Chapter XIV: Those Left Behind 303 (5)

The spirit in which he went into the work was one of declared war to the aristocratic party at Lyons and to the old régime. He was determined to show up the situation, and exhorted his friends at Lyons to uncover all the rascality and pillage of the old administration. The deputies from the Lyonnais were not too sympathetic. They found the persistency, the _vertu_, the incessant indignation, the insistency of Roland, tiresome. After sitting so many long months, under such exciting circumstances, they were weary. They saw the difficulties of getting a hearing, too, from the Assembly.

Roland poured out all his impatience to Champagneux, who was his confidant and sympathizer. Long letters, written in his fine, nervous, execrable hand, went almost daily to Lyons. They were full of indignation at everything and everybody; especially was the delay irritating to him. “If affairs do not go backwards like the crab,” he says, “at least they go no faster than the tortoise.” The delay disgusted Madame Roland as much as it did her husband. Both committee and Assembly were blamed by her. She even wished that she were a man that she might do something herself.

Of much more importance to their political lives at this moment than Assembly, clubs, or committee meetings, were the frequent gatherings of patriots held at the Rolands’ apartments, in the Rue Guénégaud. They were “grandly lodged,” the quarter was agreeable, and many of their friends lived but a short distance away. As Roland found it necessary to see the deputies frequently, he gathered them about him in his home. Brissot was the nucleus of the little circle. The relation with Brissot had been, up to this time, purely by correspondence. When they came to Paris naturally they were anxious to see him. They liked him at once. His simple manners, his frankness, his natural negligence, seemed in harmony with the austerity of his principles. A more entire disinterestedness and a greater zeal for public affairs were impossible, it seemed to them. He was admirable, too, as a man, a good husband, a tender father, a faithful friend, a virtuous citizen. His society was charming; for he was gay, naïve, imprudently confident, the nature of a sweet-tempered boy of fifteen. Such Brissot seemed to Madame Roland, who esteemed him more and more the longer she knew him.

Brissot brought several of his friends to see them. Among the most important of these were Pétion and Robespierre. The most interesting of the group was Buzot, of whom we shall hear much, later. To Pétion, Robespierre, and Buzot were added Clavière, Louis Noailles, Volfius, Antoine, Garran (“Cato Garran”), Grégoire, Garaud, and several others. In April Thomas Paine appeared. So agreeable and profitable were these informal reunions found to be that it was arranged to hold them four times a week. The guests came between the close of the sessions of the Assembly and the opening of the Jacobins. The condition of affairs in general and of the Assembly in particular was discussed; the measures which should be taken were suggested, and means of proposing them arranged; the interests of the people, the tactics of the Court and of individuals, were constantly criticised.

To Madame Roland these gatherings were of absorbing interest. She calculated carefully her relation to them, the place she ought to occupy in them, and she affirms that she never deviated from it. “Seated near a window before a little table on which were books, writing materials, and sewing, I worked, or I wrote letters while they discussed. I preferred to write; for it made me appear more indifferent to what was going on, and permitted me to follow it almost as well. I can do more than one thing at a time, and the habit of writing permits me to carry on my correspondence while listening to something quite different from what I am writing. It seems to me that I am three; I divide my attention into two as if it were a material thing, and I consider and direct these two parts as if I were quite another. I remember one day, when the gentlemen, not agreeing, made considerable noise, that Clavière, noticing the rapidity with which I wrote, said good-naturedly that it was only a woman’s head which was capable of such a thing, but he declared himself astonished at it all the same. ‘What would you say,’ I asked, smiling, ‘if I should repeat all your arguments?’

“Excepting the customary compliments on the arrival or departure of the gentlemen, I never allowed myself to pronounce a word, although I often had to bite my lips to prevent it. If any one spoke to me, it was after the club work and all deliberation were at an end. A carafe of water and a bowl of sugar were the only refreshments they found, and I told them it was all that it seemed to me appropriate to offer to men who came together to discuss after dinner.”

She was not always satisfied with the results of these gatherings. There were plenty of good things said, but they rarely ended in a systematic résumé. Ideas were advanced, but few measures resulted. It was fruitless conversation, in short, and she generalized: “The French do not know how to deliberate. A certain lightness leads them from one subject to another, but prevents order and complete analysis. They do not know how to listen. He who speaks always expands his own idea; he occupies himself rather in developing his own thought than in answering that of another. Their attention is easily fatigued; a laugh is awakened by a word and a jest overthrows logic.” A more just observation on French conversation would be impossible. It is its delight. A constant bound from one idea to another, indifference to the outcome if the attention is kept, insistence by each individual upon expressing his thought at will, with eloquence and with fantasy, lawlessness, recklessness of expression, characterize all groups of clever Frenchmen who meet to talk. But this is conversation for pleasure, not discussion for results. It was in mistaking this intellectual game of words and sentiments for reflections and reason that one of the greatest mistakes of the Rolands lay. It was these vagaries of speech in public, in private, in print (the pamphlets which poured from the press were little more than random bits of conversation and as little reflective), which kept the public, the Assembly, the Court, in a constant state of ebb and flow. But Madame Roland herself was a victim to this popular weakness. Her letters, which are almost invariably outbursts of feeling rather than of reflection, may safely be considered an index to what she was in conversation.

