Harpe to the carriage, waiting on the other side of the street. She
looked about as she came out, at all this display of force, at the crowd
of curious Parisian _badauds_ who watched the scene, and with conscious
dignity she advanced “slowly considering the cowardly and mistaken
troop.” It is a short five minutes’ walk from where Madame Roland lived
to the prison of the Abbaye and she soon was within the walls.
Two days later, June 2d, the arrest of Buzot was decreed by the
Convention. He was seized but escaped from his guards, and fled from
Paris to Evreux, where he was well received by the department which
believed that the Convention had been forced into its decree against the
twenty-two. Roland in the meantime had reached Amiens. The three were
never to see one another again. The cause which brought them together
had separated them forever.
XII
IN PRISON
It was the morning of the first day of June, 1792, that Madame Roland
was taken to the Abbaye. The imprisonment then begun lasted until
November 8th, the day of her death. The record we have of her life
during these five months is full and intimate.
Separated from her child, her husband in flight, her friends persecuted
by the Commune, she herself only just off a sick-bed, confined in a
prison which had been from the beginning of the Revolution a centre of
riot and the floors of whose halls and courts were still warm with the
blood of the massacre of September, the cries of _à la Guillotine_
following her from the street, it would not have been strange if her
courage had failed, if she had paled before the fate which she knew in
all probability awaited her. But from the beginning to the end of her
long durance she showed a proud indifference to the result, an almost
reckless audacity in braving her enemies, a splendid courage in
suffering. She was serene, haughty, triumphant, a man, not a woman.
She declared that she would not exchange the moments which followed her
entrance into the Abbaye for those which others would call the sweetest
of her life. Indifferent to her surroundings, she sank into a revery,
reviewing her past: there was nothing to make her blush, she felt, even
if her heart was the scene of a powerful passion. She calculated the
future and with pride and joy felt that she had the courage to accept
her lot, to defy its rigors. “What can compare to a good conscience, a
strong purpose,” she cries. There is nothing in her situation which is
worth an instant of unrest. Her enemies shall not prevent her loving to
the last, and if they destroy her she will go from life as one enters
upon repose. And this high serenity endured even when, twenty-four days
later, she suffered one of the most cruel and unnecessary outrages of
the Revolution. On June 24th, she was freed. Hurrying home to the Rue de
la Harpe, she flew into the house “like a bird,” calling a gay good-day
to her concierge. She had not mounted four steps of her staircase before
two men who had entered at her heels called:
“Citoyenne Roland.”
“What do you want?”
“In the name of the law we arrest you.”
That night she slept in the prison of Sainte Pélagie, only a stone’s
throw from the convent where as a girl she had prepared for her first
communion.
The bitter disappointment of reimprisonment did not bend her spirit. “I
am proud,” she wrote, some hours after her rearrest, “to be persecuted
at a moment when talent and honor are being proscribed. I am assuredly
more tranquil in my chains than my oppressors are in the exercise of
their unjust power. I confess that the refinement of cruelty with which
they ordered me to be set at liberty in order to rearrest me a moment
afterwards, has fired me with indignation. I can no longer see where
this tyranny will go.” This indignation was so bitter that the first
night in her new prison she could not sleep. It was only the first
night, however. To allow herself to be irritated by the injustice of her
enemies was to be their dupe. She would not give them that satisfaction,
and this intrepidity endured to the end.
There are several reasons for her really phenomenal fortitude. At the
bottom of it was no doubt the fact that material considerations had no
influence on her when they came into conflict with sentiments and
enthusiasms. An ordinary woman would have paled with fear at the sound
of women shouting into her carriage _à la guillotine_; the crowded halls
of the Abbaye, the tocsin sounding all night, the brutality of the
officers and guards, would have sickened her soul; the narrow and dirty
staircases, the bare and foul-smelling rooms, would have revolted her
delicacy; the dreadful associations filled her with shame and disgust.
But Madame Roland found inspiration in the thought of enduring all this.
She would not allow her soul to be moved by filth and noise, and she
moved serenely among the lowest outcasts. These things were externals,
mere incidents in life. They had no real importance in themselves. She
would use them to school her soul to more steadfast endurance,—certainly
she would never allow them to interfere with her soul’s life.
A stolid and unimaginative mind might have endured her position with
equal calm; a dull and sluggish nature might have been equally
indifferent to the revolting sights; but never was an imagination more
responsive, a nature more vibrant and sensitive than hers. It was no
lack of life and vigor. She was brave and indifferent because the fact
of being so stirred her imagination. This sort of endurance seemed to
her worthy of a hero of antiquity. Her whole nature was kindled by the
thought of being superior to circumstances, of thwarting her enemies by
her courage.
The training of her whole life helped her to carry out this idea.
Rousseau never drilled and trained Émile more rigidly in the doctrine of
submitting to necessity than she had herself. The more severe her trial,
the higher her courage rose. This she felt was a supreme test, a
martyrdom worthy of a Greek. Her classic conception of patriotism was
satisfied by the thought that she, like the ancients, was in prison for
the country and would undoubtedly die for it.
Her imprisonment made her a prominent actor, too, in the tragedy.
Hitherto she had been behind the scenes, an influence recognized, to be
sure, by all parties, but acting through others. A woman’s place was not
in public, she believed, and she conformed carefully to her idea. But in
serious natures, feeling deeply their individual responsibility, there
is a demand for action. So long as Roland was minister she had ample
chance to satisfy her patriotic longings for helping. But after his
retirement and since the Gironde had been so demoralized that Buzot
could do little or nothing, she had felt bitterly her impotence.
Now all was changed; she was in the fight, not as the amanuensis of her
husband, the inspirer of her friend, but as an independent actor. She
must show an example of how a patriot should endure and die, and she
must strike a blow for truth whenever she had a chance. What she did and
said would not only have its influence to-day, it would be quoted in the
future. This conviction of her obligation to help the cause and make
herself a figure in history, exalted her mind. She took a dramatic pose,
and she kept it to the end. If there was a shade of the theatrical in
it,—and there is almost always such a shading in Madame Roland’s
loftiest moods and finest acts,—there is so much indifference to self,
hatred of despotism, contempt of injustice, courage before pain, that
the lack of perfect naturalness is forgotten.
From the beginning of her imprisonment she lost no opportunity to give a
lesson in civism to those about her. To the guard who brought her to the
Abbaye, and who remarked on leaving her that if Roland was not guilty it
was strange that he absented himself, she said that Roland was _just_,
like Aristides, and severe, like Cato, and that it was his virtues which
had made his enemies pursue him. “Let them heap their rage on me. I can
brave it and be resigned; he must be saved for his country, for he may
yet be able to render great service.”
She neglected no opportunity of obtaining her liberty, not so much for
the sake of liberty as that it gave her a means of expressing her
opinions. By the advice of Grandpré, an inspector of prisons, protected
formerly by Roland, and who hurried to her aid the first day of her
imprisonment, she wrote to the Convention. In a haughty tone she
described her arrest, the fact that no motive for it was given, the
indignities and illegalities she had suffered, and demanded justice and
protection.
So severe was the letter that Grandpré, after consulting Champagneux,
brought it back to her to soften a little. After reflection she
consented. “If I thought the letter would be read,” she told Grandpré,
“I would leave it as it is, even if it resulted in failure. One cannot
flatter himself that he will obtain justice of the Assembly. It does not
know how to practise to-day the truths addressed to it, but they must be
said that the departments may hear.”
Grandpré did his best to have her letter read at the Convention, but in
the turmoil of the early days of June there was nothing to be obtained
from this body save through fear or force. Madame Roland, hearing that
the section in which she lived had taken her and Roland under its care,
wrote to thank them, and to suggest that they try to secure a reading of
the letter. But she took care that they should feel that she was no
tearful suppliant: “I submit this question to your _judgment_; I add no
_prayer_; truth has only one language; it is to expose _facts_; citizens
who desire _justice_ do not care that _supplications_ should be
addressed to them, and _innocence_ does not know how to make them.”
The letter was read at the section and debated, but the Terrorists from
other quarters filled the hall, and by their menaces prevented any
effectual interference by those disposed in Madame Roland’s favor.
Grandpré insisted that she should write to the ministers of justice and
of the interior. She despised the weakness and mediocrity of both, and
declared she would write nothing unless she could “give them severe
lessons.” Grandpré found the letters she prepared humiliating, and
persuaded her to change them. Even after the changes they were intensely
hostile and contemptuous, anything but politic.
The “lessons” she gave in her letters she never failed to put into any
conversation she had with public officials. One of these conversations
she relates. It was with a committee of five or six persons who had come
to look after the condition of the prisoners.
“Good-day, Citoyenne.”
“Good-day, sir.”
“Are you satisfied with your quarters? Have you any complaints to make
of your treatment. Do you want anything?”
“I complain because I am here and I ask to be released.”
“Isn’t your health good? Are you a little dull?”
“I am well and I am never dull. _L’ennui_ is a disease of an empty soul
and a mind without resources, but I have a lively sense of injustice. I
complain because I have been arrested without reason, and am detained
without being examined.”
“Ah, in a time of revolution there is so much to do that one cannot
accomplish everything.”
“A woman to whom King Philip made about the same answer told him, ‘If
you have not the time to do justice you have not time to be king.’ Take
care that you do not force oppressed citizens to say the same thing to
the people, or rather to the arbitrary authorities who are misleading
them.”
“Adieu, Citoyenne.”
“Adieu.”
She had soon a more serious task than administering gratuitous rebukes
and repeating high-sounding maxims. It was in defending herself against
calumnies and accusations. She did it with spirit and clear-headedness,
as was to be expected, and frequently in a tone of contemptuous asperity
and superiority that could not fail to be exasperating.
It was on June 12th that she was questioned. She was asked if she knew
anything about the troubles of the Republic during and after Roland’s
ministry, or of the plan to make a Federal Republic; who were the
persons who came to her salon; if she knew any traitors, or was allied
with friends of Dumouriez; what she knew of Roland’s Public Opinion
Bureau and his plan for corrupting the provinces; and lastly where was
Roland. The committee got very little satisfaction out of their victim.
They accused her of sharpness and evasion, and probably the accusation
was just. The interview indicated to Madame Roland the complaint of the
Commune against her, and showed her more clearly than before that there
was no definite reason for her arrest. She was a suspect; that explained
all.
To vague accusations was added direct calumny. _Père Duchesne_ had not
forgotten _la reine Roland_, and one morning she heard cried under her
cell window: _Visit of Père Duchesne to the citoyenne Roland in the
prison of the Abbaye_. The details of the pretended visit were cried so
that she could hear them and at the same time the people collected in
the market of Saint Germain, held by the side of the prison, were
exhorted to avenge the wrongs Madame Coco had done them. The article was
in Hébert’s most offensive and ribald style and told how its author,
visiting the prison, was taken by Madame Roland for a brigand from La
Vendée; how she rejoiced with him over the losses of the Republic; told
him that aid was coming from Coblentz and England, and assured him that
the contra-revolution had been brought about through Roland.
