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Makers of History
Madame Roland
BY
JOHN S. C. ABBOTT
WITH ENGRAVINGS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1904
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand
eight hundred and fifty, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District
of New York.
Copyright, 1878, by JANE W. ABBOTT.
[Illustration: MADAME ROLAND.]
PREFACE.
The history of Madame Roland embraces the most interesting events of
the French Revolution, that most instructive tragedy which time has
yet enacted. There is, perhaps, contained in the memoirs of no other
woman so much to invigorate the mind with the desire for high
intellectual culture, and so much to animate the spirit heroically to
meet all the ills of this eventful life. Notwithstanding her
experience of the heaviest temporal calamities, she found, in the
opulence of her own intellectual treasures, an unfailing resource.
These inward joys peopled her solitude with society, and dispelled
even from the dungeon its gloom. I know not where to look for a career
more full of suggestive thought.
CONTENTS.
Chapter Page
I. CHILDHOOD 13
II. YOUTH 33
III. MAIDENHOOD 57
IV. MARRIAGE 80
V. THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY 105
VI. THE MINISTRY OF M. ROLAND 130
VII. MADAME ROLAND AND THE JACOBINS 155
VIII. LAST STRUGGLE OF THE GIRONDISTS 178
IX. ARREST OF MADAME ROLAND 201
X. FATE OF THE GIRONDISTS 224
XI. PRISON LIFE 252
XII. TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF MADAME ROLAND 277
ENGRAVINGS.
Page
MADAME ROLAND _Frontispiece._
THE VISIT 40
LA PLATIÈRE 97
ROBESPIERRE 116
THE LIBRARY 145
EXECUTION OF THE GIRONDISTS 247
MADAME ROLAND IN PRISON 259
EXECUTION OF MADAME ROLAND 301
MADAME ROLAND
CHAPTER I.
CHILDHOOD.
1754-1767
Characters developed by the French Revolution.--Madame Roland.--Gratien
Phlippon.--His repinings at his lot.--Views of Phlippon.--His hostility
to the Church.--Origin of the French Revolution.--Character of Madame
Phlippon.--Birth of Jane Maria.--Adored by her parents.--Discontent
of Phlippon.--His complainings to his child.--Early traits of
character.--Love of books.--Jane's thirst for reading.--Her
love of flowers.--Jane's personal appearance.--Thirst for
knowledge.--Intellectual gifts.--A walk on the Boulevards.--Phlippon's
talk to his child.--Youthful dreams.--Influence of Jane's parents
over her.--Education in convents.--Jane sent to a convent.--Parting
with her mother.--Madame Roland's account of her first night in
the convent.--Jane's books of study.--Her proficiency in music and
drawing.--Scenes in the convent.--Impressions made by them.--Poetic
enthusiasms.--Taking the veil.--Taking the black veil.--Effect upon
Jane.--Lofty aspirations.--Remark of Napoleon.--Jane's contempt of
ease and luxury.--Her self-denial.
Many characters of unusual grandeur were developed by the French
Revolution. Among them all, there are few more illustrious, or more
worthy of notice, than that of Madame Roland. The eventful story of
her life contains much to inspire the mind with admiration and with
enthusiasm, and to stimulate one to live worthily of those
capabilities with which every human heart is endowed. No person can
read the record of her lofty spirit and of her heroic acts without a
higher appreciation of woman's power, and of the mighty influence one
may wield, who combines the charms of a noble and highly-cultivated
mind with the fascinations of female delicacy and loveliness. To
understand the secret of the almost miraculous influence she exerted,
it is necessary to trace her career, with some degree of minuteness,
from the cradle to the hour of her sublime and heroic death.
In the year 1754, there was living, in an obscure workshop in Paris,
on the crowded Quai des Orfevres, an engraver by the name of Gratien
Phlippon. He had married a very beautiful woman, whose placid
temperament and cheerful content contrasted strikingly with the
restlessness and ceaseless repinings of her husband. The comfortable
yet humble apartments of the engraver were over the shop where he
plied his daily toil. He was much dissatisfied with his lowly
condition in life, and that his family, in the enjoyment of frugal
competence alone, were debarred from those luxuries which were so
profusely showered upon others. Bitterly and unceasingly he murmured
that his lot had been cast in the ranks of obscurity and of unsparing
labor, while others, by a more fortunate, although no better merited
destiny, were born to ease and affluence, and honor and luxury. This
thought of the unjust inequality in man's condition, which soon broke
forth with all the volcanic energy of the French Revolution, already
began to ferment in the bosoms of the laboring classes, and no one
pondered these wide diversities with a more restless spirit, or
murmured more loudly and more incessantly than Phlippon. When the
day's toil was ended, he loved to gather around him associates whose
feelings harmonized with his own, and to descant upon their own
grievous oppression and upon the arrogance of aristocratic greatness.
