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.
From this pandemonium the concierge succeeded in saving her for a time, giving her a large chamber near her own, where she even had a piano; but the inspectors, once aware of the favor, ordered her back into the noisy corridor. Even there, however, she had her pleasures,—her flowers and her books. The first Bosc supplied her; the second she bought, or begged from her friends. She had Thompson, Shaftesbury, an English dictionary, Tacitus, and Plutarch. She bought pencils and drew a little every day; altogether it was a busy life. Her day was arranged regularly. In the morning she studied English, the essay of Shaftesbury on virtue, and Thompson; after that she drew until noon. Then she had serious work, for, conscious that her imprisonment might end in her death, she resolved at its outset to set down as fully as she should have time to, the facts in the political life of Roland, and to explain her own relations to him. It is from the material that she was able to write in this five months and get to her friends, that most of what we know of her life comes.
The first undertaken was her _Historical Notes_, written at the Abbaye. These she did, so rapidly, she says, and with such pleasure, that in less than a month she had manuscript for a volume. It was a summary of her public life, and an estimate on the people she had known during it. She had, herself, a very good opinion of the production: “I wrote it with my natural freedom and energy, with frank abandon and with the ease of one who is free from all private considerations, with pleasure in painting what I had felt and seen, and, finally, with the confidence that in any case it would be my moral and political testament. It had the originality which circumstances lent it, and the merit of reflections born from passing events, and the freshness which belongs to such an origin.”