Another real trouble of the moment which Madame Roland notes, though she does not see that she shares it, she expressed to Bancal:

“I have had the opportunity of seeing, since my sojourn here, that it is much more difficult to do good than even reflecting men imagine. It is not possible to do good in politics, save by uniting efforts; and there is nothing so difficult as to unite different minds to work persistently for the same end. Everybody believes only in the efficacy of his own system, and his own way. He is irritated and bored by that of another, and because he does not know how to bend to an idea a little different from his own, he ends by going alone, without doing anything useful. For more than a century, philosophy has been preaching tolerance; it has begun to root itself in some minds; but I see little of it in our customs. Our fine minds laugh at patience as a negative virtue. I confess that in my eyes it is the true sign of the force of the soul, the fruit of profound reflection, the necessary means for conciliating men and spreading instruction, in short, the virtue of a free people. We have everything to learn on this subject.”

Madame Roland’s letters written at this period abound in similar just criticisms on the Revolutionary temper. Her remarkably virile and comprehensive intellect penetrated the real weaknesses of the movement whenever she considered men and measures impersonally. Then she grasped perfectly the meaning of things, and her observations were profound, her insight keen, her judgments wise, and her conclusions statesmanlike.

However discreet Madame Roland may have been at the gatherings in her salon, however silent she may have kept, she gained at this period a veritable supremacy over the group of patriots. There were many reasons for this. She embodied in a sort of Greek clearness and chastity the principles they professed. No one had a clearer conception of the ideal government which France should have; no one expressed more eloquently all this government ought to do; no one idealized the future with more imagination, more hopefulness. No one gave himself more fully to the cause than this woman who would not go to the theatre because the country was in peril; who could not look at pictures; who was ashamed to send Bancal a song in exchange for one he had sent her, because it was not grave enough for the circumstances; who was even “ashamed to write of songs.” She became in a way the ideal Revolutionary figure, a Greek statue, the type of the Republic of which they dreamed.

Her inflexibility was as great a power over her friends. They wavered, compromised, stopped at practical results instead of pushing to ideal ones. She had decision, firmness of purpose, the determination to reach the end, and her influence over them was powerful because of this unyielding attitude. Nothing daunted her. Riot and war were sacred necessities. To die was their duty. Nothing could have been more inspiring than her firmness of purpose, her superb indifference to consequences. This high attitude had something of the inspired sibyl in it. Their “Greek statue” became their prophetess. Her very cruelty was divine. It was the “wrath of the gods,” the “righteous indignation” of the moralist.

No doubt the personal charm of Madame Roland had much to do with her influence. All who knew her testify to her attractiveness. Guillon de Montléon, by no means a sympathetic critic, speaks of “her pleasant, piquant face, her active, brilliant mind.” Arthur Young, who saw her in 1789, describes her as “young and beautiful.” Dumont declares that to “every personal charm” she joined “all merits of character.” Dumouriez, who certainly knew all the beautiful women of his day, found her most attractive, and speaks especially of her taste and elegance in dress. Lemontey says of her: “Her eyes, her head, her hair, were of remarkable beauty. Her delicate complexion had a freshness of color which, joined to her air of reserve and candor, made her seem singularly young. I found in her none of the elegant Parisian air which she claims in her Memoirs, though I do not mean to say that she was awkward.” And he adds, she talked “well, too well.” Indeed, all her contemporaries testify to her brilliant conversation. Tissot tells of her “sonorous, flexible voice, infinite charm in talking, eloquence which came from her heart.” As the tradition in the family of Madame Roland goes, she was short and stout, possessed no taste in dress, and could be called neither beautiful, nor even pretty. However, vivacity, sympathy, and intelligence were so combined in her face, and her voice was so mellow and vibrating, that she exercised a veritable charm when she talked. She herself considered her chief attraction to be her conversational power. In one of the frequent self-complacent passages in her Memoirs, she repeats a remark of Camille Desmoulins, that he could not understand how a woman of her age and with so little beauty had so many admirers, and she comments: “He had never heard me talk.”

The portraits of Madame Roland, of which there are numbers, nearly all show a singularly winning and piquant face. Several good collections of these portraits are in existence. The Coste collection of Lyons contained thirty-three different engravings and medallions of her, and the print department of the Carnavalet Museum and of the Bibliothèque Nationale have both rather good specimens. By far the best collection, however, is in the town museum of Versailles—a recent donation of M. Vatel, a well-known collector of Gironde and Charlotte Corday documents and curios.

MADAME ROLAND.

