_Change in the Character of the Salons--Mme. de Condorcet--Mme. Roland's
Story of Her Own Life--A Marriage of Reason--Enthusiasm for the
Revolution--Her Modest Salon--Her Tragical Fate_
The salons of the Revolution were no longer simply the fountains of
literary and artistic criticism, the centers of wit, intelligence,
knowledge, philosophy, and good manners, but the rallying points of
parties. They took the tone of the time and assumed the character of
political clubs. The salon of 1790 was not the salon of 1770. A new
generation had arisen, with new ideals and a new spirit that made for
itself other forms or greatly modified the old ones. It was not led by
philosophers and beaux esprits who evolved theories and turned them over
as an intellectual diversion, but by men of action, ready to test
these theories and force them to their logical conclusions. Mirabeau,
Vergniaud, and Robespierre had succeeded Voltaire, Diderot, and
d'Alembert. Impelled towards one end, by vanity, ambition, love of
glory, or genuine conviction, these men and their colleagues turned
the salon, which had so long been the school of public opinion, into an
engine of revolution. The exquisite flower of the eighteenth century had
blossomed, matured, and fallen. Perhaps it was followed by a plant of
sturdier growth, but the rare quality of its beauty was not repeated.
The time was past when the gentle touch of women could temper the
violence of clashing opinions, or subject the discussion of vital
questions to the inflexible laws of taste. No tactful hostess could hold
in leading strings these fiery spirits. The voices that had charmed the
old generation were silent. Of the women who had made the social life of
the century so powerful and so famous, many were quietly asleep before
the storm broke; many were languishing in prison cells, with no outlook
but the scaffold; some were pining in the loneliness of exile; and a few
were buried in a seclusion which was their only safeguard.
But nature has always in reserve fresh types that come to the surface in
a great crisis. The women who made themselves felt and heard above the
din of revolution, though by no means deficient in the graces, were
mainly distinguished for quite other qualities than those which shine in
a drawing room or lead a coterie. They were either women of rare genius
and the courage of their convictions, or women trained in the stern
school of a bitter experience, who found their true milieu in the midst
of stirring events. The names of Mme. de Stael, Mme. Roland, and Mme.
de Condorcet readily suggest themselves as the most conspicuous
representatives of this stormy period. With different gifts and in
different measure, each played a prominent role in the brief drama to
which they lent the inspiration of their genius and their sympathy,
until they were forced to turn back with horror from that carnival of
savage passions which they had unconsciously helped to let loose upon
the world.
The salon of the young, beautiful, and gifted Mme. de Condorcet had its
roots in the old order of things. During the ministry of Necker it was
in come degree a rival of the Salon Helvetique, and included many of the
same guests; later it became a rendezvous for the revolutionary party.
The Marquis de Condorcet was not only philosopher, savant, litterateur,
a member of two academies, and among the profoundest thinkers of his
time, but a man of the world, who inherited the tastes and habits of the
old noblesse. His wife, whom he had married late in life, was Sophie de
Grouchy, sister of the Marechal, and was noted for remarkable talents,
as well as for surpassing beauty. Belonging by birth and associations to
the aristocracy, and by her pronounced opinions to the radical side of
the philosophic party, her salon was a center in which two worlds met.
In its palmy days people were only speculating upon the borders of an
abyss which had not yet opened visibly before them. The revolutionary
spirit ran high, but had not passed the limits of reason and humanity.
Mme. de Condorcet, who was deeply tinged with the new doctrines,
presided with charming grace, and her youthful beauty lent an added
fascination to the brilliancy of her intellect and the rather grave
eloquence of her conversation. In her drawing room were gathered men
of letters and women of talent, nobles and scientists, philosophers and
Beaux Esprits. Turgot and Malesherbes represented its political side;
Marmontel, the Abbe Morellet, and Suard lent it some of the wit and
vivacity that shone in the old salons. Literature, science, and the
arts were discussed here, and there was more or less reading, music, or
recitation. But the tendency was towards serious conversation, and the
tone was often controversial.
