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242 hear Madame Roland trying to console the unhappy women, never alluding to her own fate, but gently imploring them henceforth to live together in peace, in hope, and in charity. The old gaoler, who had held his post for thirty years, came to open the grate to her, and wept as he did so. She was going to reply to Beugnot's whispered message, when two turnkeys roughly called her name. At this cry, which would have been terrible to anyone but her, she stopped to shake his hand, saying, "Good-bye! Sir; let us make our peace, it is time." Raising her eyes to his face, she noticed that he kept back his tears with difficulty, but only added, "Be brave!"

She vanished down the dark passage to appear before Fouquier Tinville's judgment bar. Several persons were sitting round a table for the purpose apparently of taking down the proceedings, but they only sat and stared. There was a constant coming and going of patriots. David interrogated the accused; but whenever his questions did not meet with the approval of Fouquier Tinville, the terrible public prosecutor, he altered them and put them afresh. The principal charge in the indictment against Madame Roland consisted in the relations she had entertained with the Girondins, condemned for traitorous designs against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic. The questions addressed to her reached back to a period long anterior to 1789, date of the Revolution. She was clear, explicit, luminous in her answers. Nothing could be more to her taste than to enter fully into the whole course of her husband's and her own conduct from the beginning. Why could she not have produced some of those letters addressed to Bosc and Bancal des Issarts during 1789,