Another woman--the Queen--suffered at that time, and suffered without the
command of language, the exactitude of phrase, the precision of
judgement, the proffer of prophecy, the explicit sense of Innocence and
Moderation oppressed in her person. These were Madame Roland's; but the
other woman, without eloquence, without literature, and without any
judicial sense of history, addresses no mere congregation of readers.
Marie Antoinette's unrecorded pangs pass into the treasuries of the
experience of the whole human family. All that are human have some part
there; genius itself may lean in contemplation over that abyss of woe;
the great poets themselves may look into its distances and solitudes.
Compassion here has no measure and no language. Madame Roland speaks
neither to genius nor to complete simplicity; Marie Antoinette holds her
peace in the presence of each, dumb in her presence.

Madame Roland had no dumbness of the spirit, as history, prompted by her
own musical voice, presents her to a world well prepared to do her
justice. Of that justice she had full expectation; justice here, justice
in the world--the world that even when universal philosophy should reign
would be inevitably the world of mediocrity; justice that would come of
enlightened views; justice that would be the lesson learnt by the nations
widely educated up to some point generally accessible; justice well
within earthly sight and competence. This confidence was also her
reward. For what justice did the Queen look? Here it is the "abyss that
appeals to the abyss."

Twice only in the life of Madame Roland is there a lapse into silence,
and for the record of these two poor failures of that long, indomitable,
reasonable, temperate, explicit utterance which expressed her life and
mind we are debtors to her friends. She herself has not confessed them.