compensate her for the chagrin of having parted from Buzot. Just as
she was despairing at the thought of sinking back into all the nullity
of the province, as she expresses it, the news came that the inspectors
of agriculture had been suppressed. Roland, no longer an official,
deliberated with his wife as to their next step. His own inclination
was to settle permanently in the country and devote himself to
agricultural labors which would surely and safely augment his fortune.
But his wife was by no means of the same mind. She must see her dear
Buzot again at any cost. She flattered the self-love of her
unsuspecting spouse, and persuaded him that Paris was the sole theatre
worthy of the virtuous Roland. Roland allowed himself to be convinced.
His wife, no longer mistress of herself, was drawn into the Parisian
abyss as by an irresistible force. And yet was it not she who had
proposed to herself this ideal, so easily to have been realized? "I
have never imagined anything more desirable than a life divided between
domestic cares and those of agriculture, spent on a healthy and fertile
farm, with a little family where the example of its heads and common
labor maintain attachment, peace, and freedom." Was it not she who had
uttered this profoundly true thought: "I see neither pleasure nor
happiness except in the reunion of that which charms the heart as well
as the senses, and costs no regrets"? In the most beautiful days of
her youth had she not written: "There was a time when I was never
content {69} except when I had a book or a pen in my hand; at present I
am as well satisfied when I have made a shirt for my father or added up
an account of expenses as if I had read something profound. I do not
care at all to be learned; I want to be good and happy; that is my
chief business. What is necessary but good, honest common sense?" Is
it not she, too, who will write at the beginning of her Memoirs: "I
have observed that in all classes, ambition is generally fatal; for the
few happy ones whom it exalts, it makes a multitude of victims." Why
did she not more frequently remind herself of the sentiment so just and
well expressed in a letter dated in 1790: "Women are not made to share
in all the occupations of men: they are altogether bound to domestic
cares and virtues, and they cannot turn away from them without
destroying their happiness." But, alas! passion does not reason.
Farewell common sense, wisdom, and experience, when ambition and love
have taken possession of a woman's heart. Returning to Paris, December
15, 1791, the Rolands established themselves in the rue de la Harpe,
and plunged head-long into politics. The wife redoubled her activity,
eloquence, and passion. The husband, instead of attending quietly to
the management of his retiring pension, was named a member of the
Jacobin corresponding committee at the beginning of 1792, a
revolutionary centre of which Brissot was the leader. At this period,
we are informed by Madame Roland, the intimidated court imagined that
the nomination of a {70} minister chosen from among the patriots of the
Assembly would cause it to regain a little popularity. Brissot
proposed Roland, who, on March 24, 1792, accepted the portfolio of the
Interior.
Madame, behold yourself, then, the wife of a minister, and in fact more
of a minister than your husband. Your ambitious projects, which have
been treated as chimerical, are now realized. You have a cortege like
Marie Antoinette. Men seek the favor of a smile, a word, from you.
They court, they solicit, they fear you. The monarchy, which you
detest, is at last obliged to reckon with you and your friends. Your
beauty, your talent, and your eloquence are boasted of. Your name is
in every mouth. You are powerful, you are celebrated. Well! you will
find out for yourself what bitterness there is at the bottom of this
cup of pride which has tempted your lips so long. You will learn at
your own expense that renown does not produce happiness, and that, for
a woman, twilight is better than the full glare of day. Yes, you will
long for the obscurity which weighed upon you. You will long for the
house of your father, the engraver, on the Quai des Orfevres. You will
dream of the sunsets which affected you, and of the monotonous but
peaceful succession of your days. You, the deist, the female
philosopher, will recall with regret the cloisters where in your
adolescence you tasted the peace of the elect. In the time of your
supreme trial Buzot's miniature will not console you; it is not his
image you should cover with your {71} kisses. No; that miniature is
not the viaticum for eternity. What you will need is the crucifix, and
you respect the crucifix no longer. And yet your imagination will
evoke the mystic cloister, with its altars decked with flowers, its
painted windows, its penetrating and ineffable poesy. And in thought,
also, you will see the country once more, the harvest time, the month
of the vintage, the poor who come to the door asking for bread and who
go away with blessings on their lips and gratitude in their hearts.
