It was only when she used the rhetoric ready to her hand that she stooped to verbal violence; et encore!  References to the banishment of Aristides and the hemlock of Socrates had become toy daggers and bending swords in the hands of her compatriots, and she is hardly to be accused of violence in brandishing those weapons.  Sometimes, refuse rhetoric being all too ready, she takes it on her pen, in honest haste, as though it were honest speech, and stands committed to such a phrase as this:  “The dregs of the nation placed such a one at the helm of affairs.”

But her manner was not generally to write anything but a clear and efficient French language.  She never wrote for the love of art, but without some measure of art she did not write; and her simplicity is somewhat altered by that importunate love of the Antique.  In “Bleak House” there is an old lady who insisted that the name “Mr. Turveydrop,” as it appeared polished on the door-plate of the dancing master, was the name of the pretentious father and not of the industrious son—­albeit, needless to say, one name was common to them.  With equal severity I aver that when Madame Roland wrote to her husband in the second person singular she was using the tu of Rome and not the tu of Paris.  French was indeed the language; but had it been French in spirit she would (in spite of the growing Republican fashion) have said vous to this “homme eclaire, de moeurs pures, a qui l’on ne peut reprocher que sa grande admiration pour les anciens aux depens des modernes qu’il meprise, et le faible de trop aimer a parler de lui.”  There was no French tu in her relations with this husband, gravely esteemed and appraised, discreetly rebuked, the best passages of whose Ministerial reports she wrote, and whom she observed as he slowly began to think he himself had composed them.  She loved him with a loyal, obedient, and discriminating affection, and when she had been put to death, he, still at liberty, fell upon his sword.

This last letter was written at a moment when, in order to prevent the exposure of a public death, Madame Roland had intended to take opium in the end of her cruel imprisonment.  A little later she chose that those who oppressed her country should have their way with her to the last.  But, while still intending self-destruction, she had written to her husband:  “Forgive me, respectable man, for disposing of a life that I had consecrated to thee.”  In quoting this I mean to make no too-easy effect with the word “respectable,” grown grotesque by the tedious gibe of our own present fashion of speech.

Madame Roland, I have said, was twice inarticulate; she had two spaces of silence, one when she, pure and selfless patriot, had heard her condemnation to death.  Passing out of the court she beckoned to her friends, and signified to them her sentence “by a gesture.”  And again there was a pause, in the course of her last days, during which her speeches had not been few, and had been spoken with her beautiful voice unmarred; “she leant,” says Riouffe, “alone against her window, and wept there three hours.”