“As for me, I know how to wait patiently for the return of the reign of justice, or to undergo the last excesses of tyranny in such a way that my example shall not be vain. If I fear anything, it is that you may make imprudent efforts for me. My friend, it is by saving your country that you deliver me. I do not want my safety at its expense, but I shall die satisfied if I know you are working for your country. Death, suffering, sorrow, are nothing to me. I can defy all. Why, I shall live to my last hour without spending a single moment in unworthy agitation.”
She went over life in the Abbaye, and told him what she knew of her family and friends. Of Roland she said:
“The unfortunate Roland has been twenty days in two refuges in the houses of trembling friends, concealed from all eyes, more of a captive than I am myself. I have feared for his mind and his health. He is now in your neighborhood. Would that were true in a moral sense! I dare not tell you, and you alone can understand, that I was not sorry to be arrested.... I owe it to my jailers that I can reconcile duty and love. Do not pity me. People admire my courage, but they do not understand my joys. Thou who must feel them, savest their charm by the constancy of thy courage.”
One would believe it a quotation from a letter of Julie to Saint-Preux. The 3d of July she sent another letter:
“I received your letter of the 27th. I still hear your voice; I am a witness to your resolutions; I share the sentiments which animate you. I am proud of loving you and of being loved by you.... My friend, let us not so forget ourselves as to say evil of that virtue which is bought by great sacrifice, it is true, but which pays in its turn by priceless compensations. Tell me, do you know sweeter moments than those passed in the innocence and the charm of an affection that nature recognizes and that delicacy regulates; which honors duty for the privations that she imposes upon it and gathers strength in enduring them? Do you know a greater advantage than that of being superior to adversity and to death; of finding in the heart something to enjoy and to sweeten life up to the last sigh? Have you ever experienced better these effects than in the attachment which binds us, in spite of the contradictions of society and the horrors of oppression? I have told you that to it I owe my joy in my captivity. Proud of being persecuted in these times when character and honesty are proscribed, I would have supported it with dignity, even without you, but you make it sweet and dear to me. The wretches think to overwhelm me by putting irons upon me—senseless! What does it matter to me if I am here or there? Is not my heart always with me? To confine me in a prison—is it not to deliver me entirely to it? My company, it is my love! My occupation, it is to think of it!... If I must die, very well. I know what is best in life, and its duration would perhaps only force new sacrifices upon me. The most glorified instant of my existence, that in which I felt most deeply that exaltation of soul which rejoices in braving all clangers, was when I entered the Bastille that my jailers had chosen for me. I will not say that I went before them, but it is true that I did not flee them. I had not calculated on their fury reaching me, but I believed that if it did, it would give me an opportunity to serve Roland by my testimony, my constancy, and my firmness. I would be glad to sacrifice my life for him in order to win the right to give you my last sigh.”