The success was something, for by another spring, when the little one was “six years six months and two days old,” she had commenced to dislike being blamed as much as she did being put on dry bread; she loved a caress better than her doll; reading amused her when she had nothing better to do; and she loved to write and dance,—neither of which fatigued her head,—but could not endure a story which was more than a half hour long; and was still “a hundred leagues from Robinson.”
Madame Roland’s return to Rousseau was not confined to his system of education. She went back to him at this time for inspiration. In going to Le Clos she had an ideal,—Julie at Clarens. Probably she found that in practice there was much more hard work and patient endurance in her Clarens than there were pastorals and sweet emotions. Much as she approved these stern virtues, considered abstractly, they aroused less enthusiasm when applied, and she sought her prophet; not without reward, for again and again she wrote Roland of her delight:
“I have been devouring Julie as if it were not for the fourth or fifth time. My friend, I shall always love that book, and if I ever become dévote, it is the only one I shall desire. It seems to me that we could have lived well with all those people and that they would have found us as much to their taste as we them to ours.”
And again after an evening in the chimney corner with Rousseau: “I shall read him all my life, and if ever we should be in that condition of which we no longer think, when you, old and blind, make shoe-laces while I do needle-work, all the books I shall want will be those of Jean Jacques. He would make us shed delicious tears and would arouse sentiments which would make us forget our lot.”
“Delicious tears” are as always her gauge of happiness. She never learned that the amount of living one is doing, cannot always be measured by the emotion one experiences.
In the days at Villefranche and Le Clos, Roland was as dear to her as ever. She served him with touching devotion, finding her greatest delight in being useful to him. The long and tiresome extracts on wool and hides, bleaching and tanning, were never too long and tiresome for her to copy, in her vigorous, beautiful hand; the numerous academic papers and public pamphlets never too numerous for her to apply all her literary skill and her enthusiasm to polishing and brightening. She arranged everything to make his life easy and to advance his work, and her affection was poured out as freely as in the days before their marriage. He is the “friend par excellence.” “I love you madly and I am disposed to snap my fingers at the rest,” she told him. Her letter-writing, in his absence, she calls “the dearest of her occupations,” and it must have been, to judge from the following letter written seven years after her marriage:
“I had told —— to go after it [Roland’s letter]. I awaited it in vain all the evening. He had forgotten to go. I sent him again when I sat down to supper. While I ate I waited, my heart was troubled. The servant seemed to me to be gone a long time. My heart jumped at every noise I heard at the door. Overcome, I said: News from him was never dearer, never awaited with more tender impatience. I scarcely heard what brother said and I answered yes at random. It was worse still when the package came. My heart went out to it beforehand. I examined the writing with strange haste, I opened it, I read. The mutual sentiment which inspires us leaves me incapable of feeling anything else. I scarcely spoke the rest of the evening.”
Unquestionably she believed in the endurance of this affection for Roland, so far as there is any indication in her letters. Perhaps something of the secret of the peculiar tenderness between Madame Roland and her husband at this time was that Roland was but little at home. Where the imagination has the habit of idealizing situations and persons, it is difficult to quiet it—it must have its craving satisfied. But no idealized object will resist long the friction of every-day life and the disillusion which is inevitable from constant association. Madame Roland never ceased her habit of idealization, but, fortunately, her life with Roland was so broken by his repeated absences that her imagination did still find pleasure in busying itself with him.
For several years after they went to Beaujolais there was but one break in this busy life for Madame Roland,—a trip to Switzerland taken in 1787 with her husband and her brother-in-law, the Curé of Longpoint. She wrote full notes of her trip for Eudora, as she had done of her trip to England. They were printed by Champagneux in the year 1800. They are less spontaneous than those on England, following almost entirely Roland’s letters of ten years before. This trip into Switzerland was to have been followed by one to Italy, which never was taken.
And so their life went on from 1784 to 1789. On the whole, it was happy, as it certainly was useful and honorable. To be sure, they were not quite satisfied. They still felt keenly that the title and privileges they had asked had been refused, and they still cherished hopes of being retired. Madame Roland, especially, kept the matter in view and worked to bring it about; thus, in September of 1787 we find her directing Roland: “Write to the bear and pay him the compliment of your encyclopedic work. I have imagined a little letter of which I send you the idea. To flatter a person’s pretensions is a means of capturing his good-will. If it is true that he has a mistress, Lanthenas must unearth her, as well as the sides on which she is accessible. They will be convenient notes to have in the portfolio, and can be used as one does certain drugs in desperate cases.”