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224 After this she was silent, but roused herself to give Champagneux a message for Brissot, whom she urged in glowing terms to enlighten his countrymen as to the principles and motives of his political career. She knew that nothing else remained; and the leader of the Girondins, discovered and arrested at Moulins, confined in the identical room which Madame Roland had occupied at the Abbaye, set about composing his Testament Politique. This work, according to Champagneux the most forcible of all Brissot's writings, Robespierre managed to destroy. Champagneux seized the occasion of the message to impress upon Madame Roland the importance of continuing her own private and political Memoirs, already begun, but left off again in discouragement.

So Madame Roland resumed her pen, and with her usual rapidity filled in the gray, small-sized sheets of paper with her strong, clear handwriting. How she contrived to hide her manuscript from the gaolers is a mystery. But she had succeeded in taming even the ruffianly keepers of Sainte Pélagie, and to her they were full of little attentions. Two-thirds of her Historical Notices had already been entrusted to a friend, who had burned them, under apprehensions of a domiciliary visit. The author, on learning their fate, could not help exclaiming, "I wish they had thrown me into the fire instead!" Standing on the edge of the grave, not knowing from day to day whether she would have time to finish her story, she entrusted to these frail leaves the justification of her political life. Undismayed by the trying miscarriage of her first MS., she wrote so rapidly that her Notices were finished in the space of a month, and the rest of her Memoirs in about three weeks.