With an eloquence which often deeply moved his sympathizing auditory,
and fanned to greater intensity the fires which were consuming his own
heart, he contrasted their doom of sleepless labor and of comparative
penury with the brilliance of the courtly throng, living in idle
luxury, and squandering millions in the amusements at Versailles, and
sweeping in charioted splendor through the Champs Elysée.
Phlippon was a philosopher, not a Christian. Submission was a virtue
he had never learned, and never wished to learn. Christianity, as he
saw it developed before him only in the powerful enginery of the Roman
Catholic Church, was, in his view, but a formidable barrier against
the liberty and the elevation of the people--a bulwark, bristling with
superstition and bayonets, behind which nobles and kings were securely
intrenched. He consequently became as hostile to the doctrines of the
Church as he was to the institutions of the state. The monarch was,
in his eye, a tyrant, and God a delusion. The enfranchisement of the
people, in his judgment, required the overthrow of both the earthly
and the celestial monarch. In these ideas, agitating the heart of
Phlippon, behold the origin of the French Revolution. They were
diffused in pamphlets and daily papers in theaters and _cafés_. They
were urged by workmen in their shops, by students in their closets.
They became the inspiring spirit of science in encyclopedias and
reviews, and formed the chorus in all the songs of revelry and
libertinism. These sentiments spread from heart to heart, through
Paris, through the provinces, till France rose like a demon in its
wrath, and the very globe trembled beneath its gigantic and indignant
tread.
Madame Phlippon was just the reverse of her husband. She was a woman
in whom faith, and trust, and submission predominated. She surrendered
her will, without questioning, to all the teachings of the Church of
Rome. She was placid, contented, and cheerful, and, though uninquiring
in her devotion, undoubtedly sincere in her piety. In every event of
life she recognized the overruling hand of Providence, and feeling
that the comparatively humble lot assigned her was in accordance with
the will of God, she indulged in no repinings, and envied not the more
brilliant destiny of lords and ladies. An industrious housewife, she
hummed the hymns of contentment and peace from morning till evening.
In the cheerful performance of her daily toil, she was ever pouring
the balm of her peaceful spirit upon the restless heart of her spouse.
Phlippon loved his wife, and often felt the superiority of her
Christian temperament.
Of eight children born to these parents, one only, Jeanne Manon, or
_Jane Mary_, survived the hour of birth. Her father first received her
to his arms in 1754, and she became the object of his painful and most
passionate adoration. Her mother pressed the coveted treasure to her
bosom with maternal love, more calm, and deep, and enduring. And now
Jane became the central star in this domestic system. Both parents
lived in her and for her. She was their earthly all. The mother wished
to train her for the Church and for heaven, that she might become an
angel and dwell by the throne of God. These bright hopes gilded a
prayerful mother's hours of toil and care. The father bitterly
repined. Why should his bright and beautiful child--who even in these
her infantile years was giving indication of the most brilliant
intellect--why should she be doomed to a life of obscurity and toil,
while the garden of the Tuileries and the Elysian Fields were thronged
with children, neither so beautiful nor so intelligent, who were
reveling in boundless wealth, and living in a world of luxury and
splendor which, to Phlippon's imagination, seemed more alluring than
any idea he could form of heaven? These thoughts were a consuming
fire in the bosom of the ambitious father. They burned with
inextinguishable flame.
The fond parent made the sprightly and fascinating child his daily
companion. He led her by the hand, and confided to her infantile
spirit all his thoughts, his illusions, his day-dreams. To her
listening ear he told the story of the arrogance of nobles, of the
pride of kings, and of the oppression by which he deemed himself
unjustly doomed to a life of penury and toil. The light-hearted child
was often weary of these complainings, and turned for relief to the
placidity and cheerfulness of her mother's mind. Here she found
repose--a soothing, calm, and holy submission. Still the gloom of her
father's spirit cast a pensive shade over her own feelings, and
infused a tone of melancholy and an air of unnatural reflection into
her character. By nature, Jane was endowed with a soul of unusual
delicacy. From early childhood, all that is beautiful or sublime in
nature, in literature, in character, had charms to rivet her entranced
attention. She loved to sit alone at her chamber window in the evening
of a summer's day, to gaze upon the gorgeous hues of sunset. As her
imagination roved through those portals of a brighter world, which
seemed thus, through far-reaching vistas of glory, to be opened to
her, she peopled the sun-lit expanse with the creations of her own
fancy, and often wept in uncontrollable emotion through the influence
of these gathering thoughts. Books of impassioned poetry, and
descriptions of heroic character and achievements, were her especial
delight. Plutarch's Lives, that book which, more than any other,
appears to be the incentive of early genius, was hid beneath her
pillow, and read and re-read with tireless avidity. Those illustrious
heroes of antiquity became the companions of her solitude and of her
hourly thoughts. She adored them and loved them as her own most
intimate personal friends. Her character became insensibly molded to
their forms, and she was inspired with restless enthusiasm to imitate
their deeds. When but twelve years of age, her father found her, one
day, weeping that she was not born a Roman maiden. Little did she then
imagine that, by talent, by suffering, and by heroism, she was to
display a character the history of which would eclipse the proudest
narratives in Greek or Roman story.
