was but one resource which could have consoled her for the social
inequalities which bruised her vanity and her pride. That resource
would have been religion. Nothing but an ideal of humility could have
appeased the interior revolts of this soul of fire. To such a woman,
what is lacking is heaven. Earth, no matter what happens, can give her
nothing but deceptions. The only moment of her life when she felt
herself really happy was that when she enjoyed the supreme good, peace
of heart. Of all parts of her Memoirs, the most pure and touching are
those she devotes to her recollections of the convent. One might think
that the author of _Rolla_ had remembered them when he described in
such penetrating terms the mystic poetry of the cloister, and the
regrets often engendered by the loss of faith in the minds and hearts
of people who have become unbelievers.
The little Philipon, being in her twelfth year, asked to be sent to a
convent, in order to prepare better for her first communion. She was
placed with the Ladies of the Congregation, rue Neuve-Saint-Etienne, in
the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, near Sainte-Pelagie, her future prison: "How
I pressed my dear mamma in my arms at the moment of parting {52} from
her for the first time! I was stifled, overwhelmed; but I obeyed the
voice of God, and crossed the threshold of the cloister, offering Him
with tears the greatest sacrifice that I could make. The first night I
spent at the convent was agitated: I was no longer under the paternal
roof. I felt that I was far from that good mother who was surely
thinking of me with tenderness. There was a feeble light in the room
where I had been put to bed, with four other children of my own age; I
rose quietly and went to the window. The moonlight permitted me to see
the garden upon which it looked. The most profound silence reigned; I
listened to it, so to say, with a sort of respect; great trees cast
their gigantic shadows here and there, and promised a safe refuge for
tranquil meditation. I lifted my eyes to the pure and serene sky, and
thought I felt the presence of the Divinity, who smiled at my sacrifice
and already offered me its recompense in the peace of a celestial
abode. Delicious tears flowed slowly down my cheeks; I reiterated my
vows with a holy transport, and I enjoyed the slumber of the elect."
As if in these silent cloisters, which she crossed slowly so as to
enjoy their solitude more fully, she had a presentiment of the storms
in her destiny and her heart, she sometimes stopped beside a tomb on
which was engraven the eulogy of a holy maiden. "She is happy!" she
said to herself with a sigh. While she was in prison she remembered
with emotion a novice's taking the veil: "I experience yet the {53}
thrill caused by her faintly tremulous voice when she chanted
melodiously the customary versicle: '_Elegi_: Here I have chosen my
abode, and I will not depart from it forever.' I have not forgotten
the notes of this little air; I can repeat them as exactly as if I had
heard them yesterday."
Unhappily, religious ideas were soon to undergo a change in the mind of
the future Madame Roland. Returning to the paternal dwelling, she was
badly brought up there; her mother let her read everything, even
_Candide_. Voltaire, Helvetius, Diderot, had no secrets for this young
girl. Extreme disorder and confusion in mind and heart were the
result. When she had the misfortune to lose her mother at the age of
twenty-one, the book in which she sought consolation was the _Nouvelle
Heloise_. Jean-Jacques became her god. "It seems," she says, "as if
he were my natural aliment and the interpreter of the sentiment I had
already, and which he alone knew how to explain to me.... To have the
whole of Jean-Jacques," she says again, "to be able to consult him
incessantly, to enlighten and elevate one's self with him at all times
of life, is a felicity which can only be tasted by adoring him as I
did." Such reading robbed her of faith. It made her a free-thinker
and a bluestocking. It inspired her with an unhealthy ambition,
sullied her imagination, and troubled the peace of her heart. It
deprived her of that moral delicacy, lacking which, even virtue itself
loses its charms. She was no longer anything but a young {54} girl,
well-conducted but not pure, honest but shameless.
Was not a day coming when, a prisoner and on the point of getting into
the fatal cart, she would throw off the terrible anxieties of her
situation in order to imitate the impurities of the _Confessions_ of
Jean-Jacques, and retrace indecent details with complacency? Do not
seek in her that flower of innocence which is the young girl's grace.
