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