The character of Condorcet was a sincere and elevated one. "He loved
much and he loved many people," said Mlle. de Lespinasse. He aimed at
enlightening and regenerating the world, not at overturning it; but,
like many others, strong souls and true, he was led from practical
truth in the pursuit of an ideal one. His wife, who shared his political
opinions, united with them a fiery and independent spirit that was not
content with theories. Her philosophic tastes led her to translate Adam
Smith, and to write a fine analysis of the "Moral Sentiments." But the
sympathy of which she spoke so beautifully, and which gave so living
a force to the philosophy it illuminated, if not directed by broad
intelligence and impartial judgment, is often like the ignis fatuus that
plays over the poisonous marsh and lures the unwary to destruction. For
a brief day the magical influence of Mme. de Condorcet was felt more or
less by all who came within her circle. She inspired the equable temper
of her husband with her own enthusiasm, and urged him on to extreme
measures from which his gentler soul would have recoiled. When at last
he turned from those scenes of horror, choosing to be victim rather than
oppressor, it was too late. Perhaps she recalled the days of her power
with a pang of regret when her friends had fallen one by one at the
scaffold, and her husband, hunted and deserted by those he tried to
serve, had died by his own hand, in a lonely cell, to escape a sadder
fate; while she was left, after her timely release from prison, to
struggle alone in poverty and obscurity, for some years painting
water-color portraits for bread. She was not yet thirty when the
Revolution ended, and lived far into the present century; but though the
illusions of her youth had been rudely shattered, she remained always
devoted to her liberal principles and a broad humanity.
The woman, however, who most fitly represents the spirit of the
Revolution, who was at once its inspiration, its heroine, and its
victim, is Mme. Roland. It is not as the leader of a salon that she
takes her place in the history of her time, but as one of the foremost
and ablest leaders of a powerful political party. Born in the ranks
of the bourgeoisie, she had neither the prestige of a name nor the
distinction of an aristocratic lineage. Reared in seclusion, she was
familiar with the great world by report only. Though brilliant, even
eloquent in conversation when her interest was roused, her early
training had added to her natural distaste for the spirit, as well
as the accessories, of a social life that was inevitably more or less
artificial. She would have felt cramped and caged in the conventional
atmosphere of a drawing room in which the gravest problems were apt to
be forgotten in the flash of an epigram or the turn of a bon mot. The
strong and heroic outlines of her character were more clearly defined on
the theater of the world. But at a time when the empire of the salon was
waning, when vital interests and burning convictions had for the moment
thrown into the shade all minor questions of form and convenance, she
took up the scepter in a simpler fashion, and, disdaining the arts of
a society of which she saw only the fatal and hopeless corruption, held
her sway over the daring and ardent men who gathered about her by the
unassisted force of her clear and vigorous intellect.
It would be interesting to trace the career of the thoughtful and
precocious child known as Manon or Marie Phlipon, who sat in her
father's studio with the burin of an engraver in one hand and a book in
the other, eagerly absorbing the revolutionary theories which were to
prove so fatal to her, but it is not the purpose here to dwell upon
the details of her life. In the solitude of a prison cell and under the
shadow of the scaffold she told her own story. She has introduced us
to the simple scenes of her childhood, the modest home on the Quai de
l'Horloge, the wise and tender mother, the weak and unstable father. We
are made familiar with the tiny recess in which she studies, reads, and
makes extracts from the books which are such strange companions for her
years. We seem to see the grave little face as it lights with emotion
over the inspiring pages of Fenelon or the chivalrous heroes of Tasso,
and sympathize with the fascination that leads the child of nine years
to carry her Plutarch to mass instead of her prayer book. She portrays
for us her convent life with its dreams, its exaltations, its romantic
friendships, and its ardent enthusiasms. We have vivid pictures of the
calm and sympathetic Sophie Cannet, to whom she unburdens all her hopes
and aspirations and sorrows; of the lively sister Henriette, who years
afterward, in the generous hope of saving her early friend, proposed to
exchange clothes and take her place in the cells of Sainte-Pelagie. In
the long and commonplace procession of suitors that files before us,
one only touches her heart. La Blancherie has a literary and philosophic
turn, and the young girl's imagination drapes him in its own glowing
colors. The opposition of her father separates them, but absence only
lends fuel to this virgin flame. One day she learns that his views are
mercenary, that he is neither true nor disinterested, and the charm is
broken. She met him afterward in the Luxembourg gardens with a feather
in his hat, and the last illusion vanished.