Why have you quitted these honest people? What have you come to do in
the midst of these ferocious Jacobins, who flatter you to-day and will
assassinate you to-morrow? Do you fancy that Marie Antoinette is the
only woman who will be insulted, calumniated, and betrayed? Why do you
seat at your hospitable table this livid-faced Robespierre, who to-day,
perhaps, will address you a madrigal, and to-morrow send you to the
scaffold? You will pay very dear for these false and artificial joys,
these gusts of commonplace vanity, this pride of a parvenu, and the
pleasure of presiding for a few evenings at the dinners given to the
Minister of the Interior in Calonne's dining-room. The Legislative
Assembly, the Jacobin Club, the journals and the ministry, the
souvenirs of Plutarch and the parodies of Jean-Jacques, the noisy crowd
of flatterers who are the courtiers of demagogues as they would have
been the courtiers of kings, these adulators who are going to change
into executioners,--all are vanity! Poor {72} woman, whose power will
be so ephemeral, why do you make yourself a persecutor? You will so
soon be persecuted. Why labor so relentlessly to shake the foundations
of a throne that will bury you beneath its ruins?
{73}
VII.
MARIE ANTOINETTE AND MADAME ROLAND.
Two women find themselves confronted across the chessboard and about to
move the pieces in a terrible game in which each stakes her head, and
each is foredoomed to lose. One is the woman who represents the old
regime--the daughter of the German Caesars, the Queen of France and
Navarre; the other stands for the new regime, the Parisian middle
classes--the daughter of the engraver of the Quai des Orfevres. They
are nearly the same age. Madame Roland was born March 18, 1754; and
Marie Antoinette, November 2, 1755. Both are beautiful, and both are
conscious of their charm. Each exercises a sort of domination over all
who approach her.
In 1792, when Roland enters the ministry, Marie Antoinette is no longer
thinking of coquetry, luxury, or dress. The heroine of the Gallery of
the Mirrors, the crowned shepherdess of the Trianon, the queen of
elegance, pleasure, and fashion is not recognizable in her. The time
for splendors is over, like the time for pastorals. No more festivals,
no more distractions, no more theatres. Incessant anxieties and
unremitting labor; writing throughout the day and reading, {74}
meditating, and praying throughout the night, are now the unfortunate
sovereign's whole existence. She hardly sleeps. Her eyes are reddened
by tears. A single night, that of the arrest on the journey to
Varennes, had sufficed to whiten her hair. She wears mourning for her
brother, the Emperor Leopold, and for her ally, the King of Sweden,
Gustavus III., and one might say that she is also wearing it for the
French monarchy. All trace of frivolity has disappeared. The severe
and majestic countenance of the woman who suffers so cruelly as queen,
spouse, and mother, is sanctified by the double poetry of religion and
sorrow.
Madame Roland, on the other hand, is more coquettish than she has ever
been. The actress who has at last found her theatre and is very proud
to play her part, wishes to allure, desires to reign. She delights in
presiding at these political dinners where all the guests are men, and
of which her grace and eloquence constitute the charm. She has just
completed her thirty-eighth year. Her husband is nearly fifty-eight;
Buzot is only thirty-two. Possibly she is still more preoccupied with
love than with ambition. To use one of her own expressions, "her heart
swells with the desire to please," to please Buzot above all; she takes
pains to celebrate her own beauty, which, in spite of showing symptoms
of decline, has the brilliance of sunset. In her Memoirs she describes
her "large and superbly modelled bust, her light, quick step, her frank
and open glance, at once keen and {75} soft, which sometimes amazes,
but which caresses still more, and always quickens." She writes: "My
mouth is rather large; there are a thousand prettier, but none that has
a softer and more seductive smile." In prison, when she is nearly
forty, she states that if she has lost some of her attractions, yet she
needs no help from art to make her look five or six years younger.
"Even those who see me every day," she adds, "require to be told my
age, in order to believe me more than thirty-two or thirty-three."
Madame Roland had at first written thirty-three or thirty-four. But
after reflection, finding herself too modest, she made an erasure and
retrenched another year. She adds that she made very little use of her
charms; avowing at the same time, and with the most absolute frankness,
that if she could reconcile her duty with her inclination to utilize
them more fully, she would not be sorry.
Both Marie Antoinette and Madame Roland were political women. But the
one became so in her own despite, in the hope of saving the life of her
husband and the heritage of her son; the other, through ambition and
the desire to play a part for which her origin had not destined her.
In the one, everything is at once noble and simple, natural and
majestic; in the other there is always something affected and
theatrical; one scents the _parvenue_ who will never be a _grande
dame_, even in the Ministry of the Interior or at the house of Calonne.
All is unstudied in Marie Antoinette; Madame Roland, on the contrary,
is an artist in coquetry.
{76}
Bizarre caprice of fate which makes political rivals and adversaries
treating with each other on equal terms of these two women, of whom one
was so much above the other by rank and birth. The Tuileries and the
house of the Minister of the Interior are like two hostile citadels at
a stone's throw from each other. On both sides there is watchfulness
and fear. An impassable abyss, hollowed out by the vanity of the
commoner still more than by the pride of the Queen, forever separates
these two courageous women who, had they united instead of antagonizing
each other, might have saved both their country and themselves.
