The Mountain was the party of the agitators and the street. It had the

audacity, the violence, and the populace of the faubourgs. The talents,

education, eloquence, refinement, of the Gironde were in harmony with

the conservatives, but they could not believe that there was not a

secret plot hidden under the patriotic pretensions of the

constitutionalists. Their self-pride was irritated, too, by the

aristocratic traditions, the courtly manners, and the reasonableness of

the moderates. There was a subtile superiority in their wisdom, their

gracious bearing, their _finesse_ which the Girondins resented.

As for the Mountain the Girondins feared its violence, its open advocacy

of bloodshed less than they did its suspicion. They wanted to be

considered the purest of the patriots and they could not support the

idea that there was any one who pushed farther than they in making

claims for the “sovereign” and for the “divine right of insurrection.”

They had not the practical sense, the experience, and the

disinterestedness to judge the Mountain, to see that it was chaotic,

violent, irrational. Because it called itself the representative of the

poor and the suffering, they imagined that it must be virtuous, and they

wished its support. They feared its opinion of them even more than they

feared the skeleton in the conservative closet.

To gain its favor they were even willing to sacrifice personal dignity

and delicacy. The Mountain was ragged and dirty, ill-bred and

foul-mouthed, but they shared a superstition of the day that rags and

dirt, little bread and a hut for a home, are signs of patriotism, and if

a man is poor, therefore he must have good principles. They found the

coarseness of the Mountain more endurable than the etiquette of the

Court. Pétion, at his public dinners as mayor, received the Gironde.

Among his guests were many “patriots” of the rudest sort, yet Condorcet,

Guadet, Gensonné, Roland, laughed at Chabot when he put on a _bonnet

rouge_ and went through a series of low buffoonery, mocking the King,

and applauded jests of “shocking grossness.”

Thus suspicion drove them from the conservative party, while fear of

suspicion drove them towards the Mountain. Resentment at superior

refinement turned their sympathy from the decent element of the

Assembly, while a superstition about the true meaning of rags, dirt, and

disorder awakened it for the wanton element.

Just as they floated between the parties of the Assembly, they

vacillated between the clubs,—the Feuillants, which was for the

constitution, and the Jacobins, which was for anarchy. Their object was

not simply to do what was just and honorable, it was to do what would

carry them into power. They must have power in order to carry their

cause. To serve their party all means were justifiable. It was their

uncertainty about which side would the quicker give them the leadership

of the Assembly which explains their wavering over all the questions

which absorbed the attention of the Legislative Assembly,—such as the

questions of the unsworn priests, the immigration of nobles, and the

declaration of war against Austria.

When the Rolands came up to Paris in December, the Gironde was floating

between the two other parties, fearing both, suspected by both. Hate,

defiance, exaggeration, were at their height. No one knew what would

happen next. “You would say it was a fleet at anchor in a thick fog,”

wrote Morris to Washington. “No one dares to put up sail for fear of

running against a rock.”

When Madame Roland appeared on the scene, she had no hesitation in

deciding what should be done by the Gironde. She had been too firmly

convinced since the fall of the Bastille of the benefits of anarchy to

fear it now. The lack of it had long been her despair. She was too

suspicious of all persons of aristocratic origin to tolerate any union

with the conservative party. She was too firmly convinced of the value

of war as a “great school of public virtue” to hesitate about offensive

operations.

Arrived in Paris, they settled in the Rue de la Harpe, where they lived

very quietly, Roland occupying himself with the encyclopædia, with his

plan for a pension, and with his friends. He went to the chief places of

Gironde rendezvous when he had leisure, and they came to him sometimes.

His chief political work, however, was at the Jacobin Club, where he was

engaged on a committee.

Their life was very quiet until March, when it suddenly changed. A

friend dropping in one day told Madame Roland that the patriots were to

be asked to form a ministry and that as they were going to seek men of

ability and courage, Roland had been thought of for a portfolio. Some

days later (March 21, 1792) Brissot came to see her to inquire if Roland

would accept if asked. They talked the matter over, considered its

dangers, sounded its possibilities,—the next day Brissot was told in

classic phrase that Roland’s courage did not falter, that the knowledge

of his force inspired him with confidence in his ability to be useful to

the country and to liberty.

The movement which had brought about the Girondin ministry had been led

by Brissot. After the vetoes of the King to the decrees against the

priests and _émigrés_, every effort had been made by the Jacobins to

show that the ministry of the King was in secret sympathy with Court and

_émigrés_, that while posing as constitutional, they were, in fact,

anti-constitutional. Brissot had led this movement, and had condescended

to some very low manœuvres to discredit certain members of the ministry.

His plans had at last succeeded, and Louis XVI., hoping to quiet

suspicion, had consented to name a cabinet which would satisfy the

Girondins.

It was in this body that Roland had been asked to take the Department of

the Interior. As was to be expected, the conservatives criticised the

new ministers harshly from the first. Roland was pictured to the country

by the _Mercure_ as one of the principal agitators of Lyons; “no

administrative talent, no experience in affairs of state, a hot head,

and the principles of the times in their greatest exaggeration.” The

conservative element naturally accepted this characterization; for,

outside of the manufacturing world, Roland was utterly unknown. As for

the Jacobin element, it was a question of how far in anarchy the cabinet

would go; if it kept up with them, well and good; if it fell behind,

then let it take care.

With Roland’s appointment, Madame Roland was at once put into a position

of responsibility and power. The Hôtel of the Interior, into which they

moved, was situated in the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs at the point

where the Rue Ventadour now opens. It was a fine building which had been

arranged elegantly by Calonne for the controller-general. In going into

this palace they did not give up their apartment in the Rue de la Harpe.

The other ministers settled themselves as if they were to remain for

life, but Madame Roland saw only the “luxury of an inn” in the gilded

hôtel, and kept her modest apartment on the Left Bank, a “retreat which

one must always have in mind as certain philosophers their coffins,” she

told Bancal.

In no way were their habits changed by their new position. Roland was,

perhaps, even a little more severe than usual, and took virtuous delight

in appearing at Court with ribbons on his shoes instead of buckles, to

the horror of the courtiers. They called him a Quaker in Sunday dress,

with his white hair plastered down and sparsely powdered, his plain

black coat, above all his unadorned shoes. Madame Roland arranged her

life with strict regard for her notions of classic simplicity. She

neither made nor received visits, and never invited women to dinner.

Every Friday she had the members of the ministry; twice a week a mixed

company of ministers, deputies, and persons Roland wanted to see. Rarely

were there more than fifteen covers at table. One sat down at five

o’clock to a meal always simple, and at nine o’clock this puritan

household was closed. Of course, there was the theatre, with a _loge_

for the minister, but it was not often that she left her duties for it.

These duties were many; for the habit of working with Roland, of

copying, polishing, suggesting, begun the first year of her marriage,

over the dull pages of the encyclopædia and continued at Amiens and Le

Clos, was carried into the ministry of the interior. She went over the

daily mail with her husband. Together they noted the disorders in the

country, and together decided on the policy to pursue. She gave her

opinion on every subject, and exerted an influence on every question of

the ministry. This was in private. In her salon she was as quiet as in

the little salon of the Hôtel Britannique; nevertheless, she was always

the spirit of the gatherings; a skilful and gentle peacemaker in too hot

disputes; an inspiring advocate of the most radical undertakings; an

ardent defender of her own opinions.

Many of the measures to be proposed in the Assembly by the Girondins

originated in her salon; much of Roland’s business with individuals was

talked over in her presence. It often happened that those who had

business with Roland came to her first with it.

She was especially influential when it came to choosing persons for the

positions in the department which Roland controlled. She flattered

herself on her ability to tell a true patriot, and criticised and

praised candidates fearlessly. A minister of war was wanted soon after

Roland’s call to the cabinet. He thought of Servan, because the man had

exposed patriotic principles in a creditable book, because he had a

reputation for activity, because he had lost a court position on account

of civism, and above all because he declaimed bitterly against the

aristocrats. They wished to found a journal to represent their party,

and wanted a man “wise and enlightened” as editor. They decided on

Louvet, the author of the most licentious novel of the day, because of

his “noble forehead, the fire which animated his eye,” and the fine and

eloquent political pamphlets he had published. Because Pache had the

simplicity suitable to a republican and the manners of the ancients,

because he came to his office at seven o’clock in the morning and stayed

until three in the afternoon with only a morsel of bread brought in his

pocket for lunch, because he was prudent, attentive, zealous as a clerk,

he was thought fit to be a minister.

They mistrusted all their colleagues who lacked these qualities. In the

ministry was General Dumouriez, a diplomat of skill, devoted to the

constitution, skilful with men, wise with the King. He had come to see

the Rolands in the Rue de la Harpe with Brissot to announce to them the

call to the ministry. When he left, Madame Roland said to her husband:

“There is a man I have seen for the first time. He has a penetrating

mind, a false eye; perhaps it will be more necessary to suspect him than

anybody in the world. He has expressed great satisfaction with the

patriotic choice he has been charged to announce, but I should not be

astonished if one day he caused you to be dismissed.”

She mistrusted Dumouriez at once because of his courtly manners, and his

belief that the King was sincere in his efforts to support the

constitution. There was so great a difference between him and Roland

that she could not imagine the two working together. In the one she saw

“uprightness and frankness personified, severe equity without any of the

devices of the courtier or of the society-man.” In the other she

believed she recognized “an intelligent _roué_, a bold knight, who

sneered at everything except his own interests and his own glory.”

She did not change her idea of Dumouriez, although obliged to confess

that he had more _esprit_ than any one else in the ministry, that he was

“diligent and brave,” “a good general, a skilful courtier, writing well,

capable of great enterprises,” but his “manners!” they were fit only for

the ministerial intrigues of a corrupt court.

Her suspicions extended to all his friends. “All these fine fellows,”

she said to a friend one day _à propos_ of Dumouriez’s followers, “seem

poor patriots to me. They care too much for themselves to prefer the

public good to their own interests. I can never resist the temptation to

wound their self-sufficiency by pretending not to see the merit of which

they are vainest.”

As for the good faith of the King, she would not listen to the idea.

During the first three weeks of the ministry of Roland, he and Clavière

were disposed to think well of the King, to have confidence in the turn

things were going to take. But she would tell them when they started out

confidently to the Council meetings: “When I see you go off in that way,

it always seems to me that you are going to commit a _sottise_.” And

when they came back with less done than she expected she declared the

Council was “nothing but a café.” “It is disgraceful. You are in good

humor because you experience no annoyance, even because you are well

treated. You have the air of doing about what you wish in your

departments. I fear that you are being tricked.” When they reminded her

that nevertheless affairs were going well, she replied: “Yes, and time

is being lost.”

At the moment that Roland was called to office the question of public

tranquillity was most serious. It was not alone in the cities that

riots, pillage, and bloodshed were of constant occurrence. The provinces

were in many places almost uninhabitable. Roland, to cure the disorders,

wrote circulars and put up posters.

For example, in his own department, Rhone-et-Loire, the question of the

priests was causing more and more difficulty. The provocation came now

from one side, now from another. In certain parishes the constitutional

priests were supported by the municipality, in others the unsworn were

favored. In the midst of these dissensions, births, marriages, and

deaths often went unrecorded. Here a priest declaimed against the

constitution and incited the people not to pay their taxes, there the

National Guard and mayor combined to drive a disturber from the

community. In the district of Villefranche, the constitutional _clergé_

of “the former province of Beaujolais” brought a long complaint to the

authorities: “The inhabitants of the mountains,” they wrote, “influenced

by fanaticism, are in a state of insurrection. They believe the churches

to be profaned by the mere presence of the sworn priests; during the

services they throw stones against the doors, interrupt the services,

insult the new curés in the midst of their duties, force the faithful to

desert the churches.... The presbyteries are no longer a safe asylum.

Those who inhabit them are forced to keep a guard; they cannot travel

alone without being attacked and exposed to the greatest dangers. There

is not one of them who has not been driven several times from his home.

New-born children are baptized by Non-conformists without the ceremonies

of the Church—the fanatical and barbarous mothers declare that they

would rather choke them than permit them to be baptized by the priests.”

The religious difficulties were inflamed by the rash and suspicious

actions of the various parties, whose wisdom and diplomacy were annulled

by excessive party spirit. The whole department, in fact, was racked by

religious quarrels, bitter party spirit, fear of _émigrés’_ plots and

foreign invasion, hatred of the constitution and “patriots.”

Roland had a formula for such a situation, and when the directory of

Rhone-et-Loire asked him for help to restore order, he sent it to them.

