The prisons of Paris were at that time terribly overcrowded and poorly cared for. It was the custom to confine people together without any regard to their character or lives. “On the same straw, and behind the same bars,” writes an inmate, “the Duchesse de Grammont and a handkerchief thief, Madame Roland and a wretch of the streets, a sister and a habitué of Salpétrière. The quarrelling and the obscenity were often terrible. But from the time of her arrival the chamber of Madame Roland became an asylum of peace in the bosom of this hell. If she descended into the court, her simple presence restored good order, and the unhappy women, on whom no known power had longer any influence, were restrained by the fear of displeasing her. She gave money to the most needy, and to all counsel, consolation, and hope.” Over many of the prisoners she exercised a kind of spell. “I experienced every day a new charm in listening to her,” says Comte Beugnot, a fellow-prisoner who, rare thing, escaped to write his memoirs; “less from what she said than from the magic of her manner.” “We were all attentive about her in a kind of stupefied admiration,” declares Rioffe. The next day after her arrival she was questioned for the first time; two days later she underwent a second examination. She had gone into the tribunal in her usual serene way. She came back deeply moved, her eyes wet. The interrogation was indeed most trying. The questions were so couched that in answering them honestly she condemned herself. Did she not entertain Brissot, Barbaroux, Buzot, Pétion, in conference? She must admit it, and explain the “conference” as she would, the Revolutionary tribunal used her admission as a confession of a criminal relation. A letter written to a person, whom she knew but slightly, and who had tried to secure a reading of her letters to the Convention, was used as evidence against her. It was useless to declare that she simply tried through this correspondent to reach the ear of the authorities and to obtain news of her friends. Her friends have been guillotined as traitors to the country, or are in open rebellion at this moment, conspiring for the destruction of the Republic. This person, if he were a patriot, would not have been in communication with them. If she were loyal, she would not want news of them. Let her try to explain and they accuse her of evasion. Roland’s office for creating public opinion was brought up. Was she not the directress of this pretended Bureau of Public Opinion, whose end was evidently to attack the doctrines in their purest source and to bring about the destruction of the Republic by sowing disorder? It was useless to explain the tame and harmless nature of this department of Roland’s work—a department established by public decree; for they accused her of outraging truth when she did, and told her that everybody knew that the correspondence carried on by the perfidious minister had for its principal object to bring the