The first of November Mademoiselle Phlipon brought matters to a crisis by leaving her father for good and retiring to the Convent of the Congregation. She wrote Sophie, who, of course, had known nothing of her affair with Roland, but to whom she had often written freely of her trouble with her father, that she had taken this resolution in order to save her family, if possible, from further disgrace.

In going into the convent she had broken with Roland. They were to remain friends, but dismiss all projects of marriage; but they continued to write heart-broken letters to each other. She told him, “I love you. I feel nothing but that. I repeat it as if it were something new. Your agonized letters inflame me. I devour them and they kill me. I cover them with kisses and with tears.”

Roland was quite as unhappy. He had taken Manon at her word again when she declared that their engagement was at an end, and that they would remain friends; but he could not support her unhappiness; he was too wretched himself. The worst of it was that he could not make out what she wanted: “You continually reproach me,” he wrote her in November, “of not understanding you. Is it my fault? Do you not go by contraries?”—“You complain always of what I say, and you always tell me to tell you all.... You protest friendship and confidence at the moment you give me proofs of the contrary. All your letters are a tissue of contradictions, of bitterness, of reproaches, of wrangling.”

This unhappy state continued until January, when Roland went to Paris and saw Manon. Her sadness and her tears overcame him, and again he begged her to marry him. This time the affair was happier, and in February Manon Phlipon became Madame Roland.

Twelve years later, in her Memoirs, Madame Roland gave an account of this courtship and marriage, which is a curious contrast to that one finds in the letters written at the time. If these letters show anything, it is that she was, or at least imagined herself, desperately in love; that after having outlined a Platonic relation she had broken it by telling Roland she loved him too well to endure the restrictions of mere friendship; that she had been extravagantly happy in her betrothal, and correspondingly miserable in her liberation; and that when the marriage was finally effected she was thoroughly satisfied.

But in her Memoirs she says of Roland’s first proposal: “I was not insensible to it because I esteemed him more than any one whom I had known up to that time,” but—“I counselled M. Roland not to think of me, as a stranger might have done. He insisted: I was touched and I consented that he speak to my father.” She gives the impression that as far as she was concerned her heart was not in the affair, that she merely was moved by Roland’s devotion, and that she saw in him an intelligent companion. Of his coming to her at the convent, she says that it was he alone who was inflamed by the interview, and she gives the impression that his renewed proposal awakened in her nothing but sober and wise reflections: “I pondered deeply what I ought to do. I did not conceal from myself that a man under forty-five would have hardly waited several months to make me change my mind, and I confess that I had no illusions.... If marriage was, as I thought it, a serious tie, an association where the woman is for the most part charged with the happiness of two persons, was it not better to exercise my faculties, my courage, in that honorable task, than in the isolation in which I lived?”

But at the time that Madame Roland wrote her Memoirs she was under the influence of a new and absorbing passion. The love, which twelve years before had so engulfed all other considerations and affections that she could for it break up her home, desert her father, take up a solitary and wretched existence, even contemplate suicide, had become an indifferent affair of which she could talk philosophically and at which she could smile disinterestedly.

III
SEEKING A TITLE

The first year of their marriage the Rolands spent in Paris. New regulations were being planned by the government for the national manufactures, and Roland had been summoned to aid in the work. It was an irritating task. His principles of free trade, and free competition, were sadly ignored, even after all the concessions obtainable from the government had been granted, and Madame Roland saw for the first time the irascibility and rigidness of her husband when his opinions were disregarded.

They lived in a hôtel garni, and she gave all her time to him, preparing his meals even, for he was never well, and spending hours in his study aiding him in his work. Roland’s literary labors seem to have awed her a little at first, and she took up copying and proof-reading with amusing humility and solemnity. It was not an inviting task for a young and imaginative mind accustomed to passing leisure hours with the best thinkers of the world. Roland was writing on manufacturing arts and getting his letters from Italy ready for the printer. As always, he was overcrowded with work. He was particular and tenacious, careless about notes, and wrote an execrable hand,—about the most aggravating type possible to work with. But his wife accommodated herself to him with a tact, a submission, a gentleness which were perfect. He found her judgment so true, her devotion so complete, her notions of style so much better than his own, that he grew to depend upon her entirely. It was the object she had in view. She wanted to make herself indispensable to him.