“The present troubles which agitate your department at several points,”

he wrote them, April 18th, “seem to have their source in the diversity

of religious opinions. This diversity of opinion is the fruit of error,

and the error comes from ignorance. If, then, we enlighten men, we

deliver them from prejudices, and if the prejudices were destroyed,

peace would reign on the earth.... It is not by force of arms that one

teaches reason.... In the first place a well-organized state has only

enough troops to prevent invasions, to meet force by force, and to

enable all the citizens to enjoy all the benefits of their own

constitution. Second, internal order should be maintained by

instruction, by public opinion, and finally by the force of the National

Guards.... Elected by the people, you ought to have their confidence.

Your instruction ought to produce the greatest effect, and you ought to

be able through confidence and reason to form and direct public opinion.

These means, used energetically and wisely, are sure. Is there a rare

circumstance when they are too slow? You have all the public force of

your department; you can use it as it is necessary, and you ought to

direct it according to the circumstances. These are your means, sirs,

and you rest responsible before the nation and its representatives,

before the King and your constituency, for all the disorders that you do

not foresee and prevent.”

One can imagine the feelings of a board of county directors harassed by

daily riots, by incessant quarrels, by threats and plots, on receiving

such a letter from the minister, charged with executing the laws

relative to the internal tranquillity of the State. The directory must

have been composed of men singularly devoid of humor, if even in their

grave situation they did not laugh at Roland’s application of

instruction to the Lyons street-fights.

To a department which had asked him for troops to restore order, and

secure the free circulation of grain in its territory, he responded that

if it was necessary to use force they must take the National Guards, and

he added: “But must I counsel this step? So soon as one employs arms to

execute the laws, one not only proves that he has not known how to make

himself loved, but that he will never be able to do so. A constitution

which is enforced by the bayonet only, is not a constitution. Other

means are necessary to attach a free people to the laws that it has

made.... Instruct the administrations that you direct, and if they

deviate from the observation of the rules, use that sweetness which

commands so easily, that persuasion which leads to the repentance of a

fault often involuntary. It is so easy for a superior administration to

make itself agreeable to those that it has under its surveillance that,

in fact, I believe I might say it is always the fault of the former when

harmony is broken.”

And he continued this doctrinal campaign throughout his ministry. For

all the riot-ridden country he had but one formula. And while the people

burnt châteaux, stoned priests, pillaged storehouses, waylaid and stole

grain, murdered nobles, he serenely preached how easily the difficulty

could be ended by applying the dogma. And he believed it with the

incomparable naïveté of the theorist. If some one called his attention

to the fact that the disorders increased in spite of his preaching, he

was unmoved; that was the fault of the “stick in the wheel.” He was not

dissatisfied that disorder should increase. It would show the need for a

new shock.

Armed with his formulas, his forty years of service, and his “virtue,”

Roland could see no reason why he was not adequate to the situation, and

why he should not act as he saw best. The conviction of his own

sufficiency made him tactless with those who were, in his judgment, less

infallible than he. He assumed a pedagogic tone, a severe mien, a stiff,

patronizing air towards them. He read them lectures, posed before them

as impeccable. To men of experience, used to the world and to politics,

as convinced as Roland of their own sincere desire for the good of

France, and of the sufficiency of their own ideas, this attitude was

exasperating beyond expression.

It was not long before Roland and Servan, who was charged with the

portfolio of war, began to regulate the King, “to kill him by

pin-pricks,” said Dumouriez. Madame Roland was responsible, to a large

extent, no doubt, for their unpatriotic and traitorous conduct. Servan

was as completely under her rule as Roland, and she had cured both of

them of the confidence and support they gave the King at the beginning

of their ministry, and convinced them of his intention to betray the

constitution and restore the old régime. To deserve their support he

should, she believed, withdraw the vetoes he had put to the measures

against priests and _émigrés_.

From the beginning of the Gironde ministry matters had steadily grown

worse. In April war had been declared. It had opened badly for the

French and terror and suspicion were greater than ever in Paris.

Religious troubles flamed up all over the provinces, made more intense

by the fear of foreign invasion. As rumors ran, the army was not doing

its duty; the generals were traitors; the court party was plotting to

receive the Prussians, to massacre the patriots, and to overthrow the

constitution. To meet the perils which threatened, Madame Roland had two

measures: the proscription of the Non-conformist priests, and a camp of

twenty thousand soldiers, five from each canton of France, around Paris,

to guard the city from the attack of the foreigners.

This latter plan she persuaded Servan to present to the Assembly on June

4th without the King knowing anything of his minister’s plans and

without any of the Council save Clavière and Roland being in the secret.

The measure was voted by the Assembly, but it made a noise in Paris. The

National Guards regarded it as a reflection on their patriotism and

capacity. The Feuillants raised a petition of eight thousand names

(largely of women and children, sneered the patriots), protesting

against the measure. At the Assembly and at the Jacobins the measure was

hotly discussed; in the club it was opposed by Robespierre, now in open

rupture with the Girondins, and almost daily attacked by Brissot in the

_Patriote français_.

The King hesitated to sign the measure when it was presented to him. In

Madame Roland’s eyes this refusal was due to nothing but his disloyalty,

and she advised forcing him to a decision. She was, she says, in a kind

of “moral fever” at the moment, and felt the absolute necessity of some

kind of action which would determine the situation. In her judgment

Roland should withdraw from the ministry if the King did not sign the

measures. But she wished that if he withdrew everybody should know that

he did it because the King would not take his advice.

In these circumstances Madame Roland proposed to Roland to send a letter

to Louis XVI., stating his opinions, urging the King to consent to the

proscription of the priests and the camp about Paris, and warning him

against the consequences of a refusal. She dashed off this letter in a

single sitting, in the passion of conviction and exaltation which

possessed her.

“SIRE,—The present condition of France cannot long endure. The

violence of the crisis has reached the highest degree; it must be

terminated by a blow which ought to interest Your Majesty as much as

it concerns the whole Empire.

“Honored by your confidence, and placed in a position where I owe

you the truth, I dare to speak it; it is an obligation that you

yourself have imposed upon me.

“The French have adopted a constitution; there are those that are

discontented and rebellious because of it; the majority of the

nation wishes to maintain it, has sworn to defend it with its blood,

and has welcomed joyfully the war which promises to assure it. The

minority, however, sustained by its hopes, has united all its forces

to overthrow it. Hence this internal struggle against the laws, this

anarchy over which good citizens groan, and of which the wicked take

advantage to heap calumny on the new régime. Hence this discord

which has been excited everywhere, for nowhere is there

indifference. The triumph or the overthrow of the constitution is

desired; everywhere people are eager to sustain it or to change it.

I shall refrain from examining it, and consider simply what

circumstances demand; taking as impersonal attitude as possible, I

shall consider what we can expect and what it is best to do.

“Your Majesty enjoyed great privileges which you believed belonged

to royalty. Brought up in the idea of preserving them, you could not

see them taken from you with pleasure; your desire to recover them

was as natural as your regret at seeing them destroyed. These

sentiments, natural to the human heart, must have entered into the

calculation of the enemies of the Revolution. They counted then on

secret favor, until such times as circumstances permitted open

protection. This disposition could not escape the nation itself, and

it has been driven to defiance. Your Majesty has been constantly

between two alternatives: yielding to your prejudices, to your

private preferences, or making sacrifices dictated by philosophy and

demanded by necessity; that is, either emboldening the rebels by

disturbing the nation; or quieting the nation by uniting with her.

Everything has its course, and this uncertainty must end soon.

“Does Your Majesty ally yourself openly to-day with those who are

pretending to reform the constitution? Are you going generously to

devote yourself without reserve to its triumph? Such is the true

question, and the present state of things makes a solution

necessary.

“As for the very metaphysical question, are the French ripe for

liberty, the discussion is of no importance here; it is not a

question of judging what we shall be in a century, but of seeing of

what the present generation is capable.

“The Declaration of Rights has become a political gospel, and the

French Constitution, a religion for which the people are ready to

die. Already violence has sometimes supplanted the law. When the law

has not been sufficiently vigorous to meet the situation, the

citizens have taken things in their own hands. This is why the

property of the _émigrés_, or persons of their party, has been

exposed to pillage. This is why so many departments have been forced

to punish severely the priests whom public opinion had proscribed,

and who otherwise would have become its victims.

“In the shock of interests, passion has controlled. The country is

not a word that the imagination amuses itself in embellishing; it is

a being for whom one makes sacrifices, to whom one becomes attached

according to the suffering that it causes, who has been created by

great effort, and raised up in the midst of disturbances, and who is

loved for what it has cost as well as for what it promises. Every

attack made upon it inflames enthusiasm for it.

“To what point is this enthusiasm going to rise when the enemy’s

forces, united without, intrigue with those within to deal it the

most fatal blows?

[Illustration:

MADAME ROLAND.

From a painting by an unknown artist in the Musée Carnavalet.

]

“The excitement is extreme in all parts of the Empire; unless

confidence in the intentions of Your Majesty calm it, it will burst

forth in terrible fury. Such confidence can never be based on

professions; it must have facts.

“It is evident to the French nation that the constitution will work;

that the government will have the necessary strength the moment that

Your Majesty sincerely desires the triumph of the constitution,

sustains the legislative corps with all your executive power, and

takes away every pretext for uneasiness from the people and every

hope from the discontented.

“For example, two important decrees have been passed; both concern

the tranquillity and the safety of the State. A delay to sanction

them awakens defiance; if it is prolonged, it will cause discontent;

and, it is my duty to say it, in the present state of excitement

discontent may lead to the worst.

“There is no longer time to hesitate; there is no longer any way of

temporizing. The Revolution has been accomplished in the minds of

the people; it will be finished at the price of blood if wisdom does

not forestall the evils that it is still possible to avoid.

“I know that it is imagined that anything can be done by extreme

measures; but when force shall have been used to constrain the

Assembly, terror spread throughout Paris, and disunion and stupor in

the suburbs, the whole of France will rise in indignation, and,

throwing herself into a civil war, will develop that sombre energy

always so fatal to those who have provoked it.

“The safety of the State and the happiness of Your Majesty are

intimately allied; no power can separate them; cruel anguish and

certain misfortune will surround your throne, if you yourself do not

found it on the constitution and if it is not strengthened by the

peace which it ought to bring us.

“Thus the disposition of the popular mind, the course of events, the

reason of politics, the interest of Your Majesty, make it

indispensable that you unite with the legislative corps and carry

out the desire of the nation; that which principle shows to be a

duty, the present situation makes a necessity.... You have been

cruelly deceived, Sire, by those who have sought to separate you

from your people. It is by perpetually disturbing you that they have

driven you into a course of conduct which has caused alarm. Let the

people see that you are determined to carry out the constitution

upon which they feel that their happiness depends, and you will soon

become the object of their gratitude.

“The conduct of the priests in many places, the pretext which

fanaticism has given the discontented, have led to a wise law

against these agitators. Will not Your Majesty give it your

sanction? Public peace demands it. The safety of the priests depends

upon it. If this law does not go into force, the departments will be

forced to substitute violent measures for it, as they are doing on

all sides; and the irritated people will make up for it by their

excesses.

“The attempts of our enemies, the disturbances in the capital, the

great unrest which the conduct of your guard has excited, the

situation of Paris,—all make a camp in this neighborhood necessary.

This measure, whose wisdom and urgency are recognised by all good

citizens, is waiting for nothing but the sanction of Your Majesty.

Why is it that you delay when promptness would win all hearts?

Already the efforts of the staff of the National Guard of Paris

against this measure have awakened the suspicion that it was

inspired by superior influence; already the declamations of certain

demagogues awaken suspicions of their relations with those

interested in overthrowing the constitution; already the intentions

of Your Majesty are compromised; a little more delay, and the people

will see in their King the friend and the accomplice of the

conspirators!

“Just Heaven! have you struck the powers of the earth with

blindness? will they never have other counsels than those which

bring about their ruin?

“I know that the austere language of virtue is rarely welcomed by

the throne; I know also that it is because it is so rarely heard

there, that revolutions are necessary; I know above all that it is

my duty to use it to Your Majesty, not only as a citizen, obedient

to law, but as a minister honored by your confidence and fulfilling

the functions which it supposes; and I know nothing which can

prevent me from fulfilling a duty which is on my conscience.

“It is in the same spirit that I repeat what I have already said to

Your Majesty on the obligation and the utility of carrying out the

law which provides for a secretary in the Council. The simple

existence of this law speaks so powerfully that it seems as if its

execution would follow without delay; it is a matter of great

importance to employ all possible means to preserve in our

deliberations the necessary gravity, wisdom, and maturity; moreover,

for the ministers, some means of verifying their expressions is

necessary. If such existed, I should not be addressing myself in

writing at this moment to Your Majesty.