There is an idyllic charm in these pictures so simply and gracefully
sketched. She sees with the vision of one lying down to sleep after
a life of pain, and dreaming of the green fields, the blue skies,
the running brooks, the trees, the flowers, that make so beautiful a
background for youthful loves and hopes. Perhaps we could wish sometimes
that she were a little less frank. We miss a touch of delicacy in
this nature that was so strong and self-poised. We are sorry that she
dismissed La Blancherie quite so theatrically. There is a trace too much
of consciousness in her fine self-analysis, perhaps a little vanity, and
we half suspect that her unchildlike penetration and precocity of
motive was sometimes the reflection of an afterthought. But it is to
be remembered that, even in childhood, she had lived in such close
companionship with the heroes and moralists of the past that their
sentiments had become her own. She doubtless posed a little to
herself, as well as to the world, but her frankness was a part of that
uncompromising truthfulness which scorned disguises of any sort, and led
her to paint faults and virtues alike.
Family sorrows--the death of the mother whom she adored, and the
unworthiness of her father--combined to change the current of her free
and happy life, and to deepen a natural vein of melancholy. In her
loneliness of soul the convent seemed to offer itself as the sole haven
of peace and rest. The child, who loved Fenelon, and dreamed over the
lives of the saints, had in her much of the stuff out of which mystics
and fanatics are made. Her ardent soul was raised to ecstasy by the
stately ceremonial of the Church; her imagination was captivated by its
majestic music, its mystery, its solemnity, and she was wont to spend
hours in rapt meditation. But her strong fund of good sense, her firm
reason fortified by wide and solid reading, together with her habits of
close observation and analysis, saved her from falling a victim to
her own emotional needs, or to chimeras of any sort. She had drawn her
mental nourishment too long from Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, the
English philosophers, and classic historians, to become permanently a
prey to exaggerated sensibilities, though it was the same temperament
fired by a sense of human inequality and wrong, that swept her at last
along the road that led to the scaffold. At twenty-six the vocation
of the religieuse had lost its fascination; the pious fervor of her
childhood had vanished before the skepticism of her intellect, its
ardent friendships had grown dim, its fleeting loves had proved
illusive, and her romantic dreams ended in a cold marriage of reason.
It may be noted here that though Mme. Roland had lost her belief in
ecclesiastical systems, and, as she said, continued to go to mass only
for the "edification of her neighbors and the good order of society,"
there was always in her nature a strong undercurrent of religious
feeling. Her faith had not survived the full illumination of her reason,
but her trust in immortality never seriously wavered. The Invocation
that was among her last written words is the prayer of a soul that is
conscious of its divine origin and destiny. She retained, too, the firm
moral basis that was laid in her early teachings, and which saved her
from the worst errors of her time. She might be shaken by the storms of
passion, but one feels that she could never be swept from her moorings.
Tall and finely developed, with dark brown hair; a large mouth whose
beauty lay in a smile of singular sweetness; dark, serious eyes with
a changeful expression which no artist could catch; a fresh complexion
that responded to every emotion of a passionate soul; a deep,
well-modulated voice; manners gentle, modest, reserved, sometimes
timid with the consciousness that she was not readily taken at her true
value--such was the PERSONNELLE of the woman who calmly weighed the
possibilities of a life which had no longer a pleasant outlook in any
direction, and, after much hesitation, became the wife of a grave,
studious, austere man of good family and moderate fortune, but many
years her senior.
It was this marriage, into which she entered with all seriousness, and a
devotion that was none the less sincere because it was of the intellect
rather than the heart, that gave the final tinge to a character that was
already laid on solid foundations. Strong, clear-sighted, earnest, and
gifted, her later experience had accented a slightly ascetic quality
which had been deepened also by her study of antique models. Her tastes
were grave and severe. But they had a lighter side. As a child she had
excelled in music, dancing, drawing, and other feminine accomplishments,
though one feels always that her distinctive talent does not lie in
these things. She is more at home with her thoughts. There was a touch
of poetry, too, in her nature, that under different circumstances might
have lent it a softer and more graceful coloring. She had a natural love
for the woods and the flowers. The single relief to her somber life at
La Platiere, after her marriage, was in the long and lonely rambles in
the country, whose endless variations of hill and vale and sky and color
she has so tenderly and so vividly noted. In her last days a piano and
a few flowers lighted the darkness of her prison walls, and out of
these her imagination reared a world of its own, peopled with dreams and
fancies that contrasted strangely with the gloom of her surroundings.
