AVE LIBERTAS MORITURI TE SALUTANT!
Five death carts bore the doomed ones along; among them Valazé, whom no further wrong could touch. Bare-headed, with bound hands, and in their shirt-sleeves, they yet looked like conquerors as, dragged through the streets of Paris, they chanted the Marseillaise. The Vive la République of the crowd they met with answering shouts of Vive la République. Then—as one by one they ascended the scaffold, as one by one their heads fell severed by the swift stroke of its knife—their chorus grew fainter and fainter, till at last one voice only remained singing:
Contre nous de la tyrannie
Le couteau sanglant est levé.
Then it too stopped—hushed in death was that singing!
When the Girondins left the Conciergerie their heroine entered it. It was the last milestone on the road of the Revolution. Only a fortnight before Marie Jeanne Roland entered its precincts Marie-Antoinette had quitted them for the scaffold; so that the woman who hated the Republic most bitterly was condemned almost simultaneously with that other woman who had the most adored it. But such was the turbid confusion of the times that the most heterogeneous kind of people were mixed up together in that foulest of prisons. Great nobles were cheek by jowl with felons; great ladies jostled women of the streets; by a freak of fate the Du Barry and Roland's wife slept under the same roof.
Acutely at first did the disciple of Plutarch suffer from this proximity to the reprobates of society. She was sickened in the day by repulsive scenes from whose sight she could not escape; she was awakened at night by the fierce quarrels of these unfortunates. But oh! miracle of human goodness! Ere long that part of the prison where dwelt Madame Roland had become an oasis of peace amidst this Inferno. No sooner did she appear in the courtyard than the wrangling ceased.
Women, lost to shame, felt ashamed before her radiant purity. To the most needy she gave what pecuniary help she could, spoke to all words of advice, hope, or consolation. In walking she was surrounded by those lost ones, who clung to her skirts, and seemed to regard her as a beneficent divinity, while they treated the once all-powerful mistress of Louis XV. as one of themselves. At this page of Madame Roland's history it is difficult to keep back one's tears. Not from pity for her sufferings, but that the magic of goodness touches the deepest springs of emotion.
The record of Madame Roland's last days we owe chiefly to Comte Beugnot, her fellow-prisoner at the Conciergerie. He could not help acknowledging the intrinsic greatness of this woman, against whom he had entertained a strong prejudice as a female politician and republican. Now that he saw her frequently at the grate of the prison, where many of its inmates gathered round her, he listened to her conversation in astonishment. So did Riouffe, one of the famous twelve, he who had dragged his bleeding feet across the Landes of Brittany, and had since then been incarcerated. Months of confinement had not quenched Madame Roland's enthusiasm nor impaired the beauty of her appearance. Her large dark eyes still flashed and softened with every changing emotion. Her complexion still retained its brilliancy. Comte Beugnot says he found an ever-fresh charm in listening to her, quite as much owing to her captivating manner as to the things she said. They completely differed in their politics, and the passion with which she defended her own views gave him the impression "that she had inspired her whole party with that vehement partisanship which had helped not a little to stir up hatred and set others against them." Riouffe describes her conversation as a happy blending of womanly charm with a great man's energy.
But whatever the differences of opinion, everybody loved Madame Roland, everybody desired her acquittal when she was called to appear before her judges. Comte Beugnot, entrusted with a message for her, lay in wait till she appeared in the passage where she stood at the grate until she should be called. She was dressed with great care that day, and appeared more animated than usual. "Her complexion was exquisite," writes Beugnot; "a smile hovered round her lips. She was holding up the train of her dress with one hand, her other one having been seized by a crowd of women pressing round her to kiss it. Those better acquainted with the fate awaiting her were sobbing, and commended her to Providence. No one can picture this scene unless he had seen it." But we do see it; we hear Madame Roland trying to console the unhappy women, never alluding to her own fate, but gently imploring them henceforth to live together in peace, in hope, and in charity. The old gaoler, who had held his post for thirty years, came to open the grate to her, and wept as he did so. She was going to reply to Beugnot's whispered message, when two turnkeys roughly called her name. At this cry, which would have been terrible to anyone but her, she stopped to shake his hand, saying, "Good-bye! Sir; let us make our peace, it is time." Raising her eyes to his face, she noticed that he kept back his tears with difficulty, but only added, "Be brave!"