After a crayon portrait owned by the family.
]

The only surely authentic portrait of Madame Roland is that facing this page. The original is in red crayon and much faded, but a faithful copy in black, well preserved, bearing the date of 1822, is in the possession of the great-granddaughter of Madame Roland, Madame Marillier of Paris. If one compares this portrait with that of Heinsius at Versailles, he will see that they have nothing in common. Heinsius’ portrait was bought in Louis Philippe’s time, and bore the name of Madame Roland up to 1865, when the placard was taken off because nothing proved that it was she. However, it still figures in the catalogue as Madame Roland, and photographs made after it are sold in all Paris shops. The director of the Versailles Gallery was preparing in 1893 to revise the catalogue, and purposed then to take the necessary steps to establish the authenticity of the painting, but as late as May, 1894, it still was marked Madame Roland. The family do not regard the picture as authentic; one point they make against it is that it is a full-face view, while, according to their traditions, Madame Roland never allowed anything but a profile to be made. It bears no resemblance to other authentic portraits, and is especially displeasing because of the full eyes, and the bold expression. These characteristics, however, Heinsius gave to all his portraits of French women; thus, the portraits of Mesdames Victoire and Adelaide at Versailles are almost coarse in expression, and in striking contrast to the other pictures of them which hang in the same gallery. The best reason for supposing Heinsius’ portrait to be Madame Roland is a sketch owned by the Carnavalet bearing the inscription M. J. PHLIPON, GRAVÉ PAR SON PÈRE À 19 ANS, which strikingly resembles it.

The reproduction of the painting at the Musée Carnavalet, as well as that of the cameo head, is due to the kindness of the director, M. Cousins. The painting is a new acquisition of the museum, exhibited for the first time in April, 1892. It is more apocryphal even than the picture of Heinsius. It is a picture of the time—that of a very charming woman, but it has almost nothing in common with Madame Roland. The eyes are blue and hers were brown, the hair is lighter, the chin is not so round and firm, the neck is longer. Besides it is a full-face view, thus contradicting the family tradition. As for the cameo head, it is evidently made after the family picture or the engraving of Gaucher, which latter possesses all the characteristics of the former.

One other portrait should not be forgotten; it is that traced in June, 1793, on the records of the prison of Sainte Pélagie by her jailer.

Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, wife of Roland, ex-minister, aged thirty-nine years, native of Paris, living Rue de la Harpe, No. 5.

Height, five feet; hair and eyebrows dark chestnut; brown eyes; medium nose; ordinary mouth; oval face; round chin; high forehead.

VII
A STICK IN THE WHEEL

During the months that the Rolands were in Paris, they were in constant correspondence with Champagneux at Lyons. Their letters, for the most part unpublished, show the state of mind into which French idealists worked themselves in this period. Dissatisfied because the Assembly had not been able to complete the regeneration of France in two years, suspicious of everybody whose views differed from theirs, anxious to show how reconstruction should be conducted and how easy it is to run a government if you understand the principles and possess civic virtue, this party of which the Rolands are excellent types worked incessantly to discredit the government, to arouse contempt for the work the Assembly had been able to do, and to show that Louis XVI. could not be in earnest in his declaration of fidelity to reforms instituted.

The Rolands lamented daily in their letters to Champagneux and other friends that public opinion was languishing, that the country was falling into the sleep of the enslaved, that the Assembly was worn out. They tried to arouse them to suspicion like their own by repeating all the alarming reports which ran the street without, of course, ever taking pains to verify their truthfulness, and by railing at them because they were inclined to feel that reforms were being brought about quite as rapidly as in the nature of the situation was possible.

It was not many months before their exasperation had reached such a pitch that they were convinced that civil war was necessary, and they began to look about for reasons with which to alarm and push on the people to it. The only adequate one they found was to persuade the country that the King was plotting with the _émigrés_ on the border, and that they and the Austrians were watching for a chance to attack France, overturn the new government, and restore the old régime. On June 22d an event occurred which in Madame Roland’s opinion was ample proof of the truthfulness of their opinions. On the morning of that day Madame Roland opened a letter written the day before to Bancal to say: “The King and Queen have fled, the shops are closed, the greatest tumult reigns. It is almost impossible that Lafayette should not be an accomplice.”

For twenty-four hours she was in an ecstasy of patriotic hopefulness. The flight of the King was a renunciation of the contract he had made with his people in taking the oath to support the constitution. The evident duty of the country was to declare him dethroned and to establish a republic. She was so excited she could not stay at home, but went among her friends, urging them to immediate action.

Her fixed principle that a woman should take no part in public proceedings was laid aside now. “As long as peace lasted,” she wrote her friend, “I played a peaceable rôle and exerted that kind of influence which seems to me suitable to my sex. Now that the flight of the King has declared war, it seems to me that every one must devote himself without reserve. I have joined the fraternal societies, because convinced that zeal and a good thought may sometimes be useful in a time of crisis.”

Her joy was short. The tumult which threatened in Paris was promptly quieted by Lafayette, at the head of the National Guards. The citizens were exhorted to calm, to vigilance, to confidence in the Assembly. Madame Roland writhed under this attitude. “Is this the place to be tranquil and contented?” she cried. She and her friends, convinced that the measures to prevent a riot and restore order were directed especially at themselves, gathered at Robespierre’s, where they considered ways of driving the people to an action of which the Assembly was incapable.

In the midst of their activity the King was brought back, and to their dismay they saw that he would in all probability be kept in place without public trial. Their alarm was intense. Without the King they were convinced all would be well. Regeneration was certain if royalty could be dispensed with. Nothing else was preventing the adoption of a Republic. He was “worse than a stick in a wheel,” declared Roland to Champagneux.

