innocence, however oppressed, should not assume the attitude of guilt.  I fear the eyes of no one, and do not wish to escape even those of my enemies.”  “You have much more character than many men,” they replied; “you can calmly await justice,” “Justice!” she cried; “if it existed, I should not be in your power!  I would go to the scaffold as calmly as if sent by iniquitous men.  I fear only guilt, and despise injustice and death!”

She has been deeply criticised for her letters written to her friend Buzot while she was in prison; yet it should be remembered that there was not the slightest chance of their meeting again, and, besides, the letters reveal the terrible struggle through which she had passed.  While in prison, her beauty, grace, and fearlessness won and humanized nearly all who came under her spell.  She was once unexpectedly set at liberty, but only to be sentenced to the lowest of prisons—­Sainte-Pelagie.  There, in the space of about one month, her memoirs, now among the French classics, were written.  At the Conciergerie, where the lowest criminals and the filthiest paupers were crowded into cells with the highest of the nobility, and where the cowardly Mme. du Barry spent her last hours, Mme. Roland, by her quiet dignity and patient serenity, commanded silence and respect, and calmness and peace replaced angry and pitiful wrangling.  The prisoners clung to her, crying and kissing her hand, while she spoke words of advice and consolation to the doomed women, who “looked upon her as a beneficent divinity.”  Her conduct under these circumstances alone is sufficient to keep alive her memory.  In the last days, she clung to and upheld most passionately her principles of liberty and moderation, and in her conversation with Beugnot it was evident that she had been the real inspiration in the Girondist party for all that was best and most uplifting.

The charge against her when before the bar of judgment of Fouquier-Tinville, the terrible prosecutor, consisted in her relation to the Girondists who had been condemned to death as traitors to the republic.  She met her death heroically, as became a woman who had lived bravely.  At the very last moment of her life, she offered consolation to fellow victims.  Her death was that of the greatest heroine of the Revolution, the climax of a life the one ambition of which had been to save her country and to shed her blood for it.  As she rode through the city in her pure white raiment, serenely radiant in her own innocence, she was the embodiment of all that was highest and purest in the Revolution—­one of the best and greatest women known to French history.  She stands out as a representative of the French Republic.