“Life is nothing to the man who regards his duties as higher than

everything else; after the happiness of having fulfilled them, the

greatest good that he can know is that he has discharged them with

fidelity; and to do that is an obligation for the public man.

(Signed.) ROLAND.

“10 June, 1792. Year IV. of Liberty.”

Roland sent this letter to the King on June 11th, although he had had

the idea of reading it to the Council the day before, but there was no

opportunity, so says Madame Roland in her Memoirs. According to

Dumouriez, the letter was sent earlier; for he relates that Roland read

the letter at the Council, and that when he had finished it the King

remarked with _sang-froid_: “M. Roland, it was three days ago that you

sent me your letter. It was useless to read it to the Council if it was

to remain a secret between us two.”

This letter was the climax to the irritating policy which the Gironde

ministers had been pursuing with Louis, and he decided to dismiss them.

Servan received his discharge first. “Congratulate me,” he cried when he

saw Madame Roland. “I have been put out.”

“I am piqued,” she replied, “that you are the first to have that honor,

but I hope it will not be long before it is accorded to my husband.” It

was not, for on the 13th Roland followed Servan. He hurried home to tell

his wife.

“There is only one thing to do,” she cried with vivacity: “it is to be

the first to announce it to the Assembly, sending along a copy of the

letter to the King.”

The idea was put into effect at once. They were convinced that both

“usefulness and glory” would result.

If this letter to the King began, as Dumouriez says, with a promise of

secrecy, then to send it to the Assembly was, considering the position

Roland occupied and the oath he had taken, a most disloyal act. But did

it begin so? Madame Roland does not speak of such a promise in her

Memoirs. The report of the letter given in the _Moniteur_ contains no

such opening phrase, though naturally Roland would have cut it out in

sending the document to the Assembly. Many of the memoirs and newspapers

of the day, however, either quote the promise or assume that the letter

was private.

Dumont, in writing of Madame Roland, says that the greatest reproach

that could be made upon her conduct during the Revolution was persuading

her husband to publish this letter, which commenced, according to him:

“Sire, this letter will never be known save to you and me.”

Mathieu Dumas says in his _Souvenirs_ that it was confidential, and

declares that it was read in the Council in the presence of the King,

“although the minister had promised to keep it a secret between himself

and His Majesty.” Of the presentation to the Assembly he adds: “It was a

new violation of the secret that the minister had imposed upon himself.

After his retreat propriety made the obligation of secrecy much more

rigorous.”

The _Guardian of the Constitution_ of June 16th called the letter

“criminal” and its reading sufficient cause for delivering Roland to the

public prosecutor. Among the pamphlets which the publication of the

letter called forth was an anonymous one, in which the author told the

minister that he was under the greater obligation to keep the secret, as

he had promised, because the letter was an attempt to regulate the

King’s private conduct and because it insinuated that His Majesty

intended to betray the constitution.

The result Madame Roland had foreseen, followed the presentation of the

letter to the Assembly. The reading was interrupted frequently by

applause, and it was ordered printed and distributed throughout the

eighty-three departments.

“Usefulness and glory” were attained. The Rolands were convinced that

the letter would enlighten France; that it would serve as the shock

necessary to start the movement which would crush the remnants of

monarchical authority. Madame Roland retired to the Rue de la Harpe more

jubilant than she had entered the Hôtel of the Interior. She had not

been proud of their appointment to the ministry; she was of their

dismissal.

What she and her friends expected would follow the dismissal of the

Girondin ministers, was a popular uprising, forcing the King to

reinstate them. The disturbance did not come of itself, and they set

about to prepare one—the artificial and abortive riot of the 20th of

June. On this date fell the anniversary of the oath of the Tennis Court,

and the citizens of the faubourgs Saint Antoine and Saint Marcel had

asked permission to celebrate it by presenting petitions to the Assembly

and to the King, and planting a tree of liberty. In the effervescence of

public spirit such a demonstration might easily be turned into a riot,

and there was opposition to it from the authorities; however, the

Gironde succeeded in securing the permission.

On the 20th, the petitioners assembled, a motley crowd of men, women,

and children, armed and carrying banners, and marched to the Assembly,

where they demanded admission. It was against the law, but Vergniaud and

Guadet contended that it should be granted. It was, and eight thousand

persons filed through the hall.

From the Assembly they pressed to the palace of the King, broke down the

doors, invaded the rooms, surrounded Louis XVI., put the red cap on his

head, but they did not strike. There was no popular fury. There were

cries of _Sanction the decrees_, _Recall the patriotic ministers_, _Away

with the priests_, _Choose between Coblentz or Paris_, but there were no

blows. For the people, the affair was simply a species of Mardi-gras,

and when they were tired of gazing at the splendors of the palace and at

the poor King, who, fearless and patient, let them surge about him, they

retired. The King was still king, the decrees were not signed, the

ministers were not recalled. Said Prudhomme in his report of the day:

“Paris is in consternation, but it is at seeing that this day has not

had the effect that the friends of liberty promised themselves.”

The reaction was terrific. Lafayette left his army and hurried to Paris

to protest before the Assembly and to demand measures against the

Jacobins. The Feuillants rallied their friends for a desperate effort.

The Court—openly contra-revolutionary now—worked with the _émigrés_ to

make a _coup_ which would sweep out entirely the new régime.

The patriots were not idle. In their supreme last struggle, never did

Girondin eloquence and intrigue run higher. The open contra-revolutions

in Paris and the foreign enemies now each day nearer the city were

reasons enough for action. By a burst of magnificent eloquence Vergniaud

secured a vote from the Assembly that the country was in danger, and a

call upon France to enlist for its defence. A movement of superb

patriotism followed the declaration. Here was an unmistakable enemy.

Vague alarms were at an end. The foreigners were actually approaching

the capital, and anybody could understand that they were not wanted. The

irritated, harassed country opened its heart and poured out its

blood,—young and old, weak and strong, even women and girls, offered

themselves.

But this was a movement against foreign invasion—not against the

remnants of monarchical authority. The result looked uncertain.

Consternation and despair seized the Rolands. They foresaw the triumph

of the Court, the hope of a republic lost, and they calculated on what

course the patriots ought to pursue if the _émigrés_ and their allies

reached Paris and combined with the Court to restore the old régime.

Walking one day in the Champs-Élysées with Lanthenas, Roland met two

Southerners who were in Paris on a commission from their department.

Their names were Barbaroux and Rebecqui. Since the opening of the

Revolution they had been active in the cause of the patriots in

Marseilles, Arles, and Avignon. The overthrow of the Girondin ministry

had alarmed them. Roland’s letter to the King had inspired them with

warm admiration for his courage and patriotism.

Like all the young blood of the country, they were planning action

against the dangers which threatened. Their plans were well advanced

when they met Lanthenas and Roland. The latter wished to discuss the

situation seriously with them, and the next day Barbaroux went to the

Rue de la Harpe. Madame Roland was with the ex-minister, and the three

were not long in understanding each other. Barbaroux soon won their

confidence by his enthusiasm and eloquence. He was young, but

twenty-five, and of a beauty that won him the name of Antinoüs from

Madame Roland. He was animated, too, by a fiery scorn of “tyrants,”

“courts,” and “kings,” as unbelieving as Madame Roland in the sincerity

of any party outside his own, profoundly convinced of his call to

reverse the monarchy, and already with a record of services rendered to

the Revolution. The Rolands found him “active, laborious, frank, and

brave,” and they opened their hearts to him on the means of saving

France.

“Liberty is lost,” cried Roland, “if the plots of the courts are not

immediately checked. Lafayette is meditating treason in the North. The

army of the centre is disorganized, in want of munitions, and cannot

stand against the enemy. There is nothing to prevent the Austrians being

in Paris in six weeks. Have we worked for three years for the grandest

of revolutions only to see it overthrown in a day? If liberty dies in

France, it is forever lost to the rest of the world. All the hopes of

philosophy are deceived. The most cruel tyranny will reign upon the

earth. Let us prevent this disaster. Let us arm Paris and the

departments of the North. If they fail, let us carry the statue of

liberty to the South. Let us found somewhere a colony of independent

men.”

His words were broken by sobs. Madame Roland and Barbaroux wept with

him. Rapidly then the young man sketched his plan. It was Roland’s own.

Arm Paris; if that failed, seize the South.

A map was brought out and they traced the natural boundaries of the new

State. The Vosges, the Jura, the Loire, and a vast plain between

mountains and river divide France. The plain they would take for a camp;

the river and mountains could be easily defended. If this position was

lost, there was a second boundary; on the east, the Doubs, the Ain, the

Rhone; on the west, the Vienne, the Dordogne; in the centre, the rocks

and rivers of Limoges. Farther still was Auvergne, the mountains of

Velay, the Cévennes, the Alps, Toulon. “And if all these points were

forced, Corsica remained,—Corsica where Genovese and French had not been

able to naturalize tyranny.”

As they traced the boundaries, they devised plans for fortifications and

for mobilizing the army, but they concluded their council by the

decision that a final effort must be made to save Paris. There must be

another revolt if possible; the King must be deposed and a convention

called which would give France entire a republic. Barbaroux was ready

with a plan to help bring this about and he left them, promising to

bring a battalion and two pieces of cannon from Marseilles.

They understood that it was an insurrection that he meant to prepare,

but they did not hesitate. All the violence, excess, passion, fear of

Paris must be excited this time; there must not be another 20th of June;

the stick must come out of the wheel now or never; and indifferent to

the possibility that the passion they proposed to use might assert its

right to help rule if it helped create, confident in the sufficiency of

their theory and of themselves, they awaited the promised insurrection.

But not all of their friends were so serene. Several members of the

party had begun to realize the force of the popular fury they had been

arousing. They began to feel nervous at the prospect in Paris of the

horde of Marseillais Barbaroux had called. The bloodthirstiness of the

Cordeliers clubs began to revolt them. They were forced to admit that

Marat’s journal was more influential than their own. They saw, too, a

threatening thing—hitherto the insurrectionary element had been more or

less chaotic, it was now well organized and it had at its head a man

whom they feared, Danton. What if the mob should refuse to retire after

the overthrow of the King? Would anarchy be an improvement on monarchy?

Would a _sans-culotte_ be a more enlightened administrator than an

aristocrat?

Vergniaud, Guadet, and Gensonné tried to frighten Louis XVI. into

recalling the ministers by telling him how formidable the threatened

insurrection appeared to them to be, and by assuring him that it might

be avoided by restoring the Girondins. Brissot in the Assembly denounced

“the faction of regicides, which wishes to create a dictator and

establish a republic.” He declared that men who were working to

establish a republic on the debris of the constitution were worthy to be

“smitten by the sword of the law.” If the King was guilty he should not

be deposed in haste, but a commission should be appointed to investigate

the affair thoroughly. Pétion, who, as mayor, had aided in bringing

about the 20th of June, became frightened, and counselled calm.

But this sudden change could effect nothing now. It was too late for the

Girondins to do anything but join with the Jacobins, making a pretence

to leadership, although already feeling it slipping from them.

Towards the end of July the allied force summoned France to lay down her

arms. Suspicion was at its height. Excitement and disorder were

increased by the arrival of the Marseillais on July 30th. Either the

allies would reach Paris and save the Court, or Paris must lay hands on

the Court and go out and subdue the allies. There was no certainty of

which it would be. At heart every faction was fearful. The King, the

Court, Lafayette, the allies, the _émigrés_, the Feuillants, Girondins,

Jacobins, Cordeliers, faubourgs, all hesitated. Something was coming.

What was it? There is no period of the Revolution of such awful tension

as this,—the months between the fall of the Gironde ministry and the

10th of August.

In this exciting period it was the party of insurrection which organized

most thoroughly and most intelligently. The leaders who had taken this

organization upon themselves were Barbaroux, Danton, Camille Desmoulins,

Santerre. They worked through municipal organizations, which, instituted

since the Revolution, were turbulent, impetuous, fierce; these were the

forty-eight sections into which Paris had been divided, and in nearly

all of which the officials were sympathizers with insurrectionary

methods of getting what they wanted. Under the influence of the cry the

_Country is in danger, Paris must act_, the sections had aroused the

people within their limits. During the first days of August, frequent

reunions were held in the Place de la Bastille, at which the most

alarming rumors of the treachery of the King and the approach of the

enemy were circulated. These sections sent deputations to the Assembly

with incendiary addresses. They patrolled the Tuileries lest the

_executive power escape_, they said in unintentional irony. They

fraternized with the Marseillais, over whom the enthusiasm in

revolutionary circles was constant. They swore repeatedly in their

gatherings to save the country.

