“My friends and I kept our hope of a Republic in France for a long time,” he writes; “even when everything seemed to show us that the enlightened class, either through prejudice or guided by experience and reason, refused this form of government. My friends did not give up this hope even at the period when those who governed the Republic were the most vicious and the vilest of men, and when the French people could be least counted on.... For myself, I avow that I despaired several times of the success of this project so dear to my heart. Before my expulsion from the Convention, not wishing to betray my conscience or my principles, I was on the point, several times, of retiring from a position where all the dangers, even that of dishonoring my memory, left me no hope of doing good; where even our obstinate and useless resistance did nothing but increase the error of good citizens on the true situation of the National Convention. A kind of self-love which was honored by the name of duty kept me at my post in spite of myself. My friends desired it and I stayed.... It is useless to deny it—the majority of the French people sighed after royalty and the constitution of 1790. There were only a few men with noble and elevated souls who felt worthy of having been born republicans, and whom the example of America had encouraged to follow the project of a similar institution in France, who thought in good faith to naturalize it in the country of frivolities and inconstancy. The rest—with the exception of a crowd of wretches without intelligence, without education, and without resources, who vomited injuries on the monarchy as in six months they will on the Republic, without knowing any reason why—the rest did not desire it, wanted only the constitution of 1791, and talked of the true republicans as one talks of extremely sincere fools. Have the events of the 20th of June, the suffering, the persecution, the assassinations which have followed them, changed the opinion of the majority in France? No; but in the cities they pretend to be _sans-culottes_; those that do not are guillotined. In the country the most unjust requisitions are obeyed, because those who do not obey them are guillotined; on all sides the young go to war, because those who do not go are guillotined. The guillotine explains everything. It is the great weapon of the French government. This people is republican because of the guillotine. Examine closely, go into families, search the hearts if they dare open to you; you will read there hate against the government that fear imposes upon them. You will see there that all desires, all hopes, turn towards the constitution of 1791.” [Illustration: The prison, called the Abbaye, where Madame Roland passed the first twenty-four days of her imprisonment. ]