The charming puritan does not commit great faults, but she has
astonishing licenses of thought and speech. For her, Louvet's
_Faublas_ is "one of those charming romances known to persons of taste,
in which the graces of imagination ally themselves to the tone of
philosophy." Is not this woman, who begins her life like a saint and
ends it as a pupil of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the symbol of
that troubled eighteenth century which opened in fidelity to religious
faith and closed in the depths of the abyss of incredulity? The
ravages caused by bad reading in the soul of this young girl explain
the catastrophes of the entire century.
From the time when she replaced the Gospels by the _Contrat Social_ and
the _Imitation of Jesus Christ_ by the _Nouvelle Heloise_, there was no
longer anything simple or natural remaining in the young philosopher.
All her thoughts and actions became declamatory. There was something
theatrical in her attitudes and gestures, and even in the sound of her
voice. Her speech was rhythmical, cadenced, marked {55} by a special
accent. Even her private letters often resemble the amplifications of
rhetoric rather than the effusions of friendship. One might say that
their author had a presentiment that they would be printed. She wrote
to Mademoiselle Sophie Cannet, January 3, 1776: "In any case, burn
nothing. Though my letters were one day to be read by all the world, I
would not hide the only monuments of my weakness, and my sentiments."
Monuments of weakness--is not the expression worthy of the bombast of
the time?
Not finding love, Mademoiselle Philipon married philosophically. Her
union bears a striking imitation to that of Heloise with M. de Volmar.
"Looking her destiny peacefully and tenderly in the face, greatly moved
but not infatuated," she united herself to a man whom she esteemed but
did not love. This was Roland de la Platiere, who was descended from
an ancient and very honorable middle class family. Though not rich, he
was at least comfortably well off. "Well educated, honest, simple in
his tastes and manners, he fulfilled his duties as inspector of
manufactures in a notable way. The marriage was celebrated on February
4, 1780. Roland was forty-six years old, while his wife was not yet
twenty-six. Thin, bald, careless in his dress, the husband was not at
all an ideal person. It had taken him five years to declare his
passion, and this hesitation, as his wife was to write thirteen years
later, "left not a vestige of illusion in his sentiments." "I have
often felt," {56} says she, "that there was no similarity between us.
If we lived in retirement, I spent many painful hours; if we mingled in
society, I was loved by persons among whom I perceived there were some
who might affect me too much; I plunged into labor with my husband....
It was a long time before I gained courage to contradict him."
M. Roland was sent to Amiens, where his wife presented him with a
daughter, whom she nursed, and afterwards brought up with the utmost
tenderness and devotion. In 1784, he was summoned to Lyons, where he
found himself once more in his native region. Thenceforward he spent
two of the winter months in Lyons, and the remainder of the year on his
paternal domain, the Close of Platiere, two leagues from Villefranche,
surrounded by woods and vineyards, and opposite the mountains of
Beaujolais. While her husband went to take possession of his new post,
Madame Roland, not yet a republican, remained a few weeks in Paris in
order to obtain, if possible, the patent of nobility so ardently
desired by the family. Her solicitations proved unsuccessful, and the
married pair, despairing of becoming nobles, consoled themselves by a
frank avowal of democracy.
Up to the time of the Revolution, Madame Roland's life glided
peacefully away without any remarkable incidents. In the Close of
Platiere, which she calls her dovecot, she appears as a good
housekeeper who looks after everything, from the cellar to the garret;
{57} who plays the doctor among the poor villagers; who is delighted to
find in nature a savor of frank and free rusticity. The life she leads
is not merely honest, but edifying. She is very careful at this period
to hide her philosophy. She writes to Bosc, one of her friends,
February 9, 1785: "My brother-in-law, whose disposition is extremely
gentle and sensitive, is also very religious; I leave him the
satisfaction of thinking that the dogmas are as evident to me as they
appear to him, and my exterior actions are such as become the mother of
a family out in the country, who is bound to edify everybody. As I was
very devout in my early youth, I know my prayers as well as my
philosophy, and I prefer to make use of my first erudition." She wrote
again to Bosc, October 12, 1785: "I have hardly touched a pen for a
month, and I think I am acquiring some of the inclinations of the beast
whose milk refreshes me; I am extremely _asinine_, and I busy myself
with all the petty cares of the _hoggish_ country life. I make
preserved pears that are delicious; we dry grapes and plums; we wash
and make up linen; we have white wine for breakfast, and we lie down on
the grass to rest; we follow the vintagers; we repose in the woods and
fields."
