"Garat! to you I report this insult. It is due to your cowardice; and if still worse things should happen, it is on your head I invoke the vengeance of heaven. . . . Yes, I know what events usually follow on those outrageous provocations. What matter? I have long been ready. In any case, accept this farewell which I send to prey on your heart like a vulture."
While still sore from the revolting infamies of the Père Duchesne there came to her the sweetest consolation fate could still vouchsafe, a letter from Buzot. She replied to it on the 22nd of June.[1]
"How often have I not read it, pressed it to my heart, covered it with kisses! . . . I felt calm and resolute on coming here, not without hopes for the defenders of liberty; but when I heard the decree of arrest against the Two-and-twenty I cried—My country is lost!—I have suffered tortures till assured of your safety. . . . Continue your noble efforts, my friend; Brutus despaired too soon of his country's safety on the plains of Philippi. As long as a single determined republican is free, he must and can be useful.
"As for me, I shall calmly await the return of justice, or endure the last excesses of tyranny in such a way that my example may not prove useless. What I feared most was that you might take some imprudent steps on my account. My friend, it is by saving France
- ↑ The four letters written, during her imprisonment, to Buzot, and published for the first time in 1864 by M. Dauban in his Étude sur Madame Roland, came to light in November 1868, when they were sold among a bundle of time-yellowed papers—the unpublished Memoirs of Louvet and Pétion, a copy of the Memoirs of Buzot, a tragedy of Salles, Notes and Memoranda by Barbaroux. The whole lot went for fifty francs. These letters, penned for one only, written without the faintest thought of the public, illuminate with a fresh light the heart of the noble woman whose last confession they were.
