. At last the president demanded of her that she should
reveal her husband's asylum. She proudly replied,

"I do not know of any law by which I can be obliged to violate the
strongest feelings of nature." This was sufficient, and she was
immediately condemned. Her sentence was thus expressed:

"The public accuser has drawn up the present indictment against
Jane Mary Phlippon, the wife of Roland, late Minister of the
Interior for having wickedly and designedly aided and assisted
in the conspiracy which existed against the unity and
indivisibility of the Republic, against the liberty and safety of
the French people, by assembling, at her house, in secret
council, the principal chiefs of that conspiracy, and by keeping
up a correspondence tending to facilitate their treasonable
designs. The tribunal, having heard the public accuser deliver
his reasons concerning the application of the law, condemns Jane
Mary Phlippon, wife of Roland, to the punishment of death."

She listened calmly to her sentence, and then, rising, bowed with
dignity to her judges, and, smiling, said,

"I thank you, gentlemen, for thinking me worthy of sharing the fate of
the great men whom you have assassinated. I shall endeavor to imitate
their firmness on the scaffold."

With the buoyant step of a child, and with a rapidity which almost
betokened joy, she passed beneath the narrow portal, and descended to
her cell, from which she was to be led, with the morning light, to a
bloody death. The prisoners had assembled to greet her on her return,
and anxiously gathered around her. She looked upon them with a smile
of perfect tranquillity, and, drawing her hand across her neck, made
a sign expressive of her doom. But a few hours elapsed between her
sentence and her execution. She retired to her cell, wrote a few words
of parting to her friends, played, upon a harp which had found its way
into the prison, her requiem, in tones so wild and mournful, that,
floating, in the dark hours of the night, through those sepulchral
caverns, they fell like unearthly music upon the despairing souls
there incarcerated.

The morning of the 10th of November, 1793, dawned gloomily upon Paris.
It was one of the darkest days of that reign of terror which, for so
long a period, enveloped France in its somber shades. The ponderous
gates of the court-yard of the Conciergerie opened that morning to a
long procession of c