Before looking at the female politician, let us glance once more at the
woman in private life, the charitable, devoted, honorable mother of a
family, such as she paints herself in a letter of November 10, 1786:
"From the corner of my fire, at eleven {58} o'clock, after a quiet
night and the various morning cares, my husband at his desk, my little
girl knitting, and I chatting with one and superintending the other's
work, enjoying the happiness of being snugly in the bosom of my dear
little family, writing to a friend, while the snow is falling on so
many wretches weighed down by poverty and sorrow, I am touched with
compassion for their fate; I turn back sweetly to my own, and at this
moment I count as nothing the annoyances of relations or circumstances
which seem occasionally to mar its felicity."
Alas, why did not Madame Roland stay in her modest country-house to dry
her grapes and plums, to superintend her washing, mend her linen, and
spread out in her garret the fruits for winter use? Were not
obscurity, repose, peace of heart, better for her than that fictitious
glory which was to pass so quickly and end upon the scaffold? One
might say that before quitting nature, that great consoler which calms
and does not betray, in order to plunge herself into the odious world
of politics, which spoils and embitters the most beautiful souls, she
experiences a certain vague regret for the sweet and tranquil joys
which her folly was about to cause her to renounce forever.
"The weather is delightful," wrote Madame Roland, May 17, 1790; "the
country has changed almost beyond recognition in only six days; the
vines and walnuts were as black as they are in winter, but a stroke of
the magic wand does not alter the aspect of {59} things more quickly
than the heat of a few fine days has done; everything turns green and
leafs out; a soft verdure is visible where there was nothing but the
dull and faded tint of torpor and inaction. I could easily forget
public affairs and men's controversies here; content to arrange the
manor, to see my fowls brood, and take care of my rabbits, I would care
nothing more about the revolutions of empires. But, as soon as I am in
the city, the poverty of the people and the insolence of the rich rouse
my hatred of injustice and oppression: I have no longer any soul or
desire except for the triumph of great truths and the success of our
regeneration."
The die is cast. The daughter of Philipon the engraver is about to
become a political woman. The hour is come when this great actress,
who has long known her part, is at last going on the stage. She has a
presentiment of the risk she is running in assuming a task which is
beyond her sex. But, like soldiers who love danger for danger's sake,
and prefer the emotions of the battle-field to garrison life, she will
joyfully quit her province and throw herself into the seething furnace
of Paris. Even though she is to meet persecution and death at the end
of her new career, she will not recoil. A short but agitated life will
seem better to her than a long and fortunate existence without violent
emotions. A clear sky pleases her no longer. She is homesick for
storms and lightning flashes.
{60}
VI.
MADAME ROLAND'S ENTRANCE ON THE SCENE.
The hour of the Revolution had struck, and, ambitious, unbelieving,
full of disdain for the leading classes, full of confidence in her own
superiority, active, eloquent, impassioned, uniting the language of an
orator to the seductions of a charming woman, Madame Roland was ripe
for the Revolution. Her epoch suited her, and she suited her epoch.
This pagan who, according to her own expression, roamed mentally in
Greece, attended the Olympic games, and despised herself for being
French; this fanatical admirer of antiquity who, at eight years of age,
carried Plutarch to church with her instead of a missal, who styled
Roland _the virtuous_ as the Athenians called Aristides the _just_, who
will die like her heroes, Socrates and Phocion; this student who, at
another period, would have been rated as an under-bred woman of the
middle class, a more or less ridiculous bluestocking, suddenly found
herself, in consequence of a general panic and circumstances as strange
as they were unforeseen, the very ideal of the society in which she
lived. For several months she was to be its fashionable type, its
favorite heroine. {61} But the Revolution was a Saturn who devoured
his children, male and female, and the Egeria of the Girondins expiated
bitterly the intoxication caused by her brief popularity.
In 1777, at the age of twenty-three, she had written: "Gay and jesting
speeches fall from this mouth which sobs at night upon its pillow; a
laugh dwells on my lips, while my tears, shut up within my heart, at
length make on it, in spite of its hardness, the effect produced by
water on a stone: falling drop by drop, they insensibly wear it away."
