Roland took this leadership and decision on the part of Madame in most

excellent spirit. The change was the best that they could do, he wrote;

as for the work, that would go on “in slippers.” He even showed no

resentment at a curtain lecture she gave him adroitly by the way of a

third person, telling him of his duties at Lyons. He cast out of the

account her fears for his health and peace of mind. It was she who

occupied him—if the change pleased her he had no other care.

Indeed, from the beginning of the campaign, Roland’s letters to his wife

were full of consideration for her position, of anxiety for her health,

of longing for her return. Every ache or fatigue she wrote of caused him

the greatest anxiety. Throughout the correspondence, the expression of

confidence, of mutual help, of tenderness, was perfect. Their interest

extended to every detail of the other’s life, Madame Roland insisting

upon her husband’s wearing a certain plaster for some of his ailments,

and he counselling her not to come home without a new hat.

They gave each other all the news of Paris and Amiens, and there are

many pages of her letters, especially, which are interesting for those

studying the life of that day: thus, during her stay in Paris, two

famous pieces—the _Danaïdes_ of Gluck and the _Figaro_ of

Beaumarchais—were given for the first time, and her letters on them are

long and vivid. More curious than opera or theatre is the place

mesmerism takes in the letters; the Rolands had taken up the new fad,

presumably to see what it would do for Roland, and were members of the

Magnetic Club of Amiens; Madame Roland repeated to her husband

everything she heard on the subject.

Wire-pulling, favor-seeking, letter-writing, theatre-going and

Mesmer-studying were over at last, and the end of May she started home,

and glad to go. The separation had been severe for them both. There is

scarcely a letter in the two collections not marked by tenderness; many

of them are passionate in their warmth and longing. It is evident that

at this time Madame Roland had no life apart from her husband.

Madame Roland reached Amiens early in June. The first day of July she

and her husband left for a trip in England which they had long planned.

She counted much on it; for many years she had been an enthusiastic

admirer of the English Constitution and its effects on the nation.

Roland had been there before and was somewhat known, and naturally she

saw what he thought best to show her.

The journey lasted three weeks and she wrote full notes of what she saw

for her daughter. These notes were published in Champagneux’s edition of

her works. They are in no respect remarkable for originality of

observation, or for wit. But they are always intelligent and practical,

a result, no doubt, of Roland’s companionship. They touch a wide range

of subjects and they are entertaining as a look at what an

eighteenth-century traveller saw. It is easy to see that Madame Roland,

as most travellers do, sought to confirm her preconceived ideas.

England, for her, was the country of freedom, and she saw that which was

in harmony with her ideas.

IV

COUNTRY LIFE

It was in September of 1784 that the Rolands arrived in Beaujolais.

Although Roland’s new position kept him the greater part of the time at

Lyons, they settled for the winter some twenty-eight kilometres north,

in Villefranche-sur-Saône. It was mainly for economical reasons that

they did not go to Lyons. Roland’s mother had a home at Villefranche and

they could live with her through the winter. The summers and autumns

they meant to spend at Le Clos de la Platière, the family estate about

eleven miles from Villefranche, which had recently come under their

control. With such an arrangement it was necessary to take only a small

apartment at Lyons. As M. Roland could come often to Villefranche and Le

Clos, Madame planned to spend only about two months of the year at

Lyons.

Villefranche, their first home in the Beaujolais, is to-day a

manufacturing town of perhaps twelve thousand inhabitants. There is a

wearisome commonplace about its rows of flat-faced houses, a dusty,

stupid, factory atmosphere about it as a whole. It seems to be utterly

destitute of those _genre_ pictures which give the flavor to so many

French towns, utterly lacking in those picturesque corners which make

their charm.

Save Notre Dame des Marais and the hospital, it has no buildings of

note, but Notre Dame des Marais makes up for a multitude of

architectural deficiencies. It is an irregular fifteenth-century Gothic

church whose unbalanced façade is enriched with an absolute riot of

exquisite carvings. Every ogive is latticed with trefoils and flowing

tracery, every niche is peopled, every line breaks into tendrils,

everywhere is the thistle in honor of the house of Bourbon, everywhere

are saints and angels, devils and monsters. A hundred years ago

Villefranche must have been more interesting than it is now. Certainly

it was more picturesque; for its towers and crenellated walls were still

standing, and at either extremity of its chief thoroughfare were massive

gates, doubled with iron. Its picturesqueness interfered somewhat with

its comfort and sanitary condition in Madame Roland’s eyes. She detested

particularly its flat roofs, its little streets, with their surface

sewers. In its organization it was much more complicated than to-day,

and it possessed at least one institution, since disappeared, which

placed it among the leading French towns of the period, that is, an

academy, one of the oldest in the realm.

The household which the Rolands entered at Villefranche was made up of

Madame de la Platière, Roland’s mother, and an older brother, a priest

of the town. The latter is a pleasant example of the eighteenth-century

curé, half man of pleasure, half priest, spirited and versatile in

conversation, something of a diplomat, faithful to his dogmas and

duties, _bon enfant_ in morals, but in questions of politics and

religion, domineering and prejudiced.

The _chanoine_ Roland occupied an excellent position at Villefranche. He

was one of the three dignitaries of Notre Dame des Marais; he was the

spiritual adviser of the sisters at the hospital, and he had been for

over thirty years an Academician. With these offices, his family, and

his agreeableness, he was of course received by all the families of the

town and country worth knowing.

Madame Roland was on very good terms with the _chanoine_ in all the

early years in Beaujolais, caring for him when sick, making visits with

him, talking with him over the fire winter evenings when Roland was away

from home. No doubt he found her a welcome addition in a house which up

to that time had been under the more or less tyrannical rule of his

mother, a woman “of the age of the century,” and “terrible in her

temper.” Madame Roland found him a welcome relief from the care of her

mother-in-law, whom she seems to have regarded rather as an object for

patience and philosophy than for affection. The old lady was trying. She

had the child’s vice of gormandizing, and after each _petite débauche_,

as her daughter-in-law called it, was an invalid for a few days. Then

she invited recklessly, a habit that made much work and expense, and was

particularly obnoxious to Madame Roland because the company passed all

their time at cards. To see the house filled every evening with people

who had not intellect and resources to entertain each other

intelligently was exasperating.

All these annoyances Madame Roland repeated to her husband in the long

letters she sent him almost every day. More questionable than her habit

of writing these petty vexations to him was her retailing of them to

Bosc, with whom she was in constant correspondence.

In spite of the drawbacks there was much brightness in the new home,

much of that close intimacy which is the charm of the French interior.

Madame Roland realized this and frequently painted pleasant pictures to

Bosc as contrasts to the disagreeable ones she gave him.

Although Madame Roland was greeted cordially at Villefranche by the

leading people, as became the wife and sister-in-law of two prominent

men, she never came any nearer to what was really good and enjoyable in

the place than she had in Amiens. The town displeased her, as it

naturally would, since she insisted on comparing it with Paris. She

amused herself in studying the _soul_ of the place, and she found it

frequently small, false, and distorted. Now an analysis of one’s

surroundings is certainly amusing and instructive, but if one is to be a

good neighbor and agreeable member of the society he dissects, he must

keep his observations to himself; must place humanity and courtesy

higher than analysis. Madame Roland did not do this; she showed often

what she thought and felt, and became unpopular in return. Roland, too,

made himself disliked in the Academy of Villefranche by his domineering

ways.

The Abbé Guillon de Montléon, of Lyons, who was a fellow academician of

Roland’s, relates that whenever he went to the town to attend Academy

meetings, Madame Roland and her husband tried to secure him as their

guest, and he suggests that this attention was due simply to the fact

that they were on bad terms with their townsmen and were obliged to find

their company in outsiders. It seems that a satire on a number of the

leading people of the town had been sent from Paris, and that it was

believed to be the work of M. and Madame Roland. Whether true or not,

those who had been caricatured revenged themselves by cutting them and

by ordering sent to them each day from Paris satirical epigrams and

songs.

The Abbé Guillon also tells that Roland left the Academy of Villefranche

in a pet because that body refused in 1788 to adopt the subject he had

suggested for a prize contest—“Would it not serve the public good to

establish courts to judge the dead.”

However, all that the Abbé tells of Roland must be regarded with

suspicion. He wrote after the Revolution, with his heart full of bitter

contempt and hatred of everybody who had been connected with the

movement which led up to the Reign of Terror in Lyons, and, at that

moment, was not capable of impersonal judgments.

Madame Roland was not much better pleased with Lyons than with

Villefranche. She did not love the place too well. At Lyons she mocked

at everything, she said. She was well situated there, however. Their

apartment was in a fine house in a pleasant quarter, and Madame had the

equipage of a friend to use when she would. She saw many celebrities who

passed through the town; was invited constantly; made visits; in fact,

had an admirable social position, as became the wife of one of the most

active citizens of the town, and Roland certainly was that. His

reputation for solid acquirements had preceded him. On arriving in Lyons

he was made an honorary member of the Academy, and afterwards an active

member, and from that time he constantly was at the front in the work of

the institution.

In the archives of the Academy of Lyons there are still preserved a

large number of manuscripts by Roland, some of these in the hand of his

wife. They discuss a variety of subjects: the choice of themes for the

public séances of the provincial academies; the influence of literature

in the country and the capital (this paper was given a place in the

published annals); the outlook for a universal language—to be French of

course. One peculiar paper, to come from so dry a pen as his, is on the

“Means of Understanding a Woman.” Plutarch comes in for a eulogy, and

there is an exhortation on the wisdom of knowing our fellows. Most of

the manuscripts are purely scientific, and treat the subjects in which

M. Roland was particularly at home,—the preparation of hides and

leather, of oils and soaps; the processes of drying. Others consider

means for quickening the decaying manufacturing interests of Lyons.

Altogether, it is a very honorable collection. The annals of the Academy

contain also a full printed report of a contest over cotton velvet which

had embroiled Roland in the North. Both sides of the discussion, which

Roland’s efforts to spread the knowledge of the new industry awakened,

are given.

I have examined all of these manuscripts, as well as Roland’s printed

articles in the _Encyclopédie_, and elsewhere, for a trace of the idea

the Abbé Guillon de Montléon credits to him, in his Memoirs,—that dead

bodies, instead of being buried, be utilized for the good of the

community, the flesh being used for oil and the bones for phosphoric

acid. This idea was advanced, it is said, to settle a dispute over the

cemeteries, which had long agitated Lyons; but as there is no reference

to it in any of Roland’s manuscripts or printed articles, it is probable

that it was never pushed to public attention, as the Abbé would have his

reader believe. The story is told too naturally not to have at least a

shadow of truth, and such a proposition is so like the utilitarian

Roland that, if anybody in France suggested such a thing, it probably

was he.

If their life in Villefranche and Lyons was not satisfactory, that at

their country home was entirely so; indeed, Madame Roland seems never to

have been so happy, so natural, so charming, as she was at Le Clos,

where she spent much time each year.

Le Clos is easily reached from Villefranche. One goes to-day, as one

hundred years ago, in carriage, or, as Madame Roland usually did, on

horseback, by one of the hard, smooth roads which have long formed a

network over the Lyonnais. The road runs from the town along a narrow

valley of luxuriant pasture land, strewn in May, the month in which I

visited the place, with purple mints and pure yellow fleur-de-lys. On

either hand are low, steep hillsides, all under cultivation, but so

divided under the French system of inheritance that they look like

patch-work quilts or Roman ribbons. A kilometre from town one begins to

wind and climb. Hill after hill, mountain after mountain, is passed; the

country opens broad and generous. There is a peculiar impression of

warmth and strength produced by the prevailing color of the soil and

building-material. This part of the Lyonnais is clad in a dark stone,

and walls and churches, roads and fields, are all in varying tones of

terra-cotta; here is the fresh, bright reddish-yellow of a plot recently

cultivated and not yet planted; there the dull and worn-out brown of an

ancient wall; but, though the shades are varied, the tone is never lost.

The green of the foliage and fields is peculiarly dark and positive in

contrast with this coloring of the stone. The whole makes a landscape of

originality and a certain rude strength. It looks like a country where

men worked and where there was little to tempt them to idleness. When

one comes to Beaujolais, after the soft gray tone of the Côte-d’Or and

the Seine-et-Marne, or the dull slate which prevails in Bourbonnais, the

contrast is harsh and a little saddening.

It is a thickly settled country, and one passes many hamlets, all in

terra-cotta, with high walls and old churches topped by Romanesque

towers. At the centre of these hamlets are ancient crucifixes, some of

them of grotesque carvings. On the distant hillsides are châteaux.

After climbing many hills, one passes along the side of a mountain

ridge. At the end of this ridge one sees a yellow town, of some fifty

houses, a château with its tower razed to the roof, and a small chapel.

It is the village of Theizé.

