Madame Roland

“ A countless throng flooded the streets; men, women, and children, shouting, laughing, execrating. The celebrity of Madame Roland, her extraordinary grace and beauty, and her aspect, not only of heroic fearlessness, but of joyous exhilaration, made her the prominent object of the public gaze. ”

“ The rare beauty of Madame Roland's character and her winning manners could not fail to gain the hearts of all who came in contact with her. The gaoler's wife showed her every kindness, made her sit in her own room, where the air was purer, and where she was able to receive friends. Even the turnkeys, some most villainous of appearance, became humanised in her presence. Her faithful friends rallied round her, Bosc assuring her of the safety of her daughter, placed by him under the protection of a worthy, kind-hearted lady, in whose family she remained like one of her own children. ”

“ The journals of the day were read, Madame Roland being usually called upon as reader. When not thus reading, she usually sat at her work-table, employing her fingers with her needle, while she took a quiet and unobtrusive part in the conversation. "This kind of life," says Madame Roland, "would be very austere, were not my husband a man of great merit, whom I love with my whole heart. Tender friendship and unbounded confidence mark every moment of existence, and stamp a value upon all things, which nothing without them would have. It is the life most favorable to virtue and happiness. ”

“ Here we surprise the most intimate movements of Madame Roland's heart, when she had left the world behind her and was speaking to one only, and that one for ever separated from her. Is it possible for a noble nature to express intenser affection than by rendering thanks to the dungeon for having at last reconciled duty and love? And yet love itself is subordinated to her country, ever first with her.
Was it likely that she or her friends would wish to ruin France by fomenting a civil war? ”

“ Nowhere is the great political importance attributed by contemporaries to Madame Roland so decisively shown as here. She had now been pushed to the very forefront of the Revolution, visible to all eyes, a mark for envy, to become the favourite target for the venomous calumnies of Marat and the Père Duchesne. Her co-operation in composing and promulgating the numerous writings by which Roland sought to influence public opinion could not remain unknown. ”

“ The tidings of the arrest and imprisonment of Madame Roland soon reached the ears of her unfortunate husband in his retreat. His embarrassment was most agonizing. To remain and participate in her doom, whatever that doom might be, would only diminish her chances of escape and magnify her peril; and yet it seemed not magnanimous to abandon his noble wife to encounter her merciless foes alone. The triumphant Jacobins were now, with the eagerness of blood-hounds, searching every nook and corner in Paris, to drag the fallen minister from his concealment. ”

“ She may be respected for her talents, she may be honored for her philanthropy, but she can not win the warmer emotions of the heart. But Madame Roland, with an energy of will, an inflexibility of purpose, a firmness of stoical endurance which no mortal man has ever exceeded, combined that gentleness, and tenderness, and affection—that instinctive sense of the proprieties of her sex—which gathered around her a love as pure and as enthusiastic as woman ever excited. ”

“ The silence, as of the grave, reigned there, while the clear and musical tones of Madame Roland, as of an angel of consolation, vibrated through the rusty bars, and along the dark, damp cloisters. One who was at that time an inmate of the prison, and survived those dreadful scenes, has described, in glowing terms, the almost miraculous effects of her soul-moving eloquence. She was already past the prime of life, but she was still fascinating. ”

“ No sooner had the men gone than Madame Roland formed a daring plan. She would go herself, expose the iniquity of this proceeding, and rouse the Convention to a sense of its duty. So she left her husband in the society of a friend, and, closely veiled, with a black shawl thrown over her morning gown, she hurriedly stepped into a hackney coach and drove full speed to the Place du Carousel. ”

“ LOVE IN A PRISON.
On the 31st of May, Madame Roland had sat at home listening with a thrill of excitement to the now familiar sounds of insurrection. She heard the beating of the rappel and the générale in the faubourgs; she saw armed men quickly tramping through the streets; the ill-omened tocsin sounded lugubriously. She was still in Paris, although long prepared to leave it. Having returned to private life, she considered herself free to go, and judged that, in case of danger, Roland would be more unencumbered if she and Eudora were out of the way. ”

“ As the gentlemen assembled in the retired parlor, or rather library and study, appropriated to these confidential interviews, Madame Roland took her seat at a little work-table, aside from the circle where her husband and his friends were discussing their political measures. Busy with her needle or with her pen, she listened to every word that was uttered, and often bit her lips to check the almost irrepressible desire to speak out in condemnation of some feeble proposal or to urge some bolder action. ”

“ Such was the invocation which Madame Roland addressed to the Deity she worshiped, at a time when, death by violence seeming unavoidable, she contemplated defeating the cruel guillotine by suicide. There is in it, as in all the acts of her life, the undaunted tone of the truly brave in spirit. Conscious of her own nobility of soul, there is in it no mock humility, no cowardly trusting to the blood of an innocent person to save her from the consequences of her own acts, no weak doubts expressed as to her own merit ”

“ The men here assembled were the most illustrious of the nation. Noble sentiments passed from mind to mind. Madame Roland, pale with emotion, conscious of the perils which were so portentously rising around them, shone with a preternatural brilliance in the solemn rejoicing of that evening. The aged Roland gazed with tears of fond affection and of gratified pride upon his lovely wife, as if in spirit asking her if all the loftiest aspirations of their souls were not now answered. The victorious Republicans hardly knew whether to sing triumphant songs or funeral dirges. ”

