That was what I had hoped to find Madame Roland giving; and I had found a politician with a Providence complex. I had also found what I had been trying to shove aside, as women do, new proof of that eternal and necessary natural law that the woman backs up her man. Madame Roland had been Royalist, Republican, Revolutionist, according to the man she loved. She had served her man with unyielding conviction, would not temper or cooperate, intolerant, inflexible.
But what woman in America seeking the vote as a sure cure for injustice and corruption would listen to such a message? That, of course, was no affair of mine. My affair was clearing my own mind. So far I had only succeeded in adding to its confusion, even in destroying faiths I had held. There was the ancient faith that you could depend upon the woman to oppose violence. This woman had been one of the steadiest influences to violence, willing, even eager, to use this terrible revolutionary force, so bewildering and terrifying to me, to accomplish her ends, childishly believing herself and her friends strong enough to control it when they needed it no longer.
The heaviest blow to my self-confidence so far was my loss of faith in revolution as a divine weapon. Not since I discovered the world not to have been made in six days of twenty-four hours each, had I been so intellectually and spiritually upset. I had held a revolution as a noble and sacred instrument, destroying evil and leaving men free to be wise and good and just. Now it seemed to me not something that men used, but something that used men for its own mysterious end and left behind the same relative proportion of good and evil as it started with.
Never did I so realize my ignorance of life and men and society as in the summer of 1894, when I packed up the manuscript of my life of Madame Roland to take it back to America for its final revision in the peace of my home.
Of course, I told myself, I would go through with it. I would put down what I had found as nearly as I could, even if I had not got what I came for. And then came the question, Can I get what I came for? Is it to be found—the real answer to my question about woman in society, the point or position where she can best serve it? Can I find an answer to this other question that has so disturbed me—the nature of revolution? Apparently, I told myself, as I packed my bag finally to go back to America, you have only begun; but at least you have a new starting point. Cheer up, make a new plan. And I was making a new plan. I had been making one for some time. It was laid down economically, professionally, and socially with as much precision as the plan with which I had come to Paris in 1891. It was a plan for my return to Paris.
I would go home, get my book into shape, try to convince the Scribners that it was worth their publishing. I would get a good long visit with my family, the only thing I felt now to be worth while in life. I wanted to be sure they were there, that the house was there, that my father’s chair stood by the living-room center table under the drop gas reading light, that the family Sunday dinner was what it had always been. I wanted to hear my father ask the blessing at the table, to sit with my sister and mother afternoons out on the shady side of the lawn. I wanted all the home flowers I could gather—and it was queer what a big place flowers took in my dreams of home. My mother was one of those women for whom, they say, “anything will grow.” And she had had flowers, summer and winter. One of the deprivations of not having money in Paris had been that I could not buy flowers. I had to content myself with lounging around the flower markets on the Square of Notre Dame. I lingered there almost as much as I did over the bookstalls along the Seine. But at home I could gather all I wanted.
I would come back to France on different terms. My friendly publishers would give me work. I had schemes for books and articles which I felt sure would interest the Scribners, that history of women, for instance. Then there was this lively, friendly, aggressive, delightful McClure’s. There were plenty of things I could write for them.
I would take an apartment in the Latin Quarter up high where I could look over the roofs, see the sky. I would have a salon like Madame Marillier’s. She would find me a bonne à tout faire, and I could have people in to dinner—Madame Marillier, Seignobos, and perhaps Lucien Herr and Louis Lapique and Charles Borgeaud would come. The summer would bring over my precious American friends—the Vincents, Emerys, Hazens, and my sister must join me. Life would be full and satisfying while I cleared up my mind on women and revolution and continued my search for God in the great cathedrals.
It was with this baggage and a terrible thirst for a long drink of family life that in June, 1894, I said “Au revoir” to my friends. I felt so sure it was Au revoir.
The first two months after I reached America I spent at home convincing myself that my family in spite of the trials it had been suffering was unchanged in its ways, its loyalties, and its philosophy. If life was not as easy materially for my father and mother as their long years of labor and self-denial gave them the right to hope, I found that they were enjoying that most precious experience, the evidence of the continuity of their lives. My brother and his fine wife with their children, two girls and a boy, lived only a few doors away, and the grandchildren were as much in one home as in the other. They gave, I found, a continual fresh zest to the household and its doings. My father again had the legitimate excuse for going to the circus which our growing up had taken from him: “The children want to go.” My mother had as strong a justification for family picnics and birthday celebrations on which she tired herself out: “The children enjoy them so.”