While his eyes are still on the village, he falls into a hamlet, at the

end of whose one street is a high wall and gate. It is Le Clos. Shut in

by high yellow walls,—one might almost say fortifications, they are so

long and so high,—the quaint country house, dating from the first of the

last century, is a tranquil, sheltered spot which gives one the feeling

of complete seclusion from the world. On one side of the house lies the

court, with its broad grass-plot, its low wall, its long rows of stone

farm, and vintage buildings; on the other, lies an English garden,

planted thickly with maples, sycamores, and hemlocks, with lilac clumps

and shrubs, with roses and vines. Enclosing this garden on two sides is

a stone terrace, forming a beautiful promenade. From here all the

panorama of the Beaujolais hills, mountains, and valleys opens, with

their vineyards, yellow houses, forests, and here and there a tower—the

bellevue of some rich nineteenth-century proprietor or the relic of some

ancient château. Far beyond the farthest, faintest mountain outline

rises, on clear nights, the opal crest of Mont Blanc.

To the left of garden and house are vines and fruit trees; to the right,

a long lane and vegetable garden; and everywhere beyond are vines,

vines, vines, to the very brook in Beauvallon at the foot of the

hillside.

In Madame Roland’s time the country about Le Clos was much more heavily

wooded than now. There was less of vine raising and more of grain, but

many features are unchanged. These trees are of her time no doubt, these

vines, these walls, and she doubtlessly gathered blossoms, as one does

to-day, from the long hedge of _roses panachés_, the wonderful striped

roses of Provence now almost unknown in France, though still rioting the

full length of one of the walls of Le Clos,—fanciful, sweet things which

by their infinite variety set one, in spite of himself, at the endless

search of finding two alike, as in the play of his childhood with the

striped grass of his grandmother’s yard.

[Illustration:

LE CLOS DE LA PLATIÈRE.

]

From the terrace she saw, as we do, in the valley at the right, the

château of Brossette, the friend of Boileau; and on the hillside in

front, the curious little chapel of Saint Hippolyte; and she must often

have heard the story the country folk still tell of the place, how

centuries ago the Saracens ravaged all the country as far as this

valley, but here were driven back. The Franks, in honor of their

victory, raised a chapel to Saint Hippolyte and many miracles were

performed there, and the people came to the shrine in pilgrimage from

long distances. Now, certain neighbors, wishing to possess this

miracle-working statue of Saint Hippolyte, had it carried off, but at

the moment that the person carrying the saint attempted to cross the

brook in Beauvallon, the holy image jumped from his shoulder and ran at

full speed back to the chapel. The pious thieves, seeing the preference

of the saint, like good Christians, gave up their project.

The mountains of Beaujolais changed from faintest violet to darkest

purple for her as for us, and the crest of Mont Pilate, or the Cat

Mountain as the Lyonnais peasants call Mont Blanc, startled and thrilled

her by its mysterious opalescent beauty when now and then it appeared on

the horizon suddenly, like some celestial thing.

The house, a white, square structure, with pavilions at the corners of

the court side, and red tiled roof, is unchanged without, though

rearranged somewhat within. Nevertheless, there are many things to

recall the Rolands and their immediate friends; the ancient well; the

brass water-fountain; now and then a book, with Roland de la Platière on

the fly-leaf, in the well-filled cases which one finds in every room; a

terra-cotta bust of Roland himself (by Chinard, dated 1777); portraits

of the family, including one called Madame Roland, which nobody supposes

to be she; photographs of the beautiful La Tour pastels of M. and Madame

Phlipon, now in the museum of Lyons; an oil of the _chanoine_; a few

fine old arms in the collection which decorates the billiard room; a

table whose top is made of squares of variegated marbles brought from

Italy by Roland.

There is now and then a sign about the house of what it suffered in the

Revolution; for Le Clos was pillaged then and stripped of its contents

at the same time that the château above had its towers razed. On several

of the heavy doors is still clinging the red wax of the official seal

placed by the revolutionary officers. The _chanoine’s_ crucifix is

there, a graceful silver affair darkly oxidized from long burying, he

having hid it in the garden. In the raids on the property nearly all the

furniture was taken, and for many years the peasants were said to

account for new pieces of furniture in their neighbors’ houses by

saying, “Oh, it came from Le Clos.” Some time after the Revolution, M.

Champagneux, who married Eudora, the daughter of Madame Roland, received

a notice from the curé at Theizé that a sum of “conscience money” had

been given him for the family.

Life must have been then at Le Clos—a hundred years ago—much what it is

now,—a busy, peaceful round of usefulness and kindliness, of generous

hospitality, of unaffected intelligence. Madame Roland entered it with

sentiments kindled by Rousseau. Her imagination had never been more

actively at work than it had over the prospect of this country

retirement. She had shed tears over the prospect of their future

Clarens, its bucolic pleasures, the delicious meditations, the sweet

effusions of friendship, the healthy duties. And Le Clos realized many

of her dreams; largely because she took hold of the practical life of

the house and farm with good-will and intelligence. She was no woman to

allow work to master her,—she managed it. Nor was she weak enough to

fret under it or to regard it as “beneath her.” She respected this most

dignified and useful of woman’s employments and gave it intelligence and

good-will. This acceptance of and cheerfulness over common duties is one

of the really strong things about Madame Roland.

Some of the prettiest passages in her letters of this period are of her

homely duties. She kept the accounts, directed the servants, interested

herself in every detail of farm and house. She used her scientific

acquirements practically for the benefit of Le Clos and its neighbors.

Bosc she continually applied to for information. Now it was a remedy,

“sure and easy,” against the bites of the viper, of which there were

many in the country—and they still exist; now for the caterpillars which

were troubling the apples; again it was against an enemy of her

artichokes that she demanded, as a service to the province, a remedy.

She took a lively interest in agricultural discussions, and many were

the flowers, from the rich flora of Le Clos, which she sent her friend

to analyze, or for a confirmation of her own analysis.

Her devotion to her neighbors was genuine. In her Memoirs she speaks

with pride of their love for her, and this was no meaningless

recollection. Constantly in her letters there was question of service

rendered to this or that one, and we see that it was not without reason

that her husband was worried lest she make herself ill in caring for the

domestics of Le Clos and the peasants of Boitier and Theizé.

She did more than care for them and instruct them,—she set them a good

example. Especially in religious matters was she careful to do this. One

who has climbed the long steep hill from Le Clos to the church at

Theizé, has a genuine respect for the unselfishness of a woman who would

get out of bed at six o’clock in the morning for her neighbor’s

sake,—“climbing up the rocks,” she called it. This she did, though Le

Clos possessed its own chapel where the curé came to say the Mass.

She exercised a delightful hospitality. Le Clos was always open for

their friends. Lanthenas spent much of his time there, and one of the

apartments still is called by his name. Bosc she was always urging to

come, and she drew him many a pretty picture of their summer companies.

There was now and then a friend of Bosc, from Paris, who sought them;

for in those days of stage-coaches one had time to stop over _en route_.

There were foreign and French _savants_ who had heard of Roland and came

to pay their respects, and there were the country counts and abbés.

And there were amusements besides—an occasional _petit bal_ given by a

_locataire_, where she danced “and contre-danced,” and, in spite of her

thirty-one years, only retired at midnight from “wisdom and not from

satiety.” And there was the watch-meeting which she kept with her

people, and the _vogue_, as the Beaujolais people call their provincial

fêtes. Le Clos had one peculiar to itself—a _vogue_ existing to-day.

It is one of the events of the year at Theizé—this _vogue_—on Ascension

Sunday and Monday. The place is invaded the day before for preparation:

a stand is put up for the musicians; the wine rooms are cleared out for

the lunch tables; the trees and walls are decorated; outside the gate,

too, before night there is sure to establish itself one of the

travelling lotteries which infest France.

The morning of Ascension Day there comes, between masses, a committee

headed by a band to take possession of the place and present the fête to

Madame. After dinner come the merry-makers,—young and old from all the

country round; a friendly, pleasant company who dance and walk and talk,

only quitting their sports long enough for the traditional service of

cutting the _brioche_,—a ceremony which begins with a grave promenade of

the big cake around the premises, fanfare ahead. This done, the chief of

the _vogue_, in the midst of a respectful silence from all the two or

three hundred peasants looking on, cuts the cake with a flourish so

solemn that it would be worthy of a sacrifice, and passes around the

pieces among the guests.

The _brioches_ eaten, they dance again, and that until after the night

falls and the stars come out and the children and the old people go

home—a grave dance now and silent; for the night, the wind in the trees,

the simpler music too changes the gay and romping mood of the afternoon

to one of dreaminess and silence. But Monday they come back gayer than

ever and the dance and romp do not end until, late in the evening,

Madame declares the _vogue_ over.

In this life at Le Clos Madame Roland’s most serious occupation was the

education of her daughter Eudora. She evidently hoped to find in her

little girl a second Manon Phlipon,—an infant prodigy in sentiment and

taste. She discovered early that Eudora was a rollicking, mischievous,

saucy youngster, who would rather frolic than study and who liked to

play with her doll better than to read Plutarch. She was in despair over

this lack of feeling. At the least sign of sentiment she wrote to her

husband or to Bosc, but as a rule she could only complain of the

indifference of the little miss.

She had begun by nursing her baby,—Rousseau demands it,—but when she

came back from her favor-seeking at Paris the child—three years old—did

not recognize her. “I am like the women who do not nurse their children;

I have done better than they but I am no farther advanced.” At Le Clos

she became thoroughly discouraged and decided to take up Rousseau again

and study _Émile_ and _Julie_ on the education of children. She arrived

at certain conclusions and as she was about to write her husband of them

one day received a letter from him containing similar reflections. She

replied with her full plan. The letter, hitherto unpublished, is very

sensible.

“What a pleasure to find that we are one in our ideas as in our

feelings, and for one never to have a plan that the other has not

already thought of. For the last twenty-four hours I have been trying

the method that you suggest with our little one. I had re-read Julie’s

plan, and I had decided that we were too far away from it. Controlled by

circumstances, we have either thought too much or not enough of our

child. Busy in a kind of work which demands quiet, we have kept her at

her tasks and her lessons, without taking time to cultivate a taste in

her for them, or of choosing the times when she was the most disposed

for them. When she has rebelled, and we have wanted her to be quiet, we

have been willing to do anything to silence her, so that we could go on

with our work.

“‘That which makes children cry,’ Julie says, ‘is the attention that is

paid to them. It is only necessary to let them cry all day, a few times,

without paying any attention to them, to cure them of the habit. If one

pets them or threatens them, it has no effect. The more attention that

you give to their tears, the more reason they have for continuing them.

They will break themselves of the habit very soon when they see that no

one takes notice; for, great and small, no one cares to give himself

useless trouble.’ There, my good friend, is where we have been wrong.

Julie’s children were happy and peaceable under her eyes, but they were

subject to no one and only obliged to allow others the same liberty they

enjoyed themselves.

“We want to be left in peace; that is just, but sometimes we constrain

our child, and she takes her revenge as she can. Moreover, there is no

use denying it, our little one has a strong will, and she has no

sensibility and no taste. It must be that this is, in part, our fault,

and because we have not known how to direct her. More than that, we risk

making a still greater mistake in conquering her by force or by fear,

though we have believed that it could be done in no other way. In acting

thus, we are going to be unhappy, and our child is going to develop a

hard and an unendurable obstinacy.

“I have resolved: first, never to get angry, and always to be calm and

cold as justice itself when it comes to a question of correction.

“Second, never to use either whip or blow, movement or tone, which show

impatience. Blows of whatever kind seem to me odious. They harden,

debase, and prevent the birth of sentiment. On this score we have been

guilty. When, as an infant, Eudora put her hands on something that she

ought not to have touched, and did not take them off at the first word,

it seemed to us that a little blow on her rebellious hand might have

good effect. But that little blow has led to the whip; the child has

become a torment, and we are annoyed by it; that little blow was a great

mistake; it is time that we began over again, and we have not a moment

to lose.

“Third, the child must be happier with us than with any one else; it is

a question then of making her time pass more pleasantly when she is in

our presence than it does elsewhere. That would not be very difficult if

the mother was sewing or at housework, was free to talk with her

sometimes and to teach her little tasks. In a library, between two

desks, where severe research is going on and where silence is necessary,

it is quite natural that the child grow weary; above all, if she is

forbidden to sing or to chatter, and cannot play with any one.

“None of those persons who have written treatises on education have

considered the student or those of a similar profession; they have

treated the father or the mother as occupied solely in carrying out

their duties, everything else being set aside for them. But the case is

different here; you must carry on your work, and I am only too happy to

aid you in it. I am a wife as well as a mother, and was the one before

becoming the other.

“Let us try, then, while at our desks to have our child with us, and to

see to it that she is happy beside us. For that we must leave her free

as much as possible. If nature has not fitted her for study, let us not

insist. Let us form her character as well as we can, and let the rest

come by inspiration, not by punishment or caresses. Let us hold

ourselves to these rules, and I am sure that the child will soon feel

the justice and the necessity as well as the effect of our tenderness.

