Marat professes to have this from a deputy who had visited her. It is abusive and false, but it is well to remember that a year before Madame Roland had not hesitated to believe and repeat equally ridiculous stories of Marie Antoinette. Indeed, Madame Roland had the same place in the minds of the patriots of the fall of 1792, that the Queen had a year before in the minds of the Gironde. “We have destroyed royalty,” says _Père Duchesne_, “and in its place we have raised a tyranny still more odious. The tender other half of the virtuous Roland has France in leading-strings to-day, as once the Pompadours and the Du Barrys. She receives every evening at the hour of the bats in the same place where Antoinette plotted a new Saint Bartholomew with the Austrian committee. Like the former Queen, Madame Coco (the name _Père Duchesne_ usually gives Madame Roland), stretched on a sofa, surrounded by her wits, reasons blindly on war, politics, supplies. It is in this gambling-den that all the announcements posted up are manufactured.” In December she was even obliged to appear before the Convention. Roland had been accused of being in correspondence with certain eminent _émigrés_ then in England, and to be plotting with them the re-establishment of the King. One Viard was said to be the go-between, and to have had a meeting with Madame Roland. Roland was summoned to answer the charge and, having responded, demanded that his wife be heard. Her appearance made a sensation in the Convention, and she cleared herself so well of the charges that she was loudly applauded, and was accorded the honors of the session. The spectators alone were silent and Marat remarked, “See how still the people are; they are wiser than we.” At the beginning of the year 1793, the danger of mob violence was added to the incessant slanders by Hébert and Marat. “Every day,” says Champagneux, who was then employed by the minister, “a new danger appeared. It seemed as if each night would be the last of her life, as if an army of assassins would profit by the darkness to come and murder her as well as her husband. The most sinister threats came from all sides. She was urged not to sleep at the Hôtel of the Interior.” At first the alarm was so great on her account that she yielded to her friends’ wishes, but she hated the idea of flight. One evening the danger was such that every one insisted on her disguising herself and leaving the hotel. She consented, but the wig they brought did not fit, and in a burst of impatience she flung the costume, wig and all, into the corner and declared she was ashamed of herself; that if any one wanted to assassinate her, he might do it there; that she ought to give an example of firmness and she would. And from that day she never left the hotel until Roland resigned on January 22d.