In 1795 this little house was surrounded by a great crowd of citizens come to bury Louis de Chénier, the father. The Section of Brutus guarded the bier, draped with blue set with silver stars, to suggest the immortality of the soul! And they gave every honor they could invent to the "Pompe funèbre d'un Citoyen Vertueux," whose worthy son they had beheaded.
Joseph-Marie de Chénier lived for many years under suspicion of having given his assent if not his aid to his brother's death, albeit the mother always asserted that he had tried to save André. Joseph was a fiery patriot, and a man of genius withal. He wrote the words of the "Chant du Départ" which, set to music by Méhul, proved almost as stirring as the "Marseillaise" to the pulses of the Patriots. Music was one of the potent intoxicants of the time, and the Revolution was played and sung along to the strains of these two airs, and of "Ça ira" and the "Carmagnole." The classic style, which had hitherto prevailed, gave way before the paltry sentimentality and the tinkling bombast of the music adored by the mob. David planned processions marching to patriotic airs, and shallow operas were performed in the streets. Yet Rouget-de-l'Isle, the captain of engineers who had given them the "Marseillaise," was cashiered and put into a cell; being freed, he was left to starve, and no aid came to him from the Empire or the Bourbons, naturally enough. Louis-Philippe's government found him in sad straits, in that poor house No. 21 of the poor Passage Saulnier, and ordered a small pension to be paid to him during his life. His death came in 1836.
Joseph-Marie de Chénier was a playwright, also, and in 1798 he had created a sensation by his "Charles IX.," produced at the Comédie Française, now the Odéon. In the part of the King, wonderfully made up and costumed, Talma won his first notable triumph. "This play," cried Danton from the pit, "will kill royalty as 'Figaro' killed the nobility." Joseph-Marie lived, not too reputably, but very busily, until January 10, 1811; a fussy politician, a member of the Convention, of the Council of Five Hundred, and of the Institute, Section of the French Tongue and Literature, always detested by his associates, by the Emperor, and by the common people.
When the Place Dauphine of Henri IV. was finished, the new industry of the spectacle-makers established itself in the same buildings we see to-day, and gave to the place the name of Quai des Lunettes. Later came the engravers, who found all the light they needed in these rooms, open on three sides. Among them was a master-engraver, one Phlipon, bringing his daughter, Marie-Jeanne—her pet name being Manon—from the house of her birth, in 1754, in Rue de la Lanterne, now widened into Rue de la Cité. It is not known whether the site of that house is under the Hôtel-Dieu or the Marché-aux-Fleurs. Their new home stood, and still stands, on the corner of the northern quay, and is now numbered 28 Place Dauphine and 41 Quai de l'Horloge. The small window of the second floor lights the child's alcove bedroom, where this "daughter of the Seine"—so Madame Roland dubs herself in her "Memoirs"—looked out on the river, and up at the sky, from over Pont au Change to beyond the heights of Chaillot, when she could lift her eyes from her Plutarch, and her thoughts from the altar she was planning to raise to Rousseau. It must be owned that this all too-serious girl was a prig; a creature over-fed for its size, the word has been happily defined. At the age of eleven, she was sent to the school of the "Dames de la Congrégation," in the Augustinian convent in Rue Neuve-Saint-Etienne. It has been told how that ancient street was cut in half by Rue Monge. In its eastern section, now named Rue de Navarre, was Manon's school, directly above the Roman amphitheatre, discovered only of late years in the course of excavations in this quarter. The portion that is left of this impressive relic is in good preservation and in good keeping. Her school-days done, the girl spent several years in this house before us, until her mother's death, and her father's tipsiness, sent her back to her convent for a few months. Then, having refused the many suitors who had thronged about her in her own home, she found the philosopher she wanted for a husband in Jean-Marie Roland de la Platrière, a man much older than she; lank, angular, yellow, bald, "rather respectable than seductive," in the words of the girl-friend who had introduced him. But Manon Phlipon doubtless idealized this wooden formalist who adored her, as she idealized herself and all her surroundings, including The People, who turned and rent her at the last. She gave to her husband duty and loyalty, and it was not until she counted herself dead to earth and its temptations, in her cell at Sainte-Pélagie, that she addressed her last farewell to him, whom "I dare not name, one whom the most terrible of passions has not kept from respecting the barriers of virtue." This farewell was meant for François-Léonard-Nicolas Buzot, Girondist member of the Assembly and later of the Convention. He remained unnamed and unknown, until his name and their secret were told by a bundle of old letters, found on a book-stall on Quai Voltaire in 1864. She had met him first when her husband came from Lyons, with petitions to the Assembly, in February, 1791, and took rooms at the Hôtel Britannique, in Rue Guénégaud. Her salon soon became the gathering-place of the Girondists, where those austere men, who considered themselves the sole salvation of France, were austerely regaled with a bowl of sugar and a carafe of water. Their hostess could not bother with frivolities, she, who in her deadly earnestness, renounced the theatre and pictures, and all the foolish graces of life! The Hôtel Britannique was the house now numbered 12 Rue Guénégaud, a wide-fronted, many-windowed mansion of the eighteenth century. Its stone steps within are well worn, its iron rail is good, its second floor—the Roland apartment—still shows traces of the ancient decorations.