“For three days now I have not compelled her to do anything. She reads

five or six times a day to amuse herself, and she seems to think that it

is a good act. Without entirely lending myself to her little hypocrisy,

I nevertheless pretend to be partially, at least, her dupe. In the

evening she begs for music and I make a thousand excuses in order to

have the lesson short, gay, and easy. The great thing is obedience.

There have been scenes, I have punished her and she has wept; but I have

pretended not to notice it, and have gone on with my work in perfect

indifference. She has been obliged to stop some time, and it has never

been very long.”

The success was something, for by another spring, when the little one

was “six years six months and two days old,” she had commenced to

dislike being blamed as much as she did being put on dry bread; she

loved a caress better than her doll; reading amused her when she had

nothing better to do; and she loved to write and dance,—neither of which

fatigued her head,—but could not endure a story which was more than a

half hour long; and was still “a hundred leagues from Robinson.”

Madame Roland’s return to Rousseau was not confined to his system of

education. She went back to him at this time for inspiration. In going

to Le Clos she had an ideal,—Julie at Clarens. Probably she found that

in practice there was much more hard work and patient endurance in her

Clarens than there were pastorals and sweet emotions. Much as she

approved these stern virtues, considered abstractly, they aroused less

enthusiasm when applied, and she sought her prophet; not without reward,

for again and again she wrote Roland of her delight:

“I have been devouring _Julie_ as if it were not for the fourth or fifth

time. My friend, I shall always love that book, and if I ever become

_dévote_, it is the only one I shall desire. It seems to me that we

could have lived well with all those people and that they would have

found us as much to their taste as we them to ours.”

And again after an evening in the chimney corner with Rousseau: “I shall

read him all my life, and if ever we should be in that condition of

which we no longer think, when you, old and blind, make shoe-laces while

I do needle-work, all the books I shall want will be those of Jean

Jacques. He would make us shed delicious tears and would arouse

sentiments which would make us forget our lot.”

“Delicious tears” are as always her gauge of happiness. She never

learned that the amount of living one is doing, cannot always be

measured by the emotion one experiences.

In the days at Villefranche and Le Clos, Roland was as dear to her as

ever. She served him with touching devotion, finding her greatest

delight in being useful to him. The long and tiresome extracts on wool

and hides, bleaching and tanning, were never too long and tiresome for

her to copy, in her vigorous, beautiful hand; the numerous academic

papers and public pamphlets never too numerous for her to apply all her

literary skill and her enthusiasm to polishing and brightening. She

arranged everything to make his life easy and to advance his work, and

her affection was poured out as freely as in the days before their

marriage. He is the “friend _par excellence_.” “I love you madly and I

am disposed to snap my fingers at the rest,” she told him. Her

letter-writing, in his absence, she calls “the dearest of her

occupations,” and it must have been, to judge from the following letter

written seven years after her marriage:

“I had told —— to go after it [Roland’s letter]. I awaited it in vain

all the evening. He had forgotten to go. I sent him again when I sat

down to supper. While I ate I waited, my heart was troubled. The servant

seemed to me to be gone a long time. My heart jumped at every noise I

heard at the door. Overcome, I said: News from him was never dearer,

never awaited with more tender impatience. I scarcely heard what brother

said and I answered yes at random. It was worse still when the package

came. My heart went out to it beforehand. I examined the writing with

strange haste, I opened it, I read. The mutual sentiment which inspires

us leaves me incapable of feeling anything else. I scarcely spoke the

rest of the evening.”

Unquestionably she believed in the endurance of this affection for

Roland, so far as there is any indication in her letters. Perhaps

something of the secret of the peculiar tenderness between Madame Roland

and her husband at this time was that Roland was but little at home.

Where the imagination has the habit of idealizing situations and

persons, it is difficult to quiet it—it must have its craving satisfied.

But no idealized object will resist long the friction of every-day life

and the disillusion which is inevitable from constant association.

Madame Roland never ceased her habit of idealization, but, fortunately,

her life with Roland was so broken by his repeated absences that her

imagination did still find pleasure in busying itself with him.

For several years after they went to Beaujolais there was but one break

in this busy life for Madame Roland,—a trip to Switzerland taken in 1787

with her husband and her brother-in-law, the Curé of Longpoint. She

wrote full notes of her trip for Eudora, as she had done of her trip to

England. They were printed by Champagneux in the year 1800. They are

less spontaneous than those on England, following almost entirely

Roland’s letters of ten years before. This trip into Switzerland was to

have been followed by one to Italy, which never was taken.

And so their life went on from 1784 to 1789. On the whole, it was happy,

as it certainly was useful and honorable. To be sure, they were not

quite satisfied. They still felt keenly that the title and privileges

they had asked had been refused, and they still cherished hopes of being

retired. Madame Roland, especially, kept the matter in view and worked

to bring it about; thus, in September of 1787 we find her directing

Roland: “Write to the _bear_ and pay him the compliment of your

encyclopedic work. I have imagined a little letter of which I send you

the idea. To flatter a person’s pretensions is a means of capturing his

good-will. If it is true that he has a mistress, Lanthenas must unearth

her, as well as the sides on which she is accessible. They will be

convenient notes to have in the portfolio, and can be used as one does

certain drugs in desperate cases.”

On the whole, Madame Roland was very well off, and her life would

undoubtedly have gone on thus to the end, broken after a while, perhaps,

with the much desired pension; perhaps, by even the title of nobility;

she then would have had the “paradise” she so much desired—“the pretty

apartment in town and a bijou at Le Clos”; she might, on the other hand,

have had her sad sentimental picture realized and Roland, blind, have

made shoe-laces and she done needle-work, while they both shed delicious

tears over Rousseau, had there not been something in the air which was

about to take away all from him that had and to give it to him who had

not; to make leaders of country lawyers, and doctors, and schoolmasters,

and to send the diplomats and courtiers a-begging.

The French Revolution was coming, and to trace briefly how it grew in

the Lyonnais and how our friends in particular regarded it and were

drawn to side with it, is our next affair.

V

HOW THE ROLANDS WELCOMED THE REVOLUTION

Monsieur and Madame Roland had both, throughout their lives, been

intelligent observers and critics of, as well as, to a degree, sufferers

from, the financial and social causes of the French Revolution. They had

both sympathized with the preliminary outbreaks of that revolution

which, beginning early in the century, had recurred at intervals

throughout their lives. They both had thoroughly imbibed the

intellectual causes of the movement, those new ideas of Voltaire,

Diderot, Helvétius, Abbé Raynal, Rousseau, which, coming _after_ the

first agitation,—there had been many a riot in Paris, in Lyons, in

Rouen; the King had been warned many a time that there were still

Ravaillacs; the word _Révolution_ had been often spoken by the French of

the eighteenth century before these men wrote,—had backed up the

revolutionist with philosophy and logic.

Roland was but ten years old, a boy in the Lyonnais, when the war with

Austria caused so much misery, and when a new levy of men and the

doubling of the taxes desolated and irritated the province. Lyons was

obliged to contribute two million livres at that time to aid the King.

He was seventeen when, in 1751, the misery again became so terrible that

riots occurred throughout France, and D’Argenson wrote: “Nothing but a

near revolution is talked of on account of the bad condition of the

government.” These things could not but have affected him. Indeed, the

bad outlook at Lyons was one reason that he left home with the idea of

making his fortune in America. As a boy, then, Roland had felt the

financial errors of the French government.

He was at Rouen when, in 1756, the Seven Years’ War broke out. At that

moment the annual receipts of the State were two hundred and fifty-three

million livres, the expenses between three hundred and twenty and three

hundred and thirty millions. That year Roland saw the people obliged to

pay a twentieth of their revenue—the detested _vingtième_. No one was

exempt, and no doubt the bill fell heavily on the manufacturing

interests. This tax was in addition to the _taille_, which tormented the

small proprietors of the country, and from which the nobles and clergy

were free. In addition were the special taxes of which Roland must have

felt the injury especially, both in the Lyonnais and at Rouen. These

included the _aides_, or tax on drinks; the _octroi_, at the gate of

every city; the salt-tax; the special duties on iron, leather, and

paper; the impost on tobacco, cards, and oils; the custom duties at the

frontier of every province of France, as well as at the frontier of the

kingdom.

Two years later at Rouen, 1758, Roland no doubt felt the effect in his

personal expenses of the result of the gift which the city, in common

with all the cities, boroughs, and seignioralties of the kingdom, was

obliged to pay to help on the war, and to meet which they received

permission to put a tax on all drinks, on meat, hay, and wood. When one

has to pay more for his wood and fire, he reflects why.

Two years later the Parlement of Rouen, in common with several others of

the kingdom, flatly refused to register the royal edicts creating new

taxes, declaring, with a hardihood superior even to that of the

Parlement of Paris, that the system of taxation was unjust, and the

people the victims of royal abuse, and suggesting audaciously a

parlement of France composed of all the parlements of the kingdom. So

eloquent and so free was this declaration that it was even printed and

sold in Paris.

Roland’s position made him familiar with all these revolts; he heard

them discussed as well as the King’s haughty, energetic reply to the

deputation of the Parlement. “I am your master. I ought to punish you

for the impudence of your principles. Go back to Rouen, register my

decrees and declaration without further delay. I will be obeyed.”

He was touched, no doubt, by the remonstrance which the same body sent

to the King in 1763: “Your people, Sire, is unhappy. Everything shows

this sad fact. Your parlements, the only organs of the nation, repeat it

unceasingly.... A deluge of taxes pitilessly ravages our towns and our

provinces; the property, the industry, the person of citizens, all are a

prey to these extraordinary imposts; poverty itself, and the charity

which aids it, have become its tributaries and its victims. The farming

out of the _aides_, whose rules attack all conditions and commerce in

general, weighs on the poor in a most inhuman manner. The farming of the

salt-tax presents a spectacle not less revolting.”

At Amiens, as inspector of manufactures, Roland had a still better

opportunity to see the defects of the financial and commercial system of

France. At that time, in almost all the villages of the kingdom, the

exercise of the different arts and trades was concentrated in the hands

of a small number of masters, united in trades-unions, who alone could

make and sell certain objects. The man who wished to enter a trade could

only do so by acquiring a _maîtrise_. To do this he must go through a

long and painful apprenticeship and spend much money to satisfy the

numerous imposts and exactions. Frequently a large part of the sum which

he needed for setting up his shop or store was consumed in acquiring his

license. Certain unions excluded all but sons of masters, or those who

had married the widows of masters; others rejected all who were born in

another town—foreigners, as they called them. In a number of the unions

a married man could not be an apprentice. To practise his trade after

having served his apprenticeship, a linen-dealer must pay twenty-one

hundred livres; a dyer, thirteen hundred and fifty; a mason, seventeen

hundred; a butcher, fifteen hundred; a potter, twenty-four hundred; and

so on through all the trades of the community. One could not work if he

would, unless the union gave him permission, and all classes of citizens

were obliged to submit to the dictation of the unions as to whom they

should hire. So narrow was the spirit of these organizations that women

were not allowed to carry on even such industries as embroidery.

Worse, in Roland’s eyes, were the restrictions on the way in which an

article was to be manufactured. These were so numerous that industrial

genius and initiative were practically prevented, that the manufacturer

could not respond to the demands of fashion and of taste, and that

competition with foreign trade was largely cut off. He could make only

certain stuffs. The dimensions were fixed; the dyeing and stamping must

follow a certain formula; they must bear a certain mark. If by any

accident, intentional or not, a stuff was turned out which did not

conform exactly to the rules, the severest penalty was fixed. A system

of inspection, most irritating and frequently unjust, was made of every

piece of goods; even houses with long reputation for honest

manufacturing were subjected to this examination, which was sometimes

little more than a kind of spying exercised by young and incapable men

who had no commercial training. A grave injustice was according the

title of _manufacture royale_ as a favor, or often, to new institutions,

for a sum.

Roland clashed constantly with these regulations throughout his term in

Amiens.

Mademoiselle Phlipon had likewise, in the days before her marriage, been

influenced by public affairs. She was in a centre where the populace

throbbed continually. A stone’s throw from her house the Parlement sat,

and its every act was a sign for popular joy or discontent. There could

be no demonstration without its passing largely under her windows. From

the first days of her life, then, her political education commenced. A

child of less intellectual curiosity and of less sensibility would not

have responded to these popular outbursts. They would have made but

fleeting impressions. It was different with her; she watched it all,

felt the rage or joy of the people, and brooded over its meaning. There

is, indeed, no more fascinating study in her life than the influence

which the panorama of the Pont Neuf and the Place Dauphine had upon her.