At first, hot with indignation at these calumnies, she tried to defend
herself, but she soon saw that to besiege the Revolutionary authorities
any longer was not only useless, but humiliating. It was better suited
to her proud courage to ignore them, and she found in her silence and
disdain a source of inspiration and strength.
While natural courage, long schooling in self-denial, submission to
necessity, superiority to material considerations, intense patriotism, a
desire to vindicate herself to posterity, explain her remarkable
fortitude in her imprisonment, they do not her triumph. The exaltation
she found in her prison was that of love, a love which duty had thus far
forbidden her even to think of, but which now she felt she dared yield
to. Her jailers had become her liberators.
In the documents which Madame Roland addressed from her prison to
“posterity” there are frequent allusions to her passion for one whose
name she concealed. In the collection of letters she left for friends,
under the head of “Last Thoughts,” is a passionate and exultant farewell
addressed to one whom “I dare not name, to one whom the most terrible of
passions has not kept from respecting the barriers of virtue.” She bids
him not to mourn that she precedes him to a place where “fatal
prejudices, arbitrary conventions, hateful passions, and all kinds of
tyranny are ended, where one day they can love each other without crime,
and where nothing will prevent their being united.”
That Buzot was meant, remained a secret of the family for seventy years
after Madame Roland’s death. Her biographers frequently speculated as to
whom the object of her passion was. Lairtullier, writing in 1840, quotes
her portrait of Barbaroux and apostrophizes her thus: “Femme, voilá ton
secret trahi.” Servan and Vergniaud have been named as possibly her
hero. The truth came out in 1864, when a _bouquiniste_ of the Quai
Voltaire advertised for sale a quantity of French Revolution papers
among which were mentioned five letters of Madame Roland to Buzot. He
had bought them from a young man whose father was an amateur of
_bouquins_. Evidently they had been wandering among lovers of old papers
since the day they had been taken from the dead body of Buzot. Those
letters offered for sale were bought by the Bibliothèque Nationale.
They paint, as no published letters, the exultation of love, its power
to lift the soul above all ordinary influences, free it from accepted
laws and conventionalities, to strengthen it until it glories in
suffering, if by that suffering it can yield itself to love. They show,
too, how noble and pure a conception of such a passion Madame Roland
had. It must not interfere with duty. Neither Roland must be betrayed,
nor the country neglected; if either happened, the crown of their
passion would be broken. Its glory and joy was not in abandon, but in
endurance.
It was three weeks after she was confined in the Abbaye before she heard
from Buzot. Her first letter to him bears the date of June 22d. Buzot
was at that time at Evreux, exhorting the people to take part in a
movement of federalism to arouse the departments to act against the
usurpation of Paris. She wrote in response to the first letters from him
which her friends had been able to get to her.
“How often have I re-read them! I press them to my heart; I cover them
with kisses; I had ceased to hope for them!... I came here proud and
calm, praying and still hoping in the defenders of Liberty. When I
learned of the decree against the Twenty-two, I cried, ‘My country is
lost!’ I was in the most cruel anguish until I was sure of your escape.
It was renewed by the decree against you; they owed that atrocity to
your courage. But when I found that you were at Calvados, I recovered my
calm. Continue your generous efforts, my friend. Brutus on the fields of
Philippi despaired too soon of the safety of Rome. So long as a
republican breathes and is free, let him act. He must, he can, be
useful. In any case, the South offers you a refuge; it will be an asylum
for the country. If dangers gather around you, it is there that you must
turn your eyes and your steps; it is there that you must live, for there
you can serve your fellow-men and practise virtue.
“As for me, I know how to wait patiently for the return of the reign of
justice, or to undergo the last excesses of tyranny in such a way that
my example shall not be vain. If I fear anything, it is that you may
make imprudent efforts for me. My friend, it is by saving your country
that you deliver me. I do not want my safety at its expense, but I shall
die satisfied if I know you are working for your country. Death,
suffering, sorrow, are nothing to me. I can defy all. Why, I shall live
to my last hour without spending a single moment in unworthy agitation.”
She went over life in the Abbaye, and told him what she knew of her
family and friends. Of Roland she said:
“The unfortunate Roland has been twenty days in two refuges in the
houses of trembling friends, concealed from all eyes, more of a captive
than I am myself. I have feared for his mind and his health. He is now
in your neighborhood. Would that were true in a moral sense! I dare not
tell you, and you alone can understand, that I was not sorry to be
arrested.... I owe it to my jailers that I can reconcile duty and love.
Do not pity me. People admire my courage, but they do not understand my
joys. Thou who must feel them, savest their charm by the constancy of
thy courage.”
One would believe it a quotation from a letter of Julie to Saint-Preux.
The 3d of July she sent another letter:
“I received your letter of the 27th. I still hear your voice; I am a
witness to your resolutions; I share the sentiments which animate you. I
am proud of loving you and of being loved by you.... My friend, let us
not so forget ourselves as to say evil of that virtue which is bought by
great sacrifice, it is true, but which pays in its turn by priceless
compensations. Tell me, do you know sweeter moments than those passed in
the innocence and the charm of an affection that nature recognizes and
that delicacy regulates; which honors duty for the privations that she
imposes upon it and gathers strength in enduring them? Do you know a
greater advantage than that of being superior to adversity and to death;
of finding in the heart something to enjoy and to sweeten life up to the
last sigh? Have you ever experienced better these effects than in the
attachment which binds us, in spite of the contradictions of society and
the horrors of oppression? I have told you that to it I owe my joy in my
captivity. Proud of being persecuted in these times when character and
honesty are proscribed, I would have supported it with dignity, even
without you, but you make it sweet and dear to me. The wretches think to
overwhelm me by putting irons upon me—senseless! What does it matter to
me if I am here or there? Is not my heart always with me? To confine me
in a prison—is it not to deliver me entirely to it? My company, it is my
love! My occupation, it is to think of it!... If I must die, very well.
I know what is best in life, and its duration would perhaps only force
new sacrifices upon me. The most glorified instant of my existence, that
in which I felt most deeply that exaltation of soul which rejoices in
braving all clangers, was when I entered the Bastille that my jailers
had chosen for me. I will not say that I went before them, but it is
true that I did not flee them. I had not calculated on their fury
reaching me, but I believed that if it did, it would give me an
opportunity to serve Roland by my testimony, my constancy, and my
firmness. I would be glad to sacrifice my life for him in order to win
the right to give you my last sigh.”
She sent for his picture, and writes, July 7th:
“It is on my heart, concealed from all eyes, felt at every moment, and
often bathed in my tears. Oh, I am filled with your courage, honored by
your affection, and glorying in all that both can inspire in your proud
and sensitive soul. I cannot believe that Heaven reserves nothing but
trials for sentiments so pure and so worthy of its favor. This sort of
confidence makes me endure life and face death calmly. Let us enjoy with
gratitude the goods given us. He who knows how to love as we do, carries
within himself the principle of the greatest and best actions, the price
of the most painful sacrifices, the compensation for all evils.
Farewell, my beloved, farewell.”
On July 7th, she wrote Buzot the last letter, so far as we know, that he
received from her. In it all the exultation of her ardent passion, all
the force of her noble courage, are concentrated.
“My friend, you cannot picture the charm of a prison where one need
account only to his own heart for the employment of his moments! No
annoying distraction, no painful sacrifice, no tiresome cares; none of
those duties so much the more binding on an honest heart because they
are respectable; none of those contradictions of law, or of the
prejudices of society, with the sweetest inspirations of nature; no
jealous look spies on what one feels, or the occupation which one
chooses; no one suffers from your inaction or your melancholy; no one
expects efforts or demands sentiments which are not in your power; left
to yourself and to truth, with no obstacles to overcome, no friction to
endure, one can, without harm to the rights and to the affection of
another, abandon his soul to its own righteousness, refind his moral
independence in an apparent captivity, and exercise it with a
completeness that social relations almost always change. I had not
looked for this independence.... Circumstances have given me that which
I could never have had without a kind of crime. How I love the chains
which give me freedom to love you undividedly, to think of you
ceaselessly! Here all other occupation is laid aside. I belong only to
him who loves me and merits so well to be loved by me.... I do not want
to penetrate the designs of Heaven, I will not allow myself to make
guilty prayers, but I bless God for having substituted my present chains
for those I wore before. And this change appears to me the beginning of
favor. If He grants me more, may He leave me here until my deliverance
from a world given over to injustice and unhappiness!”
“Do not pity me,” she wrote to Buzot in her letter of June 22. She was
not to be pitied. Life and death were kinder to her than to most of
those upon whom fall the supreme misfortune of loving where
conventionalities and law forbid love to go. It took the struggle from
her hand and prevented the disillusion which she must have undergone had
she lived. There is no escaping the conclusion that she would have
ultimately left Roland for Buzot. Her idealization of all relations,
persons, and ideas which stirred her; her imagination from infancy,
given full play; her passionate nature, which she knew but poorly,
though flattering herself that she was entirely its mistress; her
confidence in the superiority of sentiment and in herself,—would have
unquestionably pushed her to a union of some sort with Buzot. She was
happy to be guillotined when she was, otherwise she must have inevitably
suffered the most terrible and humiliating of all the disillusions of a
woman,—the loss of faith in herself, in the infallibility of her
sentiments, in her incapability to do wrong.
There is a much more natural and simple side to Madame Roland’s five
months in prison than this one of exaltation and endurance, which, when
viewed apart, sometimes becomes a little fatiguing. If one regards only
the heroine, her self-sufficiency is a bit irritating at moments, much
as one must admire it. It is the arrangement of her life, her
occupations, her amusements, which appeal most to ordinary minds, and
which perhaps are a better index to her real force of character than her
exalted periods and professions.
When first taken to the Abbaye she was obliged to be alone in her cell,
to take a tiny room with dirty walls and a heavily grated window. It
opened on a disagreeable street, and below she could hear by night the
cries of the sentry; by day, the hawking of _Père Duchesne’s_ journal,
and the rudeness of the market people, cries sometimes directed against
herself. Nevertheless she decorated the little cell so gayly with
flowers and books that her jailers called it Flora’s Pavilion.
At the Abbaye about fifty cents a day were allowed each prisoner for his
expenses, although he could spend more if he had it. Madame Roland
decided to amuse herself by making an experiment,—to see to what she
could reduce her fare. Bread and water was served her for her
_déjeuner_; for dinner (one hundred years ago the French dined at noon)
she ate only one kind of meat, with a salad; in the evening, a little
vegetable, but no dessert. After a time she got on without wine or beer.
“This régime,” she explained, “had a moral end, and as I should have had
as much aversion as contempt for a useless economy, I commenced by
giving a sum to the poor, in order to have the pleasure, when eating my
dry bread in the morning, of thinking that the poor souls would owe it
to me that they could add something to their dinners.”
When she went to Sainte Pélagie, she found her life a little different.