By the 9th of August, the populace was in a tumult of alarm and of

exaltation. They were persuaded that they were the providence of France,

and they believed every man who did not join them was a traitor. It had

taken a long time to work up the sections of Paris to the united effort

which Madame Roland had demanded from them in 1789, but it was done at

last, and they were as convinced of the falsity of everybody but

themselves, and of their own call to save the country, as ever Madame

Roland herself had been.

The 9th of August the ferment was perfect, and the order was given for

sounding the tocsin. At that moment the sections decided that three

commissioners should be appointed in each quarter of Paris to unite with

the Commune, with full powers to devise prompt means of saving the

country. The insurrectionary force thus had a legal representation. This

representation received at the Hôtel de Ville by the regular municipal

council, on evening of August 9th, had before morning superseded it, and

was the governing force of Paris. It was a transfer of power, probably

with the acquiescence of the legal municipality, glad to escape from the

turmoil of things. The new body, to be known as the Commune, was

composed of men almost without exception unknown outside of their

neighborhoods, and there only for agitation and violence.

While the new Commune was settling itself at the Hôtel de Ville, the

populace it represented was in motion. The force with which the Court

and constitutional party attempted to control the movement was

insufficient, and in part unreliable. In a few hours the leaders of the

opposing force had been disposed; Mandat, the commander of the National

Guards, had been murdered; Pétion had been “chained by ribbons to his

wife’s side”; Louis XVI. and his family had taken refuge in the

Assembly; the Swiss guards, who had attempted to defend the château, had

been ordered by the King to retire to their barracks, and had been

murdered as they went; the château had been invaded.

The mob filled not only the Tuileries, but the _Manège_ where the

Assembly sat. That body, composed the 10th of August of Girondins and

Jacobins alone, the constitutionals absenting themselves, found itself

under the pressure of a new force,—the populace. They had worked for

fifty days to arouse it. They had allowed it to organize itself. They

had permitted it to do the work of the day. But what were they going to

do with it now? Could they use it? Was there not a possibility that it

may use them? In any case, the objects for which the insurrection had

been prepared must be attained and the suspension of Louis XVI. was

voted; the Gironde ministers, Roland, Servan, and Clavière, were

returned, Danton, Monge, and Lebrun being added to them.

Madame Roland’s policy had been carried out to the letter; the united

sections had acted; the King was out of the way; the patriots were in

power.

IX

DISILLUSION

Madame Roland’s plan had carried. Since the beginning of the Revolution

she had urged it. In 1789 when she called for “two illustrious heads,”

for “the united sections and not the Palais Royal”; throughout 1790 in

her demands for “blood, since there is nothing else to whip you and make

you go”; in her incessant preaching of civil war; in her remonstrances

in 1791 against the seizure of Marat’s sheets, against the arrest of the

turbulent, against shutting the doors of the Assembly on those who

prevented it doing its work; in the Hôtel of the Interior scoffing at

Roland’s weakness in believing in the sincerity of Louis XVI.; in urging

Servan to present his plan for a camp of twenty thousand soldiers around

Paris without the King’s knowledge; in writing the letter to the King

and in pushing Roland to present it to the Assembly; in encouraging

Barbaroux in his preparations for the 10th of August,—she had preached

the necessity and the wholesomeness of insurrection.

Throughout this period there is not a word to show that she hesitated

about the wisdom of her demand. She was convinced, and never wavered. It

was her conviction which held Roland. It was her inspiration that fired

the Gironde. Now that the force that she had evoked was organized,

logically she must unite with it.

Roland began his ministry consistently enough. Within twelve hours after

his appointment he had changed every one in his bureaux suspected of

sympathy with the constitution. He wrote immediately to the departments

describing the Revolution and sending copies of “all the laws and all

the pieces relative to the great discoveries of the 10th of August,” and

lest the people should not hear of them, he urged the curés and

officials to read them aloud whenever they could secure a gathering of

people.

Everywhere in the departments he upheld the Jacobin party. Thus at Lyons

where the directory of Rhone-et-Sâone had been continually at war with

the municipality because of its moderation, the former body was deposed

and the latter put into power with the compliment that in all cases it

had maintained peace and tranquillity in spite of the fanaticism of the

enemies of the Revolution. Chalier, who came to Paris to represent the

municipality,—Chalier, who believed that calm could only be obtained in

Lyons by filling the streets with “impure blood” and who led in the

horrible massacres of the city,—was, through Roland’s influence, sent

home “with honors.”

Never was Roland’s energy greater. He worked twenty hours out of

twenty-four, and even his four hours of repose were often interrupted.

By the 20th of August he was able to present the Assembly with a report

on the condition of France. In all his work he was logically in harmony

with the Second Revolution.

But Roland soon found himself hindered in his activity by an important

part of the insurrectionary force which had produced the 10th of

August,—the Commune of Paris. The commissioners who had been sent to the

Town Hall the night of the 9th, with orders from their sections to

devise means to save the country, had refused to go away; large numbers

of violent Jacobins had joined the body, among them Robespierre and

Marat. The regular municipality had disappeared.

The Commune believed that there was more need of it now than ever. The

passions which had been excited to call it into being were more

violently agitated than ever. The body felt, and rightly, that only the

greatest vigilance would preserve what had been gained on the 10th of

August; for now, as never before, the aristocratic and constitutional

part of France was against the Jacobin element; now more than ever the

allied powers felt that it was the business of kings to reinstate Louis

XVI. The Commune understood the force against it, saw that only

audacious and intrepid action would conquer it, and went to work with

awful energy to “save the country.”

The tocsin was set a-ringing: the conservative printing offices were

raided; passports were suspended; barriers were put up; those who had

protested against recent patriotic measures were declared unfit for

duty; the royal family was confined in the Temple; lists of “suspects”

were made out; houses were visited at night to surprise plots, seize

suspected persons, examine papers, and search for firearms; a criminal

court of commissioners from the sections was chosen; the guillotine was

set up in the Carrousel. So much for the interior. To meet the enemy

without they seized horses and ammunition, set up stands where

volunteers could be enrolled, put every able-bodied man in Paris under

marching orders. All of this with a speed, a resolution, a savage sort

of fury which terrified the aristocrats, inflamed the populace, rejoiced

Marat, and alarmed the Assembly.

From the first Roland found himself in conflict with this new body. He

was the law now, and they were called to act above all law. They had a

reason, the same that he had held for many months,—the divine right of

taking things into your own hands and compelling people to be

regenerated according to your notion. But Roland had reached the point

where all the essentials in his scheme of regeneration had been

gained—the Commune had not. Suddenly he who had been the vigorous

champion of revolutions for removing sticks from government wheels,

found himself the “stick in the wheel.” If he demanded information of

the Commune, he did not receive it. If he complained of its

irregularities, he was called a traitor. If he called attention to the

law, he was ignored. All through August Roland and the Commune continued

to irritate and antagonize one another.

There was one man through whom they might have been reconciled,—Danton,

he who, with Robespierre and Marat, formed the triumvirate of the new

party of Terror. Danton represented the insurrectionary idea in the

ministry and it was through him alone that Roland and the Gironde might

have worked with the Commune.

But from the first Madame Roland would have nothing to do with Danton.

When it was announced to her that he had been chosen to the ministry,

she told her friends: “It is a great pity that the Council should be

spoiled by this Danton, who has so bad a reputation.” They told her that

he had been useful to the Revolution; that the people loved him; that it

was no time to make enemies; that he must be used as he was. She could

do nothing to keep him out, but she was not convinced of the wisdom of

the choice.

He sought her at once; for after the suspension of the King, Danton

never ceased to repeat that the safety of France lay in union,—in an

effort of all parties against the foreign invaders. “The enemy is at our

door and we rend one another. Will all our quarrels kill a Prussian?”

was his incessant warning. Few days passed that he did not drop into the

Hôtel of the Interior; now it was for the Council meeting, to which he

came early, hunting her up in her little salon for a chat before the

meeting began: again he dropped in on the days she was unaccustomed to

receive, begging a cup of tea before he went to the Assembly. Fabre

d’Eglantine often accompanied him. It was not a warm welcome they

received. They talked to her of patriotism, and she replied in a tone of

superiority and with a tinge of suspicion which was evident enough to

Danton and his colleague and could not fail to irritate them. She gave

them to understand that she saw through them, that she felt herself

incorruptible, and that no consideration would induce her to unite with

an element she suspected.

Danton soon realized her inflexibility and before the end of August he

had ceased his visits. Madame Roland had refused the only mediator

between Gironde and Mountain, and in so doing had lighted another

interior blaze. She was too intelligent a woman for one to suppose that

she did not see the danger in further disunion. Why then for the

Republic’s sake, for humanity’s sake, did she not unite with him?

The only reason she gives is the physical repugnance that Danton

inspired in her. She confessed that no one could have shown more zeal, a

greater love of liberty, a livelier desire to come to an understanding

for the sake of the public cause, than he. Certainly she had based her

judgments thus far in the Revolution on such indications, but Danton was

of a different nature from the men who surrounded her. A volcanic animal

tremendous in passions as in energy, in intellect, in influence. She

says that never did a face seem to her to show brutal passion so

perfectly. Her imagination had been awakened. All her life she had been

the plaything of this imagination, and every face that came under her

eyes had been read, its owner’s character analyzed and his rôle in life

assigned. Danton she figured poniard in hand, exciting by voice and

gesture a troup of assassins more timid or less bloodthirsty than he.

She could not conquer the effect of this vision and for this reason she

refused his proffer of reconciliation.

Had Danton offended her by some coarse familiarity? The best reason for

rejecting this explanation of her dislike is that she says nothing about

it. If an unwarranted gallantry had ever occurred, we may be positive

that she would not have kept it to herself. The “confessions” of her

Memoirs make such an interpretation impossible; even her friend

Lanthenas was not spared on this score. It is impossible to suppose that

Danton would have been.

For the first time, Madame Roland found herself face to face with a man

who was an embodiment of the insurrectionary spirit. Hitherto that

spirit had been an ideal, a theory, an unseen but powerful force which

was necessary to accomplish what she wanted. Personally she had never

come in contact with it. She had idealized it as an avenging spirit,

“terrible but glorious,” cruel but just, awful but divine. That this

force had an end to reach, a personal ambition to satisfy, an ideal to

attain, that it might come into conflict with her, she had not

calculated. In her plan it was simply an avenging fire which she could

use, and which, when she had had enough of it, she could snuff out.

But now she saw an insurrection as a bald fact. Danton was a positive,

living incarnation of her doctrine. Instead of rhapsodizing over the

“divine right of insurrection,” he organized the slums into brigades;

instead of talking about Utopia, he gave the populace pikes and showed

them how to use them. His policy was one of action. It was a fearful

bloody policy, but it was definite and practical, and a logical result

of what Madame Roland had been preaching.

The revolt she experienced against Danton’s brutality made her unwilling

that the insurrectionary force should be longer recognized. She suddenly

became conservative, as the radical who has gotten what he wants always

must. She was jealous, too, for her party. They were the patriots, and

they must be the ruling element in the new government. It would be a

shame to share their power with so terrible a Hydra. It was but a little

time before Roland under her influence was at cross-purposes with Danton

in the Council. Roland was destined to run athwart a more relentless and

savage enemy than Danton could ever be,—Marat, _l’Ami du Peuple_; that

Marat the destruction of whose journal by the “satellites of Lafayette”

Madame Roland had complained of but a year ago. The most violent and

uncontrolled type of the Revolutionary fury, Marat had won his following

by his daring _l’Ami du Peuple_, where in turn he had bombarded every

personality of the Revolution who seemed to him to favor anything but

absolute equality, who worked to preserve any vestige of the old régime,

or who hesitated at any extreme of terrorism. In the spring of 1792, the

“Brissotine faction” had been his target. His complaint against it was

the making of the war. Roland he had practically ignored, for until now

Roland had been the defender of Marat’s methods.