In the _mêlée_ of opinion which followed the King’s return, Madame Roland’s position was well defined: “To put the King back on the throne,” she wrote, “is an absurdity; to declare him incapable is to be obliged, according to the constitution, to name a regent; to name a regent would confirm the vices of the constitution at a moment when one can and ought to correct them. The most just measure would be to try him; but the country is incapable of anything so lofty as that. There is nothing to do but suspend and guard him while searching those who aided in his flight; to go on acting without royal consent and, in order to put more regularity and activity into the distribution and exercise of power, name a temporary President. In this way it would be easy to show Paris and the departments that a king is not necessary and that the machine can go on well enough without him.” This programme she was willing to “preach from the roofs,” but it was not adopted. The King was restored.

The Republic which she and her friends dreamed of at this moment and did not hesitate to announce, was not in the public mind, and when they insisted upon it, they were insisting upon an individual opinion of which the country at large had no conception, and for which it had no sympathy. By her own confession both the Assembly and the Jacobins “went into convulsions” at the mere pronunciation of the name _Republic_. There were only two societies which, after the flight of the King, dared declare themselves _tyrannicides_,—the Cordeliers and a group of private individuals. At the Cercle Social they did discuss whether it was suitable or not to conserve kings, but at the Jacobins the very name _Republican_ was hissed. Nevertheless they worked valiantly to spread their ideas. Robert published a pamphlet on the “Advantages of the flight of the King and the necessity of a new government or Republic.” Condorcet published a discussion “Whether a king is necessary to the conservation of liberty”; and Brissot, at the Jacobins, made a hit with a speech in which he showed that the cry that the King was inviolable and could not be tried was false; that even if inviolability were admitted it did not apply in this case; and that according to the constitution the King could and ought to be tried.

Thomas Paine was then in Paris, believing as Dumont says, that he had made the American Revolution and was called upon to make another in France. With Condorcet, Brissot, and a few others as sympathizers, Paine formed a republican society. Their first concern was to publish a journal, the prospectus of which was posted by Paine on the morning of the first of July. In it he declared that the King by his flight is “free of us as we are of him. He has no longer any authority; we no longer owe him obedience; we know him now only as an individual in the crowd, as M. Louis de Bourbon”; and he concluded his harangue by the announcement that “A society of republicans had decided to publish in separate sheets a work entitled _The Republican_. Its object is to enlighten people’s minds on this republicanism which is calumniated because it is not understood; on the uselessness, the vices, and the abuses of the royalty that prejudice persists in defending, although they may be known.” This poster made a great noise in the Assembly, where it was denounced as “worthy of all the rigor of the law.” According to Madame Roland, it was only by flattering the Assembly’s love for the monarchy and by abusing republicanism and its partisans, that it was possible to convince the body that however ridiculous the idea might be, still it was necessary to leave it free course.

Only two numbers of _The Republican_ appeared, says Madame Roland, in her Memoirs; only one, says Moncure D. Conway, in his life of Paine. As a matter of fact, there were at least four issues, that number being in the collection of Revolutionary pamphlets in the Bibliothèque Nationale.

It was soon evident that the new cause would not be supported. Nevertheless, the new word was launched. The effect of the injudicious, impractical action of Paine, Brissot, and their friends, Robespierre described a few months later when he had broken with the Brissotins. “The mere word _Republic_ caused division among the patriots, and gave the enemies of liberty the evidence they sought to prove that there existed in France a party which conspired against the monarchy and the constitution; they hastened to impute to this motive the firmness with which we defended in the Constituent Assembly the rights of national sovereignty against the monster of inviolability. It is by this word that they drove away the majority of the Constituent Assembly; it is this word which was the signal for that massacre of peaceable citizens whose whole crime was exercising legally the right of petition, consecrated by the constitutional laws. At this word the true friends of liberty were travestied as factious by perverse or ignorant citizens; and the Revolution put back perhaps a half a century. It was in those critical times that Brissot came to the society of the Friends of the Constitution, where he had almost never appeared, to propose changes in the form of government, when the simplest rules of prudence would have forbidden us to present the idea to the Constituent Assembly.”

As soon as the Rolands and their friends saw that the demand for the Republic was not welcomed by the people, they turned their efforts towards securing a trial for Louis XVI.

It seemed to be the only thing for which they were strong enough. To do this they were willing to unite with even demagogues, agitators, and with the worst elements of the people. They had only their voice and their pen, explains Madame Roland; if a popular movement came to their aid they welcomed it with pleasure without looking after, or disturbing themselves about, its origin. Beside they could not believe that a party made up of the idle and the violent, and led by demagogues, could be formidable. It was a force to be used when needed, and crushed when the result desired had been obtained. Even when the union of the Brissotins with the populace had produced so serious a riot as that of July 17, the “Massacre of the Champ-de-Mars,” as the radicals called it, Madame Roland did not change her views. She refused to see that the disorder was provoked in any degree by the people, and attributed the fault entirely to the Assembly and Lafayette.