She vanished down the dark passage to appear before Fouquier Tinville's judgment bar. Several persons were sitting round a table for the purpose apparently of taking down the proceedings, but they only sat and stared. There was a constant coming and going of patriots. David interrogated the accused; but whenever his questions did not meet with the approval of Fouquier Tinville, the terrible public prosecutor, he altered them and put them afresh. The principal charge in the indictment against Madame Roland consisted in the relations she had entertained with the Girondins, condemned for traitorous designs against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic. The questions addressed to her reached back to a period long anterior to 1789, date of the Revolution. She was clear, explicit, luminous in her answers. Nothing could be more to her taste than to enter fully into the whole course of her husband's and her own conduct from the beginning. Why could she not have produced some of those letters addressed to Bosc and Bancal des Issarts during 1789, 1790, and 1791, which bore such unmistakable witness to her revolutionary enthusiasm?
The purpose of the tribunal was not served by these eloquent replies of the accused, which needlessly prolonged a trial of which the result could not be doubtful. She was told, roughly enough, that she was not showing off her wit at the Hotel of the Interior, and had better confine herself in her answers to a plain Yes or No.
Let us briefly recapitulate some of the leading points, which show the nature of these proceedings.
Question.—Was it known to you that Roland, before he entered into the Administration, belonged to the Committee of Correspondence of the Jacobins?
Answer.—Yes.
Q.—Was it not you who took upon you to compose the letters it was his duty to draw up for the Committee?
A.—My husband never borrowed my thoughts, although he may sometimes have employed my pen.
Q.—Were you not acquainted with the office for the Formation of Public Opinion, established by Roland to corrupt the departments; to bring to Paris a departmental force; to tear the Republic to pieces, according to the plans of a liberticide faction, &c. &c.; and was it not you who conducted the business of that office?
A.—Roland established no office under that denomination, and I conducted the business of none. After the decree, passed at the latter end of August, ordering him to disseminate useful writings, he assigned to some of his clerks the care of forwarding them, exerting himself to the utmost in the execution of a law tending to diffuse the knowledge and love of the Revolution. This he called the Patriotic Correspondence; and as to his own writings, instead of promoting discord, they all breathed a desire to concur in the maintenance of order and of peace.
It was observed at this point to Madame Roland that it was in vain for her to attempt to disguise the truth. That her endeavours to justify Roland were ineffectual; fatal experience having only too well shown the mischief that perfidious Minister had done by aspersing the most faithful representatives of the people, and by exciting the departments to take up arms against Paris.
The accused, in answer to the injurious imputations upon Roland, observed that she had only two facts to oppose: firstly his writings, which all contained the soundest principles of morality and politics; secondly, his forwarding all those printed by order of the National Convention, even the speeches of the members of that Assembly, who passed for the most violent in opposition.
Q.—Do you know at what time Roland left Paris and where he may be?
A.—Whether I do or not, is what I neither ought nor choose to tell.
It was here remarked to the accused that her obstinacy in disguising the truth proved that she thought Roland guilty; that she was setting herself in open rebellion against the law. The public prosecutor, Fouquier Tinville, accompanied his examination with such insulting epithets, and put questions so offensive to her honour, that she, who could calmly meet death, felt unable to repress her tears.
But she would not be brow-beaten. Turning round to the clerk, she cried, "Take up your pen and write." Then she continued: "A person accused is answerable for his own actions but not for those of others. If, during more than four months, Roland had not solicited in vain the passing of his accounts, he would not now be obliged to absent himself, nor should I, supposing me to be acquainted with it, be obliged to make a secret of his place of residence. I know of no law which requires me to betray the dearest sentiments of nature."
Here Fouquier Tinville exclaimed, in a rage, that there was no end to her loquacity, and the examination was closed.
Among the witnesses called, the one whose testimony told most strongly against the accused was that identical Mademoiselle Mignot, Eudora's governess, whose old age Madame Roland had wished to provide for, and to whom she was wont to give a thousand livres a month to expend with Eudora on charity. The cowardly old creature, to ensure against becoming suspected herself, made a few vague statements to the effect that the Rolands had shown much tranquillity at the approach of a civil war, and that Madame Roland, on being informed by Brissot of the capture of Lille, had replied, "I know the good news," The two other witnesses were Lecoq, the man-servant, and Fleury, the cook. They were both so deeply attached to their mistress that their one wish was to share her fate, Lecoq succeeded, but the good Fleury was so distracted by grief that she was dismissed from the interrogatory as not in her right senses.
