domineering temper," had been a heavy burden, which the wife had still borne with uncomplaining fortitude.
She never ceased to honour and esteem "the virtuous Roland"; she was devoted to him as a daughter, she says; but that love which he had never awakened in her, which her powerful organization could not escape, seized hold of her in the stormiest days of the Revolution, to raise as fierce a storm in her heart, and shake the fabric of her life to its foundations. The fiery trial through which she had passed in finding a man who answered to her ideal by the courage, purity, and elevation of his nature, and who, while reciprocating her passion, recognised as fully as she did herself the inviolability of previous ties, this trial had been so terrible that persecution, imprisonment, the scaffold itself, sank by comparison into insignificance. Yes; when once her conjugal bonds had been forcibly wrenched asunder, she welcomed the prison as a deliverance from her invisible captivity, cherishing the fetters which left her free to love her friend unrestrictedly, and thanking Heaven for having substituted her present chains for those which she had previously borne. Could any words more forcibly express through what a terrible struggle she had passed? and these words would never have left her lips had she not been shut out from the world, and been writing to Buzot under the shadow of the guillotine.
In reading the letters which the captive woman sent to the proscribed republican, we must never lose sight of the unique situation in which they were penned, nor of the improbability of these lovers ever again meeting, which added a childlike openness to