It is necessary to go back a few years in order to comprehend the
motive of Madame Roland's hatred for Marie Antoinette. It was inspired
in the vain commoner by envy, the worst and vilest of all counsellors.
Madame Roland's special characteristic was the passion for making an
effect. Now the effect produced by Marie Antoinette under the old
regime was immense; that produced by the future Egeria of the Girondin
group was almost null. A simple mortal, regarding Olympus from below,
she said to herself with vexation, that in spite of her talents and her
charms there was no place for her among the gods and goddesses.
Versailles was like a superior world from which it maddened her to be
excluded. She was twenty years old when, in 1774, she visited it with
her mother, her uncle, the Abbe Bimont, and an aged gentlewoman,
Mademoiselle d'Hannaches. They all lodged at the palace. One of Marie
Antoinette's {77} women, who was acquainted with the Abbe, and who was
not then on duty, lent them her apartment. The only object of the
excursion was to give the young girl a near view of the court.
In recalling this souvenir in her Memoirs, Madame Roland displays her
aversion for the old society. She is annoyed even with the companion
of her visit, because she was, according to the expression then in use,
a person of quality. "Mademoiselle d'Hannaches," she says, "went
boldly wherever she chose, ready to fling her name in the face of any
one who tried to stop her, thinking they ought to be able to read on
her grotesque visage her six hundred years of established nobility.
The fine figure of a pedantic little cleric like the Abbe Bimont, and
the imbecile pride of the ugly d'Hannaches were not out of keeping in
those scenes; but the unpainted face of my worthy mamma, and the
modesty of my dress, announced that we were commoners; if my eyes or my
youth provoked remark, it was almost patronizing, and caused me nearly
as much displeasure as Madame de Boismorel's compliments." It was this
Madame de Boismorel who, although she found the little Philipon very
pleasing, had said to the grandmother of the future Madame Roland:
"Take care that she does not become a learned woman; it would be a
great pity."
The splendors of Versailles did not dazzle the daughter of the engraver
of the Quai des Orfevres. The apartment she occupied was at the top of
the {78} palace, in the same corridor as that of the Archbishop of
Paris, and so near it that it was necessary for the prelate to take
precautions lest she should overhear him talk. "Two poorly furnished
rooms," she says, "in the upper end of one of which space had been
contrived for a valet's bed, was the habitation which a duke and peer
of France esteemed himself honored in possessing, in order to be closer
at hand to cringe every morning at the levee of Their Majesties: and
yet he was the rigorist Beaumont.... The ordinary and the ceremonial
table-service of the entire family, eating separately or all together,
the masses, the promenades, the gaming, the presentations, had us for
spectators during a week." What impression was made on her by this
excursion to the royal palace? She herself will tell us nineteen years
later, in her prison. "I was not insensible," she says, "to the effect
of so much pomp and ceremony, but I was indignant that its object
should be to exalt certain individuals already too powerful and of very
slight personal importance: I liked much better to look at the statues
in the gardens than at the persons in the palace; and when my mother
asked if I was satisfied with my visit, 'Yes,' I replied, 'provided it
will soon be over; if I stay here many days longer, I shall detest the
people so much that I shall be unable to hide my hatred.' 'What harm
are they doing you, then?' 'Making me feel injustice, and constantly
behold absurdity.'"
How this impression is emphasized in the really {79} prophetic letter
written by the future heroine of the Revolution to her friend,
Mademoiselle Sophie Cannet, October 4, 1774: "To return to Versailles.
I cannot tell you how greatly all I have examined has made me value my
own situation, and thank Heaven that I was born in an obscure
condition. You think, perhaps, that this sentiment is based on the
slight esteem I attach to the worth of opinion, and my sense of the
reality of the penalties attached to greatness. Not at all. It is
based on the knowledge I have of my own character, which would be very
detrimental both to me and to the State if I were placed at a little
distance from the throne; because I would be keenly shocked by the
extreme inequality which sets so many thousands of men below a single
individual of the same species!" What a prediction! The most
unforeseen events were one day to bring this young plebeian near that
royalty formerly so far above her. The engraver's daughter will be the
wife of a minister of State. And then what will happen? According to
her own expression, her role will be very detrimental to herself and to
the State.
In the same letter she had written: "A beneficent king seems to me an
almost adorable being; but if, before coming into the world, the choice
of a government had been given me, my character would have made me
decide for a republic." She will end by hating the beneficent King,
and probably no one will contribute more than she towards establishing
the republican regime in France.
{80}
Supposing that, instead of being merely an insignificant commoner,
Madame Roland had been born in the ranks of aristocracy, had enjoyed
the right of sitting down in the presence of Their Majesties at
Versailles, and had shone at the familiar entertainments of the
Trianon, she would doubtless have shared the sentiments and ideas of
the women of the old regime, and, like the Princess de Lamballe or the
Duchess de Polignac, have shed tears of compassion over the Queen's
misfortunes. Fate, in placing her in a subordinate position, made her
an enemy and a rebel. She anathematized the society in which her rank
bore no relation to her lofty intelligence and her need of domination.
