Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

by Ida M. Tarbell

The Abbé Guillon de Montléon, of Lyons, who was a fellow academician of Roland’s, relates that whenever he went to the town to attend Academy meetings, Madame Roland and her husband tried to secure him as their guest, and he suggests that this attention was due simply to the fact that they were on bad terms with their townsmen and were obliged to find their company in outsiders. It seems that a satire on a number of the leading people of the town had been sent from Paris, and that it was believed to be the work of M. and Madame Roland. Whether true or not, those who had been caricatured revenged themselves by cutting them and by ordering sent to them each day from Paris satirical epigrams and songs.

The Abbé Guillon also tells that Roland left the Academy of Villefranche in a pet because that body refused in 1788 to adopt the subject he had suggested for a prize contest—“Would it not serve the public good to establish courts to judge the dead.”

However, all that the Abbé tells of Roland must be regarded with suspicion. He wrote after the Revolution, with his heart full of bitter contempt and hatred of everybody who had been connected with the movement which led up to the Reign of Terror in Lyons, and, at that moment, was not capable of impersonal judgments.

Madame Roland was not much better pleased with Lyons than with Villefranche. She did not love the place too well. At Lyons she mocked at everything, she said. She was well situated there, however. Their apartment was in a fine house in a pleasant quarter, and Madame had the equipage of a friend to use when she would. She saw many celebrities who passed through the town; was invited constantly; made visits; in fact, had an admirable social position, as became the wife of one of the most active citizens of the town, and Roland certainly was that. His reputation for solid acquirements had preceded him. On arriving in Lyons he was made an honorary member of the Academy, and afterwards an active member, and from that time he constantly was at the front in the work of the institution.

In the archives of the Academy of Lyons there are still preserved a large number of manuscripts by Roland, some of these in the hand of his wife. They discuss a variety of subjects: the choice of themes for the public séances of the provincial academies; the influence of literature in the country and the capital (this paper was given a place in the published annals); the outlook for a universal language—to be French of course. One peculiar paper, to come from so dry a pen as his, is on the “Means of Understanding a Woman.” Plutarch comes in for a eulogy, and there is an exhortation on the wisdom of knowing our fellows. Most of the manuscripts are purely scientific, and treat the subjects in which M. Roland was particularly at home,—the preparation of hides and leather, of oils and soaps; the processes of drying. Others consider means for quickening the decaying manufacturing interests of Lyons. Altogether, it is a very honorable collection. The annals of the Academy contain also a full printed report of a contest over cotton velvet which had embroiled Roland in the North. Both sides of the discussion, which Roland’s efforts to spread the knowledge of the new industry awakened, are given.

I have examined all of these manuscripts, as well as Roland’s printed articles in the Encyclopédie, and elsewhere, for a trace of the idea the Abbé Guillon de Montléon credits to him, in his Memoirs,—that dead bodies, instead of being buried, be utilized for the good of the community, the flesh being used for oil and the bones for phosphoric acid. This idea was advanced, it is said, to settle a dispute over the cemeteries, which had long agitated Lyons; but as there is no reference to it in any of Roland’s manuscripts or printed articles, it is probable that it was never pushed to public attention, as the Abbé would have his reader believe. The story is told too naturally not to have at least a shadow of truth, and such a proposition is so like the utilitarian Roland that, if anybody in France suggested such a thing, it probably was he.

If their life in Villefranche and Lyons was not satisfactory, that at their country home was entirely so; indeed, Madame Roland seems never to have been so happy, so natural, so charming, as she was at Le Clos, where she spent much time each year.

Le Clos is easily reached from Villefranche. One goes to-day, as one hundred years ago, in carriage, or, as Madame Roland usually did, on horseback, by one of the hard, smooth roads which have long formed a network over the Lyonnais. The road runs from the town along a narrow valley of luxuriant pasture land, strewn in May, the month in which I visited the place, with purple mints and pure yellow fleur-de-lys. On either hand are low, steep hillsides, all under cultivation, but so divided under the French system of inheritance that they look like patch-work quilts or Roman ribbons. A kilometre from town one begins to wind and climb. Hill after hill, mountain after mountain, is passed; the country opens broad and generous. There is a peculiar impression of warmth and strength produced by the prevailing color of the soil and building-material. This part of the Lyonnais is clad in a dark stone, and walls and churches, roads and fields, are all in varying tones of terra-cotta; here is the fresh, bright reddish-yellow of a plot recently cultivated and not yet planted; there the dull and worn-out brown of an ancient wall; but, though the shades are varied, the tone is never lost. The green of the foliage and fields is peculiarly dark and positive in contrast with this coloring of the stone. The whole makes a landscape of originality and a certain rude strength. It looks like a country where men worked and where there was little to tempt them to idleness. When one comes to Beaujolais, after the soft gray tone of the Côte-d’Or and the Seine-et-Marne, or the dull slate which prevails in Bourbonnais, the contrast is harsh and a little saddening.

It is a thickly settled country, and one passes many hamlets, all in terra-cotta, with high walls and old churches topped by Romanesque towers. At the centre of these hamlets are ancient crucifixes, some of them of grotesque carvings. On the distant hillsides are châteaux.

After climbing many hills, one passes along the side of a mountain ridge. At the end of this ridge one sees a yellow town, of some fifty houses, a château with its tower razed to the roof, and a small chapel. It is the village of Theizé.