Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

by Ida M. Tarbell

When Buzot came to Paris, it was natural and inevitable that they should see much of each other. All things considered, it was natural, inevitable, perhaps, that love should come from their intimacy; but that Madame Roland should have prevented the declaration of this love we have a right to expect when we remember her opinions, her habit of reflection, and, above all, her experience.

Madame Roland had never accepted, other than theoretically, the idea which at the end of the eighteenth century made hosts of advocates,—that love is its own justification; that any civil or religious tie which prevents one following the dictates of his heart is unnatural and wrong. Nor did she accept for herself the practice then common in France, as it is still, and as it must be so long as marriage remains a matter of business, of keeping marriage ties for the sake of society, but of finding satisfaction for the affections in liaisons of which nobody complains so long as they are discreet, to use the French characterization. Her notions of duty, of devotion, of loyalty, were those of the Nouvelle Héloïse and allowed only marriage based on affection and preserved with fidelity to the end. Her theory of life and human relations would not allow her to be false to Roland. With such opinions she could not allow Buzot to declare the affection he felt.

Had she been an inexperienced woman, such a declaration might have come naturally enough without any reproach for her; she would have been unprepared for it. Madame Roland was not inexperienced. She knew all the probability there was of Buzot loving her and she was too skilled in the human heart to believe herself incapable of a new love.

Already she had been absorbed by passions whose realization at the moment had seemed necessary to her life. Her Platonic affection for Sophie Cannet was of an intensity rarely equalled by the most ardent love. For La Blancherie she had been ready to say that if she could not marry him she would marry no one. Roland, before their marriage, she had overwhelmed by her passion, and since she had followed him incessantly with protestations of affection. Certainly she knew by this time that impassioned love may grow cool and that the heart may recover its fire and vehemence.

Nor had all her experience been before her marriage. She had not the excuse of those married women who suppose, in the simplicity of their innocence and purity, that once married there is no deviation of affection or loyalty possible, and who, when circumstances throw them into relations where a new passion is awakened, are overpowered by shame and surprise.

Her relations with different ones of her friends after her marriage had reached points which ought to have taught her serious lessons in self-repression and in tact. Bosc, with whom she was in correspondence from the time the Rolands left Paris for Amiens, became deeply attached to her. Their relation seems to have become more tender during the time that she spent in Paris seeking a title, and this quite naturally because of the loss Bosc suffered then in the death of his father, and because of the very practical aid she had given him in taking care of his sister. Their correspondence, which, while she was at Amiens, was gay and unrestrained, an ideal correspondence for two good friends and comrades, later grew more delicate. Bosc was jealous and moody at times and caused her uneasiness and sorrow. When they passed through Paris, on their way to Villefranche, in September, 1784, he found at their meeting some reason for discontent in their relation with a person he disliked, and left them abruptly and angrily.

The quarrel lasted some two months and was dismissed finally with good sense by Madame Roland telling Bosc playfully, “Receive a sound boxing, a hearty embrace, friendly and sincere—I am hungry for an old-fashioned letter from you. Burn this and let us talk no more of our troubles.”

After this whenever Bosc became too ardent in his letters, or inclined to jealousy, she treated him in this half-playful, half-matronly style. Her principle with him remained from the first to the last that there could be between them no ignorance of the question of their duty.

The experience with Bosc had taught her the strong probability that a man admitted to such intimate relations would, at some period in the friendship, fall more or less in love; and it had shown her, too, that it is possible for a woman to control this delicate relation and insure a healthy and inspiring relation. In short, Madame Roland had reason to congratulate herself, as she did with her usual self-complacency, on her wisdom and her tact in handling l’ami Bosc. Whether she would not have been less wise if she had been less in love with her husband, or Bosc had been of a different nature, a little less dry and choleric, it is not necessary to speculate here.

She was quite as happy in directing her relations with Dr. Lanthenas, whom it will be remembered Roland had picked up in Italy before their marriage, who had come back with him, who had visited them often at Amiens, and who had lived with them at Le Clos, where an apartment on the first floor is still called Lanthenas’ room. He was associated in all their planning, and in 1790, when Roland, disgusted with the turn politics had taken, sighed for Pennsylvania, Lanthenas suggested that the Rolands, and one of his friends at Paris, Bancal des Issarts, and he himself should buy a piece of national property—the State had just confiscated some millions’ worth of clerical estates and was selling them cheap—and should establish together a community where they could not fail to lead an existence ideal in its peace, its enthusiasm, its growth.