IV
COUNTRY LIFE
It was in September of 1784 that the Rolands arrived in Beaujolais. Although Roland’s new position kept him the greater part of the time at Lyons, they settled for the winter some twenty-eight kilometres north, in Villefranche-sur-Saône. It was mainly for economical reasons that they did not go to Lyons. Roland’s mother had a home at Villefranche and they could live with her through the winter. The summers and autumns they meant to spend at Le Clos de la Platière, the family estate about eleven miles from Villefranche, which had recently come under their control. With such an arrangement it was necessary to take only a small apartment at Lyons. As M. Roland could come often to Villefranche and Le Clos, Madame planned to spend only about two months of the year at Lyons.
Villefranche, their first home in the Beaujolais, is to-day a manufacturing town of perhaps twelve thousand inhabitants. There is a wearisome commonplace about its rows of flat-faced houses, a dusty, stupid, factory atmosphere about it as a whole. It seems to be utterly destitute of those genre pictures which give the flavor to so many French towns, utterly lacking in those picturesque corners which make their charm.
Save Notre Dame des Marais and the hospital, it has no buildings of note, but Notre Dame des Marais makes up for a multitude of architectural deficiencies. It is an irregular fifteenth-century Gothic church whose unbalanced façade is enriched with an absolute riot of exquisite carvings. Every ogive is latticed with trefoils and flowing tracery, every niche is peopled, every line breaks into tendrils, everywhere is the thistle in honor of the house of Bourbon, everywhere are saints and angels, devils and monsters. A hundred years ago Villefranche must have been more interesting than it is now. Certainly it was more picturesque; for its towers and crenellated walls were still standing, and at either extremity of its chief thoroughfare were massive gates, doubled with iron. Its picturesqueness interfered somewhat with its comfort and sanitary condition in Madame Roland’s eyes. She detested particularly its flat roofs, its little streets, with their surface sewers. In its organization it was much more complicated than to-day, and it possessed at least one institution, since disappeared, which placed it among the leading French towns of the period, that is, an academy, one of the oldest in the realm.
The household which the Rolands entered at Villefranche was made up of Madame de la Platière, Roland’s mother, and an older brother, a priest of the town. The latter is a pleasant example of the eighteenth-century curé, half man of pleasure, half priest, spirited and versatile in conversation, something of a diplomat, faithful to his dogmas and duties, bon enfant in morals, but in questions of politics and religion, domineering and prejudiced.
The chanoine Roland occupied an excellent position at Villefranche. He was one of the three dignitaries of Notre Dame des Marais; he was the spiritual adviser of the sisters at the hospital, and he had been for over thirty years an Academician. With these offices, his family, and his agreeableness, he was of course received by all the families of the town and country worth knowing.
Madame Roland was on very good terms with the chanoine in all the early years in Beaujolais, caring for him when sick, making visits with him, talking with him over the fire winter evenings when Roland was away from home. No doubt he found her a welcome addition in a house which up to that time had been under the more or less tyrannical rule of his mother, a woman “of the age of the century,” and “terrible in her temper.” Madame Roland found him a welcome relief from the care of her mother-in-law, whom she seems to have regarded rather as an object for patience and philosophy than for affection. The old lady was trying. She had the child’s vice of gormandizing, and after each petite débauche, as her daughter-in-law called it, was an invalid for a few days. Then she invited recklessly, a habit that made much work and expense, and was particularly obnoxious to Madame Roland because the company passed all their time at cards. To see the house filled every evening with people who had not intellect and resources to entertain each other intelligently was exasperating.
All these annoyances Madame Roland repeated to her husband in the long letters she sent him almost every day. More questionable than her habit of writing these petty vexations to him was her retailing of them to Bosc, with whom she was in constant correspondence.
In spite of the drawbacks there was much brightness in the new home, much of that close intimacy which is the charm of the French interior. Madame Roland realized this and frequently painted pleasant pictures to Bosc as contrasts to the disagreeable ones she gave him.
Although Madame Roland was greeted cordially at Villefranche by the leading people, as became the wife and sister-in-law of two prominent men, she never came any nearer to what was really good and enjoyable in the place than she had in Amiens. The town displeased her, as it naturally would, since she insisted on comparing it with Paris. She amused herself in studying the soul of the place, and she found it frequently small, false, and distorted. Now an analysis of one’s surroundings is certainly amusing and instructive, but if one is to be a good neighbor and agreeable member of the society he dissects, he must keep his observations to himself; must place humanity and courtesy higher than analysis. Madame Roland did not do this; she showed often what she thought and felt, and became unpopular in return. Roland, too, made himself disliked in the Academy of Villefranche by his domineering ways.