The Girlhood Home of Madame Roland.
Buzot lived at No. 3 Quai Malaquais, an ancient mansion now replaced by the modern structure between the seventeenth-century houses numbered 1 and 5. For when the Convention outlawed the Girondists, and Buzot fled, it was decreed that his dwelling should be levelled to the ground, and on its site should be placed a notice: "Là fut la maison du roi Buzot." So that it would seem that his colleagues of the Convention had found him an insufferably Superior Person.
Leaving this apartment on his appointment to office in 1792, Roland took his wife to the gorgeous salons of the Ministry of the Interior, in the hôtel built by Leveau for the Comte de Lionne, and beautified later by Calonne. It occupied the site of the present annex of the Bank of France just off Rue des Petits-Champs, between Rues Marsollier and Dalayrac. Here, during his two terms of office in 1792 and 1793, Roland had the aid of his wife's pen, as well as the allurements of her personal influence, in the cause to which she had devoted herself. The masculine strength of her pen was weakened, it is true, by too sharp a feminine point, and she embittered the Court, the Cordeliers, the Jacobins, all equally against her and her party. For "this woman who was a great man," in Louis Blanc's true words, was as essentially womanly as was Marie Antoinette; and these two most gracious and pathetic figures of their time were yet unconscious workers for evil to France. The Queen made impassable the breach between the throne and the people; Madame Roland hastened on the Terror. And each of them was doing exactly what she thought it right to do!
On January 23, 1793, two days after the King's death, Roland left office forever and removed to a house in Rue de la Harpe, opposite the Church of Saint-Cosme. That church stood on the triangle made by the meeting of Rues de l'École-de-Médecine and Racine with Boulevard Saint-Germain. On the eastern side of that boulevard, once the eastern side of Rue de la Harpe, where it meets modern Rue des Écoles, stood the Roland house. The students and studentesses, who sip their coffee and beer on the pavement of Vachette's, are on the scene of Madame Roland's arrest, on the night between May 31st and June 1st. On the former day, seeing the end so near, Roland had fled. His wife was taken to the prison of the Abbaye, and given the cell which was to be tenanted, six weeks later, by Charlotte Corday. Released on June 22d and returned to her home in Rue de la Harpe, she was re-arrested on the 24th and locked up in Sainte-Pélagie. It was an old prison, long kept for the detention of "femmes et filles, dont la conduite est onéreuse," and its character had not been bettered by the character of the female prisoners sent there by the Terror. This high-minded woman, subjected to infamous sights and sounds, preserved her serenity and fortitude in a way to extort the "stupefied admiration" of her fellow-prisoners, as one of these has testified. It was only in her cell that the great heart gave way. There she found solace, during her four months' confinement, with Thomson's "Seasons," "done into choice French," with Shaftesbury and an English dictionary, with Tacitus, and her girlhood companion, Plutarch. And here she busied herself with her "Memoirs," "writing under the axe," in her own phrase. In the solitude of her cell, indeed, she was sometimes disturbed by the unseemly laughter of the ladies of the Comédie Française, at supper with the prison-governor in an adjacent cell. We shall see, later, how these ladies came to be here. More acceptable sounds might have come almost to her ears; that of the hymn-singing or of the maiden laughter of the girls in her old convent, only a few steps away. The prison-register contains her description, probably as accurate as matter-of-fact: "Height, five feet; hair and eyebrows, dark chestnut; brown eyes; medium nose; ordinary mouth; oval face, round chin, high forehead." From Sainte-Pélagie she went to the Conciergerie on November 1st, the day after the guillotining of the Girondists, and thence in eight days to her own death. It has been told, by every writer, that she could look over at her girlhood home, as her tumbril crossed Pont au Change. It has not been told, so plainly as it deserves, that her famous utterance on the platform was made fine for historic purposes, as was done with Cambronne's magnificent monosyllable at Waterloo. She really said: "O Liberté, comme on t'a jouée!" With these words, natural and spontaneous and without pose, she is, indeed, "beautiful, amazonian, graceful to the eye, more so to the mind."