Chauveau-Lagarde was ambitious of the honour of pleading the cause of the great citoyenne. He went several times to see her, and on the 8th of November 1793 came to discuss the line of defence he would take. Vain measures, in which neither placed any faith; for when he was about to take his leave, Madame Roland, who had been very silent all along, rose suddenly, and, with an air of deep feeling, took a ring from her finger, and presented it to him. "Madame," cried the advocate, much moved, "we shall meet again to-morrow after the trial." "To-morrow I shall have ceased to be," she answered. . . . "I value your counsel, but it might prove fatal to you; you would ruin yourself without saving me. Let me not have the sorrow of having caused the death of a good man!"
She was not mistaken. The proceedings were again nipped in the bud by the jury declaring themselves sufficiently enlightened, for most of these political trials were only a parody of justice. The accused was condemned to death as guilty of traitorous relations with the conspirators of Caen, as proved by the correspondence seized at the house of Lauze Duperret.
Between the sentence and its execution the Revolution suffered no pause. That night of the 8th, as Madame Roland had foreboded, was destined to be her last. It was not given to her, as to the departed Twenty-one, to spend it in a kind of delirium of friendship and patriotism.
Madame Roland heard herself sentenced to death with perfect equanimity, saying proudly to her judges: "You consider me worthy to share the fate of the great men whom you have assassinated. I shall try to carry to the scaffold the courage they have shown." But in the Conciergerie there was mourning and lamentation on that 9th of November 1793, when the wife of Roland, embracing all the prisoners in her room, bade them a last farewell. To one she would say, "How now, Reboul, you weep? What weakness!" To another, "Nay, friend, am I not going to die for my country and liberty; is it not what we have always wished?"
In the dusk of the short November day, beneath the chill grey sky, the death-carts were bearing their customary load of victims to the Place de la Revolution. Sullen, half-brutalized crowds—to whom dead bodies were cast instead of bread—followed with that craving for strong sensations with which they had been accustomed to watch the racking of criminals. It was the same populace, after all, inured to ferocity through the ancient régime with its Bastile, its lettres de cachet, its brutal punishments; the same populace for whose wretched plight the youthful Manon had felt such a pathetic blending of contempt and loving pity.
All her life she had loved this people, even with the love of a mother yearning for her firstborn. All her life she had been ready to shed her blood for it, in the conviction that a new generation would arise which should live to enjoy the freedom for which she was content to perish. That conviction made her passage to the scaffold a triumphal path, and invested her, as she stood in the death cart, with a splendour as of victory. Like "a Star above the Storm" the beautiful woman, serenely radiant, in pure white raiment, with long dark locks falling in clusters to her girdle, fared through the streets of the blood-stained city, an embodiment of all that was highest and purest in the Revolution whose star was now quenched in the weltering storm. By the Quay de la Mégisserie, close to the Pont Neuf, they passed, opposite the house where Manon Roland first saw the light, where the young republican had envied the greatness of Rome, she who to-day was meeting her doom like the greatest of the Romans. Did the vision of her past life rise before her mind's eye, as they say it does before that of a drowning man's, or did she see the phantom Twenty-one beckon her along the road they had lately gone? She was proud to follow them, carrying to the scaffold a courage as great as theirs.
A courage greater than theirs in reality. For she was not sustained by that love of comrades mutually encouraging each other with their song. In the cart beside her cowered the abject figure of an old man whose teeth chattered with terror. It was Lamarche, a forger of assignats. She tried to cheer him up, and there was a sweet gaiety in her words which at times called a feeble smile to his lips. At last they reached their destination. Who can tell what vistas of eternity had opened out to her on her way thither? Report says that at the foot of the guillotine she asked for pen and paper "to write the strange thoughts that were rising in her." The request was not granted; the strange thoughts went down with her to the silence of the grave.
Yet another request she proffered. The scaffold, too, had its etiquette, and ladies were privileged to take precedence of men in death. The brave woman, wishing to spare her companion the horror of seeing her blood spilt, asked the executioner to let him go first. Samson demurred, it being contrary to custom. But when she said to him, with a smile, "Come, you cannot refuse the last request of a lady," he succumbed.
