How gladly her soul hailed these hopes! Soon she found that they were accompanied by fears, and that the popular party grew insolent and despotic in prosperity. "Is the question to be whether we have one tyrant or a hundred," she writes, and she became eager to ally herself to the liberal, but constitutional, party, by which freedom would be secured, without anarchy or public convulsion.
1789.
Ætat.
35.
Almost immediately on the breaking out of the revolution, her husband was elected into the municipality of Lyons. His integrity and firmness, and his attachment to the popular party, of course excited many enemies; but he was immovable in his course, and denounced all the abuses which had multiplied in the administration of the finances of the city. It was discovered that Lyons had 40,000,000 of livres of debt; the manufactories, meanwhile, were suffering, during a period of popular ferment, and 20,000 workmen were thrown out of employ. It was necessary to represent these things to the national assembly, and to ask for aid. Roland was charged with this mission.
1791.
Ætat.
37.
Madame Roland had not visited Paris for five years. She was familiar with the names of the heads of the various parties, and a commerce of letters and civilities had had place between her husband and Brissot, chief of the girondists. He visited them, and her house became the rendezvous of his party. Her talents, beauty, and enthusiasm, produced an effect of which she was scarcely aware herself, and which the party itself rather felt than acknowledged. "Roland," writes Thiers, in his "History of the French Revolution," "was known for his clever writings on manufactures and mechanics. This man, of austere life, inflexible principles, and cold repulsive manners, yielded, without being aware, to the superior ascendancy of his wife. Madame Roland was young and beautiful. Nourished in seclusion by philosophical and republican sentiments, she had conceived ideas superior to her sex, and had erected a strict religion from the then reigning opinions. Living in intimate friendship with her husband, she wrote for him, communicated her vivacity and ardour, not only to him but to all the girondists, who, enthusiastic in the cause of liberty and philosophy, adored beauty, and talent, and their own opinions, in her." She, meanwhile, did all she could to render her influence covert. She might converse with energy and freedom with the different members of the party during their chance visits; but when they assembled in her house to discuss present proceedings and future prospects, she was present, but maintained silence. Apart from the deliberators, occupied by needlework, or writing letters, she listened, nor interfered till, the conference breaking up, she could in privacy, and without ostentation, express her sentiments to them individually. This reserve caused all her friends to speak of her with respect, and yet to discuss their opinions eagerly with her. She had the fault, in which those who are wedded to opinions are apt to indulge, of preferring the men who agreed with her, who hated royalty and courts, and aimed at equality and republicanism, to those of superior endowments and virtues, but who differed from her. Discontented at the same time with the talents of the former, she found most of the men thus collected about her far below the estimate she had formed at a distance: they talked at random; they had no fixed plan; theoretical rather than practical, they could make paper constitutions, but knew little how to deal with their fellow men during the clash of interests, and the tempest of revolutionary passions. She had none of the vanity that seeks to shine in conversation, and grew impatient when witty sallies and argumentative discussions, instead of serious resolves and heroic acts, occupied her friends.
Roland's mission retained them at Paris for seven months. They were months crowded with events pregnant with the fate of France. Madame Roland, in her letters to her friend, Henri Brancal, then in London, paints the various events, and the sentiments they inspired. She was a warm partisan of liberty and equality, and mourned over the lukewarmness of the national assembly on these great questions; or, rather, the number of the moderate party who wished to assimilate the government of France to the English constitution. To prevent the extension of these views, the jacobins agitated and excited the people. Madame Roland at first approved their measures: she saw no safety for the newly acquired freedom of her country, except in the enthusiasm by which it was defended by the many. She had to learn, through tragical experience, how much more difficult it is to restrain than to excite the French. Her letters breathe impatience and disapprobation with regard to the actual state of things. "Represent to yourself," she writes, "a number of good citizens carrying on a perpetual, active, painful, and often fruitless struggle with the mass of the ambitious, the discontented, and the ignorant." The flight of the king filled her with alarm, mingled with enthusiasm, as she saw danger approach herself and her friends; danger to proceed from the triumph of despotism—she could not then imagine that any would arise from freedom. "While we were at peace," she writes, "I kept in the back ground, and exercised only the sort of influence suited to my sex; but, when the departure of the king declared war, it appeared to me that every one ought to devote himself without reserve. I caused myself to be received in fraternal associations, persuaded that the zeal and intelligence of any member of society must be useful in critical moments." The arrest and return of the king and his family kindled a thousand hopes. "It would be a folly, an absurdity, almost a horror," she writes, "to replace the king on the throne. To bring Louis XVI. to trial would doubtless be the greatest and most just of measures; but we are incapable of adopting it." Little did she anticipate the progress of events.