The letters they wrote to their friends after the riot of the Champ-de-Mars are full of alarms and of suspicions. “In less than twenty-four hours,” Roland wrote to Champagneux, “there have been about three hundred imprisoned at the Abbaye and they are kept there in secret. People are taken up in the night. There has just passed on the Pont Neuf [it will be remembered that the Rolands were in the Rue Guénégaud and could easily see] three loaded wagons escorted by many National Guards. They say Marat is there, and different club members. Desmoulins is said to have fled; they are after Brissot. The patriotic journalists are in bad repute, and frightful charges against them are being spread. The cross of Saint Louis multiplies incredibly. The aristocrats are more sly and insolent than ever. It was said yesterday in the Luxembourg that this legislature could not endure more than six weeks or two months; that there would be war with the foreigners in this interval; that the King and the ministers would come out ahead; that they would displace everybody, annul everything; and that they would re-establish things on the old basis, but assuredly not less despotic than before.... There is nothing but treason, lies, poisons. Those who live in hotels, or who are served by caterers, are afraid. A great number sleep away from home. There were hundreds of deaths at the Champ-de-Mars; husbands killed their wives; relatives, relatives; friends, friends. Saint Bartholomew, the dragonades, offered nothing more horrible.”

But this is an alarmist’s letter, a repetition of rumors, not a serious effort to picture what actually occurred. Compare simply its statement of the number of killed at the Champ-de-Mars—“hundreds”—with the most trustworthy accounts, and Roland’s and his wife’s state of mind is clear. Gouverneur Morris, who was in Paris at the moment, went to the “elevation opposite”—the present Trocadéro—to see the trouble. He says there were a “dozen or two” killed; Prudhomme says fifty; the official report gives twelve killed and the same number wounded. The same exaggerated statements characterize all their letters.

Before the summer of 1791 was over Madame Roland was certain that public opinion could not be aroused to another revolution; that the “stick” was going to stay in the “wheel”; that the Republic could not be established. As this conviction grew on her, she lost heart. “I have had enough of Paris, at least for this time.” She wrote: “I feel the need of going to see my trees, after having seen so many dolts and knaves. One rejoices in this little circle of honest souls when his cause triumphs, but when the _cabale_ is on top, when the wicked succeed and error is ahead, there is nothing to do but go home and plant cabbages.”

And this she decided to do very soon, for the beginning of September she left Paris for Villefranche. Everything on the trip discouraged her. She wrote Robespierre: “I find the people on the route, as in Paris, deceived by their enemies or ignorant of the true state of things; everywhere the mass is well disposed; it is just because its interest is the general interest, but it is misled or stupid. Nowhere have I met people with whom I could talk openly and advantageously of our political situation; I contented myself by distributing copies of your address in all the places through which I passed; they will be found after my departure and furnish an excellent text for meditation.”

It was even worse at Villefranche, where, on arriving, she made a tour of observation. She was convinced that the most of the inhabitants were utterly despicable, and made so by the existing social institutions; that they loved the Revolution only because it destroyed what was above them, but that they knew nothing of the theory of free government, and did not sympathize with that “sublime and delicious theory which makes us brothers”; that they hated the name of Republic, and that a king appeared to them essential to their existence.

She was as disgusted with Lyons for its devotion to the aristocracy. Its elections she declared detestable and the deputies nothing but enemies of liberty. The officers in the department were as badly chosen as the representatives; “if one was to judge of representative government by the little experience we have had of it so far, we cannot esteem ourselves very happy”; the elections were bought, so were the administrators, so the representatives, who in their turn sold the people. Even at Le Clos, where she went immediately for the fall vintage, there was a cloud; for the calumnies spread at Lyons about Roland when it was a question of nominating him for the Assembly, had reached the hills, and the people attributed their absence in Paris to the supposed arrest of Roland for _counter-revolution_. When she went out to walk she heard behind her the cry _Les aristocrates à la lanterne_.

Although Madame Roland sighed to escape from the “dolts and knaves” of Paris and longed for the peace of the country, the sentiment was only a passing one. The charm of the little circle she criticised so freely, the friendships she had formed, her devotion to the public cause, all these things made the absence from Paris hard to bear. On leaving she had hoped it would be only temporary. Roland was much talked of as a candidate for the new Assembly, and if he succeeded, it would take them back to Paris. She knew before her arrival at Le Clos that he had failed to secure the nomination. The news deepened her irritation at the condition of public affairs, strengthened the sense of oppression which the province produced, made her dissatisfied with Le Clos, her husband’s future, Eudora.

She had not seen her little daughter for seven months. She was deeply disappointed that she had changed so little. It seemed to her that she had gained nothing in the interval of separation, and that she had no idea of anything but loving and being loved. There was one way of awakening the child, however, in her judgment. She told Roland of it in one of the first letters she wrote him after reaching Villefranche, when she said: “Hasten back so that we may put our affairs in shape, and arrange to return to Paris as often as possible. I am not ambitious of the pleasures there, but such is the stupidity of our only child that I see no hope of making anything of her except by showing her as many objects as possible, and finding something which will interest her.”

