resolved to put an end to his days. In vain did the friends who had sheltered and cared for him all these months urge him to give up his resolution. He would not listen to them, but with perfect serenity laid before them two plans which he felt he might follow. The first savored strongly of Madame Roland’s influence: it was to go incognito to Paris, appear in the Convention, make an unexpected speech in which he should tell them the truths he felt they ought to hear, and then ask them to kill him on the guillotine where his wife had lost her life. The second was to kill himself.

One consideration alone deterred him from carrying out his first plan. The property of persons guillotined was confiscated by the State. If he should die in this manner, Eudora would be left penniless, and Roland abandoned the idea. There remained nothing for him but suicide. On the evening of November 15th, he bade his friends good-by, and left Rouen by the route to Paris. About four leagues from Rouen, in the hamlet of Baudoin, he left the highway, entered the roadway leading to a private house, seated himself on the ground on the edge of the avenue, and deliberately ran a cane-sword into his breast. His death must have been immediate; for passers-by, next morning, seeing him there leaning against a tree, thought he was sleeping. When the truth was discovered, a deputy from the Convention, who happened to be at Rouen, went at once to the spot and took possession of the papers on his person. The only one of importance was a note which ran:

“Whoever finds me lying here, let him respect my remains. They are those of a man who died as he lived, virtuous and honest.

“The day is not far distant when you will have to bear a terrible judgment; await that day; you will act then in full knowledge of causes, and you will understand the meaning of this advice.

“May my country soon abhor these crimes and return to humanity and kindliness.”

On another fold of the paper was written:

“I left my refuge as soon as I heard that my wife had been murdered. I desire to remain no longer in a world covered with crime.”

Eudora Roland, born October 7, 1781, was twelve years old at the time of her mother’s death. Separated the night of the arrest, the two never saw each other again. Happily, there were warm and faithful friends ready to take care of her as soon as her serious situation was known. Bosc, who throughout Madame Roland’s imprisonment showed himself of the most fearless and tender devotion, went to the apartment in the Rue de la Harpe soon after the arrest, and took the little girl to the home of a member of the Convention, CreuzÉ-la-Touche. Here she remained until a few days before her mother’s death. Then it became evident that, in sheltering Eudora, Madame CreuzÉ-la-Touche was compromising the safety of her family, and she was compelled to place her charge in a pension. She was not received there, even, until her name had been changed. All this was a great grief to Madame Roland in her last days. She understood only too well now that her child was in danger of suffering her own fate. She wrote an anxious letter to “the person charged with the care of my daughter,” and to Eudora herself she wrote a courageous adieu:

“I do not know, my little girl,” she wrote, “that I shall ever see or write to you again. Remember your mother, that is the best thing I can say to you. You have seen me happy in doing my duty and in serving those who were suffering. There is no better life.

“You have seen me tranquil in misfortune and captivity. I could be so because I had no remorse, and only pleasant memories of the good I had done. Nothing else can sustain one in the sorrows of life. Perhaps you will never experience trials like mine, but you must prepare for others. A busy, active life is the best safeguard against danger, and necessity, as well as wisdom, will compel you to work seriously.

“Be worthy of your parents. They leave you a noble example. If you follow them, you will not live in vain.

“Farewell, dear child. I nursed you at my breast. I would inspire you with my aspirations. The day will come when you will understand the effort I am making to be strong as I think of your sweet face.

“Would that I could fold you to my breast!

“Adieu, my Eudora.”

It was Madame Roland’s last letter to her child. Bosc, who had been allowed to visit her twice a week throughout the fall, was now forbidden to see her. Letters had to be smuggled in and out of the prison, and she soon ceased to have any trustworthy news of her loved ones. Six days after the above letter, she wrote to Bosc:

“My poor little one! Where is she? Tell me, I beg of you. Give me some details that I may picture her to myself in her new surroundings.”

It was too late. In less than a week after this letter she was in the Conciergerie.

After the death of M. and Madame Roland, Eudora was taken in charge by Bosc, who, in 1795, published the first edition of Madame Roland’s Memoirs, to help in her support. Legend has it that Bosc even wanted to marry the child. Later a marriage was arranged for her with a brother of Champagneux of Lyons, the old friend of the Rolands.