In 1791, when she was thirty-eight, she wrote: "The phenomena of
nature, which make the vulgar grow pale, and which are imposing even to
the philosophical eye, offer nothing to a sensitive person preoccupied
with great concerns, but scenes inferior to those of which her own
heart is the theatre." The flame consuming the eloquent and ardent
disciple of Rousseau was in need of fuel, and, finding this in
politics, she threw herself upon it with a sort of ravenous fury, just
as she had once abandoned herself to study. At twenty-two she had
written to one of her young friends: "You scold me for studying too
hard. Bear in mind, then, that unless I did so, love might perhaps
excite my imagination to frenzy. It is a necessary distraction. I am
not trying to become a learned woman; I study because I need to study,
as I do to eat." It was thus that Madame Roland plunged into politics.
All her unappeased instincts and repressed forces found their outlet in
that direction.
{62}
Woman being formed by nature to be dominated, nothing is more agreeable
to her than to invert the parts, and in her turn to domineer. To exert
influence in public affairs, to designate or support the candidates for
great offices of State, to organize or direct a ministry, to make
themselves listened to by serious men, to inspire opinions or systems,
is to ambitious women a kind of revenge for their sex. Those who have
acquired a habit of exercising this sort of power cannot relinquish it
without extreme reluctance. If they have once persuaded themselves of
their superiority to men, nothing can ever root the conviction from
their minds. To be protected humiliates them; what they long for most
of all is to be acknowledged as protectresses. Self-deluded, they
attribute to their passion for the public welfare what is, especially
in their case, the need of petty glory, the thirst for emotions, or the
amusement of pride and vanity.
The Revolutionary bluestocking, Madame Roland, was from the very start
delighted to see that her works were printed, and that they produced as
much effect as if they had been written by some great statesman. These
first successes seemed to her to justify the excellent opinion she had
always entertained of herself. She got into a habit of playing the
oracle. No sooner had her lips touched the cup containing this
poisonous but intoxicating beverage than she would have no other. That
alone could refresh, even while it killed her.
{63}
Politics has the immense defect of exasperating, troubling, and
disfiguring souls. Madame Roland was born good, sensible, and
generous. Politics made her at times wicked, vindictive, and cruel.
July 26, 1789, she wrote this odious letter: "You are nothing but
children; your enthusiasm is a fire of straw, and if the National
Assembly does not order the trial of two illustrious heads, or some
generous Decius does not strike them down, you are all ... lost"
(Madame Roland employed a more trivial expression). "If this letter
does not reach you, may the cowards who read it redden to learn that it
is from a woman, and tremble in reflecting that she can create a
hundred enthusiasts from whom will proceed a million others." Roland
had been employed by the Agricultural Society of Lyons to draw up its
reports for the States-General. Madame Roland wrote much more of them
than her husband did. She sent article on article to a journal founded
by Champagneux to forward the revolutionary propaganda. Sixty thousand
copies were printed of one of them in which she described the festival
of the Federation at Lyons. Imagine the joy felt by the
_femme-auteur_, the pupil of Jean-Jacques, the model of George Sand!
Soon afterwards, the municipality deputed Roland to the Constituent
Assembly to advocate the interests of the city, which was involved to
the extent of forty millions, and which asked to have this debt assumed
by the State. Roland and his wife arrived in Paris, February 20, 1791.
{64}
The married pair installed themselves on the third floor of the hotel
Britannique, in rue Guenegaud. There a sort of political reunion was
formed, of which Brissot was the first link. Four times a week a few
friends, and certain deputies and journalists, met around this still
unknown woman, whose wit, charm, and beauty were not long in making a
sensation. It was at this period that she made Buzot's acquaintance.
The day of her first interview with the young and brilliant deputy was
an epoch in her sentimental life. Thenceforward, two passions, love
and ambition, the one as fierce and devouring as the other, were to
occupy her ardent soul. Comparing the young orator, whom she perhaps
transformed in her imagination into the president of a more or less
Athenian republic, with the austere and prosaic companion of her
existence, she perceived that, according to her own expression, there
was no equality between her and her husband, and that "the ascendency
of a domineering character, joined to twenty years' seniority, rendered
one of these superiorities too great"--that of age. She was herself
six years older than Buzot. Even though her love for him may have
remained Platonic, she gave him all her heart and soul.