The 11th of August Marat had had his people carry off from the national

printing office four presses,—his due, he claimed, for those that the

old régime had confiscated. It was a bit of lawlessness that Roland felt

he should rebuke. It was a first point against the minister. Soon after

the Department of the Interior received a large amount of money for

printing useful matter. Marat considered his productions of the highest

importance to the country. He asked for fifteen thousand livres. Roland

replied wisely that it was too large a sum for him to give without

knowledge of the object to which it was to be put, but that if Marat

would send him his manuscripts he would submit them to a council to see

if they were suitable to be published at the expense of the nation. But

this was questioning the purity of Marat’s patriotism, submitting to

scrutiny the spokesman of the people, and Marat was angry. He felt, as

Roland had since the beginning of the Revolution, that the right to cry

out against all that he suspected, and to voice all the terrors that

swarmed in his head, was unlimited and divine.

Thus Roland had antagonized the Commune, Danton, and Marat, before the

September massacres, but he had done nothing to show the public that he

would not support their policy. On the second day of the massacres,

however, acting on the advice of Madame Roland, he put himself in open

conflict with them.

It was on the second day of September that the riot began. Revolted by

the barbarity of the slaughter, stung by the insult offered them in a

raid on their hôtel, half-conscious, too, that they must do something or

their power would slip from them, they determined on the 3d, that Roland

should protest to the Assembly against the massacre. But to protest was

to put himself in antagonism with the Commune, with Robespierre, Marat,

Danton. It was to make himself forever a suspect, to take his life in

his hand. But that was immaterial to Roland and to his wife. To die was

part of the Gironde programme, and they were all of them serenely

indifferent to death if they could only serve the public by dying.

Roland wrote a letter to the Assembly, which is an admirable specimen of

the way in which he applied theories to situations which needed arms and

soldiers—a letter of platitude and generalities. He called attention to

the danger of disorganization becoming a habit; explained where power

legally belonged, and what the duties of the people were in

circumstances like those they then faced. As for the massacre, he said:

“Yesterday was a day over whose events it is perhaps necessary to draw a

veil. I know that the people, terrible in vengeance, showed a kind of

justice. They do not seize as victims all who fall in their way. They

take those whom they believe to have been too long spared by the law,

and whom they are persuaded in the peril of the moment should be

sacrificed without delay. But I know that it is easy for agitators and

traitors to abuse this effervescence, and that it must be stopped. I

know that we owe to all France the declaration that the executive power

was unable to foresee and prevent these excesses. I know that it is the

duty of the authorities to put a stop to them or to consider themselves

crushed. I know, further, that this declaration exposes me to the rage

of certain agitators. Very well, let them take my life. I desire to save

it only to use it for liberty, for equality.”

These were bold words considering the situation. They were an open

defiance to the Mountain. They showed that the Minister of the Interior,

hitherto the enemy of the party of Order, had put himself at the head of

that party; that he had suddenly determined that he was going to snuff

out the candle he had gone to so much pains to light. He did not

consider it a serious task. It was only a question of appealing to the

people. “The docile people at the voice of their legislators will soon

feel that they must honor their own work and obey their

representatives.”

The next day, September 4th, Roland wrote to the commander general of

the National Guard, Santerre, to employ all the forces that the law gave

him to prevent that either persons or property be violated. He sent him

a copy of the law and declared that he threw the responsibility of all

future disorder on Santerre. It was fully two days after this however,

before the massacre was stopped.

Before the end the revolt of the Rolands was complete and terrible.

They, with the Gironde, were, indeed, very much in the position of

keepers of wild beasts, who, to clear their gardens of troublesome

visitors, let loose the animals. The intruders are driven out, but when

they would whistle in their beasts they find themselves obliged to flee

or to be torn in pieces in turn. “We are under the knife of Robespierre

and Marat,” Madame Roland wrote on the 5th of September, and a few days

later:

“Marat posts every day the most frightful denunciations against the

Assembly and the Council. You will see both sacrificed. You will believe

that is possible only when you see it done, and then you will groan in

vain over it. My _friend_ Danton directs everything, Robespierre is his

mannikin, Marat holds his torch and his knife; this fierce tribune

reigns and we are only waiting to become its victims. If you knew the

frightful details of this affair,—women brutally violated before being

torn to pieces by these tigers, intestines cut off and worn as ribbons,

bleeding human flesh eaten.... You know my enthusiasm for the

Revolution. Well, I am ashamed of it. It is stained by these wretches.

It is become hideous. It is debasing to remain in office.”

She had begun to experience one of the saddest disillusions of life,—the

loss of faith in her own undertaking, to see that the thing she had

worked to create was a monster, that it must be throttled, that it was

too horrible to live.

The massacre was scarcely ended before Marat attacked Roland. He called

him a traitor trying to paralyze the means necessary to save the

country; his letter to the Assembly he stigmatized as a _chef-d’œuvre_

of cunning and perfidy; he accused him of securing the nomination of as

many Brissotins as possible, of scattering gold by the handful to secure

what he wanted; again it was “opium” he was scattering to hide his

conspiracy with the traitors of the National Assembly. Madame Roland was

immediately brought to the front in Marat’s journal, he giving her the

credit of her husband’s administration.

“Roland,” he says, “is only a _frère coupe-choux_ that his wife leads by

the ears. It is she who is the Minister of the Interior under the

direction of _L’Illuminé L’Anténas_, secret agent of the Guadet-Brissot

faction.” In the same number of his journal there is an article under

the heading “Bon mot à la femme Roland,” where she is accused of

squandering national funds and of having Marat’s posters pulled down.

The quarrels between the various factions of the republicans were so

serious before the end of September that the best men of all parties saw

the imperative need of sacrificing all differences and antagonisms, in

order to combine solidly against the enemies of the new régime.

Roland made overtures to Dumouriez, then at the head of the army, and

was welcomed. Danton did his best to persuade the Girondins to forget

the September massacres, and turn all their attention to protecting the

country. A portion of the party was ready to compromise, but others

refused; they were the circle about Madame Roland. Dumouriez, who came

to Paris after the important victory of Valmy in September, did his best

to reconcile her. In his judgment, “there was but one man who could

support the Gironde, save the King and his country,—that man was

Danton,” but he was unsuccessful in spite of his diplomacy.

The experiences of September, the desperate condition of affairs, the

need of concentrating the entire force of the nation against the

invaders, the disorganization which was increasing on account of the

dissension among the patriots, the impotence of Roland, the power of the

Commune,—all seemed calculated to force Madame Roland to compromise with

the insurrectionary force as represented by Danton. That she would not

see the necessity of it, that she, so intelligent when she was

unprejudiced, so good a politician when she undertook a cause, should

refuse the only relation which could have enabled the Gironde to keep

the direction of the new government, was no doubt due partly to the fact

that she was at this time under the influence of the deepest passion of

her life.

A woman in love is never a good politician. The sentiment she

experiences lifts her above all ordinary considerations. All relations

seem petty beside the supreme union which she desires. The object of her

passion becomes the standard for her feelings towards others. She is

revolted by natures which are in opposition to the one which is stirring

hers. The sentiments, the opinions, the course of action of her lover,

become personal matters with her. She is incapable of judging them

objectively. She defends them with the instinctive passion of the

animal, because they are _hers_. Intelligence has little or nothing to

do with this defence. Even if she be a cool-headed woman with a large

sense of humor and see that her championship is illogical, she cannot

give it up.

[Illustration:

Engraving of Buzot by Nargeot, after the portrait worn by Madame

Roland during her captivity.

]

Madame Roland’s antipathy to Danton was intensified by her love for a

man who was in every way his opposite. The reserved, cold dignity of the

one made her despise the tempestuous oratory of the other. His ideals

and theories made Danton’s acts and riots more odious. His refinement

and melancholy put in insupportable contrast the brutality and joviality

of the great Commune leader. She could not see Danton’s importance to

the success of the Second Revolution, when absorbed in a personality so

different. All political tactics and compromises seemed to her

insignificant, trivial, unworthy in connection with her great passion.

Undoubtedly, too, she hoped to see her lover take a position in the new

legislature,—the Convention,—of which he was a member, which would make

the Gironde so strong that it would not need Danton.

X

BUZOT AND MADAME ROLAND

In the spring and summer of 1791, which the Rolands spent at the Hôtel

Britannique, they formed many relations which lasted throughout the

Revolution. In this number was a member of the Constitutional Assembly,

François-Nicolas-Léonard Buzot, a young man thirty-one years of age,

coming from Evreux, in Normandy. Buzot had had the typical Gironde

education, had been inspired by the Gironde heroes, and had adopted

their theories.

Like Manon Phlipon at Paris, Vergniaud at Bordeaux, Barbaroux at

Marseilles, Charlotte Corday at Caen, Buzot had lived an intensely

sentimental life, nourishing himself on dreams of noble deeds and

relations; like them, he had become devoted to a theory of complete

regeneration; and like them, he had proudly flung himself into the

Revolution, aspiring, inexperienced, impassioned, and confident.

Son of a member of the court of Evreux, Buzot became a lawyer in that

town, and took an active interest with the liberal and enlightened part

of the community in the political struggles of the Revolution. When the

notables were called together in 1787, he was elected one of them. He

aided in naming the deputies to the States-General, in preparing the

petition which the Third Estate sent to that body, and later was elected

a deputy. But his real political cares began in the Constituent

Assembly, where he sat with the extreme Left. His attitude towards the

confiscation of the property of the clergy is a specimen of his

radicalism at this period. “In my judgment,” he declared,

“ecclesiastical property belongs to the nation,” and this was at a

moment when the right of the clergy to hold property had not been

seriously questioned.

When the Rolands came up to Paris in the spring of 1791, they found

Buzot allied with that part of the Assembly most sympathetic to them and

he supported, during the time they spent in the city, the measures which

they advocated.

He lived near the Rolands, and soon became a constant visitor at the

house. His wife, an unattractive woman of no special intellectual cast,

was nevertheless amiable and sincere and the four fell into the habit of

visiting back and forth and of often going in company to call on Pétion

and Brissot.

Madame Roland was more and more attracted by Buzot’s character as she

watched him in the little circle. He not only held the same theories as

she, but he developed them with ardor and a sort of penetrating and

persuasive eloquence which stirred her sympathetic, oratory-loving

nature. His courage was endless, and it was combined with a pride and

indifference to popular opinion, which harmonized with her notion that

the ideal was to be kept in sight rather than the practical means of

working towards it. His suspicion of others, even of some of their

associates, based as it was on sentiments of patriotism, struck her as

an evidence of unusual insight.

Buzot had less of that gay versatility which annoyed her in many of her

circle, and which seemed to her inconsistent with the serious condition

of public affairs. His nature was grave and he looked at life with a

passionate earnestness which gave a permanent shade of melancholy to his

conduct and his thoughts. In affairs of great importance he became

tragic in his solemn concern. In lighter matters he was rather sober and

reflective. It was an attitude towards life which appealed deeply to

Madame Roland.

The gentleness of Buzot’s character, the purity of his life, his

susceptibility to sentiment, the strength of his feelings, his love for

nature, his habit of revery, all touched her imagination and caused her

to select him from the circle at the Hôtel Britannique as one possessing

an especially just and sympathetic nature.

When she left Paris, in the middle of September, 1791, she found the

parting with Buzot and his wife most trying. She was more deeply

attached to them than she knew. But if the two families were to be

separated, they were not to lose sight of each other. A correspondence

was arranged between them, which soon fell quite into the hands of

Madame Roland and Buzot, as the correspondence had done before between

the Rolands and other of their friends. Almost nothing remains of the

letters exchanged between them from the middle of September, 1791, when

she returned to Villefranche, and September, 1792, when Buzot went back

to Paris, a member of the Convention from Evreux, where he had been

acting as president of the civil court.

But it is not necessary to have the letters to form a clear idea of what

they would be. Letters had always been a means of sentimental expansion

for Madame Roland. She wrote, as she felt, invariably in the eloquent

and glowing phrase which her emotion awakened; now with pathos and

longing, frequently with the real grace and playfulness which her more

spontaneous and natural moods caused. Her letters were invariably deeply

personal. It was her own life and feelings which permeated them, and it

was the sentiments, the interests, the tastes of her correspondent,

which she sought to draw out and to which she responded. An intimate and

sympathetic correspondence of this sort, even if the pretext for it and

the present topic of it is public affairs, as it was in this case, soon

takes a large part in a life. Close exchange of thought and sentiment,

complete and satisfactory, is, perhaps, the finest and truest, as it is

the rarest, experience possible between a man and a woman. When once

realized, it becomes infinitely precious. Madame Roland and Buzot poured

out to each other all their ambitions and dreams, their joys and their

sorrows, sure of perfect understanding. At this time the thoughts which

filled their minds were one, their emotions were one; both relied more

and more upon the correspondence for stimulus.

