This invasion of our street produced panic among the foreigners in the house. There were a couple of middle-aged American women on the floor below me out seeing the world; but they had not bargained for a Revolution, and during the three or four days our Revolution was going on they shut themselves night and day in their room.
The Egyptians were in a worse panic. They whispered horrible stories of what happened in revolutions, and one night when fires had been set in our neighborhood and the firemen were out, they were sure we were all going to be burned alive. “Here we are, fourth floor,” cried one of them, “too high up to get out. We’ll all be dead by morning.”
A week was as long as the students could hold out in the torrid weather. There were too many cavalry, too many soldiers, too alert a police force, and also there were the apaches, the anarchists. It was no longer their revolution. They gave up; and by the end of the week kiosks were replaced, trees replanted, windows and doors opened, and we were all going on in our normal way.
Over, all quiet, nevertheless it was a pretty fine little revolution while it lasted. Was it not like Ravachol and Vaillant, a symptom, the kind of symptom by which the rise of the revolutionary fever always announces itself? Were there those who would nourish these symptoms as carefully as Madame Roland and her friends had nourished them in her day? If so, you would get your explosion. And for what good, I was asking myself.
Madame Roland had lost her head because she was not content with a first Revolution which had given the country a Constitution. She wanted to get the King and Queen and the highborn of all varieties out of the way. She wanted a Republic. She lost her head to those who were not satisfied with getting King and Queen out of the way, who wanted her and her followers out of the way as soon as they began to cry for order. Her Republic had collapsed under Napoleon Bonaparte. There had come a return to the Bourbon, then a Republic, then a return to a Bonaparte and again her Republic. But was this corrupt and vulgar Republic I was hearing about any better than the corrupt and scandalous court she hated and helped overthrow? Was the affair of the diamond necklace any worse than the affair of Panama? Was the Bastille a more ghastly prison than the spot where they were now sending political prisoners—the Devil’s Island of the Tropics?
I did not have the consolation of a fixed political formula to pull me out of my muddle. It is very easy to put everything in its place when you have that and are armed with its faith and its phrases. But here was I with a heroine on my hands whose formula and methods and motives I was beginning to question as I was questioning the formula, the methods and motives of France of the moment.
What kept me at my task, prevented me from throwing up Madame Roland and going on a blind research for the nature and roots of revolution, was the brilliant and friendly intellectual circle into which my quest of Madame Roland had led me.
Among the names I had been advised to include in my series on the writing women of Paris was that of A. Mary F. Robinson, an Englishwoman of the pre-Raphaelite school, a poetess of delicacy and distinction who had married one of the eminent scholars of France, James Darmesteter, a Hebrew and a cripple. One had only to look into his face to know that here was a great soul. And what interested me so was that this something in his face, his remarkable head, wiped out all sense of incongruity between the mating of this slender and exquisite woman with this man of alien race and crippled body. I never felt for a moment an incongruity.
When Monsieur Darmesteter learned I was after Madame Roland he was immediately helpful. “You must know Léon Marillier of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. He is a great-great-grandson of Madame Roland. He has papers which have never been given to the public. I will write you a letter.” Which he did, a letter which brought me an invitation to dinner.
This dinner was the gate to a whole new social and intellectual world. Here was a French academic household of the best sort, simple, hard-working, gay. Léon Marillier was an excellent and respected scholar. Jeanne, his wife, a sister of the Breton poet, Anatole Le Braz, was not only a skillful household manager but, like the wives of many French scholars, her husband’s amanuensis, copy and proof reader, and general adviser. She had particular charm among Parisians, for she was a Bretonne who loved her pays and kept its distinguishing marks without being provincial. Here I found, too, eager to go over the papers which Léon Marillier spread out after dinner for my inspection, one who was to prove a most helpful and delightful friend, Charles Borgeaud the eminent Swiss scholar, a friend of my friends the Vincents now back at Johns Hopkins.