These duties were many; for the habit of working with Roland, of copying, polishing, suggesting, begun the first year of her marriage, over the dull pages of the encyclopædia and continued at Amiens and Le Clos, was carried into the ministry of the interior. She went over the daily mail with her husband. Together they noted the disorders in the country, and together decided on the policy to pursue. She gave her opinion on every subject, and exerted an influence on every question of the ministry. This was in private. In her salon she was as quiet as in the little salon of the Hôtel Britannique; nevertheless, she was always the spirit of the gatherings; a skilful and gentle peacemaker in too hot disputes; an inspiring advocate of the most radical undertakings; an ardent defender of her own opinions.
Many of the measures to be proposed in the Assembly by the Girondins originated in her salon; much of Roland’s business with individuals was talked over in her presence. It often happened that those who had business with Roland came to her first with it.
She was especially influential when it came to choosing persons for the positions in the department which Roland controlled. She flattered herself on her ability to tell a true patriot, and criticised and praised candidates fearlessly. A minister of war was wanted soon after Roland’s call to the cabinet. He thought of Servan, because the man had exposed patriotic principles in a creditable book, because he had a reputation for activity, because he had lost a court position on account of civism, and above all because he declaimed bitterly against the aristocrats. They wished to found a journal to represent their party, and wanted a man “wise and enlightened” as editor. They decided on Louvet, the author of the most licentious novel of the day, because of his “noble forehead, the fire which animated his eye,” and the fine and eloquent political pamphlets he had published. Because Pache had the simplicity suitable to a republican and the manners of the ancients, because he came to his office at seven o’clock in the morning and stayed until three in the afternoon with only a morsel of bread brought in his pocket for lunch, because he was prudent, attentive, zealous as a clerk, he was thought fit to be a minister.
They mistrusted all their colleagues who lacked these qualities. In the ministry was General Dumouriez, a diplomat of skill, devoted to the constitution, skilful with men, wise with the King. He had come to see the Rolands in the Rue de la Harpe with Brissot to announce to them the call to the ministry. When he left, Madame Roland said to her husband: “There is a man I have seen for the first time. He has a penetrating mind, a false eye; perhaps it will be more necessary to suspect him than anybody in the world. He has expressed great satisfaction with the patriotic choice he has been charged to announce, but I should not be astonished if one day he caused you to be dismissed.”
She mistrusted Dumouriez at once because of his courtly manners, and his belief that the King was sincere in his efforts to support the constitution. There was so great a difference between him and Roland that she could not imagine the two working together. In the one she saw “uprightness and frankness personified, severe equity without any of the devices of the courtier or of the society-man.” In the other she believed she recognized “an intelligent roué, a bold knight, who sneered at everything except his own interests and his own glory.”
She did not change her idea of Dumouriez, although obliged to confess that he had more esprit than any one else in the ministry, that he was “diligent and brave,” “a good general, a skilful courtier, writing well, capable of great enterprises,” but his “manners!” they were fit only for the ministerial intrigues of a corrupt court.
Her suspicions extended to all his friends. “All these fine fellows,” she said to a friend one day à propos of Dumouriez’s followers, “seem poor patriots to me. They care too much for themselves to prefer the public good to their own interests. I can never resist the temptation to wound their self-sufficiency by pretending not to see the merit of which they are vainest.”
As for the good faith of the King, she would not listen to the idea. During the first three weeks of the ministry of Roland, he and Clavière were disposed to think well of the King, to have confidence in the turn things were going to take. But she would tell them when they started out confidently to the Council meetings: “When I see you go off in that way, it always seems to me that you are going to commit a sottise.” And when they came back with less done than she expected she declared the Council was “nothing but a café.” “It is disgraceful. You are in good humor because you experience no annoyance, even because you are well treated. You have the air of doing about what you wish in your departments. I fear that you are being tricked.” When they reminded her that nevertheless affairs were going well, she replied: “Yes, and time is being lost.”
At the moment that Roland was called to office the question of public tranquillity was most serious. It was not alone in the cities that riots, pillage, and bloodshed were of constant occurrence. The provinces were in many places almost uninhabitable. Roland, to cure the disorders, wrote circulars and put up posters.
For example, in his own department, Rhone-et-Loire, the question of the priests was causing more and more difficulty. The provocation came now from one side, now from another. In certain parishes the constitutional priests were supported by the municipality, in others the unsworn were favored. In the midst of these dissensions, births, marriages, and deaths often went unrecorded. Here a priest declaimed against the constitution and incited the people not to pay their taxes, there the National Guard and mayor combined to drive a disturber from the community. In the district of Villefranche, the constitutional clergé of “the former province of Beaujolais” brought a long complaint to the authorities: “The inhabitants of the mountains,” they wrote, “influenced by fanaticism, are in a state of insurrection. They believe the churches to be profaned by the mere presence of the sworn priests; during the services they throw stones against the doors, interrupt the services, insult the new curés in the midst of their duties, force the faithful to desert the churches.... The presbyteries are no longer a safe asylum. Those who inhabit them are forced to keep a guard; they cannot travel alone without being attacked and exposed to the greatest dangers. There is not one of them who has not been driven several times from his home. New-born children are baptized by Non-conformists without the ceremonies of the Church—the fanatical and barbarous mothers declare that they would rather choke them than permit them to be baptized by the priests.”