There the State gave nothing in money for the prisoners, who even paid
for their beds. All that was furnished them was a pound and a half of
bread and a dish of beans each day. She made arrangements with the
concierge of the prison to furnish her meals which were about as simple
as at the Abbaye. The prison itself she found most disagreeable. In
fact, Sainte Pélagie, which exists to-day, though condemned to
destruction, is the most gloomy and forbidding building in Paris. Its
mere presence in the quarter where it stands gives a dreary and hopeless
air to the street. The inmates of the prison at the period when Madame
Roland was confined there were of such a character that she was
subjected to the most disgusting annoyances. In the corridor from which
her cell opened, their rooms separated from one and another only by thin
partitions, were numbers of abandoned and criminal women. So obscene and
revolting were they that she rarely left her room, though she could not
shut out their noise.
From this pandemonium the concierge succeeded in saving her for a time,
giving her a large chamber near her own, where she even had a piano; but
the inspectors, once aware of the favor, ordered her back into the noisy
corridor. Even there, however, she had her pleasures,—her flowers and
her books. The first Bosc supplied her; the second she bought, or begged
from her friends. She had Thompson, Shaftesbury, an English dictionary,
Tacitus, and Plutarch. She bought pencils and drew a little every day;
altogether it was a busy life. Her day was arranged regularly. In the
morning she studied English, the essay of Shaftesbury on virtue, and
Thompson; after that she drew until noon. Then she had serious work,
for, conscious that her imprisonment might end in her death, she
resolved at its outset to set down as fully as she should have time to,
the facts in the political life of Roland, and to explain her own
relations to him. It is from the material that she was able to write in
this five months and get to her friends, that most of what we know of
her life comes.
The first undertaken was her _Historical Notes_, written at the Abbaye.
These she did, so rapidly, she says, and with such pleasure, that in
less than a month she had manuscript for a volume. It was a summary of
her public life, and an estimate on the people she had known during it.
She had, herself, a very good opinion of the production: “I wrote it
with my natural freedom and energy, with frank abandon and with the ease
of one who is free from all private considerations, with pleasure in
painting what I had felt and seen, and, finally, with the confidence
that in any case it would be my moral and political testament. It had
the originality which circumstances lent it, and the merit of
reflections born from passing events, and the freshness which belongs to
such an origin.”
The manuscript was confided to Champagneux, who was still in the
Department of the Interior, but he, arrested, confided it to a person
who, frightened lest it should fall into the hands of the inspectors,
threw it into the fire. “I should have preferred to have been thrown
there myself,” said Madame Roland, when she heard of this disaster.
Not all of the _Historical Notes_ were destroyed, however, the account
of her own and her husband’s arrest, of her first days at the Abbaye,
and a brief sketch of their official life being saved.
It was more than a month after she was imprisoned at Sainte Pélagie
before she determined to do over the task. The new undertaking included
a series of portraits and anecdotes drawn from her political life, an
account of her second arrest, and of the first and second ministries. At
the same time that she wrote this, she prepared her private Memoirs,—a
detailed history of her life up to 1777,—and notes on the time between
her marriage and the Revolution. She intended to add to her Memoirs the
story of her relations with Buzot, giving the origin and progress of her
passion, but she was never able to finish it.
To this literary budget, already large, she afterwards added several
short manuscripts,—a set of “Last Thoughts,” a number of letters, and a
comment on the accusation made by the Mountain against the Gironde, that
it was guilty of a conspiracy against the unity and the indivisibility
of the Republic, and the liberty and safety of the French people.
Almost all of this matter was given to Bosc, who, thanks to the
concierge of Sainte Pélagie, was allowed to see her twice a week, up to
the middle of October. But Bosc was proscribed later, and obliged to
flee. Unwilling to trust the treasures he held to another, he hid the
manuscripts in the crevice of a rock in the depths of the forest of
Montmorency, where they remained eight months. Later, these papers were
given to Eudora. They remained in the family until given to the
Bibliothèque Nationale, where they now are.
The difficulties under which she wrote were, of course, great. It was
essential that she should elude her guardians. She had no notes. She was
surrounded by a ribald and noisy company. But these disadvantages only
acted as spurs. She took delight in carrying on this forbidden work
under the eyes of her persecutors. So rapidly did she write that in
twenty-four days she produced two hundred pages of manuscript, including
all the early part of her Memoirs. The words seemed to flow from her
pen. The bulky manuscript of seven hundred pages, preserved at the
Bibliothèque Nationale, is a marvel of neatness and firmness. The
grayish pages are filled evenly from margin to margin in her beautiful
characteristic hand, and there is scarcely a blot or erasure, scarcely a
correction, save those made by Bosc, who published the first edition of
the Memoirs in 1795.
In style, the political writings are always clear and positive; often
they rise to a real eloquence. Written as they were under the force of
the most powerful emotions, unbiassed judgments cannot be expected. She
was defending her husband primarily in this work, and she did it with
the more earnestness and warmth because she felt, as she wrote Buzot,
that this was one way of compensating him for the sorrow she had caused
him.
Her judgments on men are not always just. Indeed, they cannot be called
judgments, they are simply her feelings towards those persons at the
moment she wrote. Her indignation against the wrongs done her and her
party is so intense that often her tone is irritated, contemptuous,
impatient. The arrangement is not systematic, as, indeed, it was
impossible to be, under the circumstances, and her pen bounds from one
character to another,—from hero to agitator, from apostrophe to
anecdote,—in a sort of reckless, impassioned hurry. The whole gallery of
the Gironde and its opponents, from 1791 to 1793 pass before us, every
one stamped with a positive, definite character.
That she poses throughout the narrative is unquestionable. It is to
posterity she speaks, and she wished to appear in the eyes of the future
as she believed herself to be,—the apostle of the ideas of liberty,
equality, and fraternity, the incarnation of patriotism, the most
perfect disinterestedness, and the highest fortitude.
It was Madame Roland’s plan, in writing her personal Memoirs, to cover
her whole life, and to follow Jean Jacques Rousseau’s _Confessions_.
Although the work was never completed, we have the first twenty-five
years. The charm of the narrative is irresistible. Never, even in the
gayest and most natural of her letters to Bosc and Roland, was Madame
Roland’s pen so happy as in these Memoirs of her youth. They sparkle
with mirth and with tenderness. Never did any one appreciate better his
own youth, nor idealize it more lovingly. To her these souvenirs are
radiant pictures, and she sketches them one after another, with a full
appreciation of all their attractiveness.
Her early masters, her suitors, her youthful enthusiasm, Sophie, the
Convent des Dames de la Congrégation, Meudon, Vincennes, La Blancherie,
her mother, the Salon, river, Luxembourg, her toilettes, duties,
sorrows, joys, the whole flows in a steady, sparkling stream, vivid with
color, pulsating with life. She relives it all, and without reflection
or hesitation pours out everything which comes into her mind. So full
and natural are these Memoirs that they are really the most attractive
material we have of the life of her class in the eighteenth century.
In all Madame Roland’s dramatic life there is no more attractive picture
than that which the writing of her Memoirs brings up: this splendid,
passionate woman, glorying in her love and her courage, sitting day
after day before the little table in her prison cell, oblivious to the
cries and oaths which rise about her, indifferent to discomfort,
forgetful of everything but the souvenirs which her flying pen records,
and which bring smiles and tears by turn to her mobile face. Here we
have none of the stilted, prepared style of her early writings, none of
the pose of the political memoirs. It is self-complacent, to be sure,
and we feel that she is making herself out to have been a most
extraordinary young girl, but one cannot help forgiving her, she makes
herself out so charming. However, if one is interested in finding out
the woman as she really was, he must not trust too fully to her
interpretations. She was so interested in herself, idealized herself so
thoroughly, was so serious in her self-confidence, so devoid of
self-reproach, that she was oblivious to her own inconsistencies and
inconsequentialities.
Rousseau’s _Confessions_ were the model of her Memoirs. The result was
that she related some experiences which good sense and taste, not to say
delicacy, ought to have forbidden her to repeat to any one, above all,
to the public. These passages in her Memoirs are due to her slavish
following of Rousseau. She was incapable of exercising an independent
judgment in a matter of taste, of opinion, of morals, where Rousseau was
concerned, so completely had she adopted him. When she came to writing
her life, she dragged to light unimportant and unpleasant details
because Rousseau had had the bad taste to do the same before her. The
naïveté, with which these things are told, will convince any one that
cares to examine the Memoirs that they mean nothing but she had taken
the foolish engagement to tell everything she could remember about her
life.
[Illustration:
THE CONCIERGERIE IN 1793.
Prison where Madame Roland passed the last eight days of her
captivity, and from which she went to the
guillotine. Pont au Change in the foreground.
]
The Memoirs, as well as her daily life, her letters, her attitude
towards the authorities, show her courage. But they show, too, the
anguish which shook her from time to time. More than once her firm,
brilliant narrative is broken suddenly—the sentence unfinished—to record
some new outrage against her friends, and as she expresses indignantly
her horror and her grief at the usurpers who are ruling France, one can
almost hear the sob which shook her, but to which she would not yield.
Here and there the gray pages of her beautiful manuscript are spotted by
tear stains. Even now, a hundred years and more after it all, one cannot
read them and see how, in spite of her iron will, her splendid courage,
her heart was sometimes so heavy with woe that her tears would fall,
without a choking in the throat and a dimness of the eyes.
One crisis after another indeed followed throughout her
imprisonment,—the arrest of the Twenty-two; her own release and
rearrest; the pursuit of Buzot; her friends and Roland’s declared
suspect, imprisoned, driven from Paris, sometimes even guillotined
because of their relations to her; the trial in October of the members
of the Gironde; her summons to the trial as a witness, but the failure
to call her,—a call which she had awaited, “as a soul in pain awaits its
liberator,” she said, so did she desire to have the chance to render one
last service to these friends, in whom she believed so strongly, whom
she deemed so trusty; her anxiety for Eudora; the execution in October
of the Twenty-one; above all, her despair for her country, for France,
which permits the dishonor and murder not of “her children, but of the
fathers of her liberty.”
The saddest phase of this dark side of her imprisonment was the growing
conviction that she and the patriots had been wrong. At last she saw
what she did when in 1791 she spurned the Assembly. She acknowledged now
that she would have disdained the members of the National Assembly less,
if she could have had an idea of their successors. She had learned to
regret Mirabeau, whose death then had seemed to her well both for his
glory and for the cause of liberty. “The counterpoise of a man of that
force was necessary to oppose the crowd of puppets and to preserve us
from the domination of the bandits.” She had learned that men may
profess, but when their interests and ideals are in opposition it is the
former which wins. She had discovered, at last, that to demand speedy
and immediate regeneration of society is to break the laws of the
universe; that to take away from men what the ages have given them is
simply to restore them to the primitive state of teeth and claws, to let
loose the passions the centuries have tamed. She saw that in politics,
in society, in individual relations, the ideal is the inspiration; the
realization, the laborious effort of centuries. She acknowledged that in
Plutarch she glided over the storms of the Republic, “forgot the death
of Socrates, the exile of Aristides, the condemnation of Phocion.” She
was willing at last to say with Sully, “C’est très difficile de faire le
bien de son pays”; to confess that “if it is permitted to politics to do
good through the wicked, or to profit by their excesses, it is
infinitely dangerous to give them the honor of the one, or not to punish
them for the other.”