For Roland, too, she felt that Paris was necessary. She was pained at the idea that he was going to be thrown back into silence and obscurity. He was accustomed to public life; it was more necessary to him than he himself thought, and she feared that his energy and activity would be fatal to his health, if they were not employed according to his tastes.

When Roland came back, he shared her feelings. He soon finished his affairs at Lyons, for the National Assembly had abolished the office of inspector of manufactures, and they spent the fall at Le Clos, occupied with the vintage, but they were restless. They had but little income and they turned their minds again to the idea of the pension, to which Roland’s forty years of service had certainly entitled him. If they were at Paris, perhaps it could be obtained. Then Roland’s work, which was simply the encyclopædia, would certainly be easier “at the fireside of light among _savants_ and artists than at the bottom of a desert”; for such their retreat seemed to them. They felt the need, too, of being near the centre of affairs; they ought to be where they could “watch”; where they could help bring about the “shock” which must come soon or the public cause would be lost forever. Their dissatisfaction became so great in the end, and public affairs so exciting, that they decided to go to Paris.

VIII
WORKING FOR A SECOND REVOLUTION

But how could they justify themselves in their determination to bring about a new “shock,” a second revolution? The Revolution was finished. In the twenty-eight months that the Constituent Assembly had been in operation, it had formed a constitution, accepted by Louis XVI. in September, 1791, which had cut from the nation a score of obnoxious and poisonous social, political, and economic growths. This constitution guaranteed, as natural and civil rights, that all citizens should be admissible to place and to employment without other distinction than that of virtue and talents; that all contributions be levied equally among the people in proportion to their ability, and that the same violations of law be punished in the same way. Every man might go and come as he would, speak, write, print, what he wished. There was no limit to the right to assemble peaceably, or to make petitions. Property was inviolable. Relief for the old, the weak, the poor, was promised. Public education was to be organized. The sovereignty rested in the nation; from it came all the power. The constitution was represented by a legislative body, and the King could not dissolve this assembly. He was King of the French, and his person was sacred, but he was inferior to the law, and reigned by it and in its name.

Undoubtedly, as Étienne Dumont said, “the constitution had too much of a republic for a monarchy, and too much of a monarchy for a republic. The King was a _hors d’œuvre_. He was everywhere in appearance, and he had no real power,” but evidently here was a basis which gave every man in France a chance, and which offered the opportunity to work out a satisfactory liberal government. To refuse to work with this constitution was to continue and to increase the disorganization, the hatred, the fear, which had been agitating France for so long; it was to prevent the new government having a fair chance, and was to make any correction of the constitution impossible. How could Madame Roland justify her resolve to prevent peace?

Her ideal was not satisfied. It mattered little to her that the people were indifferent to this ideal; that they were satisfied with the constitution and asked for nothing but a chance to let it work. The satisfaction of this ideal had become a necessity, an imperative personal need. She could not give it up. It was too beautiful.

Even if she could support the idea of a constitutional monarchy, she could not believe in the sincerity of the king and court. “I have never been able to believe in the constitutional vocation of a king, born under despotism, raised by it and accustomed to exercise it.” She wrote in her Memoirs: “Louis XVI. would have been a man much above the average had he sincerely desired a constitution which restrained his power. If he had been such a man, he would never have allowed the events which brought about the constitution.”

In her judgment the supporters of the monarchy were “traitors,” the constitutionalists a “cabale.” This suspicion had become a disease.

While she doubted the sincerity, the patriotism, the unselfishness of all parties but her own, she had profound confidence in herself. She saw no rôle in the world she says in her Memoirs, which suited her exactly except that of Providence. She had penetration, and flattered herself that she knew a “false eye” at first glance. She and Roland were “strong in reason and in character,” but she was convinced that she was better than he. “I have as much firmness and more flexibility. My energy has more agreeable forms, but it is founded on the same principles. I shock less and I penetrate deeper.” As for the majority of the human race, it was a “poor” affair.

She not only suspected the old régime, and believed herself superior to it; she cherished a personal grievance against it. It had refused her solicitations although they were just. She did not forgive the humiliation. She was near enough to the Court now to feel her dependence upon it. Years before she had written to Sophie: “I love my prince because I feel my dependence but little; if I were too near him, I should hate his grandeur.” She is “too near” now, and her prophecy is realized. She “hates his grandeur.” It is a species of that resentful jealousy which distorts certain really superior natures when they find themselves in the presence of material splendor or of persons of lofty rank.

When the Rolands went up to Paris in December, 1791, they found there a number of important persons who felt as they did, members of the Legislative Assembly, which had assembled on October 1st. They found, too, that they were already allied with their friends Brissot, Robespierre, and Pétion, all three of whom held prominent public positions, Brissot being a deputy to the Assembly from Paris, and at the head of the diplomatic committee; Robespierre, criminal accuser; Pétion, mayor.

This party of new deputies whom they found so congenial were known as the Gironde from the department whence most of them had come. They were all young and all endowed with great talent. They had been brought up on Plutarch and Rousseau, and their heads were filled with noble doctrines and drafts of perfect constitutions. When they talked, it was in classic phrases. Their arguments were based on what happened in Greece and Rome. Their illustrations were drawn from ancient heroes. There could be no doubt of the sincerity of their patriotism, of the nobility of their aspirations, of the purity of their lives, of their anxiety to die, if need be, for France.