Meanwhile the project of her party was to suspend the king from exercising the royal functions. It must be remembered that we, from a distance, judge Louis from facts, as history records them: then, when events were passing, no one could fairly judge the other; and while the French expected invasion, and saw in the flight of their king the infraction of the oath he had taken to maintain the constitution, those attached to it regarded him as a traitor. Madame Roland sided with those who regarded his dethronement as the safety of France, and the erection of a republic as the promise of its welfare. She thought that both were imminent. "I have seen," she writes, "the flame of liberty lit up in my country; it cannot be quenched, and late events have served as fuel; knowledge and reason are united to instinct to maintain and augment it; it must devour the last remains of despotism, and subvert thrones. I shall die when nature pleases, and my last sigh will be a breathing of joy and hope for the generations to come." The tumults, however, that succeeded seemed to crush these hopes. Brissot fell into disrepute: there was an endeavour to crush the republican party, which, in the moment of danger, had been willing to ally itself to the most violent jacobins. In the midst of this agitation and tumult the mission of Roland came to a close, and he prepared to leave Paris. The elections were about to commence, and he was candidate for Lyons, but was not elected. The autumn, therefore, was spent in the country. Madame Roland was evidently dispirited by the obscurity of her life and absence from the scene of action. "I see with regret," she writes, "that my husband is cast back on silence and obscurity. He is habituated to public life: it is more necessary to him than he is himself aware; his energy and activity injure his health when not exercised according to his inclinations: in addition, I had hoped for great advantages for my child in a residence at Paris. Occupied there by her education, I should have excited and developed some sort of talent. The recluse life I must lead here makes me tremble for her. From the moment that my husband has no occupation but his desk, I must remain near to amuse him, and diversify his daily labours, according to a duty and a habit which may not be eluded. This existence is in exact contradiction to that suitable to a child of ten years of age. My heart is saddened by this opposition of duties, already too deeply felt. I find myself fallen into the nullity of a provincial life, where no exterior circumstances supply that which I cannot do myself, and a dark veil falls over the future. If I believed that my husband were satisfied, it would be otherwise; hope would embellish the prospect. However, our destiny is fixed, and I must try to render it as happy as I can."
The discontent of madame Roland was natural to her ardent disposition. She desired to be great, not for the sake of riches, or even power; but to have scope afforded her to exercise those virtues which, nourished in solitude, and excited by important events, inflamed her heart to enthusiasm. She wished to be great as her favourites in Plutarch were great: she did not look forward to actual peril, but to a life of activity and usefulness on a grand scale, and to be numbered among those whose names were to be recorded in future history as the parents of the liberty of her country.
1792.
Ætat.
38.
In the December of the same year they returned to Paris, and in the following March, a new ministry being formed from the girondist party, Roland was named minister for the interior. It was a post of honour, but heavily burdened with responsibility. Dumouriez, then fluctuating, attracted by a court that flattered, yet desirous of conciliating his own party, was minister for foreign affairs. At first Roland felt assured of the good dispositions of the king towards the new state of things. "I could not believe," writes his wife, "in the constitutional vocation of a monarch born under a despotism, brought up for it, and accustomed to exercise it; and I never saw my husband leave me to attend council, full of reliance on the good intentions of the king, but I exclaimed, in my heart, 'What new folly will now be committed!'" She goes on pleasantly to relate the surprise excited at court, when Roland appeared in his quaker-like costume, his round hat, and his shoes tied with riband. The master of the ceremonies pointed him out to Dumouriez, with an angry and agitated mien, exclaiming—"Ah! sir,—no buckles to his shoes!" "Ah! sir," replied Dumouriez, with mock solemnity, "all is lost!"