Lanthenas introduced Bancal by letter to the Rolands, and a correspondence was at once begun. Madame Roland, as a rule, wrote for both herself and her husband. Her letters are as patriotic and as passionately vindictive as those she wrote Bosc.
MADAME ROLAND.
From the painting by Heinsius in the museum of Versailles.
At the same time she preached to her acquaintances at Villefranche and Le Clos, and solicited subscribers for Brissot’s journal.
There was nothing vague or uncertain about her position at this moment. Her convictions, her plan of action, had been taken. It was uncompromising, unflinching war against the existing government. Twelve days after the fall of the Bastille, she wrote to Bosc: “You are occupying yourself with a municipality, and you are letting heads escape that are going to conjure up new horrors. You are nothing but children; your enthusiasm is a straw fire and if the National Assembly does not put on trial two illustrious heads, or some generous Decius does not take them, you are all mad.” She made the demand because she did not believe in the King’s and the Court’s sincerity. Every action of theirs which was liberal, a concession to the popular party, she scoffed at. Of the appearance of the King and his beautiful Queen in the Assembly she wrote: “They were abominably frightened, that is all the business shows. Before we can believe in the sincerity of their promise to agree to what the Assembly shall do, we must forget all that has passed ... the King must send away all the foreign troops ... we are nearer than ever to a frightful slavery if we allow ourselves to be blinded by false confidence.”
Her dissatisfaction with the National Assembly was complete. She sneered at the emotion when Marie Antoinette appeared in their midst seeking protection: “The French are easily won by the fine appearance of their masters, and I am persuaded that the half of the Assembly has been bête enough to be touched at the sight of Antoinette confiding her son to them. Morbleu! is it then of a child of which it is a question! It is the safety of twenty million men. All is lost if we do not take care.” The constitution displeased her, too: “We blush in reading the public papers. They are plastering up a bad constitution just as they have botched an incomplete and faulty declaration. Am I not going to see a demand for the revision of all?”
She saw clearly that it was not from the people of France, as a whole, that she would get the revision of the constitution which she asked, or a second to her demand for the heads of the king and queen. “There is only one hope,” she said, “it is in Paris. It is for you, Parisians, to give the example. By a wise and vigorous address show the Assembly that you know your rights, that you mean to preserve them, that you are ready to defend them, and that you demand that it declare them. Without such a movement all is worse than ever. It is not the Palais Royal which must do it; it is the united districts. However, if they do not respond, let it be done by whomsoever it may, provided it be in sufficient numbers to impose and to carry others by its example.” She was even ready to go a little farther and did it cheerfully: “A civil war is necessary before we shall be worth anything. All these little quarrels and insurrections seem to me inevitable; I cannot imagine that it is possible to come from the bosom of corruption and rise to liberty, without strong convulsions. They are the salutary crises of a severe sickness, and a terrible political fever is necessary to take away our bad humors.”
Truly, there were few better Jacobins in 1793 than Madame Roland was two months after the fall of the Bastille; for we have here in purity the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, the divine right of insurrection, the demand for the head of Louis XVI., the call to Paris to take into her hands what the people of the country are not ready to do, even to use its power of terrorism against the Assembly, composed of the representatives of the people.
This spirit, this restless energy, never left her, though she was buried at Le Clos almost all the first eighteen months of the Revolution. She kept herself aflame by correspondence with her friends and by her propagandism among her neighbors, most of them decidedly recalcitrant. Especially did she incite herself by her reading. Writing to Bancal once she told him: “I have left all the Italian poets for the Tacitus of Davanzati. It is not permitted in a time of revolution to turn to pleasant studies, or objects remote from the public interest. If I can give a little time this winter to English, I shall read Macaulay’s history. I shall leave the historian only for the novel of Rousseau, which is perfectly suited to civism.”
She saw no danger in her doctrines. They moved to noble sentiments, to great aspirations. What greater good? That they incited to crimes, too, she did not admit. She was recklessly indifferent to what is; she looked only at what might be. Her eyes were turned to America, to Greece, to Rome, and not to the facts of the struggles of these countries, only to the fine actions of their heroes, the rounded phrases of their orators.