There is a much more natural and simple side to Madame Roland’s five months in prison than this one of exaltation and endurance, which, when viewed apart, sometimes becomes a little fatiguing. If one regards only the heroine, her self-sufficiency is a bit irritating at moments, much as one must admire it. It is the arrangement of her life, her occupations, her amusements, which appeal most to ordinary minds, and which perhaps are a better index to her real force of character than her exalted periods and professions. When first taken to the Abbaye she was obliged to be alone in her cell, to take a tiny room with dirty walls and a heavily grated window. It opened on a disagreeable street, and below she could hear by night the cries of the sentry; by day, the hawking of _Père Duchesne’s_ journal, and the rudeness of the market people, cries sometimes directed against herself. Nevertheless she decorated the little cell so gayly with flowers and books that her jailers called it Flora’s Pavilion. At the Abbaye about fifty cents a day were allowed each prisoner for his expenses, although he could spend more if he had it. Madame Roland decided to amuse herself by making an experiment,—to see to what she could reduce her fare. Bread and water was served her for her _déjeuner_; for dinner (one hundred years ago the French dined at noon) she ate only one kind of meat, with a salad; in the evening, a little vegetable, but no dessert. After a time she got on without wine or beer. “This régime,” she explained, “had a moral end, and as I should have had as much aversion as contempt for a useless economy, I commenced by giving a sum to the poor, in order to have the pleasure, when eating my dry bread in the morning, of thinking that the poor souls would owe it to me that they could add something to their dinners.” When she went to Sainte Pélagie, she found her life a little different. There the State gave nothing in money for the prisoners, who even paid for their beds. All that was furnished them was a pound and a half of bread and a dish of beans each day. She made arrangements with the concierge of the prison to furnish her meals which were about as simple as at the Abbaye. The prison itself she found most disagreeable. In fact, Sainte Pélagie, which exists to-day, though condemned to destruction, is the most gloomy and forbidding building in Paris. Its mere presence in the quarter where it stands gives a dreary and hopeless air to the street. The inmates of the prison at the period when Madame Roland was confined there were of such a character that she was subjected to the most disgusting annoyances. In the corridor from which her cell opened, their rooms separated from one and another only by thin partitions, were numbers of abandoned and criminal women. So obscene and revolting were they that she rarely left her room, though she could not shut out their noise.