The manuscript was confided to Champagneux, who was still in the Department of the Interior, but he, arrested, confided it to a person who, frightened lest it should fall into the hands of the inspectors, threw it into the fire. “I should have preferred to have been thrown there myself,” said Madame Roland, when she heard of this disaster.
Not all of the _Historical Notes_ were destroyed, however, the account of her own and her husband’s arrest, of her first days at the Abbaye, and a brief sketch of their official life being saved.
It was more than a month after she was imprisoned at Sainte Pélagie before she determined to do over the task. The new undertaking included a series of portraits and anecdotes drawn from her political life, an account of her second arrest, and of the first and second ministries. At the same time that she wrote this, she prepared her private Memoirs,—a detailed history of her life up to 1777,—and notes on the time between her marriage and the Revolution. She intended to add to her Memoirs the story of her relations with Buzot, giving the origin and progress of her passion, but she was never able to finish it.
To this literary budget, already large, she afterwards added several short manuscripts,—a set of “Last Thoughts,” a number of letters, and a comment on the accusation made by the Mountain against the Gironde, that it was guilty of a conspiracy against the unity and the indivisibility of the Republic, and the liberty and safety of the French people.
Almost all of this matter was given to Bosc, who, thanks to the concierge of Sainte Pélagie, was allowed to see her twice a week, up to the middle of October. But Bosc was proscribed later, and obliged to flee. Unwilling to trust the treasures he held to another, he hid the manuscripts in the crevice of a rock in the depths of the forest of Montmorency, where they remained eight months. Later, these papers were given to Eudora. They remained in the family until given to the Bibliothèque Nationale, where they now are.
The difficulties under which she wrote were, of course, great. It was essential that she should elude her guardians. She had no notes. She was surrounded by a ribald and noisy company. But these disadvantages only acted as spurs. She took delight in carrying on this forbidden work under the eyes of her persecutors. So rapidly did she write that in twenty-four days she produced two hundred pages of manuscript, including all the early part of her Memoirs. The words seemed to flow from her pen. The bulky manuscript of seven hundred pages, preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale, is a marvel of neatness and firmness. The grayish pages are filled evenly from margin to margin in her beautiful characteristic hand, and there is scarcely a blot or erasure, scarcely a correction, save those made by Bosc, who published the first edition of the Memoirs in 1795.