“ Upon [Pg 137] this wave of enthusiastic popularity Madame Roland and her husband retired from the magnificent palace where they had dwelt for so short a time, and, with a little pardonable ostentation, selected for their retreat very humble apartments in an apparently obscure street of the agitated metropolis. It was the retirement of a philosopher proud of the gloom of his garret. But M. Roland and wife were more powerful now than ever before. The famous letter had placed them in the front ranks of the friends of reform, and enshrined them in the hearts of the ever fickle populace. ”

“ At the political evening reunions in the saloon of Madame Roland, she was invariably present, not as a prominent actor in the scenes, taking a conspicuous part in the social debates, but as a quiet and modest lady, of well-known intellectual supremacy, whose active mind took the liveliest interest in the agitations of the hour. The influence she exerted was the polished, refined, attractive influence of an accomplished woman, who moved in her own appropriate sphere. She made no Amazonian speeches. She mingled not with men in the clamor of debate. ”

“ Madame Roland herself never entertained any illusions. Very early she perceived the interests of the Royalist and popular party to be diametrically opposed to each other, and in the summer of 1789 she wrote with her unflinching judgment: "You busy yourselves about a municipality and you suffer heads to escape which are about to conjure up new horrors. You are nothing but children; your enthusiasm is a momentary blaze; and if the National Assembly do not bring two illustrious heads to a formal trial, or if some generous Decrees do not strike them off, you will all go to the Devil together." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Madame Roland's enthusiasm.
Her influence upon the prisoners.
The upper part of the door of her cell was an iron grating. The surrounding cells were filled with the most illustrious ladies and gentlemen of France. As the hour of death drew near, her courage and animation seemed to increase. Her features glowed with enthusiasm; her thoughts and expressions were refulgent with sublimity, and her whole aspect assumed the impress of one appointed to fill some great and lofty destiny. She remained but a few days in the Conciergerie before she was led to the scaffold. ”

“ It is not possible that one endowed with the ardent and glowing imagination of Madame Roland should not, at times, feel inwardly the spirit of exultation in the consciousness of this vast power. From the windows of her palace [Pg 148] she looked down upon the shop of the mechanic where her infancy was cradled, and upon those dusty streets where she had walked an obscure child, while proud aristocracy swept by her in splendor—that very aristocracy looking now imploringly to her for a smile. ”

“ In rejecting this system, she had no friend to conduct her to the warm, sheltered, and congenial retreats of evangelical piety. She was led almost inevitably, by the philosophy of the times, to those chilling, barren, storm-swept heights, where the soul can find no shelter but in its own indomitable energies of endurance. These energies Madame Roland displayed in such a degree as to give her a name among the very first of those in any age who by heroism have shed luster upon human nature. ”

“ He entered magnanimously into his wife's trouble, and there goes a tradition that he had formed a resolution of voluntarily leaving her, should she not succeed in stifling her love; but she would never have consented to this, knowing as she did how closely the fibres of his life were bound up in hers: having so completely fulfilled her maxim—that a woman must make the man's happiness in marriage—that he could not live without her. Truly there seemed no way of disentangling this moral knot, when the Revolution came and cut it in two by throwing Madame Roland into prison. ”

“ So fell the Gironde, and it is refreshing to find among the list of the proscribed the heroic name of Ducos, that martyr to friendship, who, when Marat would have saved him because of his extreme youth, scorned his mercy and cast in his lot with Fonfrède, be his fate what it might.
"Things are rarely what they seem," says Madame Roland in her Memoirs, "and the periods of my life that have been the sweetest were the reverse of what outsiders would imagine. Happiness, in fact, belongs to a state of feeling, and not to external circumstances." ”

“ At every epoch of history there are certain women who become as it were living symbols, and sum up in their own persons the passions, prejudices, and illusions of their time. They reflect at once its vices and its virtues, its qualities and its defects. Such was Madame Roland. All the distinctive characteristics of the close of the eighteenth century are resumed in her: ardent enthusiasm, generous ideals, aspiration towards progress, passion for liberty, heroic courage in view of persecution, captivity, and death ”

“ But we do see it; we hear Madame Roland trying to console the unhappy women, never alluding to her own fate, but gently imploring them henceforth to live together in peace, in hope, and in charity. The old gaoler, who had held his post for thirty years, came to open the grate to her, and wept as he did so. ”

“ Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, renowned as Madame Roland, was born in Paris, March 17, 1754, in a house on the Quai de l'Horloge, near the Pont Neuf. She was thus just the same age as Louis XVI., and about a year older than Marie Antoinette. It would be difficult to find more common-place surroundings than those amidst which one of the greatest of Frenchwomen was ushered into the world.
That a daughter of shepherds and rustics should have become the saviour of her country is not surprising. For the primitive simplicity of those occupations seems the proper nursery of heroism. ”

“ It seems equally clear that Madame Roland, although shocked at the discovery, could not help feeling flattered, nor avoid a certain compassionate tenderness for the man she was now forced to bid renounce all idea of fixing himself in her neighbourhood. This, at least, seems to be the key to the letter she now addressed to Bancal after her husband's invitation.
"It would make the charm of our lives (this association) , and we should not be useless to our fellow men. ”

“ During the summer they retired to M. Roland's paternal estate, La Platière, a very beautiful rural retreat but a few miles from Lyons. The mother of M. Roland and an elder brother resided on the same estate. They constituted the ingredient of bitterness in their cup of joy. It seems that in this life it must ever be that each pleasure shall have its pain. No happiness can come unalloyed. La Platière possessed for Madame Roland all the essentials of an earthly paradise; but those trials which are the unvarying lot of fallen humanity obtained entrance there. ”