To Buzot, harassed by petty criminal trials, and married to a woman who,

whatever her worth, could never be more to him than his housekeeper and

the mother of his children, this intimacy of thought, and hope, and

despair appeared like a realization of the perfect Platonic dream, and

Madame Roland became a sacred and glorified figure in his imagination.

But if a man and woman carry on such a correspondence for a few months

and then are suddenly thrown into constant intercourse, their relation

becomes at once infinitely delicate. It is only experience, wisdom,

womanly tact, and an enormous force of self-renunciation which can

control such a situation and save the friendship.

When Buzot and Madame Roland first met at the end of September, 1792,

she was ill prepared for resistance. The Revolution had suddenly

appeared to her fierce, bloody, desperate,—a thing to disown. She could

no longer see in it the divinity she had been worshipping. Her

disillusion had been terrible. The impotence and languor which follow

disillusion enfeebled her will, weakened her splendid enthusiasm, and

threatened to drive her to the conclusion that all effort is worthless.

It must have been already evident to her that the men upon whom she

relied as leaders were inefficient. Roland, who had been the idol of the

people until since the installation of the Commune, was utterly

powerless to cope with the new force. She saw him reduced to defending

his actions, to answering criticisms on his honesty; she felt that he

was no longer necessary to the public cause; it was a humiliation to

her, and her interest in Roland lessened as his importance decreased.

Brissot had no influence; with a part of the Gironde, Vergniaud,

Gensonné, Guadet, she was not intimate; Robespierre was alienated;

Danton she had refused to work with. But in Buzot there was hope. He had

no record at Paris to hurt him. There were infinite possibilities in his

position in the new Convention. Why should he not become the leader of

the party, the spirit of the war between Gironde and Mountain, the

opponent of Danton, the incarnation of her ideals? The hope she had in

him as her spokesman, as a saviour of the situation, intensified the

interest she felt for him as a friend and comrade.

Personally, too, apart from all public questions, Buzot attracted her.

His noble face, elegant manners, careful toilette, pleased her. She was

a woman to the tips of her fingers, and Buzot’s courtly air, his

deference to her, his attentions, flattered and satisfied her. She found

in him something of that “superiority,” that “purity of language,” that

“distinguished manner,” the absence of which she had regretted in the

patriots of the Constituent Assembly when she first came up to Paris. He

presented, too, a relief to Roland’s carelessness in dress, to his

indifference to conventionalities. This superiority was the more

attractive because it was in a man so young. Buzot’s youth explains

something of the ideality of the relation between them. A woman who

preserves her illusions, her enthusiasms, her sentiments, as Madame

Roland had, up to thirty-eight, rarely finds in a man much older than

herself the faith, the disinterestedness, the devotion to ideals, the

purity of life and thought which she demands. She is continually shocked

by his cynicism, his experience, his impersonal attitude, his

indifference. Life with him becomes practical and commonplace. It lacks

in hours of self-revelation, in an intimacy of all that she feels deep

and inspiring; there is no mystery in it—nothing of the unseen. But with

a young man of a character and nature like Buzot, she finds a response

to her noblest moods, her most elevated thoughts.

A young man sees in a relation with a woman of such an elevation of

thought as Madame Roland the type of his dreams, the woman to whom

sentiments and ideals are of far more importance than amusement and

pleasure—the woman capable of great self-sacrifice for duty, of untiring

action for a noble cause, of comprehension of all that is best in him,

of brave resistance to temptation—and yet a woman to the last, dainty in

her love of beauty, flattered by his homage, untiring in her efforts to

please him, capable of a passion wide as the world.

Buzot’s relation to Madame Roland must have been the dearer to her

because at the moment the intimacy which she had had with several of her

friends was waning. With Roland working twenty hours out of the

twenty-four, tormented by false accusations, conscious of his

helplessness, irritated by dyspepsia and over-work, there could have

been very little satisfactory personal intercourse. Their relation had

come to the point to which every intimate human relation must come,

where forbearance, charity, a bit of humorous cynicism, courage,

self-sacrifice, character, and nobility of heart must sustain it instead

of dreams, transports, passion. She was incapable of the effort.

Bosc was an old friend and a loving one, but their friendship had

reached the stage where all has been said that could be, and while there

was the security and satisfaction in it which comes from all things to

which one is accustomed,—and it was necessary to her no doubt,—there was

no novelty, no possible future.

Bancal was interested in a Miss Williams, and since he had made that

known to Madame Roland, she had been less expansive. No woman will long

give her best to a man who holds another woman dearer.

Lanthenas, who had been for years their friend, to whom she had given

the title of “brother” and received in a free and frank intimacy, had

begun to withdraw his sympathy.

When Buzot came to Paris, it was natural and inevitable that they should

see much of each other. All things considered, it was natural,

inevitable, perhaps, that love should come from their intimacy; but that

Madame Roland should have prevented the declaration of this love we have

a right to expect when we remember her opinions, her habit of

reflection, and, above all, her experience.

Madame Roland had never accepted, other than theoretically, the idea

which at the end of the eighteenth century made hosts of advocates,—that

love is its own justification; that any civil or religious tie which

prevents one following the dictates of his heart is unnatural and wrong.

Nor did she accept for herself the practice then common in France, as it

is still, and as it must be so long as marriage remains a matter of

business, of keeping marriage ties for the sake of society, but of

finding satisfaction for the affections in _liaisons_ of which nobody

complains so long as they are _discreet_, to use the French

characterization. Her notions of duty, of devotion, of loyalty, were

those of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_ and allowed only marriage based on

affection and preserved with fidelity to the end. Her theory of life and

human relations would not allow her to be false to Roland. With such

opinions she could not allow Buzot to declare the affection he felt.

Had she been an inexperienced woman, such a declaration might have come

naturally enough without any reproach for her; she would have been

unprepared for it. Madame Roland was not inexperienced. She knew all the

probability there was of Buzot loving her and she was too skilled in the

human heart to believe herself incapable of a new love.

Already she had been absorbed by passions whose realization at the

moment had seemed necessary to her life. Her Platonic affection for

Sophie Cannet was of an intensity rarely equalled by the most ardent

love. For La Blancherie she had been ready to say that if she could not

marry him she would marry no one. Roland, before their marriage, she had

overwhelmed by her passion, and since she had followed him incessantly

with protestations of affection. Certainly she knew by this time that

impassioned love may grow cool and that the heart may recover its fire

and vehemence.

Nor had all her experience been before her marriage. She had not the

excuse of those married women who suppose, in the simplicity of their

innocence and purity, that once married there is no deviation of

affection or loyalty possible, and who, when circumstances throw them

into relations where a new passion is awakened, are overpowered by shame

and surprise.

Her relations with different ones of her friends after her marriage had

reached points which ought to have taught her serious lessons in

self-repression and in tact. Bosc, with whom she was in correspondence

from the time the Rolands left Paris for Amiens, became deeply attached

to her. Their relation seems to have become more tender during the time

that she spent in Paris seeking a title, and this quite naturally

because of the loss Bosc suffered then in the death of his father, and

because of the very practical aid she had given him in taking care of

his sister. Their correspondence, which, while she was at Amiens, was

gay and unrestrained, an ideal correspondence for two good friends and

comrades, later grew more delicate. Bosc was jealous and moody at times

and caused her uneasiness and sorrow. When they passed through Paris, on

their way to Villefranche, in September, 1784, he found at their meeting

some reason for discontent in their relation with a person he disliked,

and left them abruptly and angrily.

The quarrel lasted some two months and was dismissed finally with good

sense by Madame Roland telling Bosc playfully, “Receive a sound boxing,

a hearty embrace, friendly and sincere—I am hungry for an old-fashioned

letter from you. Burn this and let us talk no more of our troubles.”

After this whenever Bosc became too ardent in his letters, or inclined

to jealousy, she treated him in this half-playful, half-matronly style.

Her principle with him remained from the first to the last that there

could be between them no ignorance of the question of their duty.

The experience with Bosc had taught her the strong probability that a

man admitted to such intimate relations would, at some period in the

friendship, fall more or less in love; and it had shown her, too, that

it is possible for a woman to control this delicate relation and insure

a healthy and inspiring relation. In short, Madame Roland had reason to

congratulate herself, as she did with her usual self-complacency, on her

wisdom and her tact in handling _l’ami_ Bosc. Whether she would not have

been less wise if she had been less in love with her husband, or Bosc

had been of a different nature, a little less dry and choleric, it is

not necessary to speculate here.

She was quite as happy in directing her relations with Dr. Lanthenas,

whom it will be remembered Roland had picked up in Italy before their

marriage, who had come back with him, who had visited them often at

Amiens, and who had lived with them at Le Clos, where an apartment on

the first floor is still called Lanthenas’ room. He was associated in

all their planning, and in 1790, when Roland, disgusted with the turn

politics had taken, sighed for Pennsylvania, Lanthenas suggested that

the Rolands, and one of his friends at Paris, Bancal des Issarts, and he

himself should buy a piece of national property—the State had just

confiscated some millions’ worth of clerical estates and was selling

them cheap—and should establish together a community where they could

not fail to lead an existence ideal in its peace, its enthusiasm, its

growth.

This Utopia was discussed at length in their letters, and several pieces

of property near Lyons and Clermont, where Bancal lived, were visited.

Roland was thoroughly taken with the idea, but Madame Roland, while she

saw all the advantages, discovered a possible danger. If she had been

able to resist the siege to her heart by Bosc and Lanthenas, even to win

them over as allies, her relation with Bancal des Issarts had taken

almost immediately a turn more serious for her. She was herself touched

and interested, and her policy when she felt her heart moved was most

questionable. Instead of concealing her feelings and mastering them, she

poured them out to Bancal himself in a way to excite his sympathy and to

inflame his passion. Indeed, the turn their correspondence took in a few

months reminds one forcibly of the letters of Manon Phlipon to M. Roland

in the days when, feeling herself moved by his attentions, she drew a

declaration out of him by portraying a state of heart which no man who

was as decidedly interested as Roland was, could resist.

It was the new community which troubled her. Bancal had shown himself so

eager for it, she herself saw such a charm in it, that she became

alarmed. To a letter of Bancal’s, which we can suppose to have been

fervid, but which was not so much so that Roland was annoyed by it, it

being he who had received it and sent it on to her, she replied: “My

mind is busy with a thousand ideas, agitated by tumultuous sentiments.

Why is it that my eyes are blinded by constant tears? My will is firm,

my heart is pure, and yet I am not tranquil. ‘It will be the greatest

charm of our life and we shall be useful to our fellows,’ you say of the

affection which unites us, and these consoling words have not restored

my peace. I am not sure of your happiness and I should never forgive

myself for having disturbed it. I have believed that you were feeding it

on a hope that I ought to forbid. Who can foresee the effect of violent

agitations, too often renewed? Would they not be dangerous if they left

only that languor which weakens the moral being and which makes it

unequal to the situation? I am wrong. You do not experience this

unworthy alternative, you could never be weak. The idea of your strength

brings back mine. I shall know how to enjoy the happiness that Heaven

has allotted me, believing that it has not allowed me to trouble you.”

She was quite conscious of her inconsistency, but with the feminine

propensity for finding an excuse for an indiscretion, she charged it on

the construction of society,—a construction which, it should be noted,

she had years ago convinced herself to be necessary, and which she had

repeatedly accepted, so that there was not the excuse for her that there

is for those who have never reflected that human laws and codes of

morals are simply the best possible arrangement thus far found for men

and women getting on together without a return to the savage state, and

have never made a tacit compact with themselves to be law-abiding

because they saw the reason for being so.

“Why is it,” she writes, “that this sheet that I am writing you cannot

be sent to you openly? Why can one not show to all that which one would

dare offer to Divinity itself? Assuredly I can call upon Heaven, and

take it as a witness of my vow and of my intentions; I find pleasure in

thinking that it sees me, hears me, and judges me.... When shall we see

each other again? Question that I ask myself often, and that I dare not

answer.”

Bancal went to Le Clos, and evidently, from passages in their subsequent

letters, there passed between them some scene of passion.

Later, Bancal went to London to propagate the ideas of the patriots, but

Lanthenas and Roland became anxious that he return to Paris to help them

there. Madame Roland dared not advise him to return, though she could

not conceal her pleasure at the idea that he might, and that, too, after

she was again at Paris.

“Do as you think best,” she wrote; “at any rate I shall not have the

false delicacy to conceal from you that I am going to Paris, and shall

even push my frankness to confessing that this circumstance adds much

to my scruples in writing you to return. There is, in this situation,

an infinite number of things which one feels but cannot explain, but

that which is very clear, and which I say frankly to you, is that I

wish never to see you bend to light considerations or to half

affections. Remember that if I need the happiness of my friends this

happiness is attached, for those who feel like us, to an absolute

_irreproachability_.”