When, from the upper window of her father's house on the Quai des
Orfevres, beside the Pont-Neuf, she saw the brilliant retinue of Marie
Antoinette pass by on their way to Notre Dame to return thanks to God
for some happy event, she grew angry at all this pomp and glitter, so
much in contrast with her own obscure condition. What crimes have been
engendered by the sentiment of envy! The furies of the guillotine were
above all things envious. They were delighted to see in the fatal cart
the woman whom they had formerly beheld in gala carriages resplendent
with gold. Madame Roland certainly ought not to have carried her
hatred to such a pitch; but had she not demanded in 1789, when speaking
of Louis XVI. and the Queen, that "two illustrious heads" should be
brought to trial? Who knows? If, in 1784, she had obtained the {81}
patent of nobility for her husband which at that period she solicited
so ardently, she might have become sincerely royalist! But having
remained, despite herself, in the citizen class, she retained and
personified, to her latest hour, its rancor, pettiness, and wrath.
What figure could she have made at Versailles, or even at the
Tuileries? In the midst of great lords and noble ladies the haughty
commoner would have been out of place; she would have stifled. It was
chiefly on that account that she attached herself to the new ideas.
She told herself that so long as royalty lasted, she would always be of
small importance; while, if the republic were established, she might
aspire to anything. Though her husband was one of the King's
ministers, she became daily more adverse to the monarchy, and Roland,
following her counsels, was like a pilot whose whole intent is to make
the vessel founder, even though he were to perish with its crew.
It is a sad thing to say, but even their community in suffering did not
disarm Madame Roland's hate for Marie Antoinette. It was in prison, on
the eve of ascending the scaffold herself, that she wrote concerning
Louis XVI. and the Queen: "He was led away by a giddy creature who
united the presumption of youth and grandeur to Austrian insolence, the
intoxication of the senses, and the heedlessness of levity, and was
herself seduced by all the vices of an Asiatic court, for which she had
been too well prepared by the example of her mother." Ah! why {82}
were not these cruel lines effaced by the tears Madame Roland shed in
floods over the pages she was writing, and of which the traces still
remain on the manuscript of her Memoirs? Why did she not sympathize in
the grief of Marie Antoinette, separated from her children, when in
speaking of her daughter Eudora, she wrote: "Good God! I am a
prisoner, and she is living far from me! I dare not even send for her
to receive my embraces; hatred pursues even the children of those whom
tyranny persecutes, and mine, with her eleven years, her virginal
figure, and her beautiful fair hair, could hardly appear in the streets
without creatures suborned or deluded by falsehood pointing her out as
the offspring of a conspirator. Cruel wretches! how well they know how
to tear a mother's heart!"
Why were these two women political adversaries? Both sensitive, both
artistic, with inexhaustible sources of poetry and tenderness at heart,
they were born for gentle emotions and not for horrible catastrophes.
Who, at their dawning, could have predicted for them such an appalling
night? Like Marie Antoinette, Madame Roland loved nature and the arts.
She felt the profound and penetrating charm of the fields. She drew,
she played on the harp, guitar, and violin, and she sang. "No one
knows," she wrote a few moments before her death, "what an alleviation
music is in solitude and anguish, nor from how many temptations it can
save one in prosperity." She had sung the same romances {83} as the
Queen. The same poets had inspired and affected each.
Does not this most feminine passage in Madame Roland's Memoirs recall
the character of the mistress of the Little Trianon? "I always
remember the singular effect produced on me by a bunch of violets at
Christmas; when I received them I was in that condition of soul often
induced by a season favorable to serious thought. My imagination
slumbered, I reflected coldly, and I hardly felt at all; suddenly the
color of these violets and their delicate perfume struck my senses; it
was an awakening to life.... A rosy tinge suffused the horizon of the
day." Would not this cry of Madame Roland in her captivity suit Marie
Antoinette as well? "Ah! when shall I breathe pure air and those soft
exhalations so agreeable to my heart?" And might not the daughter of
the great Maria Theresa have cried, like the daughter of Philipon the
engraver? "Adieu! my child, my husband, my friends. Adieu! sun whose
brilliant rays brought serenity to my soul, as if they were recalling
it to the skies. Adieu! ye solitary fields which have so often moved
me."
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 Pere 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 regime 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 Pere Duchesne, as insolent to
one as to the other, will no longer speak of except under the sobriquet
of Queen Coco.
{85}
VIII.
MADAME ROLAND AT THE MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR.