In the documents which Madame Roland addressed from her prison to “posterity” there are frequent allusions to her passion for one whose name she concealed. In the collection of letters she left for friends, under the head of “Last Thoughts,” is a passionate and exultant farewell addressed to one whom “I dare not name, to one whom the most terrible of passions has not kept from respecting the barriers of virtue.” She bids him not to mourn that she precedes him to a place where “fatal prejudices, arbitrary conventions, hateful passions, and all kinds of tyranny are ended, where one day they can love each other without crime, and where nothing will prevent their being united.” That Buzot was meant, remained a secret of the family for seventy years after Madame Roland’s death. Her biographers frequently speculated as to whom the object of her passion was. Lairtullier, writing in 1840, quotes her portrait of Barbaroux and apostrophizes her thus: “Femme, voilá ton secret trahi.” Servan and Vergniaud have been named as possibly her hero. The truth came out in 1864, when a _bouquiniste_ of the Quai Voltaire advertised for sale a quantity of French Revolution papers among which were mentioned five letters of Madame Roland to Buzot. He had bought them from a young man whose father was an amateur of _bouquins_. Evidently they had been wandering among lovers of old papers since the day they had been taken from the dead body of Buzot. Those letters offered for sale were bought by the Bibliothèque Nationale. They paint, as no published letters, the exultation of love, its power to lift the soul above all ordinary influences, free it from accepted laws and conventionalities, to strengthen it until it glories in suffering, if by that suffering it can yield itself to love. They show, too, how noble and pure a conception of such a passion Madame Roland had. It must not interfere with duty. Neither Roland must be betrayed, nor the country neglected; if either happened, the crown of their passion would be broken. Its glory and joy was not in abandon, but in endurance. It was three weeks after she was confined in the Abbaye before she heard from Buzot. Her first letter to him bears the date of June 22d. Buzot was at that time at Evreux, exhorting the people to take part in a movement of federalism to arouse the departments to act against the usurpation of Paris. She wrote in response to the first letters from him which her friends had been able to get to her.