When she was eight years old she saw the smoke of burning volumes, as

she looked from her window towards the Place de la Grève. It was

Rousseau’s _Émile_ going up in smoke. Every year after she saw the same

suggestive sight. Now it was remonstrances against interferences by the

King with the rights of the Parlement which were burned; now the

seditious utterances of the independent parlements of Bretagne, of

Rouen, of Dauphiné; now a too liberal general history of the present

condition of Europe, translated from the English; now too bold

reflections on feudal rights; now Voltaire’s _Dictionnaire

philosophique_; now Holbach; now Raynal; now Helvétius. In 1775 she

heard La Harpe admonished “to be more circumspect in the future,”

because of a daring article he had published. These condemned authors

she was beginning to read.

She began to hear from her earliest days the word _révolution_. It had

been pronounced frequently for a long time in private, but it began to

be said aloud. When she was nine years old, a Paris priest declared: “We

approach a state of crisis and an age of revolutions. I believe it

impossible that the great monarchies of Europe endure long.” The priest

was condemned at the Châtelet across the river from her window, but his

discourse was printed and scattered right and left. She heard gossip of

how the Parlement had told the King that Frenchmen are free men and not

slaves; and a little later it is quite possible that she saw the King on

his way to the Palais de Justice, where, under the very eyes of the

Parlement, he erased their rebellious decree, and declared: “It is in my

person alone that the sovereign power exists; it is from me alone that

my courts have their existence and their authority; it is to me alone

that independent and indivisible legislative power belongs; public order

emanates entirely from me.”

In 1770 she saw bread riots and seditious pamphlets posted in Paris. In

January, 1771, came the dissolution and exile of the Parlement because

of its refusal to record Louis XV.’s humiliating decree abrogating its

power and condemning its conduct. Little Manon saw a surging crowd of

Parisians filling the palace and its neighborhood—a crowd in which,

wrote one who watched it, “there was sometimes a dull silence, as in

times of great calamities; sometimes a noise and a murmur like that

which precedes great revolutions.”

She saw the new and detested body—organ of the King’s despotism—sitting

in a veritable camp, and the walls of the palace covered with abusive

inscriptions. She read, too, many of the hardy pamphlets which flooded

the country after this despotic _coup d’état_. In them the doctrine of

power residing in one individual was roundly attacked; the divine

authority of kings was denied flatly, and the Constitution of England,

with the example of 1688, was held up to the country. We know she

followed the exciting seven months of the trial of Beaumarchais and

Goëzmann. When Louis XVI. came to the throne, she shared the general joy

at his promises, and doubtless felt that it was a true prophet who

printed _resurrexit_ on the statue of Henry IV., in front of her door.

When in the next year the bread riots began and across the river the

people pillaged the markets, she saw much of the disorder,—people

dancing with joy over a loaf they had secured; guards about the bakeries

to give the bakers an opportunity properly to bake the bread: hungry men

waiting with their eight sous, taking the loaves from the very oven;

shops closed in terror, as the rioters moved from quarter to quarter.

Married, the Rolands saw together all the abuses of the realm and aided

in the struggles against them. The first year of their married life

Roland labored in vain at Paris with the committee which the King had

summoned from the manufacturing centres of France, to obtain greater

freedom in the industries, and was forced to go back to Amiens with a

list of vexatious restrictions still encumbering all varieties of

manufacturing.

After their marriage they were constantly cramped for money, for

Roland’s salary was very small, and he had but few privileges in

connection with his position. For instance, when Madame Roland was in

Paris in 1784 seeking the letters of nobility, she was forced to guard

her expenses with the greatest care; to avoid taking _fiacres_ as often

as possible, and to take cheap seats at the theatre. In the Beaujolais

she had been forced to give up going to Lyons often, on account of the

expense of life there, to stay much at Le Clos, and to administer her

household with greatest economy.

There was no complaint on their part because of their poverty, but there

was dissatisfaction with the system which did not reward properly a man

who had given his life to the interests of his country, and had produced

numbers of valuable works, while it took up insignificant individuals,

and, through favoritism or for a round bribe, gave them easy and amply

paid positions, and allowed them to keep them whatever they did or did

not do; a system which, in short, justified Beaumarchais’

characterization: “Il fallait un calculateur pour remplir la place, ce

fut un danseur qui l’obtint.” (An accountant was wanted in the place, a

dancer received it.)

After the Rolands left Amiens, they came into personal contact with the

feudal rights; for in the Beaujolais the peasant was still often obliged

to give personal service to his lord. It was to the lord’s wine-press he

was obliged to take his grapes, to his mill that he must take his wheat.

They saw the effect of the wretched salt-tax, an indirect tax which

forced every inhabitant to buy seven pounds of salt a year, and it cost

eight times what it does to-day, considering the value of money. Not

only was he forced to buy, he was forced to use it in certain ways,—not

a grain of that seven pounds could be employed anywhere except in his

table food. If he wanted to salt pork, he must buy another kind.

They probably saw, in their rides to and from Lyons, the peasants bent

at their _corvée_, or road tax; for the peasants still made the royal

roads in the Lyonnais. On an average, they gave twelve days a year, and

the use of their own implements, to the highways which they rarely had

the advantage of using. The terrible tolls were another unjust

imposition from which they suffered personally. They were innumerable.

Let a boat of wine attempt to go from Dauphiné, by the Rhone, Loire, and

the canal of Briare, and it paid thirty-five to forty kinds of duties,

not counting the entrée to Paris. From Pontarlier to Lyons there were

twenty-five or thirty tolls. If Madame Roland had bought ten cents worth

of wine in Burgundy, it would have cost her fifteen to eighteen sous

before she got it to Lyons.

Another experience which intensified their disgust with the _ancien

régime_ was the study of the affairs of Lyons. In a report made, in

1791, on the condition of the city, Roland showed how Lyons, after

having been for a long time one of the most flourishing cities of the

world, because of her active and peculiar industries, and having earned

a world-wide credit, attracted the attention of the government, at that

time completely corrupt. The State forced the city to compromise her

industries and credit in order to lend money. She borrowed again and

again, and gave in return the saddest, most ruinous compensation,—the

permission to tax herself. This had gone on until Lyons was bankrupt,

her industries ruined, her streets full of beggars.

This condition of finances and society they had long seen, as had the

whole country, must be changed or there would be an upheaval. They had

even calculated on this change when Madame Roland was soliciting the

letters of nobility at Paris, and the probability that when it came

something would fall to them. Like all France, it was in a reform of the

finances that they saw hope, and it was that which they demanded. They

did not believe that France was hopelessly involved, but were confident

that she could extricate herself by severe economies in the

administration, by cutting off favoritism, by arranging a just system of

taxes. Up to 1789 that was all that was demanded.

Like all France, they participated in those outbursts of joy which swept

over the country at various periods in the reigns of Louis XV. and Louis

XVI., when ministers of force and wisdom devised relief.

The call for the States-General, in 1788, interested them more deeply

than ever in the reforms needed; the effort of the Parlement of Paris to

prevent the Third Estate naming as many members as the nobility and

clergy together, and to prevent their sitting together aroused them.

When, however, in spite of all opposition, the King issued the edict

allowing the Third Estate double representation and called for the

election of members to, and the preparation of _cahiers_ for, the coming

gathering, the Rolands went to work with energy. It was on the

preparation of the _cahiers_[2] sent to the States-General by the Third

Estate of Lyons that Roland was principally occupied, and it was with

hopefulness that he saw the deputies and the memorials depart for

Versailles, where, on May 4th, the twelve hundred representatives of the

nation met to begin the work of restoring order in France and of making

a constitution.

Footnote 2:

Memorials prepared by each of the three classes, setting forth their

grievances, their demands, and the compromises they were willing to

make.

At Le Clos the Rolands watched eagerly every act of the States-General,

of the King, and of the people. But the drama played in Paris and at

Versailles between May 4th and July 14th, turned their hopefulness to

despair, their gratitude to suspicion, their generosity to resentment,

their pliability to obstinacy.

Suddenly, on July 14th, the Parisians, terrified at the rumors of a

conspiracy on the part of the Court which had for its object the

overthrow of the pet minister, Necker, the adjournment of the National

Assembly, the abandonment of reforms, and the coercion of the people by

the foreign soldiers who had been massed in and around the capitol,

razed the Bastille.

With the falling of the Bastille a new ideal arose, full-winged, before

Madame Roland. Before the 14th of July she had no idea that out of the

events she watched so eagerly anything more than a reform of the

existing régime would grow; the old régime, stripped of its abuses and

regulated by a liberal constitution, was all she had asked. Now all was

changed; compromise, half-way measures, were at an end. Instead of

reforms she demanded “complete regeneration.” She saw in the sudden

uprising of the people the “sovereign” exercising “the divine right of

insurrection.” It was what Jean Jacques Rousseau had declared in the

_Social Contract_ the people had the right to do if the government under

which they were living was unjust. She seems to have gone at once to the

conclusion that, since the rightful “sovereign,” had at last asserted

itself, an immediate regeneration was to follow, abuses were to be wiped

out, tyranny destroyed, selfishness annihilated, equality created, and

the world to run at last with precision and to the satisfaction of all

concerned. To her the fall of the Bastille was the revolution of

society. “Friends of humanity, lovers of liberty,” she wrote afterwards,

“we believed it had come to regenerate the human kind, to destroy the

terrible misery of that unhappy class over which we had so often

mourned. We welcomed it with transports.”

Their transports soon turned to irritation; for the immediate

regeneration she had pictured was replaced by struggles more fierce than

ever before.

To those of her liberal aspirations, determined on a constitutional

government, recognizing the sovereignty of the people and the equality

of men, two political courses were open at that moment. They could unite

with the liberal party of reform in a struggle to frame a constitution;

could insist while this was doing upon respect for the National

Assembly; could recognize the difficulty of the situation; could respect

the laws and be patient;—or they could refuse alliance with this party

on the ground that reforms were no longer the need of France, but that

complete regeneration must be demanded; could suspect, and induce others

to suspect, the sincerity of all those who applied the doctrines less

vigorously than they did; could encourage by excuses or tacit sympathy

the riotous party which with incredible fecundity was spreading over

France, explaining its actions as the lawful efforts of the sovereign

people to get rid of its oppressors and to take possession of its own

rights.

Madame Roland did not approve of the first party. It attempted nothing

but reforms. She wanted every vestige of the old régime wiped out. She

suspected it, hated it. It had proved itself unworthy and must be

abolished. The real sovereign must be allowed to prepare a government.

She had no particular idea of what this government should be; certainly

she did not suggest a republic. She was convinced, however, that it

would be a simple matter to arrange something where happiness and

justice and prosperity should be the lot of all.

To obtain this ideal condition she believed riot and civil war

justifiable; indeed she believed them necessary now that the fall of the

Bastille had not been enough. They were necessary to keep the usurper in

terror and the people suspicious. For her part, even if she were a woman

and for that reason excluded from public activities, she meant to keep

her friends aroused to the necessity of insurrection.

There is no doubt that the policy of Roland in the Revolution and the

relations which he formed and which shaped his course of action were due

to this determination of Madame Roland to use her influence in

agitation. All their contemporaries remark her ascendency over her

husband. But she did not content herself with inspiring Roland. The two

friends with whom she had been so long in regular correspondence, Bosc

and Lanthenas, she strove, with all her eloquence, to urge to action. “I

write you now but little of personal affairs. Who is the traitor who has

other interest to-day than that of the nation?” Once Bosc wrote her a

story of an interesting adventure; she replied: “I do not know whether

you are in love or not; but I do know this, that in the situation where

we now are, no honest man can follow the torch of love without having

first lit it at the sacred fire of country.” She formed new political

relations—the first, with Brissot de Warville, was of particular

importance to them.

The Rolands had had a slight correspondence with Brissot before the

Revolution; for he, having been attracted by Roland’s writings, had sent

him certain of his manuscripts as a mark of his esteem. This had led to

an exchange of courteous letters, and, through one of their common

friends in Paris, the relation was still further cemented, and a regular

correspondence had grown up. When the Revolution came, Brissot started

_Le patriote français_ and the Rolands sent him “all,” said Madame

Roland, “which, under the circumstances, seemed to us to be useful to

publish.” A large number of these letters were published in the

_Patriote français_.

It was not only in Paris that her letters inspired by their ardent

patriotism. They were in relation with a young man at Lyons, called

Champagneux. The 1st of September, 1789, he started the _Courrier de

Lyon_, a journal something in the style of Brissot’s, intended to preach

the principles of 1789, and to show what was passing in the National

Assembly. Madame Roland wrote often to this journal.

The most important correspondence which she carried on at this time was

with Bancal des Issarts, a lawyer, formerly of Clermont, who had left

his profession for politics. Bancal had been a deputy to the National

Assembly, and, after the closing of the session, had returned to

Clermont, where he had established a society of Friends of the

Constitution. Returning to Paris, he made the acquaintance of Lanthenas

and the two had planned a community in which they wished to associate

the Rolands. Their idea was to buy a quantity of national property and

found a retreat where they could together prosecute the work of

regenerating France, while at the same time having the delights and the

stimulus of intelligent companionship.