[Illustration:

Inscription written by Madame Roland on the back of the portrait of

Buzot which she carried while in prison.

]

It was by this constant return to the subject that she kept the relation

between herself and Bancal “interesting.” It was by holding up her

duty—the necessity of “virtue”—that she provoked him. It was the

“coquetry of virtue” which Dumouriez found in her.

But when Madame Roland went up to Paris she found other interests, new

friends. Bancal received less attention, and he, occupied in making new

friends, gave less attention; gradually the personal tone dropped from

their letters, and by the fall of 1792 the correspondence had become

purely patriotic. The friendship became of still less moment to Madame

Roland when Bancal revealed to her his love for Miss Williams, a young

English girl who had been attracted to Paris by the Revolution, and

there had become associated with the Girondins.

The affair with Bancal des Issarts proves Madame Roland to have had no

more discretion than an ordinary woman when her heart was engaged, and

drives one to the reluctant conclusion that in her case, as in the

majority of cases, she was saved from folly by circumstances.

By experience and by reflection, then, she was armed. Indeed, on

whatever side we regard the revelation of her love to Buzot, she was

blamable save one—and that of importance. In the general dissolution of

old ideas, in the return, in theory, to the state of nature, which

intellectual France had made, every law of social life, as every law of

government, had been traced to its origin, and its reasonableness and

justice questioned in the light of pure theory. Marriage had come under

the general dissection. Love is a divine law, a higher wisdom. It is

unjust, unreasonable, unnatural, to separate those who love because of

any previous tie. It is the natural right of man to be happy.

This opinion in the air had affected Madame Roland. She found it

“bizarre and cruel” that two people should be chained together whom

differences of age, of sentiment, of character, have rendered

incompatible; and although she would not consent to take advantage of

this theory and leave Roland, it justified her in loving Buzot and in

telling him so.

It was not only the new ideas on love and marriage which influenced her.

In the chaos of laws, of usages, of ideas, of aspirations, of hopes in

which she found herself, there seemed nothing worth saving but this. The

Revolution was stained and horrible. Her friends were helpless, she

herself seemed to be no longer of any use,—why not seize the one last

chance of joy? When the efforts and enthusiasms of one’s youth suddenly

show themselves to be but illusions, and the end of life seems to be at

hand, can it be expected that human nature with its imperious demand for

happiness refuse the last chance offered? Remember, too, that never in

the world’s history had a class of people believed more completely in

the _right_ to happiness, never demanded it more fully.

At all events Madame Roland and Buzot declared their love. But this was

not enough for her; she felt that she could not deceive Roland and she

told him that she loved Buzot, but that since it was her duty to stay

with him (Roland) she would do it, and that she would be faithful to her

marriage vows. All considerations of kindliness, of reserve, of womanly

tenderness, of honor, should have dictated to Madame Roland that if she

really had no intention of yielding to her love, as she certainly never

had, it was useless and cruel to torment Roland at his age, with failing

health, and in his desperate public position, with the story of her

passion. He loved her devotedly, and she had incessantly worked to

excite and deepen this love—to be told now that she loved another must

wound him in his deepest affections. But she had a sentimental need of

frankness. She loved expansion; she must open her heart to him. In doing

it she heaped upon the overburdened old man the heaviest load a heart

can carry, that of the desertion of its most trusted friend and

companion, and that after years of association and almost daily renewal

of vows of love and fidelity.

Absorbed by her passion, she found it unreasonable and vexing that

Roland should take her confession to heart, that he did not rejoice over

her candor and accept her “sacrifice” with gratitude and tears. In her

Memoirs she says of Roland’s attitude towards the affair:

“I honor and cherish my husband as a sensitive daughter adores a

virtuous father, to whom she would sacrifice even her lover; but I found

the man who might have been my lover, and while remaining faithful to my

duties, I was too artless to conceal my feelings. My husband,

excessively sensitive on account of his affection and his self-respect,

could not endure the idea of the least change in his empire; he grew

suspicious, his jealousy irritated me. Happiness fled from us. He adored

me, I sacrificed myself for him, and we were unhappy.”

Such was the delicate and painful situation in which Madame Roland,

Buzot, and Roland were placed during the struggle between the Gironde

and Mountain. We might expect despair and indifference from them in the

face of the enormous difficulties in the Convention. But they never

faltered. Their courage was superb from first to last. Furthermore,

there is no sign left us of distrust and irritation towards one another.

Buzot supported Roland in every particular. Madame Roland and her

husband were associated as closely as ever in public work. Roland and

Buzot, both of them, were held to an almost Quixotic state of

forbearance and strength by the exalted enthusiasm of this woman of

powerful sentiments and affections. Neither of the men ever looked upon

her with dimmed love and respect. In spite of all she made them suffer,

inspired by her faith in their virtue, they accepted a Platonic life _à

trois_, and for many months were able to work together.

XI

THE ROLANDS TURN AGAINST THE REVOLUTION

Upon Roland the effect of the atrocities of September, and the

consciousness of his own powerlessness, was terrible. His health was

undermined; he could not eat; his skin became yellow; he did not sleep;

his step was feeble, but his activity was feverish; he worked night and

day. Having a chance to become a member of the new legislative body, the

Convention to meet September 21st, he sent in his resignation as

Minister of the Interior. The resignation raised a cry from the Gironde,

and hosts of anxious patriots urged him to remain.

In the session of September 29th, the question came up in the Convention

of inviting Roland, and those of his colleagues who had resigned with

him, to remain in office. His enemies did not lose the opportunity to

attack him. Danton even went so far as to say: “If you invite him,

invite Madame Roland too; everybody knows that he has not been alone in

his department.”

This discussion, and the discovery that his election as deputy would be

illegal, persuaded Roland to withdraw his resignation. He announced his

decision in an address which was an unmistakable arraignment of the

Commune and the Mountain, an announcement that the Minister of the

Interior, in remaining in office, remained as their enemy. He abandoned

in this same address an important point of his old policy. Formerly it

had been to Paris that he had appealed. She alone had the energy, the

fire, the daring to act. The rest of the country was apathetic,

passionless; but now he says Paris has done all that is necessary. She

must retire, “must be reduced to her eighty-third portion of influence;

a more extensive influence would excite fears, and nothing would be more

harmful to Paris than the discontent or suspicion of the departments—no

representations, however numerous, should acquire an ascendency over the

Convention.”

At that particular moment no policy could have been more antagonistic to

the Parisian populace. They were “saving the country.” None but a

traitor would oppose their efforts. Roland not only declared that they

must cease their work; he called for an armed force drawn from all the

departments and stationed about Paris to prevent the city from

interfering with the free action of the Convention. The suspicion which

before the 10th of August he had applied to the constitutional party he

now turned upon the party which had produced that day; the measure he

had proposed to prevent the treason of the Court, he now proposed as a

guard against the excesses of the patriots.

He ran a Bureau of Public Opinion, which scattered thousands of

documents filled with the eloquent and vague teachings of the Gironde

schools. He urged the pastors to stop singing the _Domine Salvum fac

Regnum_, and to translate their services into French; he discoursed upon

how and when the word _citizen_ should be used, advised a national

costume, suggested that scenes from the classics be regularly reproduced

in public to stir to patriotism, that fêtes celebrating every possible

anniversary be instituted; but chiefly he defended himself against the

charges of his antagonists, extolling his own impeccability and the

exactness of his accounts. No sadder reading ever was printed than the

campaign of words Roland carried on during the four months he struggled

against the Mountain. Fearless, sincere, honest, disinterested as he

was, he was still so pitifully inadequate to the situation, so

ridiculously subjective in his methods, that irritation at his impotence

is forgotten in the compassion it awakens.

While Roland carried on his Bureau of Public Opinion and defended his

character, Buzot, in the Convention, fought the Mountain more openly and

more bitterly. He had no excuse whatever for the excesses of September;

no veil to draw over the first twenty-four hours, no patience, no

thought of compromise with Robespierre and Danton, the leaders of the

Commune. To his mind they were murderers pure and simple, and the

country was not worth saving, if it could not be saved without them. In

Roland’s case there is always the feeling that if the Commune had

regarded him as necessary, obeyed his directions, let him run his Public

Opinion Office to suit himself, and ceased maligning his character, he

would have condoned their massacre as one of the unhappy but necessary

means of insuring the Revolution; that if these “misled brothers,” as he

called them, had recognized their mistake, he would have opened his arms

to them. Never so with Buzot. Sensitive, idealistic, indifferent to

public applause, from the first he took a violent and pronounced

position against the Mountain, and refused to compromise with them. It

was not hatred alone of the excesses. It was sympathy with Madame

Roland, who had revolted against the Revolution. From the day at Evreux,

when he received a letter from her, telling of her disgust and

disillusion, and setting up a new cause,—the purification of the country

of agitators and rioters,—Buzot’s ideas on the policy of Terror changed.

When he came up to the Convention he immediately made a violent attack

on Robespierre, declared that the Mountain was the most dangerous foe of

the country, that Paris was usurping the power of France, and he never

ceased his war.

The measure which Madame Roland had suggested a few months before to

protect Paris, the patriots, and the Assembly against the aristocrats,

he now proposed to thwart the activity of Paris and the Commune,—a guard

drawn from all the departments for the defence of the Convention.

Naturally, this drew upon him the hatred of the sections and leaders,

and he was accounted in the Convention, from the 1st of October, the

avowed opponent of the Terrorists.

Nothing intimidated him. He followed up the proposition for a guard by a

demand for a decree against those who provoked to murder and

assassination. Systematically he refused to believe in the sincerity of

Robespierre and Danton,—they were usurpers aiming at dictatorship. When

in March they sought to organize a revolutionary tribunal, Buzot,

furious and trembling, declared to the Convention that he was weary of

despotism. He signalled the abuses that were made all over France by the

revolutionary bodies, and violently attacked members of the Jacobin

society and of the Mountain, denouncing them as infamous wretches, as

assassins of the country. It was not only murder of which he accused

them,—it was corruption. “Sudden and scandalous fortunes” were noted

among the Terrorists in the Convention,—and he demanded that each deputy

give the condition and origin of his fortune.

In all these measures Buzot was in harmony with Roland, and he fought

the minister’s cause in the Convention so far as possible. Indeed, it

came to be a sort of personal resentment he showed when Roland was

attacked in the body, and once he went so far that they cried out to

him, “It is not you we are talking about.” It was a lover’s jealousy

against anything which harmed his lady.

But while attacking the Terrorists Buzot was obliged to prove his

patriotism, to show that he was a republican, and a hater of the

monarchy. He did it by radical measures. While insisting on an armed

force to protect the Convention, he demanded the perpetual banishment of

the _émigrés_, and their death if they set foot in France. A few weeks

later he demanded that whosoever should propose the re-establishment of

royalty in France, under whatsoever denomination, should be punished by

death; afterwards he asked the banishment of all the Bourbons, not

excepting Philippe of Orleans, then sitting in the Convention.

When it came to the question of the death of Louis XVI., Buzot wished

that the King be heard and not condemned immediately; when he came to

vote, it was for his death with delay and a _referendum_ that he

decided.

But no amount of violence against the royalists could now prove him a

patriot. That which made a patriot in the fall of 1792 was an altogether

different thing from what made one in the spring of 1792. Buzot, with

the Gironde, was suspected. It was not enough that he opposed the old

régime and approved a Republic, he must approve the vengeance of

Terrorism and support the Terrorists. But he could not do it. He was

revolted by the awful excess, and he underwent a physical repulsion

which was almost feminine and made any union with the party impossible,

whatever the demands of politics were.

As a matter of fact, the Mountain feared Buzot but little. His

irritability, haughtiness, lack of humor, made him of small importance

as a leader in the Gironde. He could not move the Convention as

Vergniaud; he had none of the wire-pulling skill of Brissot; he was

important chiefly as the spokesman of Madame Roland’s measures. Buzot’s

intimate relations to the Rolands seem to have been well understood. The

contemptuous way in which Marat treated him shows this. Marat called him

_frère tranquille Buzot_; and sneered at him for “declaiming in a

ridiculous tone”; said the _frère tranquille_ had a _pathos glacial_;

called him _le pédant Buzot; the corypheus of the Rolands_.

In this chaotic and desperate struggle neither Roland nor Buzot were

more active than Madame Roland. She had become a public factor by

Marat’s accusations, and by Danton’s sneers in the Convention. She kept

her place. At home she was as active as ever in assisting her husband.