For the majority of women, still beautiful, who mingle in public
affairs, love is the principal thing; politics but the accessory, the
pretext. They imagine they are attaching themselves to ideas, and it
is to men. In this respect the heroines of the Revolution resemble
those of the Fronde. The stateswoman in {65} Madame Roland plays
second to the lover of Buzot. In her mind the Republic and the
handsome republican blend into one. Believing herself a patriot when
she is above all a woman in love, she carries the emotions, the
infatuations, the ardors and exaggerations of her private life into her
public one. With her, angers and enthusiasms rise to paroxysm. She is
extreme in all things.
She detests Louis XVI. as much as she loves Buzot. After the flight to
Varennes, she wrote: "To replace the King on the throne is a folly, an
absurdity, if it is not a horror; to declare him demented is to make
obligatory the appointment of a regent. To impeach Louis XVI. would
be, beyond all contradiction, the greatest and most righteous step, but
you are incapable of taking it. Well then, put him not exactly under
interdict, but suspend him." Here begins the influence of Madame
Roland. The suspension of the royal authority is one of her ideas.
"So long as peace lasted," she says, "I adhered to the peaceful role
and to that kind of influence which I thought fitting to my sex; when
war was declared by the King's departure, it appeared to me that every
one should devote himself unreservedly. I joined the fraternal
societies, being persuaded that zeal and good intentions might be very
useful in critical moments. I was unable to stay at home any longer,
and I went to the houses of worthy people of my acquaintance that we
might excite each other to great measures." One knows what the {66}
Revolution meant by that expression: great measures. Madame Roland
became furious. She wanted a freedom of the press without check or
limit. She was angry because Marat's newspapers were destroyed by the
satellites of Lafayette. "It is a cruel thing to think of," she
exclaims, "but it becomes every day more evident that peace means
retrogression, and that we can only be regenerated by blood."
Her hatred includes both Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. June 25,
1791, she writes: "It appears to me that the King ought to be
sequestered and his wife impeached." And on July 1: "The King has sunk
to the lowest depths of degradation; his trick has exposed him
completely, and he inspires nothing but contempt. His name, his
portrait, and his arms have been effaced everywhere. Notaries have
been obliged to take down the escutcheons marked with a flower-de-luce
which served to designate their houses. He is called nothing but Louis
the False, or the great hog. Caricatures of every sort represent him
under emblems which, though not the most odious, are the most suitable
to nourish and augment popular disdain. The people tend of their own
accord to all that can express this sentiment, and it is impossible
that they should ever again be willing to see seated on the throne a
being they despise so completely."
Things did not go fast enough to suit Madame Roland's furious hatred.
The popular gathering in the Champ-de-Mars, whose aim was to bring
about {67} the deposition of the King, was forcibly dispersed on July
17. With six exceptions, all the deputies who had belonged either to
the Jacobin Club or that of the Cordeliers, left them on account of
their demand that Louis XVI. should be brought to trial. The time for
great measures, to use Madame Roland's expression, had not yet arrived.
The ardent democrat laments it. "I cannot describe our situation to
you," she writes at this moment of the revolutionary recoil; "I feel
environed by a silent horror; my heart grows steadfast in a mournful
and solemn silence, ready to sacrifice all rather than cease to defend
principles, but not knowing the moment when they can triumph, and
forming no resolution but that of giving a great example."
The mission which had kept Roland in Paris for seven months being
ended, the discouraged pair returned to their province in September.
After stopping a few days in Lyons, in order to found a popular society
affiliated to the Jacobins of the capital, they went to spend the
remainder of the autumn at their country place, the Close of Platiere.
But calm and silence no longer suited Madame Roland. Repose
exasperated her. She missed the struggle and the emotions of
revolutionary Paris, of which she had said: "One lives ten years here
in twenty-four hours; events and affections blend with and succeed each
other with singular rapidity; no such great events ever occupied minds."