After the Revolution, Madame Champagneux recovered her father’s property, and Le Clos, the family estate, near Villefranche, came into her possession. This property is still in the family, being owned by one of Madame Champagneux’s granddaughters, Madame CÉcile Marillier of Paris.

All of the papers of Madame Roland, which had been confided to Bosc, were given by him to Eudora, and she seems to have experienced a certain resentment towards her mother when she found that she had told posterity so frankly that her only child lacked in depth of sentiment and keenness of intellect. This feeling only intensified her admiration for her father, and when Lamartine’s History of the Girondins appeared, she was deeply indignant at the way in which he belittled M. Roland in order to make the figure of Madame Roland more brilliant. It was with the hope that Lamartine’s influence could be counteracted, that she urged a friend, a grand-nephew of Bosc, M. P. FaugÈre by name, to take possession of all the family papers, and prepare a work which would justify the memory of Roland. M. FaugÈre was already busy with a new edition of the Memoirs, but he promised Madame Champagneux to do the work on M. Roland as soon as that was finished. The Memoirs he completed, and his edition is by far the best published; but though he began the study of Roland he died before finishing it. The family papers remained in the possession of Madame FaugÈre, who, in 1888, turned over the most important of them to the BibliothÈque Nationale.

Madame Champagneux lived to be nearly seventy-seven years old, dying in Paris July 19, 1858. The last years of her life were clouded by the death of one of her daughters, a loss from which she is said never fully to have recovered.

Of the three left behind, the fate of Buzot was saddest. At the moment that he escaped to Evreux, the northwest departments felt that the Convention had been coerced into the decree against the Gironde and there was a general revolt against the tyranny of Paris. Buzot and his friends who had escaped decided, on sounding this feeling, that it was sufficiently wide-spread and profound to justify them in undertaking a campaign against the Convention and in favor of federalism. Buzot began by speaking in the cathedral at Evreux and here he was joined by PÉtion, Barbaroux, and Louvet. The agitators were not long unmolested. The Convention turned its fiercest anathemas against the “traitors,” as it called them, and the Revolutionary authorities of the northwest were ordered to crush them. At first they fled into Brittany, evidently hoping to find a vessel there for America, but disappointed in this, they made their way to Gascogne, where one of their number had friends.

While Buzot was escaping, the patriotic saviours of their country were exhausting themselves in fantastic efforts to show their hatred of his “treason.” His house was demolished amid civic rejoicings. His effigy was burned and riddled with bullets in the process. On the walls near his residence could be still read a few years ago an inscription written in the excitement.

This effectual and dignified way of dealing with a political opponent reached its climax on December 30, 1793, when Evreux held a fÊte of rejoicing over the recapture of Toulon. The cathedral in which, six months before, Buzot had spoken had become a “temple of reason and philosophy.” On the altars were the busts of Marat, Lepelletier, and Brutus, where once were the forms of Virgin and Child and peaceable saint. The latter had been transferred to the Place de la FÉdÉration, where, together with effigies of Buzot and other local celebrities who had refused to believe and vote as the authorities desired, they were burned.

In the mean time Buzot had escaped to Saint Émilion, where, for some three months, he and his friends were concealed. They busied themselves, when their places of hiding permitted it, with writing their memoirs. Buzot discussed his political career and made a violent, often vindictive, attack on his opponents. There is no direct avowal, in his work, of his love for Madame Roland, but one feels throughout the despairing, passionate passages the struggling of a great emotion, stifled, but not dead. It is said that when the news of Madame Roland’s death reached Buzot, his friends thought he had gone mad, and it was many days before the violence of his grief was calmed.

At the beginning of 1794 the refugees were obliged to change asylums, and went to the house of a hair-dresser in Saint Émilion, where they stayed until June of that year. At that time, however, the Revolutionary authorities of Bordeaux decided that they were not doing their whole duty in saving the country, and began a house-to-house search throughout the department. Buzot, with his friends, PÉtion and Barbaroux, were forced to fly. After days of fatigue and fear and hunger, the end came. Barbaroux, thinking he was discovered, attempted to shoot himself, but succeeded only in wounding himself, and was captured.

Just how death came to Buzot no one knows; for when his body was found it lay beside that of PÉtion in a wheat-field, half-eaten by wolves.

In unconscious irony the peasants have since called the field the champ des ÉmigrÉs.