The saddest phase of this dark side of her imprisonment was the growing conviction that she and the patriots had been wrong. At last she saw what she did when in 1791 she spurned the Assembly. She acknowledged now that she would have disdained the members of the National Assembly less, if she could have had an idea of their successors. She had learned to regret Mirabeau, whose death then had seemed to her well both for his glory and for the cause of liberty. “The counterpoise of a man of that force was necessary to oppose the crowd of puppets and to preserve us from the domination of the bandits.” She had learned that men may profess, but when their interests and ideals are in opposition it is the former which wins. She had discovered, at last, that to demand speedy and immediate regeneration of society is to break the laws of the universe; that to take away from men what the ages have given them is simply to restore them to the primitive state of teeth and claws, to let loose the passions the centuries have tamed. She saw that in politics, in society, in individual relations, the ideal is the inspiration; the realization, the laborious effort of centuries. She acknowledged that in Plutarch she glided over the storms of the Republic, “forgot the death of Socrates, the exile of Aristides, the condemnation of Phocion.” She was willing at last to say with Sully, “C’est très difficile de faire le bien de son pays”; to confess that “if it is permitted to politics to do good through the wicked, or to profit by their excesses, it is infinitely dangerous to give them the honor of the one, or not to punish them for the other.” Under the pressure of all these woes she sometimes felt her resolution weaken. What wonder that when she heard, in October, that Buzot and his friends, now escaped to the Gascogne, were being tracked so closely that their arrest was sure, she determined to kill herself? “You know the malady the English call _heart-break_,” she wrote; “I am attacked hopelessly by it and I have no desire to delay its effects.” It seemed to her now that it was weak to await the blow of her tyrants—their _coup de grâce_ she called it—when she could give it to herself. Why should she allow them to see how bravely she could die—they who were incapable of understanding her courage? Three months ago a noble public death might have served for something. To-day it was pure loss. All this she wrote to Bosc. She consented, however, to accept his decision as to whether she ought or not to take her own life, charging him to weigh the question as if it were impersonal. This letter to Bosc bears the date of October 25th. On October 31st, the condemned Girondins were beheaded. On November 1st, Madame Roland, who because of Bosc’s arguments had abandoned her resolution to suicide, was conveyed to the Conciergerie, a prison which in those days was but a transfer to the cart which led to the guillotine.