Under the pressure of all these woes she sometimes felt her resolution
weaken. What wonder that when she heard, in October, that Buzot and his
friends, now escaped to the Gascogne, were being tracked so closely that
their arrest was sure, she determined to kill herself? “You know the
malady the English call _heart-break_,” she wrote; “I am attacked
hopelessly by it and I have no desire to delay its effects.” It seemed
to her now that it was weak to await the blow of her tyrants—their _coup
de grâce_ she called it—when she could give it to herself. Why should
she allow them to see how bravely she could die—they who were incapable
of understanding her courage? Three months ago a noble public death
might have served for something. To-day it was pure loss. All this she
wrote to Bosc. She consented, however, to accept his decision as to
whether she ought or not to take her own life, charging him to weigh the
question as if it were impersonal.
This letter to Bosc bears the date of October 25th. On October 31st, the
condemned Girondins were beheaded. On November 1st, Madame Roland, who
because of Bosc’s arguments had abandoned her resolution to suicide, was
conveyed to the Conciergerie, a prison which in those days was but a
transfer to the cart which led to the guillotine.
But could she not have been saved? She had friends who would have gladly
dared death for her. All Paris knew of her imprisonment—was there no
lover of justice to intercede? Her friends had tried to save her. Buzot
and Roland both contrived many plans; she repulsed them all. They were
too foolhardy to succeed; they might implicate those who would interest
themselves in carrying them out, or perhaps ruin guardians who had been
kind to her—of these she would hear nothing. Her old friend, Henriette
Cannet, then a widow, came from Amiens, succeeded in reaching her in
prison, insisted on changing garments with her and on remaining in her
place. She would not consent; she would rather “suffer a thousand
deaths” than run the risk of causing that of a friend. And then what did
release mean? Merely the taking on of her old chains. “Nothing would
stop me if I braved dangers only to rejoin you,” she wrote Buzot; “but
to expose my friends and to leave the irons with which the wicked honor
me, in order to take on others that no one sees—there is no hurry for
that.”
Madame Roland, throughout her imprisonment, had hoped for a popular
uprising, a revolt against tyranny, coming from Paris or the
departments, which would release her and her friends. She never got
thoroughly over her illusion that the people, as a mass, were the ones
that were to reconstruct France; never realized fully how the people
are simply a passive unit, asking only to be let alone, to be allowed
to live as they can without interference; that they have no
initiative, that when they act it is because they have been aroused by
leaders working on them systematically, appealing to their wants,
their desires, their reason sometimes, but more often inflaming their
passions. She never appreciated, save dimly, the fact that throughout
the Revolution, so far, the revolt of the people had been prepared by
agitators,—prepared as she and her friends wished to make the 20th of
July, did make the 10th of August. The people know she is imprisoned;
if they reflect at all, they know that probably it is unjust, but they
are cautious. They have seen, ever since the Revolution commenced,
that he who tries to prevent outrage is sure to be the first to be
punished. They have concluded wisely that the only safe plan is to let
the belligerents fight it out, to follow as well as they can their
usual occupations, and to say nothing. The mass of the Parisians go on
as usual. The Terror has become a part of daily discussion, a part of
the city’s spectacles,—that is all. People buy and sell as usual, the
theatres do not close, not even the Sunday promenade is omitted. They
even take advantage of events to give a livelier interest to their
amusements. The theatres, the fairs, the _cafés chantants_, the maker
of songs and engravings, draw their subjects from the quarrels of the
Assembly, the persecutions of the Commune, the events of the prisons
and of the guillotine. They even use it to advertise their wares: The
real estate agents announce, “in the new state of Kentucky, and the
ancient state of Virginia, lands in a country free from despotism and
anarchy.” The potter improves the chance, and turns out plates and
cups and saucers by the thousands, suitable for all the varying tastes
and shades of opinion; there is elegant Sèvres with a _bonnet rouge_
for the rich patriot; there is a _vive le roi_, with a sceptre, for
the monarchist; there is a guillotine for the bloodthirsty; there is a
coarse and vulgar joke for the ribald. The cloth-maker prints
patriotic scenes on his curtain stuff; the handkerchief-maker
decorates with transcriptions of the _droits des hommes_; the
hat-maker turns out idealized _bonnets rouges_ suitable for the street
or opera; the fan-maker illuminates with king or _sans-culottes_,
according to taste; the very manufacturer of playing-cards takes off
the time-honored king and queen and knave, and replaces them with
heroes, philosophers, and Revolutionary emblems. Cabinet-maker,
jeweller, shoemaker, weaver, all turn the Revolution to account. For
whether justice reign or fall, the world must go on, and while the few
wrestle with the pains of progress, of achievement, of aspiration, the
mass looks on and calculates what effect the struggle will have on the
price of bread.
XIII
DEATH ON THE GUILLOTINE
The inmates of the Conciergerie were still shivering under the horror of
the death of the twenty-one Girondins when Madame Roland appeared among
them. Her coming was an event which awakened the liveliest interest. For
eight months she had been the most influential woman in France. She was
the recognized inspiration of the party which had wrecked the monarchy
and established the Republic, which had been conquered by the force it
had called to life. To the majority she was but a name. They all knew
that her death was a foregone conclusion. They felt that she, too, knew
it, and they watched, many of them with curiosity—for numbers of the
inmates were of constitutional and royalist sympathies—for signs of
revolt and of weakness. Never, however, had she been calmer, never more
serene.
The prisons of Paris were at that time terribly overcrowded and poorly
cared for. It was the custom to confine people together without any
regard to their character or lives. “On the same straw, and behind the
same bars,” writes an inmate, “the Duchesse de Grammont and a
handkerchief thief, Madame Roland and a wretch of the streets, a sister
and a habitué of Salpétrière. The quarrelling and the obscenity were
often terrible. But from the time of her arrival the chamber of Madame
Roland became an asylum of peace in the bosom of this hell. If she
descended into the court, her simple presence restored good order, and
the unhappy women, on whom no known power had longer any influence, were
restrained by the fear of displeasing her. She gave money to the most
needy, and to all counsel, consolation, and hope.”
Over many of the prisoners she exercised a kind of spell. “I experienced
every day a new charm in listening to her,” says Comte Beugnot, a
fellow-prisoner who, rare thing, escaped to write his memoirs; “less
from what she said than from the magic of her manner.” “We were all
attentive about her in a kind of stupefied admiration,” declares Rioffe.
The next day after her arrival she was questioned for the first time;
two days later she underwent a second examination. She had gone into the
tribunal in her usual serene way. She came back deeply moved, her eyes
wet. The interrogation was indeed most trying. The questions were so
couched that in answering them honestly she condemned herself. Did she
not entertain Brissot, Barbaroux, Buzot, Pétion, in conference? She must
admit it, and explain the “conference” as she would, the Revolutionary
tribunal used her admission as a confession of a criminal relation. A
letter written to a person, whom she knew but slightly, and who had
tried to secure a reading of her letters to the Convention, was used as
evidence against her. It was useless to declare that she simply tried
through this correspondent to reach the ear of the authorities and to
obtain news of her friends. Her friends have been guillotined as
traitors to the country, or are in open rebellion at this moment,
conspiring for the destruction of the Republic. This person, if he were
a patriot, would not have been in communication with them. If she were
loyal, she would not want news of them. Let her try to explain and they
accuse her of evasion. Roland’s office for creating public opinion was
brought up. Was she not the directress of this pretended Bureau of
Public Opinion, whose end was evidently to attack the doctrines in their
purest source and to bring about the destruction of the Republic by
sowing disorder? It was useless to explain the tame and harmless nature
of this department of Roland’s work—a department established by public
decree; for they accused her of outraging truth when she did, and told
her that everybody knew that the correspondence carried on by the
perfidious minister had for its principal object to bring the
departments to Paris and to spread calumnies against the faithful
representatives of the people. They asked her the whereabouts of Roland,
and when she refused to tell they informed her that she was in rebellion
against the law.
It was evident, indeed, that whatever she might say was useless. She was
the friend of the Gironde, and the last of the race must be exterminated
just as royalist and _émigré_ had been. The world was being made over,
and all who objected to the transformation and wished to fight for
another order must be put out of the way. There was not room enough in
France any longer for people of different ways of looking at things.
The night after her second interrogation, Madame Roland wrote a defence
to read before the tribunal, in which she indignantly denied the
accusations against her friends, and declared herself honored to perish
for her fidelity to them. The defence was in her haughtiest, most
uncompromising style, and showed her at the very end as resolute, as
proud, as triumphant, as ever. But this defence was written in the heat
of indignation at her examination, and for the hearing of the judges she
despised. Away from her persecutors, many times during the days which
followed, her strength failed and her fellow-prisoners remarked, almost
with awe, that she had been weeping. The woman who served her told them:
“Before you she collects all her strength, but in her chamber she
remains often hours at a time, leaning against the window, weeping.”
On the 7th of November, the witnesses against Madame Roland appeared.
There were three of them;—her faithful _bonne_, for thirteen years in
her service, and who during her imprisonment had dared every danger to
be useful to her, a governess of Eudora’s, and a domestic. The weight of
their testimony was simply that the Girondins had frequented the house.
That night Madame Roland’s lawyer, a courageous young man,
Chauveau-Lagarde by name, who was ambitious to defend her, came to
consult with her. She listened calmly to him and discussed several
points of her defence. When he rose to go she drew a ring from her
finger and, without a word, gave it to him. The young man divined the
farewell. “Madame,” he cried, “we shall see each other to-morrow after
the sentence.”
“To-morrow I shall not be alive. I know the fate which awaits me. Your
counsels are dear to me, but they might be fatal to you. They would ruin
you without saving me. Let me never know the sorrow of causing the death
of a good man. Do not come to the court, I shall disown you, but accept
the only token my gratitude can offer. To-morrow I shall exist no more.”
The next day, November 8th, was her trial. When she came out from her
cell to await for her summons to the court, Comte Beugnot joined her.
“She was clad carefully in white muslin, trimmed with blonde and
fastened by a girdle of black velvet.” He says: “Her face seemed to me
more animated than usual. Its color was exquisite and she had a smile on
her lips. With one hand she held up the train of her gown; the other she
had abandoned to a crowd of prisoners who pressed near to kiss it. Those
who understood the fate which awaited her sobbed about her and commended
her to God.... Madame responded to all with affectionate kindness. She
did not promise to return, she did not say she was going to her death,
but her last words to them were touching counsels. She begged them to
have peace, courage, hope, to practise those virtues which are fitting
for misfortune. An old jailer, called Fontenay, whose good heart had
resisted the practice of his cruel trade for thirty years, came to open
the gate for her, weeping. I did my errand with her in the passage. She
answered me in a few words and in a firm tone. She had commenced a
sentence when two jailers from the interior called her to the tribunal.
At this cry, terrible for another than her, she stopped and, pressing my
hand, said: ‘Good-by, sir, let us make peace, it is time.’ Raising her
eyes, she saw that I was struggling violently to keep back my tears. She
seemed moved and added but two words, ‘Have courage.’”
