fortune, and it may be to trample it under my feet.

"Robespierre! I send not this softened picture of my condition to
excite your pity. No! such a sentiment, expressed by you, would
not only offend me, but be rejected as it deserves. I write for
your edification. Fortune is fickle--popular favor equally so.
Look at the fate of those who led on the revolutions of former
ages--the idols of the people, and afterward their
governors--from Vitellius to Caesar, or from Hippo, the orator of
Syracuse, down to our Parisian speakers. Scylla and Marius
proscribed thousands of knights and senators, besides a vast
number of other unfortunate beings; but were they enabled to
prevent history from handing down their names to the just
execration of posterity, and did they themselves enjoy happiness?
Whatever may be the fate awarded to me, I shall know how to
submit to it in a manner worthy of myself, or to anticipate it
should I deem it advisable. After receiving the honors of
persecution, am I to expect the still greater one of martyrdom?
Speak! It is something to know your fate, and a spirit such as
mine can boldly face it, be it as it may. Should you bestow upon
my letter a fair and impartial perusal, it will neither be
useless to you nor to my country. But, under any circumstances,
this I say, Robespierre--and you can not deny the truth of my
assertion--none who have ever known me can persecute me without a
feeling of remorse."

Madame Roland preferred to die rather than to owe her life to the
_compassion_ of her enemies. Could she obtain a triumphant acquittal,
through the force of her own integrity, she would greatly exult. But
her imperial spirit would not stoop to the acceptance of a pardon from
those who deserved the execrations of mankind; such a pardon she would
have torn in fragments, and have stepped resolutely upon the
scaffold.

There is something cold and chilling in the supports which pride and
philosophy alone can afford under the calamities of life. Madame
Roland had met with Christianity only as it appeared in the pomp and
parade of the Catholic Church, and in the openly-dissolute lives of
its ignorant or voluptuous priesthood. While her poetic temperament
was moved by the sublime conception of a God ruling over the world of
matter and the world of mind, revealed religion, as her spirit
encoun