Lanthenas introduced Bancal by letter to the Rolands, and a

correspondence was at once begun. Madame Roland, as a rule, wrote for

both herself and her husband. Her letters are as patriotic and as

passionately vindictive as those she wrote Bosc.

[Illustration:

MADAME ROLAND.

From the painting by Heinsius in the museum of Versailles.

]

At the same time she preached to her acquaintances at Villefranche and

Le Clos, and solicited subscribers for Brissot’s journal.

There was nothing vague or uncertain about her position at this moment.

Her convictions, her plan of action, had been taken. It was

uncompromising, unflinching war against the existing government. Twelve

days after the fall of the Bastille, she wrote to Bosc: “You are

occupying yourself with a municipality, and you are letting heads escape

that are going to conjure up new horrors. You are nothing but children;

your enthusiasm is a straw fire and if the National Assembly does not

put on trial two illustrious heads, or some generous Decius does not

take them, you are all mad.” She made the demand because she did not

believe in the King’s and the Court’s sincerity. Every action of theirs

which was liberal, a concession to the popular party, she scoffed at. Of

the appearance of the King and his beautiful Queen in the Assembly she

wrote: “They were abominably frightened, that is all the business shows.

Before we can believe in the sincerity of their promise to agree to what

the Assembly shall do, we must forget all that has passed ... the King

must send away all the foreign troops ... we are nearer than ever to a

frightful slavery if we allow ourselves to be blinded by false

confidence.”

Her dissatisfaction with the National Assembly was complete. She sneered

at the emotion when Marie Antoinette appeared in their midst seeking

protection: “The French are easily won by the fine appearance of their

masters, and I am persuaded that the half of the Assembly has been

_bête_ enough to be touched at the sight of Antoinette confiding her son

to them. Morbleu! is it then of a child of which it is a question! It is

the safety of twenty million men. All is lost if we do not take care.”

The constitution displeased her, too: “We blush in reading the public

papers. They are plastering up a bad constitution just as they have

botched an incomplete and faulty declaration. Am I not going to see a

demand for the revision of all?”

She saw clearly that it was not from the people of France, as a whole,

that she would get the revision of the constitution which she asked, or

a second to her demand for the heads of the king and queen. “There is

only one hope,” she said, “it is in Paris. It is for you, Parisians, to

give the example. By a wise and vigorous address show the Assembly that

you know your rights, that you mean to preserve them, that you are ready

to defend them, and that you demand that it declare them. Without such a

movement all is worse than ever. It is not the Palais Royal which must

do it; it is the united districts. However, if they do not respond, let

it be done by whomsoever it may, provided it be in sufficient numbers to

impose and to carry others by its example.” She was even ready to go a

little farther and did it cheerfully: “A civil war is necessary before

we shall be worth anything. All these little quarrels and insurrections

seem to me inevitable; I cannot imagine that it is possible to come from

the bosom of corruption and rise to liberty, without strong convulsions.

They are the salutary crises of a severe sickness, and a terrible

political fever is necessary to take away our bad humors.”

Truly, there were few better Jacobins in 1793 than Madame Roland was two

months after the fall of the Bastille; for we have here in purity the

doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, the divine right of

insurrection, the demand for the head of Louis XVI., the call to Paris

to take into her hands what the people of the country are not ready to

do, even to use its power of terrorism against the Assembly, composed of

the representatives of the people.

This spirit, this restless energy, never left her, though she was buried

at Le Clos almost all the first eighteen months of the Revolution. She

kept herself aflame by correspondence with her friends and by her

propagandism among her neighbors, most of them decidedly recalcitrant.

Especially did she incite herself by her reading. Writing to Bancal once

she told him: “I have left all the Italian poets for the _Tacitus_ of

Davanzati. It is not permitted in a time of revolution to turn to

pleasant studies, or objects remote from the public interest. If I can

give a little time this winter to English, I shall read Macaulay’s

history. I shall leave the historian only for the novel of Rousseau,

which is perfectly suited to civism.”

She saw no danger in her doctrines. They moved to noble sentiments, to

great aspirations. What greater good? That they incited to crimes, too,

she did not admit. She was recklessly indifferent to what is; she looked

only at what might be. Her eyes were turned to America, to Greece, to

Rome, and not to the facts of the struggles of these countries, only to

the fine actions of their heroes, the rounded phrases of their orators.

The reasonable girl who welcomed Louis XVI. to the throne, the politic

woman who for years had been seeking a title and its advantages, and who

had been willing to devote all her splendid power to reforming the old

régime, had become suddenly inexorable in her demands, unyielding in her

suspicions, fierce in her thought. She believed that one must “watch and

preach to the last sigh or else not mingle with the Revolution.” It was

the revolt of the idealist against compromises made in the past;

resentment for wrongs suffered; the “strike back” for the title not

granted, and for Roland’s talent and services unrecognized; the hope of

realizing dreams of an ideal society.

Nor was it a momentary enthusiasm. Her conviction never wavered. Others

as firmly founded in the doctrines as she, and as eloquent in their

defence of them, hesitated sometimes, drew back with apprehension at the

torrents of passion and of demagogy they were loosening on France. But

she never admitted that anything but “complete regeneration” could come

of their teachings. It was the woman’s nature which, stirred to its

depths by enthusiasm or passion, becomes narrow, stern, unbending,—which

can do but one thing, can see but one way; that inexplicable feminine

conviction which is superior to experience, and indifferent to logic.

VI

FIRST POLITICAL SALON

The Rolands were not long in embroiling themselves in Lyons and in the

Beaujolais. Disorganization and disorder were increasing daily there, as

in Paris and throughout the country. The aristocracy, clergy, and

commercial portions of the community, irritated at the failure of the

government to restore tranquillity, and discouraged over the delay of

the National Assembly in forcing its way through the difficulties of the

situation, grew hard against the Revolution. There was a universal

demand for order. Disorder grew from day to day.

The conservative party was firmly convinced that the disorder was the

fault of the friends of the Revolution. There was a suspicion of

everybody who professed the new doctrines. Those who taught them were

regarded as dangerous “agitators.” The reforms to which they had

consented, and which they had left to the National Assembly, would never

be made, they felt, unless the people could be quieted. They saw a

general and universal catastrophe awaiting society if organization was

not restored.

On the other hand, the liberals saw in the policy of the aristocrats and

clergy a plot against the people; sympathy with the Court. The disorders

which occurred they attributed either to the just indignation of the

long-oppressed “sovereign,” or to hired agitators, brought in by the

conservative party to stir up riots, and thus cover the popular cause

with odium.

On either hand there were accusations without proof, suspicions without

cause, violence and hatred instead of patience and good-will. All of the

generosity, the dignity, the reasonableness, which the different estates

had shown a year before in the memorials which they had sent to the

States-General, had disappeared.

Roland and his wife were known to be deeply in sympathy with democratic

ideas, to preach them constantly. In spite of the fact that his natural

relations were with the aristocratic class, Roland was active in the

people’s clubs at Lyons; he was called the Mæcenas of Champagneux. He

was suspected, if not of inciting to disorder, yet of sympathizing with

it, and of regarding it as an instrument for forcing the Court, and

driving the Assembly. He began to be considered a “suspect” by the

conservatives. Such was the feeling towards him when he was a candidate

for mayor, in 1789, that the most improbable stories were circulated

about him. The Abbé Guillon declares in his Memoirs that Roland

disguised himself and went into the taverns, begging the people’s votes;

that he joined in their orgies and distributed among them seditious

pamphlets. These charges are so inconsistent with the real character of

Roland that it is not worth considering them, and they are only worth

quoting as a specimen of the violent suspicions of the liberals, or

_révolutionnaires_, held and spread by the conservative party.

About this time a question arose in which Roland took an active

interest—that of the octroi. The misery of the people of Lyons demanded

that it be removed. It was retained, however, and the people, desperate,

rose in revolt. This uprising, said the patriots, was “spontaneous.” It

was the “work of agitators,” declared the conservatives. Brissot, in the

_Patriote français_, condemned the riot. Roland wrote, thereupon, a long

letter defending it, and remarked in Lyons, one day, that there never

had been a revolution yet without bloodshed. This was enough for his

opponents to declare him to be the author of the insurrection. “This

report has already [21 July, 1790] reached the capitol,” wrote Madame

Roland to Bancal, “and in three or four quarters of Lyons, where the

mercantile aristocracy is dominant, the strangest things are said

against him. You judge that this storm disturbs us very little; we have

seen more terrible, and would not mind it if our enemies should cause us

to be called to the bar of the National Assembly. Our friend there would

be like Scipio before the assembly of the people.”

Every-day matters grew more complicated. The aristocracy, in face of the

disorders, called upon the government for troops. The people, like the

Parisians the year before, were exasperated at the idea of guards. At

the same time rumors of an Austrian and Prussian invasion, organized by

the _émigrés_ who had been leaving France ever since the days of October

5th, irritated and frightened the Lyonnais. It was said that the enemy

would enter by the way of Savoy. The idea of a counter-revolution,

centred in Lyons, was spread abroad and inflamed more than ever the

nervous and terrified populace.

Madame Roland was convinced of the truth of all these rumors, just as

her opponents were convinced that she and her husband meant anarchy and

violence by their patriotic and determined support of the people and the

Revolution. In every letter to Bancal, since June 22d,—she had been

writing him constantly,—she repeated her distrust. In her judgment, it

was her duty to report very alarming signs. Her two principles, at this,

moment, were “security is the tomb of liberty,” “indulgence towards men

in authority tempts them to despotism.”

Throughout the summer and fall of 1790, the rumors of

counter-revolution, accusation, denials, suspicion, terror, similar to

what Madame Roland was attempting to spread among her friends, agitated

Lyons; and the preparations for the elections of the year were made in

savage excitement. Roland was again a candidate for a position in the

municipality and from day to day was more detested. Madame Roland’s name

was everywhere associated with his. “They write me from Lyons,” she

says, “that at the mention of my name the aristocrats writhe as those

possessed of devils are said to do when holy water is sprinkled on

them.”

Roland was elected a member of the municipal government in spite of the

machinations of the aristocrats, the power of whom had been greatly

weakened by the discovery in November of an extensive royalist plot.

There was no doubt of the plot this time, and the reaction in favor of

the Revolution was general.

They left Le Clos after Roland’s election to establish themselves at

Lyons, which they had made up their minds not to abandon until after its

complete regeneration. So serious were the affairs of the city that the

new municipality soon decided to send representatives to Paris to claim

from the National Assembly the payment of the debt that the ancient

régime had made her take upon herself. Roland was one of the deputies

chosen to go. When he went up on this mission his wife accompanied him.

The opinions on the work of the Assembly which Madame Roland carried up

to Paris were not friendly. She had watched its work all through the

year with critical keenness. All its actions had been tested by her pure

republican standards, and wherever they fell short had been sharply

condemned. She had absolutely no sympathy with delays, with compromises,

with tentative measures, and she was as aggressively suspicious of the

patriotism of the members as she was of the sincerity of the

aristocrats. The condition of the finances troubled her. She could see

no excuse for a delay in giving the country an exact statement of the

public accounts. The press had not enough liberty to please her. “A

people is not free,” she declared, “and cannot become so, unless each

one has the means of uncovering perfidious designs, of revealing the

abuses of talent as well as of authority, of exposing the opinions of

everybody, of weighing the laws in the scales of universal reason. What

does it matter if one is abused, providing one is innocent and always

ready to prove it? This kind of war on virtue seems to me excellent;

perhaps custom and security do nothing for virtue but take away its

energy. It must be attacked to be strong, and it is danger which renders

it sublime.”

The manner in which the National Assembly did its work inspired her

contempt. It was stupid, mere patch-work. “It jumps perpetually from one

thing to another,” she complained, “and is behind with the things of the

first importance without our knowing why.”

On account of this feebleness of the Assembly, she insisted that it must

be watched; that addresses should be made to it by the clubs; that the

_bons esprits_ should unite and sketch the objects which it was suitable

for the legislature to consider, to the exclusion of everything else.

She failed to see that it was largely just this interference with the

Assembly which was preventing its doing its work; that it was because

the patriots in their zeal did not mind their own business, but

encumbered the sittings with demands of the most varied character,

threatened the body with disaster if it did not hear them, sent

delegations on errands, now of private and selfish, now of large import,

that the continuity she demanded was wanting.