The accusation waited her. It was a charge of having “wickedly and
designedly participated in a conspiracy against the unity and
indivisibility of the Republic, against the liberty and surety of the
French people, by collecting at her home the principal leaders of this
conspiracy, and carrying on a correspondence with them tending to
facilitate their murderous projects.” She was not allowed to read her
defence, and the judgment was pronounced at once. She was convicted of
being one of the authors, or accomplices, in a “horrible conspiracy
against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic, the liberty and
surety of the French people,” and was sentenced to be punished by death.
When she came out from the tribunal the cart awaited her in the prison
court.
Standing on the Pont au Change and looking down the Seine, is one of
those fascinating river views of Paris where a wealth of associations
disputes with endless charm the attention of the loiterer. The left of
the view is filled by the Norman Towers of the Conciergerie, the façades
of the prison, the irregular fronts of the houses facing on the Quai de
l’Horloge, and ends in an old house of Henry IV.’s time. It is the house
where Manon Phlipon passed her girlhood. When the cart drove across the
Pont au Change, Madame Roland had before her the window from which, as a
girl, she had leaned at sunset, and “with a heart filled with
inexpressible joy, happy to exist, had offered to the Supreme Being a
pure and worthy homage.”
She faces death now as she faced life then. The girl and the woman, in
spite of the drama between, are unchanged: the same ideals, the same
courage, the same faith. Not even this tragic last encounter with the
home of her youth moves her calm; for she passed the Pont Neuf, writes
one who saw her, “upright and calm,—her eyes shining, her color fresh
and brilliant,—a smile on her lips, trying to cheer her companion, a man
overwhelmed by the terror of approaching death.”
It was a long and weary jolt in the rough cart from the Pont Neuf, where
M. Tissot saw her passing, “erect and calm,” by the Rue Saint Honoré to
the Place de la Concorde, then Place de la Guillotine. The hideous,
howling crowd followed and cursed her. But nothing earthly could reach
the heights whither she had risen. At the foot of the guillotine, so
tradition goes, she asked for a pen to write the thoughts which had
arisen in this awful journey to death, but it was refused. Sanson, the
headsman, in a hurry, pressed her to mount the short ladder which led to
the platform; for there was a grim guillotine etiquette which gave her
the right to die first, but she asked him to give her place to her
cringing companion and spare him the misery of seeing her die. Sanson
demurred. It was against his orders. “Can you refuse a lady her last
request?” she said, smiling, and he, a little shamefaced, consented.
Then her turn came. As they fastened her to the fatal plank, her eyes
fell on a colossal statue of liberty erected to celebrate the first
anniversary of the 10th of August. “O liberté,” she cried, “comme on t’a
jouée.” Then the axe dropped, the beautiful head fell; Madame Roland was
dead.
XIV
THOSE LEFT BEHIND
Madame Roland was dead, but she had left behind the three beings dearest
and closest to her,—her husband, her child, and her lover.
Roland fled from Paris, as we have seen, on the night of May 31st. He
succeeded in reaching Amiens, where he had lived many years and where he
had many friends; but though more than one home was opened to him the
surveillance of the Mountain was such that he thought it wise to leave
the town. From Amiens he went westward to Rouen, where he easily found
shelter. He was here on June 22d, when Madame Roland wrote her first
letter to Buzot. The life he led there was miserable in the extreme. He
constantly feared to be arrested; he felt that he was jeopardizing the
lives of his hosts by his presence; he fretted under the contempt and
false accusations which the Mountain continued to rain upon him; and,
above all, he was tortured by his inability to do anything to insure the
future of his child or to effect the release of his wife.
This anxiety had not grown less with time. The events of the summer and
the fall of 1793 only increased day by day his misery and apprehension.
The news of the death of the twenty-one Girondins in October seemed to
turn to bitterness the last drop of his hope. A heavier blow awaited
him. That happened which must have seemed to his simple soul the
impossible,—his wife was guillotined. When the fatal word reached him,
she had been dead for several days. As the news was given him he fell,
stricken with a blessed unconsciousness. When he recovered himself, his
distress was so great that he resolved to put an end to his days. In
vain did the friends who had sheltered and cared for him all these
months urge him to give up his resolution. He would not listen to them,
but with perfect serenity laid before them two plans which he felt he
might follow. The first savored strongly of Madame Roland’s influence:
it was to go _incognito_ to Paris, appear in the Convention, make an
unexpected speech in which he should tell them the truths he felt they
ought to hear, and then ask them to kill him on the guillotine where his
wife had lost her life. The second was to kill himself.
[Illustration:
ROLAND DE LA PLATIÈRE.
From a drawing by Gabriel.
]
One consideration alone deterred him from carrying out his first plan.
The property of persons guillotined was confiscated by the State. If he
should die in this manner, Eudora would be left penniless, and Roland
abandoned the idea. There remained nothing for him but suicide. On the
evening of November 15th, he bade his friends good-by, and left Rouen by
the route to Paris. About four leagues from Rouen, in the hamlet of
Baudoin, he left the highway, entered the roadway leading to a private
house, seated himself on the ground on the edge of the avenue, and
deliberately ran a cane-sword into his breast. His death must have been
immediate; for passers-by, next morning, seeing him there leaning
against a tree, thought he was sleeping. When the truth was discovered,
a deputy from the Convention, who happened to be at Rouen, went at once
to the spot and took possession of the papers on his person. The only
one of importance was a note which ran:
“Whoever finds me lying here, let him respect my remains. They are those
of a man who died as he lived, virtuous and honest.
“The day is not far distant when you will have to bear a terrible
judgment; await that day; you will act then in full knowledge of causes,
and you will understand the meaning of this advice.
“May my country soon abhor these crimes and return to humanity and
kindliness.”
On another fold of the paper was written:
“_Not fear, but Indignation._
“I left my refuge as soon as I heard that my wife had been murdered. I
desire to remain no longer in a world covered with crime.”
Eudora Roland, born October 7, 1781, was twelve years old at the time of
her mother’s death. Separated the night of the arrest, the two never saw
each other again. Happily, there were warm and faithful friends ready to
take care of her as soon as her serious situation was known. Bosc, who
throughout Madame Roland’s imprisonment showed himself of the most
fearless and tender devotion, went to the apartment in the Rue de la
Harpe soon after the arrest, and took the little girl to the home of a
member of the Convention, Creuzé-la-Touche. Here she remained until a
few days before her mother’s death. Then it became evident that, in
sheltering Eudora, Madame Creuzé-la-Touche was compromising the safety
of her family, and she was compelled to place her charge in a _pension_.
She was not received there, even, until her name had been changed. All
this was a great grief to Madame Roland in her last days. She understood
only too well now that her child was in danger of suffering her own
fate. She wrote an anxious letter to “the person charged with the care
of my daughter,” and to Eudora herself she wrote a courageous adieu:
“I do not know, my little girl,” she wrote, “that I shall ever see or
write to you again. REMEMBER YOUR MOTHER, that is the best thing I can
say to you. You have seen me happy in doing my duty and in serving those
who were suffering. There is no better life.
“You have seen me tranquil in misfortune and captivity. I could be so
because I had no remorse, and only pleasant memories of the good I had
done. Nothing else can sustain one in the sorrows of life. Perhaps you
will never experience trials like mine, but you must prepare for others.
A busy, active life is the best safeguard against danger, and necessity,
as well as wisdom, will compel you to work seriously.
“Be worthy of your parents. They leave you a noble example. If you
follow them, you will not live in vain.
“Farewell, dear child. I nursed you at my breast. I would inspire you
with my aspirations. The day will come when you will understand the
effort I am making to be strong as I think of your sweet face.
“Would that I could fold you to my breast!
“Adieu, my Eudora.”
It was Madame Roland’s last letter to her child. Bosc, who had been
allowed to visit her twice a week throughout the fall, was now forbidden
to see her. Letters had to be smuggled in and out of the prison, and she
soon ceased to have any trustworthy news of her loved ones. Six days
after the above letter, she wrote to Bosc:
“My poor little one! Where is she? Tell me, I beg of you. Give me some
details that I may picture her to myself in her new surroundings.”
It was too late. In less than a week after this letter she was in the
Conciergerie.
After the death of M. and Madame Roland, Eudora was taken in charge by
Bosc, who, in 1795, published the first edition of Madame Roland’s
Memoirs, to help in her support. Legend has it that Bosc even wanted to
marry the child. Later a marriage was arranged for her with a brother of
Champagneux of Lyons, the old friend of the Rolands.
After the Revolution, Madame Champagneux recovered her father’s
property, and Le Clos, the family estate, near Villefranche, came into
her possession. This property is still in the family, being owned by one
of Madame Champagneux’s granddaughters, Madame Cécile Marillier of
Paris.
All of the papers of Madame Roland, which had been confided to Bosc,
were given by him to Eudora, and she seems to have experienced a certain
resentment towards her mother when she found that she had told posterity
so frankly that her only child lacked in depth of sentiment and keenness
of intellect. This feeling only intensified her admiration for her
father, and when Lamartine’s _History of the Girondins_ appeared, she
was deeply indignant at the way in which he belittled M. Roland in order
to make the figure of Madame Roland more brilliant. It was with the hope
that Lamartine’s influence could be counteracted, that she urged a
friend, a grand-nephew of Bosc, M. P. Faugère by name, to take
possession of all the family papers, and prepare a work which would
justify the memory of Roland. M. Faugère was already busy with a new
edition of the Memoirs, but he promised Madame Champagneux to do the
work on M. Roland as soon as that was finished. The Memoirs he
completed, and his edition is by far the best published; but though he
began the study of Roland he died before finishing it. The family papers
remained in the possession of Madame Faugère, who, in 1888, turned over
the most important of them to the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Madame Champagneux lived to be nearly seventy-seven years old, dying in
Paris July 19, 1858. The last years of her life were clouded by the
death of one of her daughters, a loss from which she is said never fully
to have recovered.
Of the three left behind, the fate of Buzot was saddest. At the moment
that he escaped to Evreux, the northwest departments felt that the
Convention had been coerced into the decree against the Gironde and
there was a general revolt against the tyranny of Paris. Buzot and his
friends who had escaped decided, on sounding this feeling, that it was
sufficiently wide-spread and profound to justify them in undertaking a
campaign against the Convention and in favor of federalism. Buzot began
by speaking in the cathedral at Evreux and here he was joined by Pétion,
Barbaroux, and Louvet. The agitators were not long unmolested. The
Convention turned its fiercest anathemas against the “traitors,” as it
called them, and the Revolutionary authorities of the northwest were
ordered to crush them. At first they fled into Brittany, evidently
hoping to find a vessel there for America, but disappointed in this,
they made their way to Gascogne, where one of their number had friends.
While Buzot was escaping, the patriotic saviours of their country were
exhausting themselves in fantastic efforts to show their hatred of his
“treason.” His house was demolished amid civic rejoicings. His effigy
was burned and riddled with bullets in the process. On the walls near
his residence could be still read a few years ago an inscription written
in the excitement.
“Buzot le scélérat trahit la liberté;
Pour ce crime infâme, il sera decapité.”
