She was shut up in prison at once.  She asked for books—­for Plutarch, and Thompson’s Seasons.  On the 24th of June she was liberated, and then suddenly rearrested.  This deception was more than cruel, it was infamous.  She was placed in the prison of St. Pelaige—­a filthy and miserable place.  The wife of the jailor pitied her and gave her a neat, upper apartment, and brought her books and flowers, and she was comparatively happy again.  It was in this prison that she wrote her own memoirs.  She usually kept a stout heart, but at times when thoughts of her husband and child came over her, she was overwhelmed with grief.

The chief Girondists now began to fall under the stroke of the guillotine, and her turn was quickly coming.  The day that her friend Brissot perished, she was transferred to the Conciergerie the prison which suggested this sketch of her to my mind.  I went over this prison, and the very apartment was pointed out to me in which Madame Roland was confined.  Here she spent her last days, and wretched days they were, indeed.  But she conducted herself nobly and courageously through all.  The mockery of a trial was held, and she wrote her own defense, a most eloquent production.  She was sentenced to death in twenty-four hours.  Twenty-two victims had just poured out their blood, and she was to follow their example.  A French writer speaks of her at that time as “full of attractions, tall, of an elegant figure, her physiognomy animated, but sorrow and long imprisonment had left traces of melancholy on her face that tempered her natural vivacity.  Something more than is usually found in the eyes of woman, beamed in her large, dark eyes, full of sweetness and expression.  She often spoke to me at the grate, with the freedom and courage of a great man.  This republican language falling from the lips of a pretty French woman, for whom the scaffold was prepared, was a miracle of the revolution.  We gathered attentively around her in a species of admiration and stupor.  Her conversation was serious, without being cold.  She spoke with a purity, a melody, and a measure which rendered her language a soul of music of which the ear never tired.  She spoke of the deputies who had just perished with respect, but without effeminate pity; reproaching them even for not having taken sufficiently strong measures.  Sometimes her sex had mastery, and we perceived that she had wept over the recollection of her daughter and husband.”

She was led out to execution on the 10th of November, on that place of blood—­La Concorde.  She was dressed in white, and inspired the multitudes who saw her with admiration.  Another victim accompanied her.  She exhorted him to ascend first, that his courage might not be shaken by witnessing her death.  She turned to the statue of Liberty, exclaiming, “Oh, Liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name.”  She was thirty-nine years of age, and though she ended her life thus young, she had achieved immortality.