This poetic vein was closely allied to the keen sensibility that
tempered the seriousness of her character. With the mental equipment of
a man, she combined the rich sympathy of a woman. Her devotion to her
mother was passionate in its intensity; her letters to Sophie throb with
warmth and sentiment. She is tender and loving, as well as philosophic
and thoughtful. Her emotional ardor was doubtless partly the glow of
youth and not altogether in the texture of a mind so eminently rational;
but there were rich possibilities behind it. A shade of difference in
the mental and moral atmosphere, a trace more or less of sunshine and
happiness are important factors in the peculiar combination of qualities
that make up a human being. The marriage of Mme. Roland led her into a
world that had little color save what she brought into it. Her husband
did not smile upon her friends. Sympathy other than that of the
intellect she does not seem to have had. But her story is best told in
her own words, written in the last days of her life.
"In considering only the happiness of my partner, I soon perceived that
something was wanting to my own. I had never, for a single instant,
ceased to see in my husband one of the most estimable of men, to whom I
felt it an honor to belong; but I have often realized that there was
a lack of equality between us, that the ascendency of an overbearing
character, added to that of twenty years more of age, gave him too much
superiority. If we lived in solitude, I had many painful hours to pass;
if we went into the world, I was loved by men of whom I saw that some
might touch me too deeply. I plunged into work with my husband, another
excess which had its inconvenience; I gave him the habit of not knowing
how to do without me for anything in the world, nor at any moment.
"I honor, I cherish my husband, as a sensible daughter adores a virtuous
father to whom she would sacrifice even her lover; but I have found the
man who might have been that lover, and remaining faithful to my duties,
my frankness has not known how to conceal the feelings which I subjected
to them. My husband, excessively sensitive both in his affections and
his self-love, could not support the idea of the least change in
his influence; his imagination darkened, his jealousy irritated me;
happiness fled; he adored me, I sacrificed myself for him, and we were
miserable.
"If I were free, I would follow him everywhere to soften his griefs and
console his old age; a soul like mine leaves no sacrifices imperfect.
But Roland was embittered by the thought of sacrifice, and the knowledge
once acquired that I mad made one ruined his happiness; he suffered in
accepting it, and could not do without it."
The sequel to this tale is told in allusions and half revelations,
in her letters to Buzot, which glow with suppressed feeling; in her
touching farewell to one whom she dared not to name, but whom she hoped
to meet where it would not be a crime to love; in those final words of
her "Last Thoughts"--"Adieu.... No, it is from thee alone that I do not
separate; to leave the earth is to approach each other."
Beneath this semi-transparent veil the heart-drama of her life is
hidden.
For the sake of those who would be pained by this story, as well as
for her own, we would rather it had never been told. We should like to
believe that the woman who worked so nobly with and for the man who
died by his own hand five days after her death, because he could stay no
longer in a world where such crimes were possible, had lived in the
full perfection of domestic sympathy. But, if she carried with her an
incurable wound, one cannot help regretting that her Spartan courage
had not led her to wear the mantle of silence to the end. Posterity
is curious rather than sympathetic, and the world is neither wiser nor
better for these needless soul-revelations. There is always a certain
malady of egotism behind them. But it is often easier to scale the
heights of human heroism than to still the cry of a bruised spirit. Mme.
Roland had moments of falling short of her own ideals, and this was one
of them. Pure, loyal, self-sustained as she was, her strong sense
of verity did not permit the veil which would have best served the
interests of the larger truth. It is fair to say that she thought the
malicious gossip of her enemies rendered this statement necessary to
the protection of her fame. Perhaps, after all, she shows here her most
human and lovable if not her strongest side. We should like Minerva
better if she were not so faultlessly wise.
