What must not these two keenly sensitive women have had to suffer at the epoch when France became a hell? They have each believed in the amelioration of the human species and the return of the golden age to earth, and what will their awakening be, after such alluring dreams? Men will be as unjust, as wicked, as cruel to the republican as to the queen. { 84} She, too, will be drenched with calumnies and outrages. They will insult her also in the most cowardly and ferocious manner. Under the very windows of her dungeon she will hear the hawkers crying: "Great visit of Père Duchesne to Citizeness Roland, in the Abbey prison, for the purpose of pumping her." The ignoble journalist will call her "old sack of the counter-revolution." He will say to her with his habitual oaths: "Weep for your crimes, old fright, before you expiate them on the scaffold!" The wife of Louis XVI. and the wife of Roland will die within twenty-three days of each other: one on October 16, the other on November 8, 1793. They will start from the same prison of the Conciergerie, to be led to the same Place Louis XV., to have their heads cut off by the blade of the same guillotine. The commoner who had been so jealous of the Queen, can no longer complain. If the lives of the two women have been different, they will at least have the same death; and the doer of the noble deeds of the régime of equality, the headsman, will make no distinction between the two victims, between the veritable sovereign, the Queen of France and Navarre, and the sovereign of a day, whom Père Duchesne, as insolent to one as to the other, will no longer speak of except under the sobriquet of Queen Coco.
MADAME ROLAND AT THE MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR.
Roland took the portfolio of the Interior, March 24, 1792, and installed himself and his wife in the ministerial residence, then occupying the site afterwards built on by the _Théâtre Italien_. This very beautiful and luxurious mansion had formerly been the controller's office, and both Calonne and Necker had lived in it. Madame Roland found no small pleasure in queening it under the gilded canopies of the old régime. It was not at all disagreeable to her to give dinners in the sumptuous banqueting hall erected by the elegant Calonne, nor did the austere admirer of the ancients set the black broth of Sparta before her guests.