Jane appears never to have known the frivolity and thoughtlessness of
childhood. Before she had entered the fourth year of her age she knew
how to read. From that time her thirst for reading was so great, that
her parents found no little difficulty in furnishing her with a
sufficient supply. She not only read with eagerness every book which
met her eye, but pursued this uninterrupted miscellaneous reading to
singular advantage, treasuring up all important facts in her retentive
memory. So entirely absorbed was she in her books, that the only
successful mode of withdrawing her from them was by offering her
flowers, of which she was passionately fond. Books and flowers
continued, through all the vicissitudes of her life, even till the
hour of her death, to afford her the most exquisite pleasure. She had
no playmates, and thought no more of play than did her father and
mother, who were her only and her constant companions. From infancy
she was accustomed to the thoughts and the emotions of mature minds.
In personal appearance she was, in earliest childhood and through
life, peculiarly interesting rather than beautiful. As mature years
perfected her features and her form, there was in the contour of her
graceful figure, and her intellectual countenance, that air of
thoughtfulness, of pensiveness, of glowing tenderness and delicacy,
which gave her a power of fascination over all hearts. She sought not
this power; she thought not of it; but an almost resistless attraction
and persuasion accompanied all her words and actions.
It was, perhaps, the absence of playmates, and the habitual converse
with mature minds, which, at so early an age, inspired Jane with that
insatiate thirst for knowledge which she ever manifested. Books were
her only resource in every unoccupied hour. From her walks with her
father, and her domestic employments with her mother, she turned to
her little library and to her chamber window, and lost herself in the
limitless realms of thought. It is often imagined that character is
the result of accident--that there is a native and inherent tendency,
which triumphs over circumstances, and works out its own results.
Without denying that there may be different intellectual gifts with
which the soul may be endowed as it comes from the hand of the
Creator, it surely is not difficult to perceive that the peculiar
training through which the childhood of Jane was conducted was
calculated to form the peculiar character which she developed.
In a bright summer's afternoon she might be seen sauntering along the
Boulevards, led by her father's hand, gazing upon that scene of gayety
with which the eye is never wearied. A gilded coach, drawn by the most
beautiful horses in the richest trappings, sweeps along the streets--a
gorgeous vision. Servants in showy livery, and out-riders proudly
mounted, invest the spectacle with a degree of grandeur, beneath which
the imagination of a child sinks exhausted. Phlippon takes his little
daughter in his arms to show her the sight, and, as she gazes in
infantile wonder and delight, the discontented father says, "Look at
that lord, and lady, and child, lolling so voluptuously in their
coach. They have no right there. Why must I and my child walk on this
hot pavement, while they repose on velvet cushions and revel in all
luxury? Oppressive laws compel me to pay a portion of my hard earnings
to support them in their pride and indolence. But a time will come
when the people will awake to the consciousness of their wrongs, and
their tyrants will tremble before them." He continues his walk in
moody silence, brooding over his sense of injustice. They return to
their home. Jane wishes that her father kept a carriage, and liveried
servants and out-riders. She thinks of politics, and of the tyranny of
kings and nobles, and of the unjust inequalities of man. She retires
to the solitude of her loved chamber window, and reads of Aristides
the Just, of Themistocles with his Spartan virtues, of Brutus, and of
the mother of the Gracchi. Greece and Rome rise before her in all
their ancient renown. She despises the frivolity of Paris, the
effeminacy of the moderns, and her youthful bosom throbs with the
desire of being noble in spirit and of achieving great exploits. Thus,
when other children of her age were playing with their dolls, she was
dreaming of the prostration of nobles and of the overthrow of
thrones--of liberty, and fraternity, and equality among mankind.