They reached Paris towards the end of February, 1791, and installed

themselves at the Hôtel Britannique, in the Rue Guénégaud, opposite the

Hôtel des Monnaies. Here she was within easy reach of all her old

neighbors, and whenever she went out on the street which opened on the

quay, she could see her old home. She had not been in Paris for five

years. In her intimate circle great changes had taken place. Her father

had died in the rude winter of 1787–88; her uncle Bimont, the good curé

of Vincennes, and the Curé Roland, whom they loved so well, who made the

trip in Switzerland with them, and who had welcomed the Revolution as

they did, were both dead. There was left only “the débris of a family,

which in the last ten years had become almost extinct.” She took the

greatest pleasure in going over the places where her early years had

been passed, and the tears of tenderness she shed in looking on these

familiar scenes delighted her. They proved that she had not allowed

ambition, cares, and petty passions to dry up the springs of her soul.

Her visits to her old friends were scarcely finished before she began to

devote herself to public affairs. The Assembly was sitting only a little

distance from her hotel, in the Manège of the Tuileries, now destroyed,

but then running along the north side of the garden, parallel with the

Rue de Rivoli, and thither she went frequently, but her first impression

of the body saddened and irritated her. All the opinions she had formed

at Le Clos were only intensified by the nearer view.

Two years and a half afterwards, when she recalled these visits, she

noted an impression which explains unquestionably something of her

harshness towards the Assembly. “I saw, with secret resentment, that if

reason, honesty, principle, controlled the Left, there were advantages

on the Right, that I would have gladly turned over to the good cause

because of their great effect on an assembly. I mean that easy and noble

elocution, that nicety of expression, that polish in the tones of the

voice,—if I am allowed to express myself so,—which a superior education

and familiarity with good society give.”

Her pride was wounded by the evident superiority of the aristocrats in

manner and in expression. It aroused in her an altogether illogical

bitterness against them. She was irritated because she and her friends,

who alone, she was convinced, understood unselfish patriotism, who alone

held the doctrines in all their purity and simplicity, should yet be

inferior in externals to their rivals. This distinction became a

personal grievance with her.

After having followed the Assembly two months, she left a session at the

end of April in anger, persuaded that it was incapable of anything but

folly, and vowing never to look at it again,—an engagement she

faithfully kept. At the same time she told Champagneux, with whom she

and Roland were both in correspondence, that she was not going any more

to the theatre: “It is much too frivolous for my taste in such serious

circumstances.” And to Bancal she wrote: “In other days the fine arts

and all that concern them was the greatest charm of the capital in my

eyes, but now that I know that I have a country I feel differently; the

solicitude of the patriot leaves but little place for matters of taste.”

To the patriotic clubs she did go, however, and one of them, the Cercle

Social, especially interested her. She even sent letters to it

sometimes, without signing them, however. “I do not believe that our

customs permit women to show themselves yet,” she said; “they ought to

inspire and nourish the good, inflame all the sentiments useful to the

country, but not appear to take part in political work. They can act

openly only when the French shall merit the name of free men; until

then, our lightness, our corrupt customs, would make what they tried to

do ridiculous; and would destroy the advantage which otherwise might

result.” While the Cercle Social pleased them both, the Jacobins were

too conservative. “The Jacobins have lost their credit, no longer doing,

or doing badly, the duty that they took upon themselves, to discuss the

subjects before the Assembly,” Madame Roland wrote. “They are led by

their directors’ board, which is under the thumb of two or three

individuals who are much more careful about preserving their own

ascendency than of propagating public spirit and of serving liberty

efficiently. In the club formerly so useful everything is now done by a

clique.” “We have seen those precious Jacobins,” Roland wrote to

Champagneux. “If objects increase in size as we approach them, it is

rare that it is not the contrary with mortals.” No doubt much of their

dissatisfaction with the Assembly and the public was due to the

difficulty Roland had in pushing the claims of Lyons. Paris was crowded

with commissioners from all the towns between Marseilles and Dunkirk,

and there was the greatest trouble in getting hearings from the

committee charged with such affairs, and in persuading the deputies of

the department to present the business to the Assembly. Roland worked

night and day almost, to push the claim of his town. “I sleep less and

walk much more. Truly I have scarcely time to live.” He besieged the

committee rooms, waiting for hours before the doors to collar his man as

he entered or retired. He ate his morsel of bread alone in order to run

to the Assembly, where one was obliged to arrive early in order to find

a seat.

The spirit in which he went into the work was one of declared war to the

aristocratic party at Lyons and to the old régime. He was determined to

show up the situation, and exhorted his friends at Lyons to uncover all

the rascality and pillage of the old administration. The deputies from

the Lyonnais were not too sympathetic. They found the persistency, the

_vertu_, the incessant indignation, the insistency of Roland, tiresome.

After sitting so many long months, under such exciting circumstances,

they were weary. They saw the difficulties of getting a hearing, too,

from the Assembly.

Roland poured out all his impatience to Champagneux, who was his

confidant and sympathizer. Long letters, written in his fine, nervous,

execrable hand, went almost daily to Lyons. They were full of

indignation at everything and everybody; especially was the delay

irritating to him. “If affairs do not go backwards like the crab,” he

says, “at least they go no faster than the tortoise.” The delay

disgusted Madame Roland as much as it did her husband. Both committee

and Assembly were blamed by her. She even wished that she were a man

that she might do something herself.

Of much more importance to their political lives at this moment than

Assembly, clubs, or committee meetings, were the frequent gatherings of

patriots held at the Rolands’ apartments, in the Rue Guénégaud. They

were “grandly lodged,” the quarter was agreeable, and many of their

friends lived but a short distance away. As Roland found it necessary to

see the deputies frequently, he gathered them about him in his home.

Brissot was the nucleus of the little circle. The relation with Brissot

had been, up to this time, purely by correspondence. When they came to

Paris naturally they were anxious to see him. They liked him at once.

His simple manners, his frankness, his natural negligence, seemed in

harmony with the austerity of his principles. A more entire

disinterestedness and a greater zeal for public affairs were impossible,

it seemed to them. He was admirable, too, as a man, a good husband, a

tender father, a faithful friend, a virtuous citizen. His society was

charming; for he was gay, naïve, imprudently confident, the nature of a

sweet-tempered boy of fifteen. Such Brissot seemed to Madame Roland, who

esteemed him more and more the longer she knew him.

Brissot brought several of his friends to see them. Among the most

important of these were Pétion and Robespierre. The most interesting of

the group was Buzot, of whom we shall hear much, later. To Pétion,

Robespierre, and Buzot were added Clavière, Louis Noailles, Volfius,

Antoine, Garran (“Cato Garran”), Grégoire, Garaud, and several others.

In April Thomas Paine appeared. So agreeable and profitable were these

informal reunions found to be that it was arranged to hold them four

times a week. The guests came between the close of the sessions of the

Assembly and the opening of the Jacobins. The condition of affairs in

general and of the Assembly in particular was discussed; the measures

which should be taken were suggested, and means of proposing them

arranged; the interests of the people, the tactics of the Court and of

individuals, were constantly criticised.

To Madame Roland these gatherings were of absorbing interest. She

calculated carefully her relation to them, the place she ought to occupy

in them, and she affirms that she never deviated from it. “Seated near a

window before a little table on which were books, writing materials, and

sewing, I worked, or I wrote letters while they discussed. I preferred

to write; for it made me appear more indifferent to what was going on,

and permitted me to follow it almost as well. I can do more than one

thing at a time, and the habit of writing permits me to carry on my

correspondence while listening to something quite different from what I

am writing. It seems to me that I am three; I divide my attention into

two as if it were a material thing, and I consider and direct these two

parts as if I were quite another. I remember one day, when the

gentlemen, not agreeing, made considerable noise, that Clavière,

noticing the rapidity with which I wrote, said good-naturedly that it

was only a woman’s head which was capable of such a thing, but he

declared himself astonished at it all the same. ‘What would you say,’ I

asked, smiling, ‘if I should repeat all your arguments?’

“Excepting the customary compliments on the arrival or departure of the

gentlemen, I never allowed myself to pronounce a word, although I often

had to bite my lips to prevent it. If any one spoke to me, it was after

the club work and all deliberation were at an end. A carafe of water and

a bowl of sugar were the only refreshments they found, and I told them

it was all that it seemed to me appropriate to offer to men who came

together to discuss after dinner.”

She was not always satisfied with the results of these gatherings. There

were plenty of good things said, but they rarely ended in a systematic

résumé. Ideas were advanced, but few measures resulted. It was fruitless

conversation, in short, and she generalized: “The French do not know how

to deliberate. A certain lightness leads them from one subject to

another, but prevents order and complete analysis. They do not know how

to listen. He who speaks always expands his own idea; he occupies

himself rather in developing his own thought than in answering that of

another. Their attention is easily fatigued; a laugh is awakened by a

word and a jest overthrows logic.” A more just observation on French

conversation would be impossible. It is its delight. A constant bound

from one idea to another, indifference to the outcome if the attention

is kept, insistence by each individual upon expressing his thought at

will, with eloquence and with fantasy, lawlessness, recklessness of

expression, characterize all groups of clever Frenchmen who meet to

talk. But this is conversation for pleasure, not discussion for results.

It was in mistaking this intellectual game of words and sentiments for

reflections and reason that one of the greatest mistakes of the Rolands

lay. It was these vagaries of speech in public, in private, in print

(the pamphlets which poured from the press were little more than random

bits of conversation and as little reflective), which kept the public,

the Assembly, the Court, in a constant state of ebb and flow. But Madame

Roland herself was a victim to this popular weakness. Her letters, which

are almost invariably outbursts of feeling rather than of reflection,

may safely be considered an index to what she was in conversation.

Another real trouble of the moment which Madame Roland notes, though she

does not see that she shares it, she expressed to Bancal:

“I have had the opportunity of seeing, since my sojourn here, that it is

much more difficult to do good than even reflecting men imagine. It is

not possible to do good in politics, save by uniting efforts; and there

is nothing so difficult as to unite different minds to work persistently

for the same end. Everybody believes only in the efficacy of his own

system, and his own way. He is irritated and bored by that of another,

and because he does not know how to bend to an idea a little different

from his own, he ends by going alone, without doing anything useful. For

more than a century, philosophy has been preaching tolerance; it has

begun to root itself in some minds; but I see little of it in our

customs. Our fine minds laugh at patience as a negative virtue. I

confess that in my eyes it is the true sign of the force of the soul,

the fruit of profound reflection, the necessary means for conciliating

men and spreading instruction, in short, the virtue of a free people. We

have everything to learn on this subject.”

Madame Roland’s letters written at this period abound in similar just

criticisms on the Revolutionary temper. Her remarkably virile and

comprehensive intellect penetrated the real weaknesses of the movement

whenever she considered men and measures impersonally. Then she grasped

perfectly the meaning of things, and her observations were profound, her

insight keen, her judgments wise, and her conclusions statesmanlike.

However discreet Madame Roland may have been at the gatherings in her

salon, however silent she may have kept, she gained at this period a

veritable supremacy over the group of patriots. There were many reasons

for this. She embodied in a sort of Greek clearness and chastity the

principles they professed. No one had a clearer conception of the ideal

government which France should have; no one expressed more eloquently

all this government ought to do; no one idealized the future with more

imagination, more hopefulness. No one gave himself more fully to the

cause than this woman who would not go to the theatre because the

country was in peril; who could not look at pictures; who was ashamed to

send Bancal a song in exchange for one he had sent her, because it was

not grave enough for the circumstances; who was even “ashamed to write

of songs.” She became in a way the ideal Revolutionary figure, a Greek

statue, the type of the Republic of which they dreamed.

Her inflexibility was as great a power over her friends. They wavered,

compromised, stopped at practical results instead of pushing to ideal

ones. She had decision, firmness of purpose, the determination to reach

the end, and her influence over them was powerful because of this

unyielding attitude. Nothing daunted her. Riot and war were sacred

necessities. To die was their duty. Nothing could have been more

inspiring than her firmness of purpose, her superb indifference to

consequences. This high attitude had something of the inspired sibyl in

it. Their “Greek statue” became their prophetess. Her very cruelty was

divine. It was the “wrath of the gods,” the “righteous indignation” of

the moralist.

No doubt the personal charm of Madame Roland had much to do with her

influence. All who knew her testify to her attractiveness. Guillon de

Montléon, by no means a sympathetic critic, speaks of “her pleasant,

piquant face, her active, brilliant mind.” Arthur Young, who saw her in

1789, describes her as “young and beautiful.” Dumont declares that to

“every personal charm” she joined “all merits of character.” Dumouriez,

who certainly knew all the beautiful women of his day, found her most

attractive, and speaks especially of her taste and elegance in dress.

Lemontey says of her: “Her eyes, her head, her hair, were of remarkable

beauty. Her delicate complexion had a freshness of color which, joined

to her air of reserve and candor, made her seem singularly young. I

found in her none of the elegant Parisian air which she claims in her

Memoirs, though I do not mean to say that she was awkward.” And he adds,

she talked “well, too well.” Indeed, all her contemporaries testify to

her brilliant conversation. Tissot tells of her “sonorous, flexible

voice, infinite charm in talking, eloquence which came from her heart.”

