Two rows of armed men extended from the doorway across the Rue de la Harpe to the carriage, waiting on the other side of the street. She looked about as she came out, at all this display of force, at the crowd of curious Parisian _badauds_ who watched the scene, and with conscious dignity she advanced “slowly considering the cowardly and mistaken troop.” It is a short five minutes’ walk from where Madame Roland lived to the prison of the Abbaye and she soon was within the walls.
Two days later, June 2d, the arrest of Buzot was decreed by the Convention. He was seized but escaped from his guards, and fled from Paris to Evreux, where he was well received by the department which believed that the Convention had been forced into its decree against the twenty-two. Roland in the meantime had reached Amiens. The three were never to see one another again. The cause which brought them together had separated them forever.
It was the morning of the first day of June, 1792, that Madame Roland was taken to the Abbaye. The imprisonment then begun lasted until November 8th, the day of her death. The record we have of her life during these five months is full and intimate.
Separated from her child, her husband in flight, her friends persecuted by the Commune, she herself only just off a sick-bed, confined in a prison which had been from the beginning of the Revolution a centre of riot and the floors of whose halls and courts were still warm with the blood of the massacre of September, the cries of _à la Guillotine_ following her from the street, it would not have been strange if her courage had failed, if she had paled before the fate which she knew in all probability awaited her. But from the beginning to the end of her long durance she showed a proud indifference to the result, an almost reckless audacity in braving her enemies, a splendid courage in suffering. She was serene, haughty, triumphant, a man, not a woman.
She declared that she would not exchange the moments which followed her entrance into the Abbaye for those which others would call the sweetest of her life. Indifferent to her surroundings, she sank into a revery, reviewing her past: there was nothing to make her blush, she felt, even if her heart was the scene of a powerful passion. She calculated the future and with pride and joy felt that she had the courage to accept her lot, to defy its rigors. “What can compare to a good conscience, a strong purpose,” she cries. There is nothing in her situation which is worth an instant of unrest. Her enemies shall not prevent her loving to the last, and if they destroy her she will go from life as one enters upon repose. And this high serenity endured even when, twenty-four days later, she suffered one of the most cruel and unnecessary outrages of the Revolution. On June 24th, she was freed. Hurrying home to the Rue de la Harpe, she flew into the house “like a bird,” calling a gay good-day to her concierge. She had not mounted four steps of her staircase before two men who had entered at her heels called: