When they came to that conclusion they took Steed in, and from that time on he was welcome. All through the years of his brilliant career as a correspondent and later through the war as foreign editor of the London Times, the association with Seignobos continued. In his recollections, “Through Thirty Years,” Steed tells of his introduction to the circle—“a sort of entrance examination” which convinced his examiners he was less stupid than he ought to have been.
This then was the group in which my interest in Madame Roland had landed me. As the weeks went on, the intimacy grew greater. Whatever occurred to them that might help me in my work, they suggested. It was through their introduction that I was given every opportunity in the manuscript room of the National Library to work over the large collection of Roland manuscripts which had just been catalogued. Indeed, I was the first person to work on them in the Library.
Delightful as well as important to my enterprise was the invitation Madame gave me in the spring of 1893 to go with her for a fortnight to Le Clos, a country estate which had been in the Roland family for at least a hundred years before the Revolution. After the death of Monsieur and Madame Roland in 1793 Le Clos had passed to their daughter. It now belonged to Madame Marillier, who managed it, giving special care to its chief yield, grapes—made into wine on the place.
Le Clos lay in the Beaujolais, some thirty miles north of the city of Lyons and close to a hamlet called Theizé. Here Madame Roland had spent some four years while her husband served as inspector of manufactures at Lyons. The château was little changed, so Madame Marillier told me. The activities were what they had been a hundred years ago. It was a rare chance to see my heroine in a different role, busy with other duties than those of student, tuft-hunter, political diplomat, Providence to a Nation. I needed to see her in a more natural and helpful environment, for I was beginning to mistrust her.
The journey to Le Clos with Madame Marillier, taken in May, was an adventure for both of us. How much she had jeopardized her position in her own family by traveling with a foreigner and a Protestant, I did not realize until the day we spent sightseeing at Dijon. She left me for an hour to visit an important and ancient aunt. “I should not dare take you with me,” she said, “my aunt would cast me out if she knew I was traveling with a heretic.”
To reach Le Clos we left the railroad at Villefranche and climbed in a horse-cart for an hour and more, steadily up hills, across valleys, a high broad country, striped by many colored ribbonlike farms, dotted by stout buildings of dull yellow, the stone of the country, sprinkled with splendid trees, vineyards and orchards. Theizé, the hamlet we sought, lay high. We drove between its walls, turned into a lane, and stopped before a big gate in a yellow wall. Behind it lay Le Clos, a little white château of Louis XIV’s time with corner towers and red-tiled roofs, a court on one side, a garden on the other. From this garden one looked out over a magnificent panorama of hills, mountains, valleys, stretching to the Swiss Alps in the east. On clear evenings the snowcaps were visible and now and then the round crown of Mount Blanc glowed on the sky line like an immense opal.
Within the château there had been little outward change from Madame Roland’s time. There was the same great dark kitchen, with its stone floor, its huge fireplace (although now a stove helped out), the same shining copper vessels on the walls. There was the same brick floor in the billiard room with its ancient table, its guns and caps of successive generations of soldiers on the walls. The brightest place within the house was the salon, done in yellow plush, family portraits on the walls, a piano, books.
I had an apartment to myself looking out on the garden and beyond to the mountains: a bedroom, toilet and workroom, severe as a nun’s cell with its uncovered floor, its unadorned walls, but containing every necessary comfort and a wealth of books—five hundred or more in my workroom, including several magnificent sets. Among them, Voltaire complete in seventy volumes. They nearly all bore eighteenth century dates, and some of them the name of Roland himself. Indeed, the home was rich in books of value. In Madame Marillier’s library there were two thousand or more; but these were only “what was left.” From the collection she had inherited she had given Léon Marillier complete early sets of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot; she had made a collection of scientific books for Louis Lapique, one of the members of her Paris household, and another of historical books for Charles Seignobos, and still there were all these hundreds, many of which I had the right to believe Madame Roland herself had handled. We ransacked them for marginal notes and hunted through the drawers of old desks and bureaus for papers, finding not a few small bits which were grist for my mill.
Books were about all the original possessions of Le Clos that the Revolutionists of the seventeen-nineties had not made away with. The château itself had not suffered seriously, though there were still some slight scars; but, books aside, it had been completely stripped of furnishings. Even today, so Madame Marillier told me, it was not unusual when inquiry was made about the origin of some interesting old piece in a Beaujolais farmhouse to be told, “Oh, that came from Le Clos a hundred years ago.”
The Revolution stripped Le Clos of its possessions and all but ended the family. But it did not succeed in convincing all the Beaujolais of its beneficence. There was not a little outspoken antirevolutionary feeling still abroad. The Marseillaise was never played in Theizé, I was told. The curé and the municipal council would not permit it, nor would they allow the 14th of July to be celebrated. While I was at Le Clos there was a sharp dispute in a neighboring hamlet on the playing of the “Marseillaise.” The bandmaster refused to lead when it was asked. It was put up to the band who voted yes. Thereupon the master laid down his baton and went off in a huff. Madame Roland’s Revolution was not ended.