Strange dreams for a child, but still more strange in their
fulfillment.
The infidelity of her father and the piety of her mother contended,
like counter currents of the ocean, in her bosom. Her active intellect
and love of freedom sympathized with the speculations of the so-called
philosopher. Her amiable and affectionate disposition and her pensive
meditations led her to seek repose in the sublime conceptions and in
the soul-soothing consolations of the Christian. Her parents were
deeply interested in her education, and were desirous of giving her
every advantage for securing the highest attainments. The education of
young ladies, at that time, in France, was conducted almost
exclusively by nuns in convents. The idea of the silence and solitude
of the cloister inspired the highly-imaginative girl with a blaze of
enthusiasm. Fondly as she loved her home, she was impatient for the
hour to arrive when, with heroic self-sacrifice, she could withdraw
from the world and its pleasures, and devote her whole soul to
devotion, to meditation, and to study. Her mother's spirit of religion
was exerting a powerful influence over her, and one evening she fell
at her feet, and, bursting into tears, besought that she might be
sent to a convent to prepare to receive her first Christian communion
in a suitable frame of mind.
The convent of the sisterhood of the Congregation in Paris was
selected for Jane. In the review of her life which she subsequently
wrote while immured in the dungeons of the Conciergerie, she says, in
relation to this event, "While pressing my dear mother in my arms, at
the moment of parting with her for the first time in my life, I
thought my heart would have broken; but I was acting in obedience to
the voice of God, and I passed the threshold of the cloister,
tearfully offering up to him the greatest sacrifice I was capable of
making. This was on the 7th of May, 1765, when I was eleven years and
two months old. In the gloom of a prison, in the midst of political
storms which ravage my country, and sweep away all that is dear to me,
how shall I recall to my mind, and how describe the rapture and
tranquillity I enjoyed at this period of my life? What lively colors
can express the soft emotions of a young heart endued with tenderness
and sensibility, greedy of happiness, beginning to be alive to the
beauties of nature, and perceiving the Deity alone? The first night I
spent in the convent was a night of agitation. I was no longer under
the paternal roof. I was at a distance from that kind mother, who was
doubtless thinking of me with affectionate emotion. A dim light
diffused itself through the room in which I had been put to bed with
four children of my own age. I stole softly from my couch, and drew
near the window, the light of the moon enabling me to distinguish the
garden, which it overlooked. The deepest silence prevailed around, and
I listened to it, if I may use the expression, with a sort of respect.
Lofty trees cast their gigantic shadows along the ground, and promised
a secure asylum to peaceful meditation. I lifted up my eyes to the
heavens; they were unclouded and serene. I imagined that I felt the
presence of the Deity smiling upon my sacrifice, and already offering
me a reward in the consolatory hope of a celestial abode. Tears of
delight flowed down my cheeks. I repeated my vows with holy ecstasy,
and went to bed again to taste the slumber of God's chosen children."
Her thirst for knowledge was insatiate, and with untiring assiduity
she pursued her studies. Every hour of the day had its appropriate
employment, and time flew upon its swiftest wings. Every book which
fell in her way she eagerly perused, and treasured its knowledge or
its literary beauties in her memory. Heraldry and books of romance,
lives of the saints and fairy legends, biography, travels, history,
political philosophy, poetry, and treatises upon morals, were all read
and meditated upon by this young child. She had no taste for any
childish amusements; and in the hours of recreation, when the mirthful
girls around her were forgetting study and care in those games
appropriate to their years, she would walk alone in the garden,
admiring the flowers, and gazing upon the fleecy clouds in the sky. In
all the beauties of nature her eye ever recognized the hand of God,
and she ever took pleasure in those sublime thoughts of infinity and
eternity which must engross every noble mind. Her teachers had but
little to do. Whatever study she engaged in was pursued with such
spontaneous zeal, that success had crowned her efforts before others
had hardly made a beginning.
In music and drawing she made great proficiency. She was even more
fond of all that is beautiful and graceful in the accomplishments of a
highly-cultivated mind, than in those more solid studies which she
nevertheless pursued with so much energy and interest.
The scenes which she witnessed in the convent were peculiarly
calculated to produce an indelible impression upon a mind so
imaginative. The chapel for prayer, with its somber twilight and its
dimly-burning tapers; the dirges which the organ breathed upon the
trembling ear; the imposing pageant of prayer and praise, with the
blended costumes of monks and hooded nuns; the knell which tolled the
requiem of a departed sister, as, in the gloom of night and by the
light of torches, she was conveyed to her burial--all these
concomitants of that system of pageantry, arranged so skillfully to
impress the senses of the young and the imaginative, fanned to the
highest elevation the flames of that poetic temperament she so
eminently possessed.
