When she first wrote Sophie she was so convinced of the existence of God for “philosophical reasons” that she declared the authority of the world could not upset her. With this went the immortality of the soul. These two dogmas were enough to satisfy her heart and imagination. She did not need them to be upright, she said, but she did to be happy. She did right because she had convinced herself that it was to her own and to her neighbor’s interest. She was happy because she had a reasonable basis for goodness and nobility, and because she believed in God and in immortality. On this foundation further study became an inspiration. “My sentiments have gained an energy, a warmth, a range,” she wrote to Sophie after reading Raynal’s Philosophical History, “that the exhortations of priests have never given them—the General Good is my idol, because it must be the result and the reasonable end of everything. Virtue pleases me, inflames my imagination because it is good for me, useful to others, and beautiful in itself. I cherish life because I feel the value of it. I use it to the best advantage possible. I love all that breathes, I hate nothing but evil, and still I pity the guilty. With a conduct conformed to these ideas, I live happy and tranquil, and I shall finish my career in peace and with the greatest confidence in a God whom I dare believe to be better than I have been taught.”
She had her fundamentals, but she had not by any means finished her investigations. Each system she examined, fascinated her. In turn she was Jansenist, stoic, deist, materialist, idealist.
“The same thing happens to me sometimes,” she wrote Sophie, “that happened to the prince who went to the Court to hear the pleas,—the last lawyer who spoke always seemed to him to be right.” “I am continually in doubt, and I sleep there peacefully as the Americans in their hammocks. This state is best suited to our situation and to the little we know.”
Whatever her mental vagaries, she never altered her religious practices. She did not wish to torment her mother, or to set a bad example to those who took her as a model; for instance, there was her bonne whom she desired should keep her faith. “I should blame myself for weakening it,” she said, “as I should for taking away her bread.”
Only two months before the end of her life Madame Roland summed up her religious and philosophical life in a passage of her Memoirs. It is simply a résumé of what in her girlhood she wrote at different times to Sophie. The main points of this philosophy have been given above.
II
LOVERS AND MARRIAGE
Until she was twenty-one years of age, Manon Phlipon’s life was singularly free from care. Her studies, her letters to Sophie, her hours with her mother, her promenades, filled it full. Suddenly in 1775 its peace was broken by the death of Madame Phlipon. Manon’s veneration and affection for her mother were sincere and passionate, her dependence upon her complete. Her death left the girl groping pitifully. The support and the joy of her life seemed to have been taken from her. But the necessity of action, her obligations to her father, the kindness of her friends, her own philosophy, finally calmed her, and she made a brave effort to adjust herself to her new duties. Her real restoration, however,—that is, her return to happiness and to enthusiasm, was wrought by a book—the Nouvelle Héloïse, of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
In the middle and in the latter half of the eighteenth century France passed through a paroxysm of sentiment. Man was acknowledged a reasoning being, to be sure, but it was because he was a sensitive one that he was extolled. His mission was to escape pain and seek happiness. To laugh, to weep, to vibrate with feeling, was the ideal of happiness. This sensitiveness to sentiment was shown in the most extravagant ways. Words ran out in the efforts to paint emotion. Friends no longer saluted, they fell into each other’s arms. Tears were no longer sufficient for grief, they were needed for joy. Convulsions and spasms alone expressed sorrow adequately. At the least provocation women were in a faint and men trembling. Acute sensibility was cultivated as an Anglo-Saxon cultivates reserve.
The prophet of this sentimental generation was Jean Jacques Rousseau, the hand-book he gave his followers the Nouvelle Héloïse. Here sentimentalism reaches the highest point possible without becoming unadulterated mawkishness and sensuality, if, indeed, it does not sometimes pass the limit. To France, however, the book was a revelation. Rousseau declares that Frenchwomen particularly were intoxicated by it, and that there were few ladies of rank of whom he could not have made the conquest if he had undertaken it. It is only necessary to read the memoirs of the day, to see that Rousseau tells the truth. The story that George Sand tells of her grandmother, and those Madame de Genlis relates of the reception of the book by the great ladies of the Palais Royal, are but examples of the general outburst of admiration which swept through feminine hearts.
The Nouvelle Héloïse was a revelation in sentiment to Manon Phlipon. The severe studies of the past few years had checked and regulated the excessive and uncontrolled emotions of her girlhood. She had become an intelligent, reflecting creature. But the death of her mother had overthrown her philosophy for the moment; then came the Nouvelle Héloïse. Its effect on her was like that of Plutarch twelve years before. It kindled her imagination to the raptures of love, the beauty of filial affection, the peace of domestic life, the joy of motherhood.