This effectual and dignified way of dealing with a political opponent
reached its climax on December 30, 1793, when Evreux held a fête of
rejoicing over the recapture of Toulon. The cathedral in which, six
months before, Buzot had spoken had become a “temple of reason and
philosophy.” On the altars were the busts of Marat, Lepelletier, and
Brutus, where once were the forms of Virgin and Child and peaceable
saint. The latter had been transferred to the Place de la Fédération,
where, together with effigies of Buzot and other local celebrities who
had refused to believe and vote as the authorities desired, they were
burned.
In the mean time Buzot had escaped to Saint Émilion, where, for some
three months, he and his friends were concealed. They busied themselves,
when their places of hiding permitted it, with writing their memoirs.
Buzot discussed his political career and made a violent, often
vindictive, attack on his opponents. There is no direct avowal, in his
work, of his love for Madame Roland, but one feels throughout the
despairing, passionate passages the struggling of a great emotion,
stifled, but not dead. It is said that when the news of Madame Roland’s
death reached Buzot, his friends thought he had gone mad, and it was
many days before the violence of his grief was calmed.
At the beginning of 1794 the refugees were obliged to change asylums,
and went to the house of a hair-dresser in Saint Émilion, where they
stayed until June of that year. At that time, however, the Revolutionary
authorities of Bordeaux decided that they were not doing their whole
duty in saving the country, and began a house-to-house search throughout
the department. Buzot, with his friends, Pétion and Barbaroux, were
forced to fly. After days of fatigue and fear and hunger, the end came.
Barbaroux, thinking he was discovered, attempted to shoot himself, but
succeeded only in wounding himself, and was captured.
Just how death came to Buzot no one knows; for when his body was found
it lay beside that of Pétion in a wheat-field, half-eaten by wolves.
In unconscious irony the peasants have since called the field the _champ
des émigrés_.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Appel à l’impartiale postérité. Par la citoyenne Roland, femme du
ministre de l’intérieur. 1795.
Œuvres de J. M. Ph. Roland, femme de l’ex-ministre de l’intérieur.
1800. 3 vols.
Mémoires de Madame Roland, avec une notice sur sa vie. Par MM.
Berville et Barrière. 1820. 2 vols.
Mémoires de Madame Roland. Par Ravenel. 1840. 2 vols.
Lettres inédites de Mademoiselle Phlipon. Adressées aux demoiselles
Cannet. Par M. Auguste Breuil. 1841.
Mémoires particuliers de Madame Roland. Par M. François Barrière.
1855. 1 vol.
Mémoires de Madame Roland, écrits durant sa captivité. Par M. P.
Faugère. 1864. 2 vols.
Mémoires de Madame Roland. Par C. A. Dauban.
Lettres de Madame Roland (Mademoiselle Phlipon) aux demoiselles
Cannet. Par C. A. Dauban. 1867. 2 vols.
Étude sur Madame Roland et son temps, suivie des lettres de Madame
Roland à Buzot. Par C. A. Dauban. 1864.
Lettres autographes adressées à Bancal des Issarts. Publiées par
Henriette des Issarts et précédées d’une introduction par
Sainte-Beuve. 1836.
Papiers de M. et Madame Roland, Nouvelles acquisitions françaises,
Bibliothèque Nationale. 4 vols. In this collection are over 250
unpublished letters of Madame Roland, a large number by Roland, a
voluminous academic and political correspondence, many
communications to the academies, the documents for establishing
the genealogy of the Roland family, and many other papers.
Manuscript contributed to the Academy of Lyons by Roland. Now in the
library of the Academy at Lyons.
Published Reports of the Academy of Lyons. 1785–1790.
Lettres écrites de Suisse, d’Italie, de Sicile, et de Malte. Par M. ...
à Mademoiselle ... à Paris, en 1776, 1777 et 1778. 1782. 6 vols.
Dictionnaires des Manufactures des Arts et des Métiers in the
Encyclopédie Méthodique. 4 vols. By Roland.
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Tableau de Paris. Par Mercier. 1783–1789.
Le Nouveau Paris. Par Mercier. 6 vols. 1795.
Paris tel qu’il était avant la Révolution. Par M. Thiéry. An IV.
État ou Tableau de la ville de Paris. Par de Jéze. 1761.
Dictionnaire historique de la ville de Paris et de ses environs. Par
Hurtant et Magry. 1779.
Tableaux des Mœurs. 1600–1880. Par Paul Lacombe. 1887.
L’an 1789. Par Hippolyte Gautier. 1888.
Paris en 1789. Par Albert Babeau. 1890.
La vie privée d’autrefois. Par A. Franklin. 17 vols. 1887–1895.
Mémoires inédits de M^{me} de Genlis. 1825. 10 vols.
Mémoires de M^{me} d’Épinay.
La femme au XVIII^{me} Siècle. Par Edmond et Jules de Goncourt. 1874.
2 vols.
L’Éducation des femmes par les femmes. Par Octave Gréard. 1887.
L’Art du XVIII^{me} Siècle. Par Edmond et Jules de Goncourt. 1874. 2
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Causeries du Lundi. Par Sainte-Beuve.
Études sur la littérature contemporaine. Par Edmond Scherer.
Extrait du journal de mes voyages. 1776. 2 vols. Par Pahin de la
Blancherie.
Nouvelles de la République des lettres et des arts. 8 vols. 1779–1787.
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Émile—Les Confessions—La Nouvelle Héloïse—Contrat social. Par J. J.
Rousseau.
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L’Esprit public au XVIII^{me} Siècle. Par Charles Aubertin. 1872.
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Les causes financières de la Révolution française. Par Charles Gomel.
1893.
De l’administration Provinciale et de la réforme de l’impôt. Par
Letrosne. 1779.
Le Paysan sous l’Ancien Régime. Par Ferdinand Brunetière. Revue des
Deux Mondes. Avril, 1883.
La Vie Rurale dans l’Ancienne France. Par Albert Babeau, 1883.
Procés verbaux de l’assemblée provinciale de Lyon. 1787.
Lettres de l’intendant du Lyonnais pendant 1780–1789.
Cahiers du Tiers État, de la noblesse, et du clergé de Lyon aux États
Généraux, 1789.
Almanach Royal de France.
Almanach National de France.
Dr. Rigby’s Letters from France in 1789.
Procés Verbaux. Assemblée Nationale, 1789–1791. 76 vols.
Letters written in France. H. M. Williams. 1796.
Histoire littéraire de la Convention Nationale. Par E. Maron. 1860.
L’eloquence parlementaire pendant la Révolution française. Par F. A.
Aulard. 1885–1886. 2 vols.
Catalogue d’une collection d’ouvrages historiques sur la Révolution
française. Par E. Gonon.
Les Origines de la France contemporaine. Par A. Taine. 1878–1885. 3
vols.
Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution
française. Par Madame la baronne de Staël. 1843.
Letters and Speeches of Thomas Paine during the French Revolution.
Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris. 1888. 2 vols.
Mémoires et correspondance (de Mallet du Pan) pour servir à l’histoire
de la Révolution française. 1851. 2 vols.
Histoire de la société française pendant la Révolution. Par Edmond et
Jules de Goncourt. 1854.
De l’autorité de Rabelais dans la révolution présente et dans la
constitution civile du clergé. Par Pierre Louis Ginguené. 1791.
La démagogie en 1793 à Paris. Charles Aimé Dauban. 1868.
Souvenirs sur les deux premières assemblées. Par E. Dumont.
Mémoires sur la Révolution. Par D. J. Garat. 1795.
J. P. Brissot député du département d’Eure et Loire à ses commettans,
sur la situation de la Convention Nationale, sur l’influence des
anarchistes, et les maux qu’elle a causés, sur la nécessité
d’anéantir cette influence pour sauver la République. 1794.
Histoire Musée de la République française depuis l’Assemblée des
notables jusqu’à l’empire. Avec les estampes, médailles,
caricatures, portraits historiques et autographes remarquables du
temps. Par Jean Challamel. 2 vols. 1842.
La société des Jacobins, Recueil de documents pour l’histoire du club
des Jacobins de Paris. Par. F. A. Aulard. 1889–1895. 5 vols.
Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris pendant la Terreur. Par Edmond Biré.
1884.
Légendes révolutionnaires. Par Edmond Biré. 1893.
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comte Albert Beugnot. 1868. 2 vols.
Englishmen in the French Revolution, 1789–1795. By John G. Alger.
1889.
Glimpses of the French Revolution. By John G. Alger. 1894.
Le culte de la Raison et le culte de l’Être Suprême. Par F. A. Aulard.
1892.
Études et leçons sur la Révolution française. Par F. A. Aulard.
Dumouriez. Vie et Mémoires. 1822. 4 vols.
Mémoires inédits de Pétion et Mémoires de Buzot et de Barbaroux. Par
C. A. Dauban. 1866.
Charlotte de Corday et les Girondins. Par Charles Vatel. 1864–1872.
Histoire de la faction de la Gironde. Par Camille Desmoulins.
Les Girondins, leur vie privée, leur vie publique, leur proscription
et leur mort. Joseph Guadet. 2 vols. 1861.
Recherches historiques sur les Girondins. Par Charles Vatel. 2 vols.
Histoire des Girondins et des Massacres de Septembre. A. de Granier de
Cassagnac. 1860. 2 vols.
Protestation contre le livre intitulé Histoire des Girondins et des
Massacres de Septembre. Par Joseph Guadet. 1860.
La Légende des Girondins. Par E. Biré. 1881.
Histoire des Girondins. Par A. de Lamartine. 1847. 8 vols.
La Grande Encyclopédie. Vol. 18. Les Girondins. Par H. Monin.
Les ministres de la République Française. Roland et Madame Roland. Par
le Baron de Girardot. 1860.
Histoire de Lyon et des anciennes provinces du Lyonnais. Par Eug.
Fabrier. 1846. 2 vols.
Almanach de la ville de Lyon et des provinces du Lyonnais. Par Forez
et Beaujolais. 1784–86.
Histoire de Villefranche. Par Hippolyte Laplatte.
Bibliographie Historique de la ville de Lyon. Par Gonon. 1845.
Histoire de Lyon. Par Ballydier.
Histoire du commerce de l’industrie des fabriques de Lyon. Par C.
Beaulieu. 1838.
Histoire de la ville de Lyon pendant la Révolution. Par l’Abbe Guillou
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Les premières années de la Révolution à Lyon. Par Maurice Wahl. 1894.
NEWSPAPERS
Courrier de Lyon.
Le Patriote Français.
Moniteur Universel.
Le Gardien de la Constitution.
L’Ami du Peuple.
Journal de la République Française.
La Sentinelle.
Mercure de France.
Le Père Duchèsne.
POLITICAL PAMPHLETS
Correspondance du ministre de l’intérieur Roland avec le Général
Lafayette.
Lettre au Roi.
Lettre de Junius à Roland.
Lettre à M. Roland.
Lettres sur le ministère de Roland.
Rapport relatif au 20 Juin.
Adresse au peuple français.
Ni Marat ni Roland. Opinion d’Anarcharsis Cloots. 1792.
Réponses au Prussien Cloots par Roland, Kersaint, Guadet, et Brissot.
