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190 his wife never left the house. Prepared for the worst, she always slept with a loaded pistol within reach, not for purposes of attack or defence, but to guard herself from outrages worse than death.

Careless for herself, or, more properly speaking, feeling it her duty to remain, Madame Roland was very anxious to know her daughter in safety. Eudora, now between twelve and thirteen, was a gentle, blue-eyed girl, whose abundant hair fell in fair clusters about her shoulders. She lacked her mother's passionate mental energy, and appeared by contrast of a cold, unimpressionable temperament, which made the idea of having to entrust her to others less bitter than it would otherwise have been. The parents decided to send her to Roland's elder brother under the charge of a Mademoiselle Mignot, her instructress. But when it came to the point other counsels prevailed; it was judged even more hazardous to send Eudora to the country than to know her under her mother's protection. The time-serving woman in whom Madame Roland would have reposed so great a trust, and for whose old age she had tried to provide, left as soon as Roland retired from office, to reappear on the trial of his wife, when her deposition against her former mistress served to give a shadow of plausibility to some of the charges in the indictment. Roland resigned his post of Minister of the Interior on the 22nd of January, the dey following that of the execution of Louis XVI. No invitations poured in now pressing him to remain in office. Highly as the Gironde valued his services and integrity, its own grim struggle for existence engrossed it completely.

Roland, in fact, had become a source of weakness instead of strength to it. The partisans of the