She waited calmly; and, with her wonted quickness of step, she mounted the short steep ladder leading from the cart to the platform of the scaffold. Then, her shining eyes turned to the colossal statue of Liberty lately erected near it, she said, bowing to the goddess of her worship, "O Liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!"
Swiftly the axe clanked down; swiftly the heroic heart ceased to beat. It had not once quickened with fear. A witness, who daily haunted the place of execution, has borne strange testimony to Madame Roland's Spartan courage. When her head was severed from her body, he saw two enormous jets of blood thrown up from her mutilated trunk—an exceptional fact, for habitually only a few scant drops oozed slowly from the veins, whose blood had all been driven to the heart by apprehension.
The wife of Roland had said that he would not survive her. She was not mistaken. The news of her execution determined him to follow her. But how? He intended at first to force his way to the Convention, and to make his voice heard of its Representatives before he, too, took the way to the scaffold, which his great wife had trodden before him. But the difficulty of carrying out this scheme made him prefer the simpler course of taking his own life, by which he also mistakenly hoped to secure his fortune to his daughter. The good ladies who had so bravely sheltered him all this time, finding they could not shake his purpose, evinced a truly noble friendship by doing all in their power to assist him in his undertaking. In the evening of the 15th of November he bade them a last farewell; then, in the gloaming, with face set Paris-ward, he rapidly walked along, with the dead leaves crackling under his feet, and hopes as dead in his heart. What his hand had found to do he had always done resolutely; when the thing was to take his life he was no less resolute. Cato could not have run himself more calmly through the body than this Frenchman; and those who, on the following morning, found the austere old man leaning against a tree in M. Normand's avenue, surmised him to be asleep from his attitude. On his person was this writing: "Whoever thou art that findest me lying here, respect my remains. They are those of a man who devoted his life to being useful, and who has died as he lived, virtuous and honest. . . . Not fear, but indignation, made me quit my retreat on learning that my wife had been murdered. I did not choose to remain longer in a land polluted with crimes."
There lived yet another man on earth whose fate was indissolubly linked with the departed heroine. Buzot—who, in those terrible months of the Red Terror, had been dragging from hiding-place to hiding-place, in company with Pétion and Barbaroux, often exposed to all the inclemency of winter, or crouched half-starved at the bottom of caverns and old wells—was at this time roaming along stormy coves and cliffs of the Western coast, seeking an uncertain refuge. When at last the news of Madame Roland's execution reached the unfortunate Girondin, his despair bordered on frenzy. It took him days to recover his right senses. After this calamity were probably written those moving lines: "I have done! My heart gives way. Oh, God! what remains still to be suffered? What remains there of myself? . . . Vainly do I seek the objects that made life dear to me. Nothing is left but the void of solitude and despair. I can no longer claim a heart which reciprocated my tender attachment, and revived my life with its gentle flame. All is lost, for ever lost. Terrible words, which plunge me into nothingness!"
Buzot, however, went on living as though the parting words of her he loved could have reached him, which was almost an impossibility. "You whom I dare not name," she had said, "you who never lapsed from virtue, despite the most terrible of passions, will you grieve that I precede you to those realms where we may love each other without crime? There will cease all fatal prejudices, all arbitrary distinctions, all evil passions, tyranny of every kind. I will rest and await you!" She bade him not to follow her, but live, if so he might still serve the cause of liberty, but to seek death voluntarily rather than take it from a mercenary hand. She would not bid him farewell. "From you alone I part not. To leave life is to draw closer together."
So the unhappy Buzot continued leading his precarious life, "often without bread, without food of any kind, without clothes or money," only sustained by the hope of some day "avenging his friends and his country's liberty." But he was not destined to see the fall of Robespierre, though it followed close on his own death, for he and his two companions survived till July 1794. Forced to leave a kind-hearted barber's shelter at St. Émilion, owing to the increased vigilance of commissioners sent by the Committee of Public Safety, they went forth once more. Mistaking a great crowd of harmless villagers for Jacobin troops in pursuit of them, they plunged into a pine-wood. Barbaroux, in trying to shoot himself, shattered his jaw, was discovered, taken to Bordeaux, and executed. Buzot and Pétion escaped. But two days afterwards their bodies were found in a corn-field, half-eaten by wolves.