God thus became in Jane's mind a vision of poetic beauty. Religion was
the inspiration of enthusiasm and of sentiment. The worship of the
Deity was blended with all that was ennobling and beautiful. Moved by
these glowing fancies, her susceptible spirit, in these tender years,
turned away from atheism, from infidelity, from irreligion, as from
that which was unrefined, revolting, vulgar. The consciousness of the
presence of God, the adoration of his being, became a passion of her
soul. This state of mind was poetry, not religion. It involved no
sense of the spirituality of the Divine Law, no consciousness of
unworthiness, no need of a Savior. It was an emotion sublime and
beautiful, yet merely such an emotion as any one of susceptible
temperament might feel when standing in the Vale of Chamouni at
midnight, or when listening to the crash of thunder as the tempest
wrecks the sky, or when one gazes entranced upon the fair face of
nature in a mild and lovely morning of June, when no cloud appears in
the blue canopy above us, and no breeze ruffles the leaves of the
grove or the glassy surface of the lake, and the songs of birds and
the perfume of flowers fill the air. Many mistake the highly poetic
enthusiasm which such scenes excite for the spirit of piety.
While Jane was an inmate of the convent, a very interesting young
lady, from some disappointment weary of the world, took the veil. When
one enters a convent with the intention of becoming a nun, she first
takes the white veil, which is an expression of her intention, and
thus enters the grade of a novice. During the period of her novitiate,
which continues for several months, she is exposed to the severest
discipline of vigils, and fastings, and solitude, and prayer, that
she may distinctly understand the life of weariness and self-denial
upon which she has entered. If, unintimidated by these hardships, she
still persists in her determination, she then takes the black veil,
and utters her solemn and irrevocable vows to bury herself in the
gloom of the cloister, never again to emerge. From this step there is
no return. The throbbing heart, which neither cowls nor veils can
still, finds in the taper-lighted cell its living tomb, till it sleeps
in death. No one with even an ordinary share of sensibility can
witness a ceremony involving such consequences without the deepest
emotion. The scene produced an effect upon the spirit of Jane which
was never effaced. The wreath of flowers which crowned the beautiful
victim; the veil enveloping her person; the solemn and dirge-like
chant, the requiem of her burial to all the pleasures of sense and
time; the pall which overspread her, emblematic of her consignment to
a living tomb, all so deeply affected the impassioned child, that,
burying her face in her hands, she wept with uncontrollable emotion.
The thought of the magnitude of the sacrifice which the young novice
was making appealed irresistibly to her admiration of the morally
sublime. There was in that relinquishment of all the joys of earth a
self-surrender to a passionless life of mortification, and penance,
and prayer, an apparent heroism, which reminded Jane of her
much-admired Roman maidens and matrons. She aspired with most romantic
ardor to do, herself, something great and noble. While her sound
judgment could not but condemn this abandonment of life, she was
inspired with the loftiest enthusiasm to enter, in some worthy way,
upon a life of endurance, of sacrifice, and of martyrdom. She felt
that she was born for the performance of some great deeds, and she
looked down with contempt upon all the ordinary vocations of every-day
life. These were the dreams of a romantic girl. They were not,
however, the fleeting visions of a sickly and sentimental mind, but
the deep, soul-moving aspirations of one of the strongest intellects
over which imagination has ever swayed its scepter. One is reminded by
these early developments of character of the remark of Napoleon, when
some one said, in his presence, "It is nothing but imagination."
"Nothing but imagination!" replied this sagacious observer;
"_imagination rules the world!_"
These dim visions of greatness, these lofty aspirations, not for
renown, but for the inward consciousness of intellectual elevation, of
moral sublimity, of heroism, had no influence, as is ordinarily the
case with day-dreams, to give Jane a distaste for life's energetic
duties. They did not enervate her character, or convert her into a
mere visionary; on the contrary, they but roused and invigorated her
to alacrity in the discharge of every duty. They led her to despise
ease and luxury, to rejoice in self-denial, and to cultivate, to the
highest possible degree, all her faculties of body and of mind, that
she might be prepared for any possible destiny. Wild as, at times, her
imaginings might have been, her most vivid fancy never could have
pictured a career so extraordinary as that to which reality introduced
her; and in all the annals of ancient story, she could find no record
of sufferings and privations more severe than those which she was
called upon to endure. And neither heroine nor hero of any age has
shed greater luster upon human nature by the cheerful fortitude with
which adversity has been braved.