The outbreak of the Revolution found Mme. Roland at La Platiere, where
she shared her husband's philosophic and economic studies, brought
peace into a discordant family, attended to her household duties and the
training of her child, devoted many hours to generous care for the sick
and poor, and reserved a little leisure for poetry and the solitary
rambles she loved so well. The first martial note struck a responsive
chord in her heart. Her opportunity had come. Embittered by class
distinctions over which she had long brooded, saturated with the
sentiments of Rousseau, and full of untried theories constructed in
the closet, with small knowledge of the wide and complex interests with
which it was necessary to deal, she centered all the hitherto latent
energies of her forceful nature upon the quixotic effort to redress
human wrongs. Her birth, her intellect, her character, her temperament,
her education, her associations--all led her towards the role she played
so heroically. She had a keen appreciation for genuine values, but
none whatever for factitious ones. Her inborn hatred of artificial
distinctions had grown with her years and colored all her estimates
of men and things. When she came to Paris, she noted with a sort of
indignation the superior poise and courtesy of the men in the assembly
who had been reared in the habit of power. It added fuel to her enmity
towards institutions in which reason, knowledge, and integrity paid
homage to fine language and distinguished manners. She found even
Vergniaud too refined and fastidious in his dress for a successful
republican leader. Her old contempt for a "philosopher with a feather"
had in no wise abated. With such principles ingrained and fostered, it
is not difficult to forecast the part Mme. Roland was destined to play
in the coming conflict of classes. Whatever we may think of the wisdom
of her attitude towards the Revolution, she represented at least its
most sincere side. As she stood white-robed and courageous at the foot
of the scaffold, facing the savage populace she had laid down her life
to befriend, perhaps her perspectives were truer. Experience had given
her an insight into the characters of men which is not to be gained in
the library, nor in the worship of dead heroes. If it had not shaken her
faith in human perfectibility, it had taught her at least the value of
tradition in chaining brutal human passions.
The tragical fate of Mme. Roland has thrown a strong light upon the
modest little salon in which the unfortunate Girondists met four times a
week to discuss the grave problems that confronted them. A salon in the
old sense it certainly was not. It had little in common with the famous
centers of conversation and esprit. It was simply the rallying point of
a party. The only woman present was Mme. Roland herself, but at first
she assumed no active leadership. She sat at a little table outside
of the circle, working with her needle, or writing letters, alive to
everything that was said, venturing sometimes a word of counsel or
a thoughtful suggestion, and often biting her lips to repress some
criticism that she feared might not be within her province. She had
left her quiet home in the country fired with a single thought--the
regeneration of France. The men who gathered about her were in full
accord with her generous aims. It was not to such enthusiasms that the
old salons lost themselves. They had been often the centers of political
intrigues, as in the days of the Fronde; or of religious partisanship,
as during the troubles of Port Royal; they had ranged themselves for and
against rival candidates for literary or artistic honors; but they had
preserved, on the whole, a certain cosmopolitan character. All shades of
opinion were represented, and social brilliancy was the end sought, not
the triumph of special ideas. It is indeed true that earnest
convictions were, to some extent, stifled in the salons, where charm
and intelligence counted for so much, and the sterling qualities of
character for so little. But the etiquette, the urbanity, the measure,
which assured the outward harmony of a society that courted distinction
of every kind, were quite foreign to the iconoclasts who were bent
upon leveling all distinctions. The Revolution which attacked the whole
superstructure of society, was antagonistic to its minor forms as well,
and it was the revolutionary party alone which was represented in the
salon of Mme. Roland. Brissot, Vergniaud, Petion, Guadet, and Buzot were
leaders there--men sincere and ardent, though misguided, and unable to
cope with the storm they had raised, to be themselves swept away by
its pitiless rage. Robespierre, scheming and ambitious, came there,
listened, said little, appropriated for his own ends, and bided his
time. Mme. Roland had small taste for the light play of intellect and
wit that has no outcome beyond the meteoric display of the moment, and
she was impatient with the talk in which an evening was often passed
among these men without any definite results. As she measured their
strength, she became more outspoken. She communicated to them a spark
of her own energy. The most daring moves were made at her bidding. She
urged on her timid and conservative husband, she drew up his memorials,
she wrote his letters, she was at once his stimulus, and his helper.
