Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/220

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MADAME ROLAND.

of her own; for Hume's History of England, and for Tacitus. To her regret she could not procure Mrs. Macaulay's History of the English Revolution, a work at that time greatly admired by French Republicans, and which she would fain have matched by a rival production in her mother tongue.

The rare beauty of Madame Roland's character and her winning manners could not fail to gain the hearts of all who came in contact with her. The gaoler's wife showed her every kindness, made her sit in her own room, where the air was purer, and where she was able to receive friends. Even the turnkeys, some most villainous of appearance, became humanised in her presence. Her faithful friends rallied round her, Bosc assuring her of the safety of her daughter, placed by him under the protection of a worthy, kind-hearted lady, in whose family she remained like one of her own children. To Champagneux, who had always admired her, she had never appeared so great as now "when she gave to the prison the dignity of a throne." The kindly Grandpré, appointed Inspector of Prisons by Roland to obviate some of their grossest abuses, proposed that she should address the Minister of Justice and the Minister of the Interior to protest against an imprisonment for which no cause had been assigned. She readily consented, more to vent her indignation than from any expectation of a favourable result.

Tranquil on her own account, she was racked by cruel anxieties concerning Roland and her proscribed friends, especially the one dearest of all. Roland had fled, and was now sheltered in the house of some ladies who lavished every care and kindness on him. Some of the Girondins were under arrest at their own homes, having remained in pledge of the good faith of