So perished the founders of the Republic, the preachers of the anti-monarchical crusade, and the men whose orator had put their principle into a nut-shell when he said, "You think to found the Revolution by Terror; I was fain to see her established through Love." So perished she who was the soul of the Gironde, its highest inspiration, its undying glory—who, sooner than make a truce with murder, led her party to martyrdom; for were not those the true martyrs of liberty who refused to turn despots for her sake? They died like martyrs, too, scorning death for that which transcends death, passing away with that smile on their lips, that rapture in their hearts, which those who sacrifice themselves for a great idea bequeath as the most precious of legacies. We may say that none of those who had sent the Girondins to the scaffold ascended it in their turn with the same spiritual exaltation.
Yes; they all followed, those who had sent or who had suffered them to be sent there. It was the inevitable fatality of their action. The National Convention was the corner-stone of the new State, the visible expression of the Sovereignty of the people, and to violate it was to proclaim the Revolution en permanence, to wrest the government from the legally-constituted authorities of the Republic, and leave it at the mercy of every fresh shock of insurrection.
Vergniaud, seeing the irreconcilable breach of parties, had uttered the sublime cry, "Fling us into the abyss," and they were flung. But the abyss did not close. Nay, it widened and widened, though batch after batch of the revolutionary leaders were thrown in without truce or mercy. Blood still called unto blood, and victims entailed ever fresh victims by the inextricable mesh of circumstance.
All the offspring of the Revolution, the noble and ignoble, the fairest and foulest, followed in turn. The anarchic Hébertists, who had grown bloated on the blood-money of the condemned, were succeeded by Camille Desmoulins and the titanic Danton; revolters now revolted against the terror, and clamouring for a Committee of Mercy. These clamours were silenced by the guillotine; but their overthrow shook the foundation of the Republic. Still there stood its strongest pillar, the inexorable Robespierre! What ultimate plans of government he nourished we shall never know. Cut off in the middle of his career, this man—who as a young judge had resigned his post from remorse at having condemned a murderer to death, and who not many years afterwards devised the Law of Prairial, the deadly instrument of the Terror by which one thousand three hundred and fifty-six victims perished from March to July 1794—must now always remain one of the enigmas of history. If, as is assumed, he was fain to kill the Terror by the Terror, to fill up the abyss by dead bodies, and so cross over this bridge of corpses into the promised land of a reorganized society, his plan was the most horrible failure. And it is well that it was so. Better that the Republic perished than that it should flourish on such a basis. Robespierre himself fell into the abyss, hurled by the Revolution whose riddle he had failed to solve, and after him came the great Revolution herself.
But though the Republic perished, the conquests of the Revolution were imperishable. Its proclamation of the equal, natural, and unalienable rights of man have modified the political and social life of Europe. Its many great and vital reforms in the administration of justice, in the distribution of land, in the condition of the peasant, wrought the most beneficent changes in the lot of the people. If the humanitarian principles to which it gave birth were baptised in blood, we must remember that there has never yet in the world's history been a fresh incarnation of the idea without violent convulsions. The passage from a state of brutish degradation, corruption, and misery to freedom could not be accomplished without a mortal struggle. But as the earthquake, which lays cities in ruins, also lifts to the surface of the ocean beautiful islands, which presently a luxuriant vegetation will clothe, and where fresh young life will teem, so this great social upheaval, while destructive of much good as well as evil, raised a new social foundation for future generations to build on and complete.
Not only are the conquests of the Revolution imperishable, but the examples of heroism left by many of its children are among its priceless bequests. Among these examples we know of none greater than that given by Madame Roland in her life and death. Once, in a moment of discouragement while a prisoner, seeing in what her devotion to liberty had ended, she asked, "Was it worth while to have been born for this?" Yes, a thousand times yes, answers history. For in the long, painful process of education through which humanity is slowly advancing towards higher phases of development, the best of systems must remain waste sheets of paper but for the lives of noble men and women capable of transmuting abstractions into realities. Lives that shall illumine the path where others are groping, kindle the moral energies of men; lives such as Madame Roland's stirring her sex to a generous emulation, handing on, as she falls, the sacred tradition of heroes and martyrs.