Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/242

232 others, in groups of twos and threes, vanished along different routes, mostly ending in the guillotine.

Madame Roland at Sainte-Pélagie was not altogether ignorant of these events. She knew now that the proscribed Girondins, those who were not already imprisoned in Paris, would never reach America. This conviction, harder to her than her own impending fate, filled her with despair. She resolved to commit suicide. Several considerations urged her to take this step. She would foil her executioners and escape the last indignity of mounting the scaffold. A most powerful motive with her was that, by doing so, she hoped to secure her personal property to Eudora, which, were she condemned, would be legally confiscated. Having come to this conclusion, she wrote a letter to Roland, asking him "to forgive her for disposing of a life which should have been devoted to him, but that she, having now been deprived of the power of doing so, he would lose nothing but a shadow."

Two months ago, the Citoyenne Roland had declared that she would proudly have ascended the scaffold; then the victim, still able to speak, could bear witness to the truth. Now, deprived of this right, also, she considered it a degradation to submit. A paper to which she committed her last thoughts on this occasion, contains a striking proof of her calmness and minute attention to her daughter's interests. After giving a business-like account of the little property she could claim in virtue of marriage settlements and legacies, she directs that a small sum of ready money shall be laid out in buying her daughter the harp which had hitherto only been hired for her; "and they shall get it from Koliker," she says, "an honest, fair-dealing man, who will, perhaps, abate something of the