dences, and which tend no less to offer snares to men
through their virtues than their crimes. Death is everywhere: but,
whatever the fate may be, virtue alone never repents. Beneath the
dungeons of the Conciergerie Madame Roland remembered that night with
satisfaction. If Robespierre recalled it in his power, this memory must
have fallen colder on his heart than the axe of the headsman.

BOOK IX.

I.

After the dispersion of the Constituent Assembly, the mission of M. and
Madame Roland having terminated, they quitted Paris. This woman, who had
just left the centre of faction and business, returned to La Platiere to
resume the cares of her rustic household and the pruning of her vines.
But she had quaffed of the intoxicating cup of the Revolution. The
movement in which she had participated for a moment impelled her still,
though at a distance. She carried on a correspondence with Robespierre
and Buzot; political and formal with Robespierre, pathetic and tender
with Buzot. Her mind, her soul, her heart, all recalled it. Then took
place between herself and her husband a deliberation, apparently
impartial, in order to decide whether they should bury themselves in the
country, or should return to Paris. But the ambition of the one, and the
ardent desire of the other, had decided, unknown to, and before, either.
The most trifling pretext was sufficient for their impatience. In the
month of December they were again installed in Paris.

It was the period when all their friends arrived. Petion had just been
elected _maire_, and was creating a republic in the _commune_.
Robespierre, excluded from the Legislative Assembly by the law which
forbade the re-election of the members of the Constituent Assembly,
found a tribune in the Jacobins. Brissot assumed Buzot's place in the
new Assembly, and his reputation, as a public writer and statesman,
brought around him and his doctrines the young Girondists, who had
arrived from their department, with the ardour of their age, and the
impulse of a second revolutionary tide. They cast themselves, on their
arrival, into the places which Robespierre, Buzot, Laclos, Danton, and
Brissot had marked out for them.

Roland, the friend of all these men, but in the back ground, and
concealed in their shadow, had one of those peculiar reputations, the
more potent over opinion, as it made but little display: it was spoken
of as though an antique virtue, beneath the simple appearance of a
r