Sara A. Underwood

“ Young men and old, looking upon that face in its defiance of the power of death, listening to the brave words of that unflinching soul, grew strong to meet the martyrdom they had dared for dear Liberty's sake, and learned to smile gravely even under the grim shadow of the guillotine, feeling that, after all, their lives had not been lived in vain, when they were to give them up in sacrifice to freedom in such glorious companionship. ”

“ In 1789, events preceding the Revolution had thrown France into a state of ferment. Every one in whose soul one spark of the divine fire of liberty burned felt himself forced to take an interest and a part in the events and politics of the times. Political meetings were held over all France, and the slow-burning fires of insurrection and revolution broke out here and there into sudden and no-longer-to-be repressed flame.
Among the first to declare themselves admirers and advocates of a new and republican form of government, as a panacea for the national distress, were M. and Madame Roland. ”

“ Without me, Roland would have been quite as good a Minister, for his knowledge, his activity, and his integrity were all his own; but I infused into his writings that mixture of spirit and gentleness, of authoritative reason and seducing sentiment, which is only found in the language of a woman who has a clear head and a feeling heart.”
At the time of Roland’s second ministry, the tide of anarchical revolution had already begun to overflow unhappy France. The rotten barriers of an effete monarchy gave way before the surging waves of that seething sea of infuriated men and women. ”

“ Madame Roland, filled with enthusiastic energy, wrote from Lyons to the Paris journals political letters of the most radical stamp, thus unwittingly helping to kindle the blaze which lit her own funeral pyre. But in joining the Revolutionists she had declared, "We must be ready for everything, even to die without regret!" Whatever may have been the mistakes which made the French Revolution so terrible a failure, it is certain that most of its original leaders were at first animated by only the purest and most devoted patriotism and love of liberty. ”

“ Marie Jeanne Phlipon, daughter of the drunken engraver, child of the people, wife of the just and conscientious philosopher Roland—in thee we find our ideal woman, as Christendom finds in Jesus its ideal man! Virtuous, loving, lovely, intellectual, self-sacrificing woman, could any Christ live an holier life, or die more nobly than thou didst? As he was put to death by a rude rabble because of his brave utterance of pure principles, so also wast thou. If his crucifixion was a more protracted bodily anguish, the horrible outlines of the blood-begrimed guillotine were no less terrible to thee ”

“ Madame Roland had declared that her husband would never consent to survive her execution, and the event justified her prophetic fear. Beautiful faith of a wife in a husband's love! and noble testimony of the husband to the merit of his wife! A writer in the London Critical Review says, in regard to her, “The objections to her character are those common to her with mast of the French writers and politicians of that period. They are philosophers without wisdom, and moralists without religion.” ”

“ Much as I revere the character of the man Jesus, I doubt whether his death was more sublime than was hers. I doubt also whether any belief in his atoning virtues could have made this woman's death more heroic than did her faith in “all that was great, and good, and immortal,” within herself, and her belief of the truths she advocated, and for which she died.
As soon as M. Roland heard of her execution, filled with anguish and despair he emerged from his concealment at Rouen, and started on the road to Paris, probably with some vague thought of avenging her death ”

“ Riouffe, one of her fellow-prisoners, who subsequently escaped, says of her: “Something more than is usually found in the looks of women painted itself in those large dark eyes of hers, full of expression and sweetness, She spoke to me often at the grate, with the freedom and courage of a great man. Such republican language in the mouth of a beautiful French woman preparing for the scaffold was a miracle of the Revolution for which we were not prepared. ”

“ If, however, we were to judge of the female and male mind by contrasting these confessions with those, the advantage of purity will be greatly on the side of our sex.”
“Madame Roland,” says Margaret Fuller, “is the fairest specimen we yet have of her class; as clear to discern her aim, as valiant to pursue it, as Spenser's Britomarte; austerely set apart from all that did not belong to her, whether as woman or as mind. ”

“ Her mother, a pure-minded, large-hearted woman, possessing rare worth and intelligence, early instilled into the mind of her child those principles of conscientious virtue which afterward added such lustre to the genius of that child—which made her strong and brave in the face of a terrible death, and which made hers the purest public character developed by the Revolution of ‘93. ”

“ I am glad there is danger. I see nothing else capable of goading you on. It is impossible to rise to freedom from the midst of corruption without strong convulsions. They are the salutary crises of a serious disease.”
It was through these letters, ablaze with the passionate fire of the love of liberty, that she first became known to the liberal party as the radiant priestess of that liberty. M. Roland was sent as Deputy Extraordinary to the Constituent Assembly at Paris in 1791, whither Madame Roland accompanied him on the 20th of February. ”

“ A thoughtful, conscientious child, she began at a very early age to give much attention to matters of religion, and when only eleven years of age was sent to a convent at her own urgent desire, where for several years she remained as a pupil. Here her mind applied itself with all its intense ardor to the study of the Catholic religion. ”

“ But Manon, with a good home, many friends, her books, and a free heart, was in no hurry to marry, and her life went on happily and joyously until in 1773 her first real sorrow came to her in the death of her tender, loving mother, to whom she was passionately devoted, and her grief at the death of this dear friend was such as to prostrate her on a bed of sickness and for a while threatened to destroy her reason or her life. ”

“ In the prospective downfall of Royalty in France they beheld glorious visions of another France, a new American Republic, a republic void of aristocratical distinctions, where merit and not rank should demand and receive homage. ”

“ Here, then, in the person of a pure, conscientious, liberty-loving, and historical woman, we find the refutation of the prevalent idea, that perfection of moral character is dependent on a belief in Christianity. ”

“ He had also made sad inroads upon the fortune left her by her mother; her expostulations were met with anger and injustice on his part, and after his rudeness to M. Roland—a rudeness which had deeply wounded the feelings of that gentleman—she decided that it was useless to attempt to live with him in peace, and she retired from home, hiring rooms in a convent, where she lived for six months alone. At the end of that time M. Roland sought her out, and renewed his proposals of marriage. They were married in the winter of 1779, she being then twenty-five years of age, while he was forty-seven. ”

“ True to their principles, M. and Madame Roland did not allow any change of station to alter the republican simplicity of their manners. She paid no visits and received only those visitors whom her husband’s public position and duties obliged her to receive. By the adoption of this course, she found time for her studies, and to remodel and enliven, if she did not originate, many of the State papers which appeared over Roland’s signature.
In regard to this phase of her life, Carlyle writes of her thus: “Envious men insinuate that the wife of Roland is Minister, not the husband. ”

“ Although on her marriage with M. Roland she had confessed that she esteemed more than she loved him, yet never was wife more devoted to husband than she; never was husband happier in a wife than he. In her memoirs she thus bears testimony to the mutual confidence and sympathy subsisting between them:
“During twelve years I shared in my husband's intellectual labors, as I did in his repasts ”