This Utopia was discussed at length in their letters, and several pieces of property near Lyons and Clermont, where Bancal lived, were visited. Roland was thoroughly taken with the idea, but Madame Roland, while she saw all the advantages, discovered a possible danger. If she had been able to resist the siege to her heart by Bosc and Lanthenas, even to win them over as allies, her relation with Bancal des Issarts had taken almost immediately a turn more serious for her. She was herself touched and interested, and her policy when she felt her heart moved was most questionable. Instead of concealing her feelings and mastering them, she poured them out to Bancal himself in a way to excite his sympathy and to inflame his passion. Indeed, the turn their correspondence took in a few months reminds one forcibly of the letters of Manon Phlipon to M. Roland in the days when, feeling herself moved by his attentions, she drew a declaration out of him by portraying a state of heart which no man who was as decidedly interested as Roland was, could resist.
It was the new community which troubled her. Bancal had shown himself so eager for it, she herself saw such a charm in it, that she became alarmed. To a letter of Bancal’s, which we can suppose to have been fervid, but which was not so much so that Roland was annoyed by it, it being he who had received it and sent it on to her, she replied: “My mind is busy with a thousand ideas, agitated by tumultuous sentiments. Why is it that my eyes are blinded by constant tears? My will is firm, my heart is pure, and yet I am not tranquil. ‘It will be the greatest charm of our life and we shall be useful to our fellows,’ you say of the affection which unites us, and these consoling words have not restored my peace. I am not sure of your happiness and I should never forgive myself for having disturbed it. I have believed that you were feeding it on a hope that I ought to forbid. Who can foresee the effect of violent agitations, too often renewed? Would they not be dangerous if they left only that languor which weakens the moral being and which makes it unequal to the situation? I am wrong. You do not experience this unworthy alternative, you could never be weak. The idea of your strength brings back mine. I shall know how to enjoy the happiness that Heaven has allotted me, believing that it has not allowed me to trouble you.”
She was quite conscious of her inconsistency, but with the feminine propensity for finding an excuse for an indiscretion, she charged it on the construction of society,—a construction which, it should be noted, she had years ago convinced herself to be necessary, and which she had repeatedly accepted, so that there was not the excuse for her that there is for those who have never reflected that human laws and codes of morals are simply the best possible arrangement thus far found for men and women getting on together without a return to the savage state, and have never made a tacit compact with themselves to be law-abiding because they saw the reason for being so.
“Why is it,” she writes, “that this sheet that I am writing you cannot be sent to you openly? Why can one not show to all that which one would dare offer to Divinity itself? Assuredly I can call upon Heaven, and take it as a witness of my vow and of my intentions; I find pleasure in thinking that it sees me, hears me, and judges me.... When shall we see each other again? Question that I ask myself often, and that I dare not answer.”
Bancal went to Le Clos, and evidently, from passages in their subsequent letters, there passed between them some scene of passion.
Later, Bancal went to London to propagate the ideas of the patriots, but Lanthenas and Roland became anxious that he return to Paris to help them there. Madame Roland dared not advise him to return, though she could not conceal her pleasure at the idea that he might, and that, too, after she was again at Paris.
“Do as you think best,” she wrote; “at any rate I shall not have the false delicacy to conceal from you that I am going to Paris, and shall even push my frankness to confessing that this circumstance adds much to my scruples in writing you to return. There is, in this situation, an infinite number of things which one feels but cannot explain, but that which is very clear, and which I say frankly to you, is that I wish never to see you bend to light considerations or to half affections. Remember that if I need the happiness of my friends this happiness is attached, for those who feel like us, to an absolute irreproachability.”
Inscription written by Madame Roland on the back of the portrait of Buzot which she carried while in prison.
It was by this constant return to the subject that she kept the relation between herself and Bancal “interesting.” It was by holding up her duty—the necessity of “virtue”—that she provoked him. It was the “coquetry of virtue” which Dumouriez found in her.