Some of the prettiest passages in her letters of this period are of her homely duties. She kept the accounts, directed the servants, interested herself in every detail of farm and house. She used her scientific acquirements practically for the benefit of Le Clos and its neighbors. Bosc she continually applied to for information. Now it was a remedy, “sure and easy,” against the bites of the viper, of which there were many in the country—and they still exist; now for the caterpillars which were troubling the apples; again it was against an enemy of her artichokes that she demanded, as a service to the province, a remedy.
She took a lively interest in agricultural discussions, and many were the flowers, from the rich flora of Le Clos, which she sent her friend to analyze, or for a confirmation of her own analysis.
Her devotion to her neighbors was genuine. In her Memoirs she speaks with pride of their love for her, and this was no meaningless recollection. Constantly in her letters there was question of service rendered to this or that one, and we see that it was not without reason that her husband was worried lest she make herself ill in caring for the domestics of Le Clos and the peasants of Boitier and Theizé.
She did more than care for them and instruct them,—she set them a good example. Especially in religious matters was she careful to do this. One who has climbed the long steep hill from Le Clos to the church at Theizé, has a genuine respect for the unselfishness of a woman who would get out of bed at six o’clock in the morning for her neighbor’s sake,—“climbing up the rocks,” she called it. This she did, though Le Clos possessed its own chapel where the curé came to say the Mass.
She exercised a delightful hospitality. Le Clos was always open for their friends. Lanthenas spent much of his time there, and one of the apartments still is called by his name. Bosc she was always urging to come, and she drew him many a pretty picture of their summer companies. There was now and then a friend of Bosc, from Paris, who sought them; for in those days of stage-coaches one had time to stop over en route. There were foreign and French savants who had heard of Roland and came to pay their respects, and there were the country counts and abbés.
And there were amusements besides—an occasional petit bal given by a locataire, where she danced “and contre-danced,” and, in spite of her thirty-one years, only retired at midnight from “wisdom and not from satiety.” And there was the watch-meeting which she kept with her people, and the vogue, as the Beaujolais people call their provincial fêtes. Le Clos had one peculiar to itself—a vogue existing to-day.
It is one of the events of the year at Theizé—this vogue—on Ascension Sunday and Monday. The place is invaded the day before for preparation: a stand is put up for the musicians; the wine rooms are cleared out for the lunch tables; the trees and walls are decorated; outside the gate, too, before night there is sure to establish itself one of the travelling lotteries which infest France.
The morning of Ascension Day there comes, between masses, a committee headed by a band to take possession of the place and present the fête to Madame. After dinner come the merry-makers,—young and old from all the country round; a friendly, pleasant company who dance and walk and talk, only quitting their sports long enough for the traditional service of cutting the brioche,—a ceremony which begins with a grave promenade of the big cake around the premises, fanfare ahead. This done, the chief of the vogue, in the midst of a respectful silence from all the two or three hundred peasants looking on, cuts the cake with a flourish so solemn that it would be worthy of a sacrifice, and passes around the pieces among the guests.
The brioches eaten, they dance again, and that until after the night falls and the stars come out and the children and the old people go home—a grave dance now and silent; for the night, the wind in the trees, the simpler music too changes the gay and romping mood of the afternoon to one of dreaminess and silence. But Monday they come back gayer than ever and the dance and romp do not end until, late in the evening, Madame declares the vogue over.
In this life at Le Clos Madame Roland’s most serious occupation was the education of her daughter Eudora. She evidently hoped to find in her little girl a second Manon Phlipon,—an infant prodigy in sentiment and taste. She discovered early that Eudora was a rollicking, mischievous, saucy youngster, who would rather frolic than study and who liked to play with her doll better than to read Plutarch. She was in despair over this lack of feeling. At the least sign of sentiment she wrote to her husband or to Bosc, but as a rule she could only complain of the indifference of the little miss.