As the tradition in the family of Madame Roland goes, she was short and

stout, possessed no taste in dress, and could be called neither

beautiful, nor even pretty. However, vivacity, sympathy, and

intelligence were so combined in her face, and her voice was so mellow

and vibrating, that she exercised a veritable charm when she talked. She

herself considered her chief attraction to be her conversational power.

In one of the frequent self-complacent passages in her Memoirs, she

repeats a remark of Camille Desmoulins, that he could not understand how

a woman of her age and with so little beauty had so many admirers, and

she comments: “He had never heard me talk.”

The portraits of Madame Roland, of which there are numbers, nearly all

show a singularly winning and piquant face. Several good collections of

these portraits are in existence. The Coste collection of Lyons

contained thirty-three different engravings and medallions of her, and

the print department of the Carnavalet Museum and of the Bibliothèque

Nationale have both rather good specimens. By far the best collection,

however, is in the town museum of Versailles—a recent donation of M.

Vatel, a well-known collector of Gironde and Charlotte Corday documents

and curios.

[Illustration:

MADAME ROLAND.

After a crayon portrait owned by the family.

]

The only surely authentic portrait of Madame Roland is that facing this

page. The original is in red crayon and much faded, but a faithful copy

in black, well preserved, bearing the date of 1822, is in the possession

of the great-granddaughter of Madame Roland, Madame Marillier of Paris.

If one compares this portrait with that of Heinsius at Versailles, he

will see that they have nothing in common. Heinsius’ portrait was bought

in Louis Philippe’s time, and bore the name of Madame Roland up to 1865,

when the placard was taken off because nothing proved that it was she.

However, it still figures in the catalogue as Madame Roland, and

photographs made after it are sold in all Paris shops. The director of

the Versailles Gallery was preparing in 1893 to revise the catalogue,

and purposed then to take the necessary steps to establish the

authenticity of the painting, but as late as May, 1894, it still was

marked Madame Roland. The family do not regard the picture as authentic;

one point they make against it is that it is a full-face view, while,

according to their traditions, Madame Roland never allowed anything but

a profile to be made. It bears no resemblance to other authentic

portraits, and is especially displeasing because of the full eyes, and

the bold expression. These characteristics, however, Heinsius gave to

all his portraits of French women; thus, the portraits of Mesdames

Victoire and Adelaide at Versailles are almost coarse in expression, and

in striking contrast to the other pictures of them which hang in the

same gallery. The best reason for supposing Heinsius’ portrait to be

Madame Roland is a sketch owned by the Carnavalet bearing the

inscription M. J. PHLIPON, GRAVÉ PAR SON PÈRE À 19 ANS, which strikingly

resembles it.

The reproduction of the painting at the Musée Carnavalet, as well as

that of the cameo head, is due to the kindness of the director, M.

Cousins. The painting is a new acquisition of the museum, exhibited for

the first time in April, 1892. It is more apocryphal even than the

picture of Heinsius. It is a picture of the time—that of a very charming

woman, but it has almost nothing in common with Madame Roland. The eyes

are blue and hers were brown, the hair is lighter, the chin is not so

round and firm, the neck is longer. Besides it is a full-face view, thus

contradicting the family tradition. As for the cameo head, it is

evidently made after the family picture or the engraving of Gaucher,

which latter possesses all the characteristics of the former.

One other portrait should not be forgotten; it is that traced in June,

1793, on the records of the prison of Sainte Pélagie by her jailer.

Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, wife of Roland, ex-minister, aged thirty-nine

years, native of Paris, living Rue de la Harpe, No. 5.

Height, five feet; hair and eyebrows dark chestnut; brown eyes; medium

nose; ordinary mouth; oval face; round chin; high forehead.

VII

A STICK IN THE WHEEL

During the months that the Rolands were in Paris, they were in constant

correspondence with Champagneux at Lyons. Their letters, for the most

part unpublished, show the state of mind into which French idealists

worked themselves in this period. Dissatisfied because the Assembly had

not been able to complete the regeneration of France in two years,

suspicious of everybody whose views differed from theirs, anxious to

show how reconstruction should be conducted and how easy it is to run a

government if you understand the principles and possess civic virtue,

this party of which the Rolands are excellent types worked incessantly

to discredit the government, to arouse contempt for the work the

Assembly had been able to do, and to show that Louis XVI. could not be

in earnest in his declaration of fidelity to reforms instituted.

The Rolands lamented daily in their letters to Champagneux and other

friends that public opinion was languishing, that the country was

falling into the sleep of the enslaved, that the Assembly was worn out.

They tried to arouse them to suspicion like their own by repeating all

the alarming reports which ran the street without, of course, ever

taking pains to verify their truthfulness, and by railing at them

because they were inclined to feel that reforms were being brought about

quite as rapidly as in the nature of the situation was possible.

It was not many months before their exasperation had reached such a

pitch that they were convinced that civil war was necessary, and they

began to look about for reasons with which to alarm and push on the

people to it. The only adequate one they found was to persuade the

country that the King was plotting with the _émigrés_ on the border, and

that they and the Austrians were watching for a chance to attack France,

overturn the new government, and restore the old régime. On June 22d an

event occurred which in Madame Roland’s opinion was ample proof of the

truthfulness of their opinions. On the morning of that day Madame Roland

opened a letter written the day before to Bancal to say: “The King and

Queen have fled, the shops are closed, the greatest tumult reigns. It is

almost impossible that Lafayette should not be an accomplice.”

For twenty-four hours she was in an ecstasy of patriotic hopefulness.

The flight of the King was a renunciation of the contract he had made

with his people in taking the oath to support the constitution. The

evident duty of the country was to declare him dethroned and to

establish a republic. She was so excited she could not stay at home, but

went among her friends, urging them to immediate action.

Her fixed principle that a woman should take no part in public

proceedings was laid aside now. “As long as peace lasted,” she wrote her

friend, “I played a peaceable rôle and exerted that kind of influence

which seems to me suitable to my sex. Now that the flight of the King

has declared war, it seems to me that every one must devote himself

without reserve. I have joined the fraternal societies, because

convinced that zeal and a good thought may sometimes be useful in a time

of crisis.”

Her joy was short. The tumult which threatened in Paris was promptly

quieted by Lafayette, at the head of the National Guards. The citizens

were exhorted to calm, to vigilance, to confidence in the Assembly.

Madame Roland writhed under this attitude. “Is this the place to be

tranquil and contented?” she cried. She and her friends, convinced that

the measures to prevent a riot and restore order were directed

especially at themselves, gathered at Robespierre’s, where they

considered ways of driving the people to an action of which the Assembly

was incapable.

In the midst of their activity the King was brought back, and to their

dismay they saw that he would in all probability be kept in place

without public trial. Their alarm was intense. Without the King they

were convinced all would be well. Regeneration was certain if royalty

could be dispensed with. Nothing else was preventing the adoption of a

Republic. He was “worse than a stick in a wheel,” declared Roland to

Champagneux.

In the _mêlée_ of opinion which followed the King’s return, Madame

Roland’s position was well defined: “To put the King back on the

throne,” she wrote, “is an absurdity; to declare him incapable is to be

obliged, according to the constitution, to name a regent; to name a

regent would confirm the vices of the constitution at a moment when one

can and ought to correct them. The most just measure would be to try

him; but the country is incapable of anything so lofty as that. There is

nothing to do but suspend and guard him while searching those who aided

in his flight; to go on acting without royal consent and, in order to

put more regularity and activity into the distribution and exercise of

power, name a temporary President. In this way it would be easy to show

Paris and the departments that a king is not necessary and that the

machine can go on well enough without him.” This programme she was

willing to “preach from the roofs,” but it was not adopted. The King was

restored.

The Republic which she and her friends dreamed of at this moment and did

not hesitate to announce, was not in the public mind, and when they

insisted upon it, they were insisting upon an individual opinion of

which the country at large had no conception, and for which it had no

sympathy. By her own confession both the Assembly and the Jacobins “went

into convulsions” at the mere pronunciation of the name _Republic_.

There were only two societies which, after the flight of the King, dared

declare themselves _tyrannicides_,—the Cordeliers and a group of private

individuals. At the Cercle Social they did discuss whether it was

suitable or not to conserve kings, but at the Jacobins the very name

_Republican_ was hissed. Nevertheless they worked valiantly to spread

their ideas. Robert published a pamphlet on the “Advantages of the

flight of the King and the necessity of a new government or Republic.”

Condorcet published a discussion “Whether a king is necessary to the

conservation of liberty”; and Brissot, at the Jacobins, made a hit with

a speech in which he showed that the cry that the King was inviolable

and could not be tried was false; that even if inviolability were

admitted it did not apply in this case; and that according to the

constitution the King could and ought to be tried.

Thomas Paine was then in Paris, believing as Dumont says, that he had

made the American Revolution and was called upon to make another in

France. With Condorcet, Brissot, and a few others as sympathizers, Paine

formed a republican society. Their first concern was to publish a

journal, the prospectus of which was posted by Paine on the morning of

the first of July. In it he declared that the King by his flight is

“free of us as we are of him. He has no longer any authority; we no

longer owe him obedience; we know him now only as an individual in the

crowd, as M. Louis de Bourbon”; and he concluded his harangue by the

announcement that “A society of republicans had decided to publish in

separate sheets a work entitled _The Republican_. Its object is to

enlighten people’s minds on this republicanism which is calumniated

because it is not understood; on the uselessness, the vices, and the

abuses of the royalty that prejudice persists in defending, although

they may be known.” This poster made a great noise in the Assembly,

where it was denounced as “worthy of all the rigor of the law.”

According to Madame Roland, it was only by flattering the Assembly’s

love for the monarchy and by abusing republicanism and its partisans,

that it was possible to convince the body that however ridiculous the

idea might be, still it was necessary to leave it free course.

Only two numbers of _The Republican_ appeared, says Madame Roland, in

her Memoirs; only one, says Moncure D. Conway, in his life of Paine. As

a matter of fact, there were at least four issues, that number being in

the collection of Revolutionary pamphlets in the Bibliothèque Nationale.

It was soon evident that the new cause would not be supported.

Nevertheless, the new word was launched. The effect of the injudicious,

impractical action of Paine, Brissot, and their friends, Robespierre

described a few months later when he had broken with the Brissotins.

“The mere word _Republic_ caused division among the patriots, and gave

the enemies of liberty the evidence they sought to prove that there

existed in France a party which conspired against the monarchy and the

constitution; they hastened to impute to this motive the firmness with

which we defended in the Constituent Assembly the rights of national

sovereignty against the monster of inviolability. It is by this word

that they drove away the majority of the Constituent Assembly; it is

this word which was the signal for that massacre of peaceable citizens

whose whole crime was exercising legally the right of petition,

consecrated by the constitutional laws. At this word the true friends of

liberty were travestied as factious by perverse or ignorant citizens;

and the Revolution put back perhaps a half a century. It was in those

critical times that Brissot came to the society of the Friends of the

Constitution, where he had almost never appeared, to propose changes in

the form of government, when the simplest rules of prudence would have

forbidden us to present the idea to the Constituent Assembly.”

As soon as the Rolands and their friends saw that the demand for the

Republic was not welcomed by the people, they turned their efforts

towards securing a trial for Louis XVI.

It seemed to be the only thing for which they were strong enough. To do

this they were willing to unite with even demagogues, agitators, and

with the worst elements of the people. They had only their voice and

their pen, explains Madame Roland; if a popular movement came to their

aid they welcomed it with pleasure without looking after, or disturbing

themselves about, its origin. Beside they could not believe that a party

made up of the idle and the violent, and led by demagogues, could be

formidable. It was a force to be used when needed, and crushed when the

result desired had been obtained. Even when the union of the Brissotins

with the populace had produced so serious a riot as that of July 17, the

“Massacre of the Champ-de-Mars,” as the radicals called it, Madame

Roland did not change her views. She refused to see that the disorder

was provoked in any degree by the people, and attributed the fault

entirely to the Assembly and Lafayette.

The letters they wrote to their friends after the riot of the

Champ-de-Mars are full of alarms and of suspicions. “In less than

twenty-four hours,” Roland wrote to Champagneux, “there have been about

three hundred imprisoned at the Abbaye and they are kept there in

secret. People are taken up in the night. There has just passed on the

Pont Neuf [it will be remembered that the Rolands were in the Rue

Guénégaud and could easily see] three loaded wagons escorted by many

National Guards. They say Marat is there, and different club members.

