tisfied!
Ungrateful nation, why dost thou not appreciate thy happiness? Madame
Roland resembled certain politicians, who, having attained to power,
would willingly disembarrass themselves of those by whose aid they
reached it. For the second time she had just arrived at the goal of
her ambition. Who dared, then, to pollute her joy? Why did that
marplot, Danton, come with his untimely massacres to destroy such
brilliant projects and banish such delightful dreams? The man who, as
if in derision and antithesis, allowed himself to be called the
Minister of Justice, produced the effect of a monster on Madame Roland.
The republic as conceived by him had not the head of a goddess, but of
a Gorgon. Its eyes glittered with a sinister lustre. The sword it
held was that of an assassin or a headsman.

Madame Roland was greatly astonished when, on Sunday, September 2,
1792, toward five in the evening, when the massacres had already begun,
she saw two hundred men of forbidding appearance arrive at the Ministry
of the Interior and ask for her husband, who was absent. Lucky for him
he was; for albeit a minister, they had come to arrest him in virtue of
a mandate of the Communal Council of Surveillance. Not finding Roland,
the two hundred men retired. One of them, with his shirt-sleeves
rolled up to his {375} elbows, and a sabre in his hand, declaimed
furiously against the treachery of ministers. A few minutes later,
Danton said to Petion: "Do you know what they have taken into their
heads? If they haven't issued a decree to arrest Roland!"--"Who did
that?" demanded the mayor.--"Eh! those devils of committeemen. I have
taken the mandate; hold! here it is!"

What was Madame Roland doing the next day, when the worst of the
massacres were going on? She gave a dinner, and allowed the Prussian,
Anacharsis Clootz, who came, moreover, uninvited, to make a regular
defence of these horrible murders. "The events of the day," she says
in her Memoirs, "formed the subject of conversation. Clootz pretended
to prove that it was an indispensable and salutary measure; he uttered
a good many commonplaces about the people's rights, the justice of
their vengeance, and of its utility to the welfare of the species; he
talked a long while and very loudly, ate still more, and fatigued more
than one listener."

And yet, revolutionary passions had not extinguished every notion of
humanity and justice in Madame Roland's soul. On that very day