In 1777, at the age of twenty-three, she had written: "Gay and jesting speeches fall from this mouth which sobs at night upon its pillow; a laugh dwells on my lips, while my tears, shut up within my heart, at length make on it, in spite of its hardness, the effect produced by water on a stone: falling drop by drop, they insensibly wear it away." In 1791, when she was thirty-eight, she wrote: "The phenomena of nature, which make the vulgar grow pale, and which are imposing even to the philosophical eye, offer nothing to a sensitive person preoccupied with great concerns, but scenes inferior to those of which her own heart is the theatre." The flame consuming the eloquent and ardent disciple of Rousseau was in need of fuel, and, finding this in politics, she threw herself upon it with a sort of ravenous fury, just as she had once abandoned herself to study. At twenty-two she had written to one of her young friends: "You scold me for studying too hard. Bear in mind, then, that unless I did so, love might perhaps excite my imagination to frenzy. It is a necessary distraction. I am not trying to become a learned woman; I study because I need to study, as I do to eat." It was thus that Madame Roland plunged into politics. All her unappeased instincts and repressed forces found their outlet in that direction.
Woman being formed by nature to be dominated, nothing is more agreeable to her than to invert the parts, and in her turn to domineer. To exert influence in public affairs, to designate or support the candidates for great offices of State, to organize or direct a ministry, to make themselves listened to by serious men, to inspire opinions or systems, is to ambitious women a kind of revenge for their sex. Those who have acquired a habit of exercising this sort of power cannot relinquish it without extreme reluctance. If they have once persuaded themselves of their superiority to men, nothing can ever root the conviction from their minds. To be protected humiliates them; what they long for most of all is to be acknowledged as protectresses. Self-deluded, they attribute to their passion for the public welfare what is, especially in their case, the need of petty glory, the thirst for emotions, or the amusement of pride and vanity.
The Revolutionary bluestocking, Madame Roland, was from the very start delighted to see that her works were printed, and that they produced as much effect as if they had been written by some great statesman. These first successes seemed to her to justify the excellent opinion she had always entertained of herself. She got into a habit of playing the oracle. No sooner had her lips touched the cup containing this poisonous but intoxicating beverage than she would have no other. That alone could refresh, even while it killed her.
Politics has the immense defect of exasperating, troubling, and disfiguring souls. Madame Roland was born good, sensible, and generous. Politics made her at times wicked, vindictive, and cruel. July 26, 1789, she wrote this odious letter: "You are nothing but children; your enthusiasm is a fire of straw, and if the National Assembly does not order the trial of two illustrious heads, or some generous Decius does not strike them down, you are all ... lost" (Madame Roland employed a more trivial expression). "If this letter does not reach you, may the cowards who read it redden to learn that it is from a woman, and tremble in reflecting that she can create a hundred enthusiasts from whom will proceed a million others." Roland had been employed by the Agricultural Society of Lyons to draw up its reports for the States-General. Madame Roland wrote much more of them than her husband did. She sent article on article to a journal founded by Champagneux to forward the revolutionary propaganda. Sixty thousand copies were printed of one of them in which she described the festival of the Federation at Lyons. Imagine the joy felt by the femme-auteur, the pupil of Jean-Jacques, the model of George Sand! Soon afterwards, the municipality deputed Roland to the Constituent Assembly to advocate the interests of the city, which was involved to the extent of forty millions, and which asked to have this debt assumed by the State. Roland and his wife arrived in Paris, February 20, 1791.
The married pair installed themselves on the third floor of the hotel Britannique, in rue Guénégaud. There a sort of political reunion was formed, of which Brissot was the first link. Four times a week a few friends, and certain deputies and journalists, met around this still unknown woman, whose wit, charm, and beauty were not long in making a sensation. It was at this period that she made Buzot's acquaintance. The day of her first interview with the young and brilliant deputy was an epoch in her sentimental life. Thenceforward, two passions, love and ambition, the one as fierce and devouring as the other, were to occupy her ardent soul. Comparing the young orator, whom she perhaps transformed in her imagination into the president of a more or less Athenian republic, with the austere and prosaic companion of her existence, she perceived that, according to her own expression, there was no equality between her and her husband, and that "the ascendency of a domineering character, joined to twenty years' seniority, rendered one of these superiorities too great"—that of age. She was herself six years older than Buzot. Even though her love for him may have remained Platonic, she gave him all her heart and soul.
For the majority of women, still beautiful, who mingle in public affairs, love is the principal thing; politics but the accessory, the pretext. They imagine they are attaching themselves to ideas, and it is to men. In this respect the heroines of the Revolution resemble those of the Fronde. The stateswoman in Madame Roland plays second to the lover of Buzot. In her mind the Republic and the handsome republican blend into one. Believing herself a patriot when she is above all a woman in love, she carries the emotions, the infatuations, the ardors and exaggerations of her private life into her public one. With her, angers and enthusiasms rise to paroxysm. She is extreme in all things.
She detests Louis XVI. as much as she loves Buzot. After the flight to Varennes, she wrote: "To replace the King on the throne is a folly, an absurdity, if it is not a horror; to declare him demented is to make obligatory the appointment of a regent. To impeach Louis XVI. would be, beyond all contradiction, the greatest and most righteous step, but you are incapable of taking it. Well then, put him not exactly under interdict, but suspend him." Here begins the influence of Madame Roland. The suspension of the royal authority is one of her ideas. "So long as peace lasted," she says, "I adhered to the peaceful rôle and to that kind of influence which I thought fitting to my sex; when war was declared by the King's departure, it appeared to me that every one should devote himself unreservedly. I joined the fraternal societies, being persuaded that zeal and good intentions might be very useful in critical moments. I was unable to stay at home any longer, and I went to the houses of worthy people of my acquaintance that we might excite each other to great measures." One knows what the Revolution meant by that expression: great measures. Madame Roland became furious. She wanted a freedom of the press without check or limit. She was angry because Marat's newspapers were destroyed by the satellites of Lafayette. "It is a cruel thing to think of," she exclaims, "but it becomes every day more evident that peace means retrogression, and that we can only be regenerated by blood."