There she was, calm as to her own fate, inexpressibly anxious concerning that of her country and her friends, when, on the 2nd of June, the familiar sounds of insurrection reached her in captivity. Marat himself that day sounded the tocsin to call the people to arms; Henriot, the ruffianly commander, was investing the Tuileries, and behold the Convention itself actually a prisoner in Paris!
After a feeble show of resistance, the Right and the Centre, cowed by Henriot's cannon, agreed to the expulsion of the twenty-two Girondins, who, to smooth matters, were only to be put under arrest at home. So fell the Gironde, and it is refreshing to find among the list of the proscribed the heroic name of Ducos, that martyr to friendship, who, when Marat would have saved him because of his extreme youth, scorned his mercy and cast in his lot with Fonfrède, be his fate what it might.
"Things are rarely what they seem," says Madame Roland in her Memoirs, "and the periods of my life that have been the sweetest were the reverse of what outsiders would imagine. Happiness, in fact, belongs to a state of feeling, and not to external circumstances." Circumstances were now at their darkest, but hidden in her heart she had a hive of honey. In reviewing her past life she had nothing with which to reproach herself; she had done her duty valiantly. In the very act of securing her husband's liberty she had sacrificed her own. From the beginning of their union all her faculties had been placed at his service, and, reinforcing his powers with hers, she had practically lifted him into the important position which had now ended in ruin. But in this marriage, "the ascendancy of twenty years' seniority, added to a