Weak and vacillating men yielded to her rapid insight, her vigor, her
earnestness, and her persuasive eloquence. This was probably the period
of her greatest influence. Many of the swift changes of those first
months may be traced to her salon. The moves which were made in the
Assembly were concocted there, the orators who triumphed found their
inspiration there. Still, in spite of her energy, her strength, and
her courage, she prides herself upon maintaining always the reserve and
decorum of her sex.
If she assumed the favorite role of the French woman for a short time
while her husband was in the ministry, it was in a sternly republican
fashion. She gave dinners twice a week to her husband's political
friends. The fifteen or twenty men who met around her table at five
o'clock were linked by political interests only. The service was simple,
with no other luxury than a few flowers. There were no women to temper
the discussions or to lighten their seriousness. After dinner the guests
lingered for an hour or so in the drawing room, but by nine o'clock it
was deserted. She received on Friday, but what a contrast to the Fridays
of Mme. Necker in those same apartments! It was no longer a brilliant
company of wits, savants, and men of letters, enlivened by women of
beauty, esprit, rank, and fashion. There was none of the diversity of
taste and thought which lends such a charm to social life. Mme. Roland
tells us that she never had an extended circle at any time, and that,
while her husband was in power, she made and received no visits, and
invited no women to her house. She saw only her husband's colleagues,
or those who were interested in his tastes and pursuits, which were also
her own. The world of society wearied her. She was absorbed in a single
purpose. If she needed recreation, she sought it in serious studies.
It is always difficult to judge what a man or a woman might have been
under slightly altered conditions. But for some single circumstance that
converged and focused their talent, many a hero would have died unknown
and unsuspected. The key that unlocks the treasure house of the soul is
not always found, and its wealth is often scattered on unseen shores.
But it is clear that the part of Mme. Roland could never have been a
distinctively social one. She lived at a time when great events brought
out great qualities. Her clear intellect, her positive convictions,
her boundless energy, and her ardent enthusiasm, gave her a powerful
influence in those early days of the Revolution, that looked towards a
world reconstructed but not plunged into the dark depths of chaos, and
it is through this that she has left a name among the noted women of
France. In more peaceful times her peculiar talent would doubtless have
led her towards literature. In her best style she has rare vigor and
simplicity. She has moments of eloquent thought. There are flashes of it
in her early letters to Sophie, which she begs her friend not to burn,
though she does not hope to rival Mme. de Sevigne, whom she takes for
her model. She lacked the grace, the lightness, the wit, the humor of
this model, but she had an earnestness, a serious depth of thought, that
one does not find in Mme. de Sevigne. She had also a vein of sentiment
that was an underlying force in her character, though it was always
subject to her masculine intellect. She confesses that she should like
to be the annalist of her country, and longs for the pen of Tacitus,
for whom she has a veritable passion. When one reads her sharp, incisive
pen-portraits, drawn with such profound insight and masterly skill, one
feels that her true vocation was in the world of letters. At the close
she verges a little upon the theatrical, as sometimes in her young days.
But when she wrote her final records she felt her last hours slipping
away. Life, with its large possibilities undeveloped and its promises
unfulfilled, was behind her. Darkness was all around her, eternal
silence before her. And she had lived but thirty-nine years.
Mme. Roland does not really belong to the world of the salons, though
she has been included among them by some of her own cotemporaries. She
was of quite another genre. She represents a social reaction in which
old forms are adapted to new ideas and lose their essential quality
by the change. But she foreshadows a type of woman that has had great
influence since the salons have lost their prestige. She relied neither
upon the reflected light of a coterie, the arts of the courtier, nor the
subtle power of personal attraction; but, firm in her convictions, clear
in her purpose, and unselfish in her aims, she laid down her interests,
and, in the end, her life, upon the altar of liberty and humanity. She
could hardly be regarded, however, as herself a type. She was cast in a
rare mold and lived under rare conditions. She was individual, as were
Hypatia, Joan of Arc, and Charlotte Corday--a woman fitted for a special
mission which brought her little but a martyr's crown and a permanent
fame.