Many of the official papers of this period, which have been preserved,

are in her hand, or have been annotated by her. Important circulars and

reports she frequently prepared, and Roland trusted her implicitly in

such work. She was his adviser and helper in every particular of the

official work, and at the same time saw many people who were essential

to them. This social activity brought down Marat’s abuse. She was

“Penelope Roland” for him, and in one number of the journal under the

head “Le Trantran de la Penelope Roland,” he wrote: “The woman Roland

has a very simple means of recruiting. Does a deputy need her husband

for affairs of the department, Roland pretends a multiplicity of

engagements and begs to put him off until after the Assembly,—‘Come and

take supper with us, citizen and deputy, we will talk of your business

afterwards.’ The woman Roland cajoles the guests one after the other,

even _en portant la main sous le menton de ses favoris_, redoubles

attention for the new-comer, who soon joins the clique.”

Marat professes to have this from a deputy who had visited her. It is

abusive and false, but it is well to remember that a year before Madame

Roland had not hesitated to believe and repeat equally ridiculous

stories of Marie Antoinette. Indeed, Madame Roland had the same place in

the minds of the patriots of the fall of 1792, that the Queen had a year

before in the minds of the Gironde. “We have destroyed royalty,” says

_Père Duchesne_, “and in its place we have raised a tyranny still more

odious. The tender other half of the virtuous Roland has France in

leading-strings to-day, as once the Pompadours and the Du Barrys. She

receives every evening at the hour of the bats in the same place where

Antoinette plotted a new Saint Bartholomew with the Austrian committee.

Like the former Queen, Madame Coco (the name _Père Duchesne_ usually

gives Madame Roland), stretched on a sofa, surrounded by her wits,

reasons blindly on war, politics, supplies. It is in this gambling-den

that all the announcements posted up are manufactured.”

In December she was even obliged to appear before the Convention. Roland

had been accused of being in correspondence with certain eminent

_émigrés_ then in England, and to be plotting with them the

re-establishment of the King. One Viard was said to be the go-between,

and to have had a meeting with Madame Roland. Roland was summoned to

answer the charge and, having responded, demanded that his wife be

heard. Her appearance made a sensation in the Convention, and she

cleared herself so well of the charges that she was loudly applauded,

and was accorded the honors of the session. The spectators alone were

silent and Marat remarked, “See how still the people are; they are wiser

than we.”

At the beginning of the year 1793, the danger of mob violence was added

to the incessant slanders by Hébert and Marat. “Every day,” says

Champagneux, who was then employed by the minister, “a new danger

appeared. It seemed as if each night would be the last of her life, as

if an army of assassins would profit by the darkness to come and murder

her as well as her husband. The most sinister threats came from all

sides. She was urged not to sleep at the Hôtel of the Interior.”

At first the alarm was so great on her account that she yielded to her

friends’ wishes, but she hated the idea of flight. One evening the

danger was such that every one insisted on her disguising herself and

leaving the hotel. She consented, but the wig they brought did not fit,

and in a burst of impatience she flung the costume, wig and all, into

the corner and declared she was ashamed of herself; that if any one

wanted to assassinate her, he might do it there; that she ought to give

an example of firmness and she would. And from that day she never left

the hotel until Roland resigned on January 22d.

The little apartment in the Rue de la Harpe was waiting them. To leave

the Hôtel of the Interior was no trial to them privately. No one could

have been more indifferent to considerations of position and

surroundings. Their convictions of their own right-doing made them

superior to all influences which affect worldly and selfish natures. It

is impossible for such people as the Rolands to “come down” in life.

Material considerations are so external, so mere an incident, that they

can go from palace to hut without giving the matter a second thought.

But retirement did not mean relief. Roland’s reports which he had made

to the Convention, and which he felt justly were a complete answer to

the charges against him, were unnoticed. He begged the body repeatedly

to examine them. He urged his ill-health and his desire to leave Paris

as a reason, but no notice was taken of him. To Roland this neglect

seemed insolence. He felt that he deserved honorable recognition. He

craved it, and was irritated and discouraged when he did not receive it.

It was evident, too, that his retirement from office had not made his

enemies forget him. They followed him as they had priests, _émigrés_,

and nobles, and Marat repeatedly denounced him as connected with the

opposition to the Mountain.

It was horrible for them to watch day after day the struggle going on in

the Convention between Gironde and Mountain. Day by day the condition of

the former grew more desperate, their defeat and the triumph of the

policy of vengeance more certain. The most tragic part of the gradual

downfall of the Gironde was not defeat, however. It was disillusion—the

slow-growing and unconfessed suspicion that their dream had been an

error. It was Buzot who felt this most deeply. In his Memoirs he

confesses that gradually he grew convinced that France was not fitted

for the Republic they had dared to give it, and that often he had been

at the point of owning his mistake:

“My friends and I kept our hope of a Republic in France for a long

time,” he writes; “even when everything seemed to show us that the

enlightened class, either through prejudice or guided by experience and

reason, refused this form of government. My friends did not give up this

hope even at the period when those who governed the Republic were the

most vicious and the vilest of men, and when the French people could be

least counted on.... For myself, I avow that I despaired several times

of the success of this project so dear to my heart. Before my expulsion

from the Convention, not wishing to betray my conscience or my

principles, I was on the point, several times, of retiring from a

position where all the dangers, even that of dishonoring my memory, left

me no hope of doing good; where even our obstinate and useless

resistance did nothing but increase the error of good citizens on the

true situation of the National Convention. A kind of self-love which was

honored by the name of duty kept me at my post in spite of myself. My

friends desired it and I stayed.... It is useless to deny it—the

majority of the French people sighed after royalty and the constitution

of 1790. There were only a few men with noble and elevated souls who

felt worthy of having been born republicans, and whom the example of

America had encouraged to follow the project of a similar institution in

France, who thought in good faith to naturalize it in the country of

frivolities and inconstancy. The rest—with the exception of a crowd of

wretches without intelligence, without education, and without resources,

who vomited injuries on the monarchy as in six months they will on the

Republic, without knowing any reason why—the rest did not desire it,

wanted only the constitution of 1791, and talked of the true republicans

as one talks of extremely sincere fools. Have the events of the 20th of

June, the suffering, the persecution, the assassinations which have

followed them, changed the opinion of the majority in France? No; but in

the cities they pretend to be _sans-culottes_; those that do not are

guillotined. In the country the most unjust requisitions are obeyed,

because those who do not obey them are guillotined; on all sides the

young go to war, because those who do not go are guillotined. The

guillotine explains everything. It is the great weapon of the French

government. This people is republican because of the guillotine. Examine

closely, go into families, search the hearts if they dare open to you;

you will read there hate against the government that fear imposes upon

them. You will see there that all desires, all hopes, turn towards the

constitution of 1791.”

[Illustration:

The prison, called the Abbaye, where Madame Roland passed the first

twenty-four days of her imprisonment.

]

That Buzot should have remained until the end with the Gironde, when

convinced, as he here says, that their efforts for a Republic were

contrary to the will of the country, and when, too, he was revolted

against the excesses its establishment was causing, he explained fully,

when he wrote: “My error was too beautiful to be repented of;” and

again, when he says: “Our dream was too beautiful to be abandoned.”

The terrible whirlpool had dragged away hopes, ambitions, dreams, from

them. Into it went, too, some of their most valued friends; men whom

they had raised to positions of importance, but who now that they saw

the party defeated abandoned them through fear and disillusion. At the

same time that they were experiencing all the force of their

disillusion, the relation between Roland and his wife was becoming

terribly tense and painful. They felt that they must bring it to an end

in some way, must get away from Buzot, and they resolved to go to the

country. In May Roland wrote, for the eighth time, to the Convention,

begging that the report on his administration be examined. His letter

was not even read to the body. It became more and more probable that

threats which had followed them a long time would take effect soon, and

Roland be arrested. Madame Roland decided that she ought not to remain

in Paris with her daughter any longer, as Roland could escape more

easily if they were at Le Clos. Her health, too, sadly altered by the

storm of emotions which she had passed through, demanded a change.

The passports permitting them to leave Paris had been delayed some days,

and just as she received them she fell ill. She was not herself again

when the 31st of May came. This day was for the Gironde what the 10th of

August had been for the King.

During the latter half of May the Convention had been the scene of one

of the maddest, awfulest struggles in the history of legislative bodies,

and the victory had throughout leaned towards the Terrorists. They were

decided, and audacious. The indecision, the platitudes, the disgust, of

the Gironde weakened the party constantly. The struggle was ended by the

riot of May 31st. Before the contest was over the Convention had voted

the expulsion and trial of twenty-two members of the Gironde. Again the

stick was out of the wheel, and the Republic was to roll.

Roland was not in the number that the Mountain could strike through the

Convention. It had a much more direct and simple, a more _legal_, method

of reaching him. Its Revolutionary committee had already been in

operation some time. Its work was arresting those who stood in the way

of the Republic. That Roland did, Marat had proved time and again, and

now that the time had come to rid the country of the Gironde _in toto_,

it would never do to let him escape.

It was on the afternoon of May 31st that the arrest of Roland was made

at their apartment in the Rue de la Harpe. Arrests at this period were

so arbitrary a matter, the sympathy or resentment of the officers and

spectators had so much to do with their execution or non-execution, that

it is not surprising that Roland by his own protestations and arguments,

and by the aid of the good people of the house who were friendly to him,

was able to induce the officer in charge to leave his colleagues and go

after further orders.

Madame Roland took advantage of the delay to attempt a _coup d’état_, go

to the Convention, secure a hearing, present Roland’s case, and trust to

her beauty, her wit, and her eloquence to obtain his release. In her

morning gown, for she was only just off her sick-bed, she sprung into a

cab and drove to the Carrousel. The front court was filled with armed

men; every entrance was guarded. With the greatest difficulty she

reached the waiting-room and attempted to get a hearing from the

president. A terrible uproar came from the Assembly, and after a long

wait she learned what it meant,—the demand for the arrest of the

twenty-two was being made.

She sent for Vergniaud and explained the situation. She could hope for

nothing in the condition of affairs in the Assembly,—he told her the

Convention was able to do nothing more. “It can do everything,” she

cried; “the majority of Paris only asks to know what ought to be done.

If I am admitted, I shall dare say what you could not without being

accused. I fear nothing in the world, and if I do not save Roland, I

shall say what will be useful to the Republic.” But what use to insist

in this chaos? Not Vergniaud, not Buzot, not the Gironde as a body, had

the power at this final moment to secure a hearing. She was forced to

give it up and retire; not so easy a matter through the suspicious

battalions guarding the approaches to the château. She was even obliged

to leave her cab at last and go home on foot.

Back in the apartment she found that Roland had escaped. She went from

house to house until she found him. They talked over the situation, he

concluded to fly, she decided to go again to the Convention, and they

parted.

In spite of weakness and fatigue Madame Roland made, that night, another

attempt to reach the Convention. But when she reached the palace the

session was closed. After infinite difficulty from the citizens who

guarded the Tuileries she reached her home again. She had seated herself

to write a note to Roland when, about midnight, a deputation from the

Commune presented itself, asking for Roland. She refused to answer their

questions, and they retired, leaving a sentinel at the door of the

apartment and at that of the house. She finished her letter and went to

bed. In an hour she was awakened. Her frightened servant told her that

delegates from the section wanted to see her. With perfect calm she

dressed herself for the street and passed into the room where the

commissioners waited.

“We come, Citoyenne, to arrest you and put on the seals.”

“Where are your orders?”

“Here,” says a man drawing an order of arrest from the Revolutionary

committee of the Commune. No reason of arrest is assigned in the

document, which still exists, and the order given is to place her in the

Abbaye to be questioned the next day. She hesitated. Should she resist?

But what was the use? She was in their eyes _mise hors de la loi_ and

she submitted, not sorry at heart perhaps, to be put into a position

where she could resist publicly the tyranny of her enemies. Reinforced

by officers from the section, and by fifty to a hundred good

_sans-culottes_ come to see that the officers do their duty according to

their sovereign will, the commissioners placed seals on boxes and doors,

windows and wardrobes. One zealous patriot wanted to put one on the

piano. They told him it was a musical instrument. Thereupon he contented

himself with pulling out a yardstick and taking its dimensions.

In this ignorant, vulgar, and violent crowd she came and went serenely,

preparing for her imprisonment. She even noted with amusement their

curiosity and stupidity. It was morning when she left her weeping

household. “These people love you,” said one of the commissioners, as

they went downstairs. “I never have any one about me who does not,” she

replied proudly.