Desmoulins is said to have fled; they are after Brissot. The patriotic

journalists are in bad repute, and frightful charges against them are

being spread. The cross of Saint Louis multiplies incredibly. The

aristocrats are more sly and insolent than ever. It was said yesterday

in the Luxembourg that this legislature could not endure more than six

weeks or two months; that there would be war with the foreigners in this

interval; that the King and the ministers would come out ahead; that

they would displace everybody, annul everything; and that they would

re-establish things on the old basis, but assuredly not less despotic

than before.... There is nothing but treason, lies, poisons. Those who

live in hotels, or who are served by caterers, are afraid. A great

number sleep away from home. There were hundreds of deaths at the

Champ-de-Mars; husbands killed their wives; relatives, relatives;

friends, friends. Saint Bartholomew, the dragonades, offered nothing

more horrible.”

But this is an alarmist’s letter, a repetition of rumors, not a serious

effort to picture what actually occurred. Compare simply its statement

of the number of killed at the Champ-de-Mars—“hundreds”—with the most

trustworthy accounts, and Roland’s and his wife’s state of mind is

clear. Gouverneur Morris, who was in Paris at the moment, went to the

“elevation opposite”—the present Trocadéro—to see the trouble. He says

there were a “dozen or two” killed; Prudhomme says fifty; the official

report gives twelve killed and the same number wounded. The same

exaggerated statements characterize all their letters.

Before the summer of 1791 was over Madame Roland was certain that public

opinion could not be aroused to another revolution; that the “stick” was

going to stay in the “wheel”; that the Republic could not be

established. As this conviction grew on her, she lost heart. “I have had

enough of Paris, at least for this time.” She wrote: “I feel the need of

going to see my trees, after having seen so many dolts and knaves. One

rejoices in this little circle of honest souls when his cause triumphs,

but when the _cabale_ is on top, when the wicked succeed and error is

ahead, there is nothing to do but go home and plant cabbages.”

And this she decided to do very soon, for the beginning of September she

left Paris for Villefranche. Everything on the trip discouraged her. She

wrote Robespierre: “I find the people on the route, as in Paris,

deceived by their enemies or ignorant of the true state of things;

everywhere the mass is well disposed; it is just because its interest is

the general interest, but it is misled or stupid. Nowhere have I met

people with whom I could talk openly and advantageously of our political

situation; I contented myself by distributing copies of your address in

all the places through which I passed; they will be found after my

departure and furnish an excellent text for meditation.”

It was even worse at Villefranche, where, on arriving, she made a tour

of observation. She was convinced that the most of the inhabitants were

utterly despicable, and made so by the existing social institutions;

that they loved the Revolution only because it destroyed what was above

them, but that they knew nothing of the theory of free government, and

did not sympathize with that “sublime and delicious theory which makes

us brothers”; that they hated the name of Republic, and that a king

appeared to them essential to their existence.

She was as disgusted with Lyons for its devotion to the aristocracy. Its

elections she declared detestable and the deputies nothing but enemies

of liberty. The officers in the department were as badly chosen as the

representatives; “if one was to judge of representative government by

the little experience we have had of it so far, we cannot esteem

ourselves very happy”; the elections were bought, so were the

administrators, so the representatives, who in their turn sold the

people. Even at Le Clos, where she went immediately for the fall

vintage, there was a cloud; for the calumnies spread at Lyons about

Roland when it was a question of nominating him for the Assembly, had

reached the hills, and the people attributed their absence in Paris to

the supposed arrest of Roland for _counter-revolution_. When she went

out to walk she heard behind her the cry _Les aristocrates à la

lanterne_.

Although Madame Roland sighed to escape from the “dolts and knaves” of

Paris and longed for the peace of the country, the sentiment was only a

passing one. The charm of the little circle she criticised so freely,

the friendships she had formed, her devotion to the public cause, all

these things made the absence from Paris hard to bear. On leaving she

had hoped it would be only temporary. Roland was much talked of as a

candidate for the new Assembly, and if he succeeded, it would take them

back to Paris. She knew before her arrival at Le Clos that he had failed

to secure the nomination. The news deepened her irritation at the

condition of public affairs, strengthened the sense of oppression which

the province produced, made her dissatisfied with Le Clos, her husband’s

future, Eudora.

She had not seen her little daughter for seven months. She was deeply

disappointed that she had changed so little. It seemed to her that she

had gained nothing in the interval of separation, and that she had no

idea of anything but loving and being loved. There was one way of

awakening the child, however, in her judgment. She told Roland of it in

one of the first letters she wrote him after reaching Villefranche, when

she said: “Hasten back so that we may put our affairs in shape, and

arrange to return to Paris as often as possible. I am not ambitious of

the pleasures there, but such is the stupidity of our only child that I

see no hope of making anything of her except by showing her as many

objects as possible, and finding something which will interest her.”

For Roland, too, she felt that Paris was necessary. She was pained at

the idea that he was going to be thrown back into silence and obscurity.

He was accustomed to public life; it was more necessary to him than he

himself thought, and she feared that his energy and activity would be

fatal to his health, if they were not employed according to his tastes.

When Roland came back, he shared her feelings. He soon finished his

affairs at Lyons, for the National Assembly had abolished the office of

inspector of manufactures, and they spent the fall at Le Clos, occupied

with the vintage, but they were restless. They had but little income and

they turned their minds again to the idea of the pension, to which

Roland’s forty years of service had certainly entitled him. If they were

at Paris, perhaps it could be obtained. Then Roland’s work, which was

simply the encyclopædia, would certainly be easier “at the fireside of

light among _savants_ and artists than at the bottom of a desert”; for

such their retreat seemed to them. They felt the need, too, of being

near the centre of affairs; they ought to be where they could “watch”;

where they could help bring about the “shock” which must come soon or

the public cause would be lost forever. Their dissatisfaction became so

great in the end, and public affairs so exciting, that they decided to

go to Paris.

VIII

WORKING FOR A SECOND REVOLUTION

But how could they justify themselves in their determination to bring

about a new “shock,” a second revolution? The Revolution was finished.

In the twenty-eight months that the Constituent Assembly had been in

operation, it had formed a constitution, accepted by Louis XVI. in

September, 1791, which had cut from the nation a score of obnoxious and

poisonous social, political, and economic growths. This constitution

guaranteed, as natural and civil rights, that all citizens should be

admissible to place and to employment without other distinction than

that of virtue and talents; that all contributions be levied equally

among the people in proportion to their ability, and that the same

violations of law be punished in the same way. Every man might go and

come as he would, speak, write, print, what he wished. There was no

limit to the right to assemble peaceably, or to make petitions. Property

was inviolable. Relief for the old, the weak, the poor, was promised.

Public education was to be organized. The sovereignty rested in the

nation; from it came all the power. The constitution was represented by

a legislative body, and the King could not dissolve this assembly. He

was King of the French, and his person was sacred, but he was inferior

to the law, and reigned by it and in its name.

Undoubtedly, as Étienne Dumont said, “the constitution had too much of a

republic for a monarchy, and too much of a monarchy for a republic. The

King was a _hors d’œuvre_. He was everywhere in appearance, and he had

no real power,” but evidently here was a basis which gave every man in

France a chance, and which offered the opportunity to work out a

satisfactory liberal government. To refuse to work with this

constitution was to continue and to increase the disorganization, the

hatred, the fear, which had been agitating France for so long; it was to

prevent the new government having a fair chance, and was to make any

correction of the constitution impossible. How could Madame Roland

justify her resolve to prevent peace?

Her ideal was not satisfied. It mattered little to her that the people

were indifferent to this ideal; that they were satisfied with the

constitution and asked for nothing but a chance to let it work. The

satisfaction of this ideal had become a necessity, an imperative

personal need. She could not give it up. It was too beautiful.

Even if she could support the idea of a constitutional monarchy, she

could not believe in the sincerity of the king and court. “I have never

been able to believe in the constitutional vocation of a king, born

under despotism, raised by it and accustomed to exercise it.” She wrote

in her Memoirs: “Louis XVI. would have been a man much above the average

had he sincerely desired a constitution which restrained his power. If

he had been such a man, he would never have allowed the events which

brought about the constitution.”

In her judgment the supporters of the monarchy were “traitors,” the

constitutionalists a “cabale.” This suspicion had become a disease.

While she doubted the sincerity, the patriotism, the unselfishness of

all parties but her own, she had profound confidence in herself. She saw

no rôle in the world she says in her Memoirs, which suited her exactly

except that of Providence. She had penetration, and flattered herself

that she knew a “false eye” at first glance. She and Roland were “strong

in reason and in character,” but she was convinced that she was better

than he. “I have as much firmness and more flexibility. My energy has

more agreeable forms, but it is founded on the same principles. I shock

less and I penetrate deeper.” As for the majority of the human race, it

was a “poor” affair.

She not only suspected the old régime, and believed herself superior to

it; she cherished a personal grievance against it. It had refused her

solicitations although they were just. She did not forgive the

humiliation. She was near enough to the Court now to feel her dependence

upon it. Years before she had written to Sophie: “I love my prince

because I feel my dependence but little; if I were too near him, I

should hate his grandeur.” She is “too near” now, and her prophecy is

realized. She “hates his grandeur.” It is a species of that resentful

jealousy which distorts certain really superior natures when they find

themselves in the presence of material splendor or of persons of lofty

rank.

When the Rolands went up to Paris in December, 1791, they found there a

number of important persons who felt as they did, members of the

Legislative Assembly, which had assembled on October 1st. They found,

too, that they were already allied with their friends Brissot,

Robespierre, and Pétion, all three of whom held prominent public

positions, Brissot being a deputy to the Assembly from Paris, and at the

head of the diplomatic committee; Robespierre, criminal accuser; Pétion,

mayor.

This party of new deputies whom they found so congenial were known as

the Gironde from the department whence most of them had come. They were

all young and all endowed with great talent. They had been brought up on

Plutarch and Rousseau, and their heads were filled with noble doctrines

and drafts of perfect constitutions. When they talked, it was in classic

phrases. Their arguments were based on what happened in Greece and Rome.

Their illustrations were drawn from ancient heroes. There could be no

doubt of the sincerity of their patriotism, of the nobility of their

aspirations, of the purity of their lives, of their anxiety to die, if

need be, for France.

But they had no experience of politics, of men, or of society, save what

they had gotten from short terms in provincial law offices and clubs.

They had never come into contact with other forces than the petty

agitations and wire-pulling of their home towns. Of the force of human

passions, of the lethargy and persistence of the mass of men, of the

fine diplomacy of the trained statesman, they had not a notion.

They knew their Plutarch well, to be sure; but all they had drawn from

him was a glibness in making fine periods and certain lofty sentiments,

a species of patriotic emotionalism by which they could move and thrill

men. Of practical policy for difficult and complicated situations, like

the one they had been elected to face, they had not a shadow.

In courage, in audacity, in buoyancy of spirits, in eloquence, in bright

visions, in purity of life, they are all that one’s imagination could

paint. A more lovable and inspiring group of young men was never called

together. But there was not one of them in whom contact with the world

and sober reflection, had developed the common sense, the clear

comprehensive judgment, the hard determination to do his best, and the

simple honesty which alone make men fit for public office.

They were as blindly partisan as Madame Roland, and what Dumont said of

Brissot was applicable to the Gironde as a whole: “He was one of those

men in whom the party spirit was stronger than all moral, or rather he

saw no moral save in his own party. No one had so much zeal of the

convent as he. Dominican, he would have burned the heretics; Roman, he

would not have been unworthy of following Cato and Regulus; French

republican, he wished to destroy the monarchy and to reach his object

did not shrink from calumny, persecution, or death on the scaffold.”

They all had the malady of the times,—suspicion. It had become a species

of superstition with them. “One may laugh if he will,” said Dumont, “at

these imaginary terrors, but they made the second revolution.” It was

useless to argue with them, to give them proofs to call upon their

good-will; they were suspicious and what they imagined was as real to

them as if it had actually existed. They did not need proofs, mistrust

never does. They were possessed by a sentiment and reason had no place.

As for their self-confidence, it was monumental. “No argument, no

criticism, was listened to by them,” says Mme. de Staël. “They answered

the observations of disinterested wisdom by a mocking smile. One wore

himself out in reminding them of circumstances and what had led to them;

if they condescended to answer, they denied the most evident facts and

observations and used in opposition to them common maxims, though, to be

sure, expressed eloquently.”

Feeling as they did, the only logical thing for them was to struggle to

obtain power. If they were the “Providence” of France, it was their duty

to get to the front. It was not for the sake of power that they made

this effort. It was because they alone in their own judgment were

sufficiently virtuous and enlightened to carry out the doctrines. They

were “called” to preach liberty and a republic, and they went to their

work in the same frame of exaltation and expectation as he goes who

preaches the Kingdom of Heaven.

The only way in which they could arrive at power was by uniting with one

of the two parties in the Assembly, with the constitutionalists or the

Mountain, as the Radicals were termed. The former was composed of the

well-to-do and the experienced men of the Assembly. It supported the

King. It was the more honest and trustworthy, but it was accused of

“aspiring secretly to increase the royal authority and to form two

chambers.”