L’ex-ministre de l’intérieur au président de la Convention Nationale.
Observations de l’ex-ministre Roland sur le rapport fait contre lui
par le député Brival.
Lettres et pièces intéressantes pour servir à l’histoire des ministres
de Roland, de Servan et de Clavière.
Conversations et correspondance de M. Champy avec M. Roland.
À M. Roland de la Platière sur sa “Lettre au Roi,” 17 Juillet, 1792.
Almanach des Bizarreries Humaines. Par J. C. Bailleul. 1889.
INDEX
Abbaye, Madame Roland imprisoned in the, 261 _et seq._
Antoine, 145.
Assembly, National, see National Assembly.
Barbaroux, and the Rolands, their plans, 202–205, 206;
his fate, 309–311.
Beaumarchais, his _Figaro_ first given, 85;
quoted, 121.
Beugnot, Comte, his words concerning Madame Roland in prison, 296, 299.
Buzot, François-Nicolas-Léonard, at the home of the Rolands, 145;
Madame Roland’s passion for, 224, 225;
his early career, 226, 227;
attracts Madame Roland, 227;
his nature, 228;
correspondence with Madame Roland, 228, 230;
his wife not his equal, 227, 230;
his personal attractions, 231, 232;
his love for Madame Roland, 230, 234, 242–244;
his relations toward M. Roland, 244;
his struggle against the Mountain party, 247–249;
his opinion of Danton and Robespierre, 247, 249;
in harmony with M. Roland, 249;
his efforts to prove his patriotism, 250;
could not approve the Terrorists, 250, 251;
his relations with the Rolands well understood, 251;
characterized by Marat as _frère tranquille_, 251;
his words on the Republic, 255–257;
flees from Paris to Evreux, 262, 263;
Madame Roland’s letters to, from prison, 274–280;
his last days and death, 309–311.
Cannet, Henriette, offers to take Madame Roland’s place in prison, 292.
Cannet, Sophie, Manon Phlipon’s friendship with, 12–15.
Cercle Social, the, patriotic club, 142, 143.
Chalier, sent home to Lyons by Roland “with honors,” 211.
Champagneux, M., starts the _Courrier de Lyon_, 128;
in constant correspondence with the Rolands, 155;
arrested, 284.
Champagneux, brother of above, husband of Eudora Roland, 98, 308.
Champ-de-Mars, the massacre of, 162, 163.
Chauveau-Lagarde, ambitious to defend Madame Roland in her trial, 299.
Clavière, at the home of the Rolands, 145–147.
Commune, the, 208;
and M. Roland, 212, 213;
vigorous action of, 212.
Conciergerie, Madame Roland imprisoned in the, 292, 295, 296.
Condorcet, his pamphlet on “Whether a king is necessary to the
conservation of energy,” 159.
Constitution, the, formed by the Assembly and accepted by Louis XVI.,
168, 169.
Constitutionalist party, the, 174.
Convention, National, see National Assembly.
Conversation, French, character of, 147, 148.
Creuzé-la-Touche, shelters Eudora Roland, 306.
Dames de la Congrégation de Notre Dame, Convent, Manon Phlipon at, 9
_et seq._;
instruction given at, 10.
Danton, at the head of the insurrectionary element, 205, 206, 214;
Madame Roland’s antipathy to, 214–217;
the only mediator between the Gironde and the Mountain parties, 215;
his brutality, 217, 222;
“the one man who could support the Gironde, save the King and his
country,” 223;
his words concerning Madame Roland, 245;
Buzot’s opinion of, 247, 249.
Desmoulins, Camille, his inability to understand the general admiration
for Madame Roland, 151, 152, 206.
Dumas, Mathieu, his words on the publication of Roland’s letter to the
King, 198.
Dumont, his comment on Madame Roland’s persuading her husband to
publish his letter to the King, 198.
Dumouriez, General, Madame Roland’s distrust of, 181, 182;
Roland made overtures to, 223.
_Encyclopédie méthodique_, M. Roland’s contributions to, 76, 77.
Faugère, M. P., and the Roland Memoirs, 308, 309.
Feuillants, the, 176, 189, 201.
Financial errors of the French government, 113–117, 121, 122.
France, financial errors of the government, 113–117, 121, 122.
Garaud, 146.
Garran, 145.
Genlis, Madame de, her lack of knowledge at twelve, 10.
Gironde, the party of the, character and principles of, 171–176;
Madame de Staël’s words concerning, 173;
its attitude toward the Mountain and constitutionalist parties,
174–176;
the Girondin ministry, 178;
join the Jacobins, 205;
struggle between the Mountain party and, 255;
expulsion and trial of twenty-two members of, 259;
twenty-one executed, 290.
Gluck, his _Danaïdes_ first given, 85.
Grandpré, his assistance to Madame Roland in prison, 269, 270.
Grégoire, 146.
Greuze, Manon Phlipon’s visit to, 57, 58.
Guillon de Montléon, Abbé, his words concerning M. Roland, 91;
his words concerning Madame Roland, 150, 151.
Hannaches, Mademoiselle d’, and Manon Phlipon, 19, 20.
Heinsius, his portrait of Madame Roland, 152, 153.
Insurrection, party of the, 205–207.
Jacobins, too conservative for the Rolands, 143;
the Girondins join, 205.
Lafayette, Marquis de, 157, 200.
Lanthenas, and the Rolands, 127, 128, 216, 233, 237.
Le Clos, the country home of M. and Madame Roland, 94 _et seq._;
amusements at, 101;
Madame Roland’s life at, 99–111.
Louis Noailles, 145.
Louise, Madame, sister of Louis XVI., did not know her alphabet at
twelve, 10.
Louis XVI., appears with Marie Antoinette in the National Assembly,
129, 130;
his flight and return, 156–159;
“worse than a stick in a wheel,” 158;
efforts to secure a trial of, 161, 162;
accepts the constitution, 168;
names a cabinet to suit the Girondins, 178;
Madame Roland doubts the good faith of, 183;
hesitates to sign measure to raise army for protection of Paris
against foreign attack, 189;
Roland’s letter to, concerning the public perils, 190–199;
his words to Roland concerning the letter, 197;
the red cap placed on his head in the riot of the 20th of June, 200.
Lyons, M. and Madame Roland at, 91–93;
M. Roland’s manuscripts in the archives of the Academy of, 92, 93;
disorders in, 134–137;
rumors of a Prussian and Austrian invasion, 137;
the Rolands detested in, 138;
its devotion to the aristocracy, 165.
Mandat, murdered, 208.
Marat, joins the Commune, 212;
his character, 218;
and M. Roland, 218, 219;
attacks M. and Madame Roland in his journal, 222, 223;
his words concerning Buzot, 251;
his characterization of Madame Roland, 252.
Marie Antoinette, her appearance in the National Assembly, 129, 130;
her flight, 156.
Mesmer-study, 85.
Mirabeau, Madame Roland’s words concerning, 290.
Morris, Gouverneur, quoted, 163;
his words concerning the attitude of affairs in Paris, 177.
Mountain party, the, its character, 174–176;
M. Roland’s struggle against, 247;
Buzot’s struggle against, 247–249;
struggle of the Gironde party with, 255.
National Assembly, the, 124;
King and Marie Antoinette appear in, 129, 130;
Madame Roland’s dissatisfaction with, 129–131, 138–142;
M. Roland a deputy to, 138;
measure to raise army to protect Paris against attack of foreigners,
voted by, 189;
Roland’s letter to the King presented to the, 197–199;
Madame Roland appears before the Convention, 253;
struggle in, between the Mountain and Gironde parties, 255;
expulsion and trial of members of the Gironde, 259;
Madame Roland’s letter to, from prison, 269, 270.
Noailles, Louis, 145.
Notre Dame des Marais, the Gothic church at Villefranche, 88.
_Nouvelle Héloïse_, Rousseau’s, its influence on Manon Phlipon, 32–35.
Paine, Thomas, at the home of the Rolands, 146;
forms a republican society in Paris, 159.
Paris, gold and silver smiths in the western end of, 1;
measure to guard the city against attack of foreigners, 188 _et
seq._, 201;
life in, during the Revolution, 293, 294.
Pétion, at the home of the Rolands, 145;
a Girondin, 171;
counsels calm, 205, 208;
his fate, 309–311.
Phlipon, Madame, mother of Manon Phlipon, her character, 3;
her control over her daughter, 5;
her death, 31.
Phlipon, Marie-Jeanne, called Manon, afterwards Madame Roland, her
parents, 2–6;
her birth, 5;
her character as a child, 5, 6;
early reading and education, 6 _et seq._;
effect of _Plutarch’s Lives_ on, 7, 8;
her religions zeal, 9;
enters the convent, Dames de la Congrégation de Notre Dame, 9, 10;
her life and work there, 10–14;
her friendship with Sophie Cannet, 12–15;
her piety, 11, 12;
her letters to Sophie Cannet, 14, 15;
her secret resolve to return to convent life, 15;
her dislike for the vanities of life, 16, 17, 20, 21;
her love of nature, 17;
Meudon her favorite spot, 17;
her visit to Madame de Boismorel, 18, 19;
her early contempt for the social conditions, 19–21;
a secretary to Mademoiselle d’Hannaches, 20;
makes an eight-day visit to Versailles, 21;
her description of her impressions there, 22;
her attitude toward the King and government at twenty years of age,
22–24;
prefers a republic, 22, 23;
her reading after leaving the convent, 24–26;
her _cahiers_, 26;
deeply interested in philosophy, 26, 27;
studies Christian dogma severely and rationally, 27, 28;
her mental and spiritual condition, 28–30;
the influence of Rousseau’s _Nouvelle Héloïse_ on, 31–35;
her words concerning Rousseau and his works, 34, 35;
her notions of a future husband, 35–38;
applicants for her hand, 35, 36;
her love affair with Pahin de la Blancherie, 38–44;
her _Loisirs_, 40, 58;
her interest in Sainte-Lettre, 44, 45;
refuses M. de Sévelinges, 46, 47;
her interest in Roland de la Platière, 45, 52, 53;
her interest in M. Pittet, 54;
the dulness of her life, 54;
her visit to Rousseau, 55, 56;
her visit to Greuze, 57, 58;
her relations with her father, 58, 59;
conceals from Sophie Cannet her feeling for Roland de la Platière,
60;
Platonic arrangement with Roland, 61;
correspondence between Roland and, 61–69;
difficulty with her father in her betrothal to M. Roland, 67–69;
leaves her father, and retires to the convent, 69, 70;
marries Roland, 71;
her account in her Memoirs of the courtship and marriage, 71, 72.
See Roland, Madame.
Phlipon, Pierre Gatien, his engraving shop, 2, 3;
his character, 3, 4;
his home life and family, 4, 5;
displeased with Pahin de la Blancherie, 40;
his relations toward his daughter, 58, 59;
grows dissipated, 68;
his attitude toward M. Roland, 68, 69;
death, 140.
Pittet, M., Manon Phlipon’s interest in, 54.
_Plutarch’s Lives_, effect of, on Manon Phlipon, 7, 8.
Rebecqui, 202.