But they had no experience of politics, of men, or of society, save what they had gotten from short terms in provincial law offices and clubs. They had never come into contact with other forces than the petty agitations and wire-pulling of their home towns. Of the force of human passions, of the lethargy and persistence of the mass of men, of the fine diplomacy of the trained statesman, they had not a notion.

They knew their Plutarch well, to be sure; but all they had drawn from him was a glibness in making fine periods and certain lofty sentiments, a species of patriotic emotionalism by which they could move and thrill men. Of practical policy for difficult and complicated situations, like the one they had been elected to face, they had not a shadow.

In courage, in audacity, in buoyancy of spirits, in eloquence, in bright visions, in purity of life, they are all that one’s imagination could paint. A more lovable and inspiring group of young men was never called together. But there was not one of them in whom contact with the world and sober reflection, had developed the common sense, the clear comprehensive judgment, the hard determination to do his best, and the simple honesty which alone make men fit for public office.

They were as blindly partisan as Madame Roland, and what Dumont said of Brissot was applicable to the Gironde as a whole: “He was one of those men in whom the party spirit was stronger than all moral, or rather he saw no moral save in his own party. No one had so much zeal of the convent as he. Dominican, he would have burned the heretics; Roman, he would not have been unworthy of following Cato and Regulus; French republican, he wished to destroy the monarchy and to reach his object did not shrink from calumny, persecution, or death on the scaffold.”

They all had the malady of the times,—suspicion. It had become a species of superstition with them. “One may laugh if he will,” said Dumont, “at these imaginary terrors, but they made the second revolution.” It was useless to argue with them, to give them proofs to call upon their good-will; they were suspicious and what they imagined was as real to them as if it had actually existed. They did not need proofs, mistrust never does. They were possessed by a sentiment and reason had no place.

As for their self-confidence, it was monumental. “No argument, no criticism, was listened to by them,” says Mme. de Staël. “They answered the observations of disinterested wisdom by a mocking smile. One wore himself out in reminding them of circumstances and what had led to them; if they condescended to answer, they denied the most evident facts and observations and used in opposition to them common maxims, though, to be sure, expressed eloquently.”

Feeling as they did, the only logical thing for them was to struggle to obtain power. If they were the “Providence” of France, it was their duty to get to the front. It was not for the sake of power that they made this effort. It was because they alone in their own judgment were sufficiently virtuous and enlightened to carry out the doctrines. They were “called” to preach liberty and a republic, and they went to their work in the same frame of exaltation and expectation as he goes who preaches the Kingdom of Heaven.

The only way in which they could arrive at power was by uniting with one of the two parties in the Assembly, with the constitutionalists or the Mountain, as the Radicals were termed. The former was composed of the well-to-do and the experienced men of the Assembly. It supported the King. It was the more honest and trustworthy, but it was accused of “aspiring secretly to increase the royal authority and to form two chambers.”

The Mountain was the party of the agitators and the street. It had the audacity, the violence, and the populace of the faubourgs. The talents, education, eloquence, refinement, of the Gironde were in harmony with the conservatives, but they could not believe that there was not a secret plot hidden under the patriotic pretensions of the constitutionalists. Their self-pride was irritated, too, by the aristocratic traditions, the courtly manners, and the reasonableness of the moderates. There was a subtile superiority in their wisdom, their gracious bearing, their _finesse_ which the Girondins resented.

As for the Mountain the Girondins feared its violence, its open advocacy of bloodshed less than they did its suspicion. They wanted to be considered the purest of the patriots and they could not support the idea that there was any one who pushed farther than they in making claims for the “sovereign” and for the “divine right of insurrection.” They had not the practical sense, the experience, and the disinterestedness to judge the Mountain, to see that it was chaotic, violent, irrational. Because it called itself the representative of the poor and the suffering, they imagined that it must be virtuous, and they wished its support. They feared its opinion of them even more than they feared the skeleton in the conservative closet.

To gain its favor they were even willing to sacrifice personal dignity and delicacy. The Mountain was ragged and dirty, ill-bred and foul-mouthed, but they shared a superstition of the day that rags and dirt, little bread and a hut for a home, are signs of patriotism, and if a man is poor, therefore he must have good principles. They found the coarseness of the Mountain more endurable than the etiquette of the Court. Pétion, at his public dinners as mayor, received the Gironde. Among his guests were many “patriots” of the rudest sort, yet Condorcet, Guadet, Gensonné, Roland, laughed at Chabot when he put on a _bonnet rouge_ and went through a series of low buffoonery, mocking the King, and applauded jests of “shocking grossness.”

Thus suspicion drove them from the conservative party, while fear of suspicion drove them towards the Mountain. Resentment at superior refinement turned their sympathy from the decent element of the Assembly, while a superstition about the true meaning of rags, dirt, and disorder awakened it for the wanton element.

