Almost all of this matter was given to Bosc, who, thanks to the concierge of Sainte Pélagie, was allowed to see her twice a week, up to the middle of October. But Bosc was proscribed later, and obliged to flee. Unwilling to trust the treasures he held to another, he hid the manuscripts in the crevice of a rock in the depths of the forest of Montmorency, where they remained eight months. Later, these papers were given to Eudora. They remained in the family until given to the Bibliothèque Nationale, where they now are.
The difficulties under which she wrote were, of course, great. It was essential that she should elude her guardians. She had no notes. She was surrounded by a ribald and noisy company. But these disadvantages only acted as spurs. She took delight in carrying on this forbidden work under the eyes of her persecutors. So rapidly did she write that in twenty-four days she produced two hundred pages of manuscript, including all the early part of her Memoirs. The words seemed to flow from her pen. The bulky manuscript of seven hundred pages, preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale, is a marvel of neatness and firmness. The grayish pages are filled evenly from margin to margin in her beautiful characteristic hand, and there is scarcely a blot or erasure, scarcely a correction, save those made by Bosc, who published the first edition of the Memoirs in 1795.
In style, the political writings are always clear and positive; often they rise to a real eloquence. Written as they were under the force of the most powerful emotions, unbiassed judgments cannot be expected. She was defending her husband primarily in this work, and she did it with the more earnestness and warmth because she felt, as she wrote Buzot, that this was one way of compensating him for the sorrow she had caused him.
Her judgments on men are not always just. Indeed, they cannot be called judgments, they are simply her feelings towards those persons at the moment she wrote. Her indignation against the wrongs done her and her party is so intense that often her tone is irritated, contemptuous, impatient. The arrangement is not systematic, as, indeed, it was impossible to be, under the circumstances, and her pen bounds from one character to another,—from hero to agitator, from apostrophe to anecdote,—in a sort of reckless, impassioned hurry. The whole gallery of the Gironde and its opponents, from 1791 to 1793 pass before us, every one stamped with a positive, definite character.
That she poses throughout the narrative is unquestionable. It is to posterity she speaks, and she wished to appear in the eyes of the future as she believed herself to be,—the apostle of the ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the incarnation of patriotism, the most perfect disinterestedness, and the highest fortitude.
It was Madame Roland’s plan, in writing her personal Memoirs, to cover her whole life, and to follow Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. Although the work was never completed, we have the first twenty-five years. The charm of the narrative is irresistible. Never, even in the gayest and most natural of her letters to Bosc and Roland, was Madame Roland’s pen so happy as in these Memoirs of her youth. They sparkle with mirth and with tenderness. Never did any one appreciate better his own youth, nor idealize it more lovingly. To her these souvenirs are radiant pictures, and she sketches them one after another, with a full appreciation of all their attractiveness.
Her early masters, her suitors, her youthful enthusiasm, Sophie, the Convent des Dames de la Congrégation, Meudon, Vincennes, La Blancherie, her mother, the Salon, river, Luxembourg, her toilettes, duties, sorrows, joys, the whole flows in a steady, sparkling stream, vivid with color, pulsating with life. She relives it all, and without reflection or hesitation pours out everything which comes into her mind. So full and natural are these Memoirs that they are really the most attractive material we have of the life of her class in the eighteenth century.
In all Madame Roland’s dramatic life there is no more attractive picture than that which the writing of her Memoirs brings up: this splendid, passionate woman, glorying in her love and her courage, sitting day after day before the little table in her prison cell, oblivious to the cries and oaths which rise about her, indifferent to discomfort, forgetful of everything but the souvenirs which her flying pen records, and which bring smiles and tears by turn to her mobile face. Here we have none of the stilted, prepared style of her early writings, none of the pose of the political memoirs. It is self-complacent, to be sure, and we feel that she is making herself out to have been a most extraordinary young girl, but one cannot help forgiving her, she makes herself out so charming. However, if one is interested in finding out the woman as she really was, he must not trust too fully to her interpretations. She was so interested in herself, idealized herself so thoroughly, was so serious in her self-confidence, so devoid of self-reproach, that she was oblivious to her own inconsistencies and inconsequentialities.
Rousseau’s Confessions were the model of her Memoirs. The result was that she related some experiences which good sense and taste, not to say delicacy, ought to have forbidden her to repeat to any one, above all, to the public. These passages in her Memoirs are due to her slavish following of Rousseau. She was incapable of exercising an independent judgment in a matter of taste, of opinion, of morals, where Rousseau was concerned, so completely had she adopted him. When she came to writing her life, she dragged to light unimportant and unpleasant details because Rousseau had had the bad taste to do the same before her. The naïveté, with which these things are told, will convince any one that cares to examine the Memoirs that they mean nothing but she had taken the foolish engagement to tell everything she could remember about her life.