Republic, excitement at the name of, 158–160;
not welcomed by the people, 161.
_Republican_, the, journal, 159, 160.
Robespierre, at home of the Rolands, 145;
his words concerning a Republic, 160, 161;
criminal accuser, 171;
in open rupture with the Girondins, 189;
joins the Commune, 212, 221, 222;
Buzot’s opinion of, 247, 249.
Revolution, the French, the Rolands welcomed, 112 _et seq._;
preliminary outbreaks of, 117–120;
the word _révolution_ long used in private, 118;
call for States-General in 1788, 123;
the fall of the Bastille, 124;
disorders in Lyons, 134–137;
rumors of a Prussian and Russian invasion, 137;
the Revolutionary temper, 149;
the flight and return of the king, 156–159;
the massacre of the Champ-de-Mars, 162, 163;
disorders and riots everywhere, 183, 184;
the riot of the 20th of June, 199, 200;
the insurrectionary element organizing, 206, 207;
the Commune, 208, 212, 213;
the September massacres, 219–222;
the execution of the twenty-one Girondins, 290;
the daily life of Parisians during, 293, 294.
Roland, Eudora, daughter of Madame Roland, born, 75;
her husband Champagneux receives “conscience money,” 98;
her education by her mother, 102;
her life, 305–309;
her resentment toward her mother and admiration for her father, 308.
Roland, the _chanoine_, brother of M. Roland, 89, 140.
Roland, Madame, first year of married life, 73–75;
at Amiens, 75;
her child, 75;
helping her husband on the _Encyclopédie_, 77;
absorbed in her domestic life, 78;
her efforts in Paris to secure a title for her husband, 79–84;
secures for her husband the position of inspector at Lyons, 84;
her correspondence with her husband while in Paris, 85, 86;
interest in Mesmerism, 85;
returns to Amiens, 85, 86;
trip to England, 86;
life at Villefranche-sur-Saône, 87 _et seq._;
her relations toward M. Roland’s mother and brother, 89, 90;
in correspondence with Bosc, 90;
not pleased with and not popular at Villefranche, 90, 91;
not pleased with Lyons, 92;
home life at Le Clos, 94, 99–111;
education of her daughter, 102;
her letters on Rousseau’s _Julie_ and the education of children,
103–108;
her devotion to her husband unabated during life at Le Clos, 108,
109;
her trip to Switzerland, 109, 110;
a sympathetic witness of preliminary outbreaks of the Revolution,
112, 117 _et seq._;
cramped for money after marriage, 120;
her idea of “complete regeneration” of social affairs, 124, 125;
her political convictions and plan of action, 125–133;
her influence over her husband and friends, 126–129;
her words after the fall of the Bastille, 129;
concerning the King’s and Marie Antoinette’s appearance in the
National Assembly, 129, 130;
displeased with the constitution, 130;
her firmness, 132;
detested in Lyons, 138;
her dissatisfaction with the National Assembly, 129–131, 138–142;
goes up to Paris, 138, 140;
her irritation at the aristocrats, 142;
gives up going to theatres, and goes to political clubs, 142, 143;
her words concerning Jacobins, 143;
her esteem for Brissot, 145;
her comments on the discussions of patriots that gathered at her
house, 146–148;
her words on the necessity of uniting efforts, 148, 149;
her supremacy over group of patriots around her, 149, 150;
her inflexibility, 150;
her personal charms, 150–152;
the portraits of, 152–154;
her joy at the flight of the King, 156, 157;
her words on the return of the King, 158;
endeavors to secure a trial of the King, 161, 162;
she loses heart, and returns from Paris to Villefranche, 164;
her disgust with Lyons, 165;
her disappointment in her child, 166;
decides to return to Paris, 166, 167;
her ideal of government unsatisfied, 169, 170;
her supreme confidence in herself, 170;
considered herself better than her husband, 170;
her feeling against the old régime, 170;
her attitude on her return to Paris, 176, 177;
her life and habits after her husband entered the Ministry of the
Interior, 179, 180;
her influence in choosing persons for positions in the department,
180, 181;
her mistrust of General Dumouriez and others, 181, 182;
doubts the good faith of the King, 183;
her measures to meet perils threatening Paris, 188 _et seq._;
she writes letter to the King concerning the perils, 190;
persuades her husband to publish the letter to the King, 197, 198;
meets Barbaroux, 201, 202;
her plan carried, 210;
her antipathy to Danton, 214–217;
her words concerning Robespierre, Marat, and Danton, 221, 222;
her disgust at the brutal turn of affairs in the Revolution, 222;
attacked by Marat, 222, 223;
would not compromise with the insurrectionary force, 223, 225;
her passion for Buzot, 224, 225, 227–244;
her first interest in Buzot, 227, 228;
her correspondence with Buzot, 228–230;
her disillusionment in regard to the Revolution, 230, 231;
her hope in Buzot, 231;
attracted by Buzot’s personal charms, 231, 232;
the waning of her affection for her husband and of her friendship
with Bosc, Lanthenas, and Bancal, 233;
her notions of duty and devotion, 234;
her relations with various friends during her life, 235–241;
influenced by the “new ideas” of love and marriage, she accepts the
love of Buzot, 242, 243;
she tells her husband of her love for Buzot, 243;
her relations to her husband thereafter, 244;
Danton’s words concerning, 245;
holds her place in the struggle, 251;
abused by Marat, 252;
her position compared with that of Marie Antoinette, 252;
appears before the Convention, 253;
danger to her life, 253, 254;
attempts to leave Paris, but falls ill, 258;
her vain endeavor to reach the Convention to plead her husband’s
cause, 259–261;
put under arrest, 261, 262;
her imprisonment in the Abbaye and Sainte Pélagie, 264, 265;
her fortitude in prison, 266, 267;
made a prominent actor in the public tragedy by her imprisonment,
267, 268;
her letters from prison to the Convention and to the ministers, 269,
270;
her conversation with a committee visiting her prison, 270, 271;
defending herself against accusations and calumnies, 271–273;
her “Last Thoughts,” 273, 284;
doubt as to the object of her passion alluded to in her last letters,
274;
her letters to Buzot from prison, 274–280;
would ultimately have left Roland for Buzot, 280;
her life and occupations in prison, 280–283;
her _Historical Notes_ written at the Abbaye prison, 283, 284;
her Memoirs and other writings, 284–289;
rapidity and ease with which she wrote, 285;
Rousseau’s _Confessions_ the model of her Memoirs, 287, 288;
her anguish and despair, 289, 290;
her words concerning Mirabeau, 290;
she resolves to kill herself, 291;
conveyed to the Conciergerie, 292;
refuses assistance from her friends, 292;
had hoped, during her imprisonment, for a popular uprising, 292, 293;
her life in the Conciergerie, 295, 296;
her second examination, 296–298;
her defence, 298;
her trial, 299, 300;
sentenced to death, 301;
her words to Chauveau-Lagarde, refusing his assistance as counsel,
299;
her trip to the guillotine, and death, 301, 302.
See Phlipon, Marie-Jeanne.
Roland de la Platière, M., 45;
his position and career, 47–51;
his character and disposition, 51, 52;
first acquaintance with Manon Phlipon, 53;
professes love for Manon Phlipon, 60;
Platonic arrangement with Manon, 61;
correspondence between Manon and, 61–69;
annoyances and obstacles in his love affair with Manon, 67–70;
marries Manon, 71;
the first year after his marriage, 73, 74;
his contribution to the _Encyclopédie méthodique_, 76, 77;
ambitious to obtain a title, 78, 79;
the general prejudice against, 81, 82;
his wife obtains for him the position of inspector of commerce at
Lyons, 84;
his letters to his wife while she was in Paris, 85, 86;
trip to England, 86;
his life at Villefranche-sur-Saône, 87 _et seq._;
his mother and brother, 88–90;
disliked in the Academy of Villefranche, 91;
the Abbé Guillon’s words concerning, 91;
his manuscripts in the archives of the Academy of Lyons, 92, 93;
home life at Le Clos, 94 _et seq._;
sympathized with preliminary outbreaks of the Revolution, 112 _et
seq._;
appreciated the financial errors of the French government, 113–116;
labors against the abuses of the realm, 120;
poverty after marriage, 120;
his wife’s influence over, 126, 127;
becomes embroiled in Lyons, 134–138;
detested in Lyons, 138;
goes to Paris as deputy to the National Assembly, 138;
his words concerning Jacobins, 143;
hard at work in Paris, 143, 144;
his zealous spirit, 144;
gathering of patriots at home of, 145–147;
pronounces the King “worse than a stick in a wheel,” 158;
his pamphlet on the “Advantages of the flight of the king, etc.,”
159;
his words on the riot in the Champ-de-Mars, 162, 163;
appointed to head of Department of Interior on Girondin ministry,
177–179;
pictured by the _Mercure_ as one of the principal agitators of Lyons,
178;
his life and duties as minister, 179, 180;
his formulas in reply to requests of departments that he suppress
disorders, 185–187;
his conduct exasperating, 188;
his letter to the King concerning the perils threatening Paris,
190–196;
discharged from the ministry, 197;
presents his letter to the Assembly, 197–199;
meets and plans with Barbaroux, 201–205;
everywhere upheld the Jacobin party, 211;
his great energy, 212;
hindered in activity by the Commune, 212–214;
at cross-purposes with Danton, 217;
antagonized Marat, 218, 219;
protests against the September massacres, 219–221;
orders Santerre to quell disorder, 221;
attacked by Marat, 222;
makes overtures to Dumouriez, 223;
Madame Roland informs him of her love for Buzot, 243;
resigns from the ministry, 245;
withdraws his resignation, 246;
his struggle against the Mountain party, 247;
his retirement, 254, 255;
neglected by the Convention, 254, 255, 258;
arrested, 259;
in concealment, 276;
his last days and death, 303–305.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, the prophet of the sentimental generation, 32;
his _Nouvelle Héloïse_ and its influence on Manon Phlipon, 32–35;
his _Émile_, 33, 34;
Manon Phlipon’s visit to, 55, 56;
his _Social Contract_, 125;
his _Confessions_ the model of Madame Roland’s Memoirs, 287, 288.
Sainte-Lettre, M. de, and Manon Phlipon, 44, 45.
Sainte Pélagie, the prison of, 281, 282.
Sanson, the headsman, and Madame Roland, 302.
Santerre, 206, 221.
Servan, in the ministry with Roland, 188, 189;
discharged from the ministry, 197.
Sévelinges, M. de, Manon Phlipon declines hand of, 46, 47.
Staël, Madame de, her words concerning Girondins, 173, 174.
Taxes, heavy previous to the Revolution, 113–116, 121, 122.
Tissot, his words concerning Madame Roland, 151.
Vergniaud, 201.
Villefranche-sur-Saône, 87 _et seq._;
the Church Notre Dame des Marais, at, 88;
disorders in the district of, 184.
Volfius, 145.
Williams, Miss, Bancal’s love for, 233, 241.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
4. Superscripts are denoted by a caret before a single superscript
character or a series of superscripted characters enclosed in
curly braces, e.g. M^r. or M^{ister}.