Just as they floated between the parties of the Assembly, they vacillated between the clubs,—the Feuillants, which was for the constitution, and the Jacobins, which was for anarchy. Their object was not simply to do what was just and honorable, it was to do what would carry them into power. They must have power in order to carry their cause. To serve their party all means were justifiable. It was their uncertainty about which side would the quicker give them the leadership of the Assembly which explains their wavering over all the questions which absorbed the attention of the Legislative Assembly,—such as the questions of the unsworn priests, the immigration of nobles, and the declaration of war against Austria.

When the Rolands came up to Paris in December, the Gironde was floating between the two other parties, fearing both, suspected by both. Hate, defiance, exaggeration, were at their height. No one knew what would happen next. “You would say it was a fleet at anchor in a thick fog,” wrote Morris to Washington. “No one dares to put up sail for fear of running against a rock.”

When Madame Roland appeared on the scene, she had no hesitation in deciding what should be done by the Gironde. She had been too firmly convinced since the fall of the Bastille of the benefits of anarchy to fear it now. The lack of it had long been her despair. She was too suspicious of all persons of aristocratic origin to tolerate any union with the conservative party. She was too firmly convinced of the value of war as a “great school of public virtue” to hesitate about offensive operations.

Arrived in Paris, they settled in the Rue de la Harpe, where they lived very quietly, Roland occupying himself with the encyclopædia, with his plan for a pension, and with his friends. He went to the chief places of Gironde rendezvous when he had leisure, and they came to him sometimes. His chief political work, however, was at the Jacobin Club, where he was engaged on a committee.

Their life was very quiet until March, when it suddenly changed. A friend dropping in one day told Madame Roland that the patriots were to be asked to form a ministry and that as they were going to seek men of ability and courage, Roland had been thought of for a portfolio. Some days later (March 21, 1792) Brissot came to see her to inquire if Roland would accept if asked. They talked the matter over, considered its dangers, sounded its possibilities,—the next day Brissot was told in classic phrase that Roland’s courage did not falter, that the knowledge of his force inspired him with confidence in his ability to be useful to the country and to liberty.

The movement which had brought about the Girondin ministry had been led by Brissot. After the vetoes of the King to the decrees against the priests and _émigrés_, every effort had been made by the Jacobins to show that the ministry of the King was in secret sympathy with Court and _émigrés_, that while posing as constitutional, they were, in fact, anti-constitutional. Brissot had led this movement, and had condescended to some very low manœuvres to discredit certain members of the ministry. His plans had at last succeeded, and Louis XVI., hoping to quiet suspicion, had consented to name a cabinet which would satisfy the Girondins.

It was in this body that Roland had been asked to take the Department of the Interior. As was to be expected, the conservatives criticised the new ministers harshly from the first. Roland was pictured to the country by the _Mercure_ as one of the principal agitators of Lyons; “no administrative talent, no experience in affairs of state, a hot head, and the principles of the times in their greatest exaggeration.” The conservative element naturally accepted this characterization; for, outside of the manufacturing world, Roland was utterly unknown. As for the Jacobin element, it was a question of how far in anarchy the cabinet would go; if it kept up with them, well and good; if it fell behind, then let it take care.

With Roland’s appointment, Madame Roland was at once put into a position of responsibility and power. The Hôtel of the Interior, into which they moved, was situated in the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs at the point where the Rue Ventadour now opens. It was a fine building which had been arranged elegantly by Calonne for the controller-general. In going into this palace they did not give up their apartment in the Rue de la Harpe. The other ministers settled themselves as if they were to remain for life, but Madame Roland saw only the “luxury of an inn” in the gilded hôtel, and kept her modest apartment on the Left Bank, a “retreat which one must always have in mind as certain philosophers their coffins,” she told Bancal.

In no way were their habits changed by their new position. Roland was, perhaps, even a little more severe than usual, and took virtuous delight in appearing at Court with ribbons on his shoes instead of buckles, to the horror of the courtiers. They called him a Quaker in Sunday dress, with his white hair plastered down and sparsely powdered, his plain black coat, above all his unadorned shoes. Madame Roland arranged her life with strict regard for her notions of classic simplicity. She neither made nor received visits, and never invited women to dinner. Every Friday she had the members of the ministry; twice a week a mixed company of ministers, deputies, and persons Roland wanted to see. Rarely were there more than fifteen covers at table. One sat down at five o’clock to a meal always simple, and at nine o’clock this puritan household was closed. Of course, there was the theatre, with a _loge_ for the minister, but it was not often that she left her duties for it.

These duties were many; for the habit of working with Roland, of copying, polishing, suggesting, begun the first year of her marriage, over the dull pages of the encyclopædia and continued at Amiens and Le Clos, was carried into the ministry of the interior. She went over the daily mail with her husband. Together they noted the disorders in the country, and together decided on the policy to pursue. She gave her opinion on every subject, and exerted an influence on every question of the ministry. This was in private. In her salon she was as quiet as in the little salon of the Hôtel Britannique; nevertheless, she was always the spirit of the gatherings; a skilful and gentle peacemaker in too hot disputes; an inspiring advocate of the most radical undertakings; an ardent defender of her own opinions.

Many of the measures to be proposed in the Assembly by the Girondins originated in her salon; much of Roland’s business with individuals was talked over in her presence. It often happened that those who had business with Roland came to her first with it.