Madame Roland was also arrested.  Her husband had fled from Paris.  She was consigned to the prison of St. Pelagie, and afterwards, after suffering the cruel mockery of a release, she was imprisoned in the Conciergerie.  This prison was the abiding place of assassins, thieves, and all impurity.  It was the anteroom to the scaffold, for incarceration there was an infallible symptom of death.  The inmates were crowded into rooms with merciless disregard of their relative characters or antecedents.  Madame Roland was first associated with the duchess of Grammont, with a female pick-pocket, with a nun, with an insane woman, and with a street-walker.  She finally procured a cell to herself, which she made bloom with flowers.  The prison was populous with the most degraded of her sex.  Yet she asserted here the same marvelous ascendancy which she had always possessed over her associates.  The obscene outcries of lost women died away when she approached.  Her cell was an ark of safety for any dove seeking refuge from that deluge of human sin.  When she went into the courtyard the lost of her own sex gathered around her with reverence, as around a tutelary and interceding angel, the same women who inflicted upon Madame Du Barry, that princess of their caste, every torment which the malice of their sex could inspire.  Inmates and visitors crowded to the door of her cell, and she spoke to them through its iron bars with eloquence, which increased as inspiring death drew near, of liberty, country, equality, and of better days for France, but when they went away she would look through her window to the sky, and, thinking of her hunted husband and sequestered little daughter, cry and moan like the simplest wife and mother.  Then she would send by surreptitious conveyance, letters to refugee statesmen, which discussed the political situation as calmly as if written upon the work-table of a secure and peaceful home.  Calumny now busied itself to defile her.  Hebert, vilest of editors, flung the ordure of Pere Duchesne, vilest of newspapers, upon this spotless woman, soon to be a saint, and sent the newsmen to cry the disgusting charges under her prison windows, so that she heard them rendered in all the villainies of a language whose under-drains have sources of vileness filthier than any other speech of man.  She did not fear death, but she did fear calumny.  She had never delighted in any public display of her enormous intellectual powers, and she had never made any such display.  She had fixed the sentiment of Lyons by an anonymous newspaper article, of which sixty thousand copies had been bought in one day.  She had written to the king a letter which drove her husband from power, and which, when read by the people, compelled the king to restore him.  She had written a dispatch to the pope, claiming rights for certain French in Rome, in which the sanctity of his office and the dignity of her country was respected, appealed to, and asserted.  It is said that the state papers