Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

MADAME ROLAND

A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY

MADAME ROLAND AT THE CONCIERGERIE.
From a painting by Jules Goupil, now in the museum of Amboise.

MADAME ROLAND
A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY

BY

IDA M. TARBELL

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1896

COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith

Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

To my dear Friend

MADAME CÉCILE MARILLIER

PREFACE

Some eight years ago I undertook a study of the women of the French Revolution, my object being merely to satisfy myself as to the value of their public services in that period. In the course of my studies I became particularly interested in Madame Roland, and when five years ago I found myself in Paris for an extended period, I decided to use my leisure in making a more careful investigation of her life and times than I had been able to do in America. The result of that study is condensed in this volume.

Much of the material used in preparing the book is new to the public. The chapter on Mademoiselle Phlipon’s relations with M. Roland and of their marriage has been written from unpublished letters, and presents a very different view of that affair from that which her biographers have hitherto given, and from that which she herself gives in her Memoirs. The story of her seeking a title with its privileges in Paris in 1784 has never before been told, the letters in which the details of her search are given never having been published. Those of her biographers who have had access to these letters have been too ardent republicans, or too passionate admirers of their heroine, to dwell on an episode of her career which seemed to them inconsistent with her later life.

The manuscripts of the letters from which these chapters have been written are now in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. They were given to the library in 1888, by Madame Faugère, the widow of M. P. Faugère, to whom they had been given by Madame Champagneux, only daughter of Madame Roland, that he might prepare a satisfactory edition of her mother’s works, and write a life of her father. M. Faugère finished his edition of Madame Roland’s writings, but he died before completing his life of M. Roland.

Much of the material used in the book I have obtained from the descendants of Madame Roland, now living in Paris. My relations with them came about through that distinguished scholar and gentleman, the late James Darmesteter. Learning that I was interested in Madame Roland, he kindly sent me to her great-grandson M. Léon Marillier, a professor in the École des Hautes Études, of Paris. M. Marillier and his wife were of the greatest service to me, called my attention to the manuscripts which Madame Faugère had turned over to the Bibliothèque, and which had just been catalogued, and gave me for examination a large quantity of letters and cahiers from Madame Roland’s girlhood. There also I met their mother, Madame Cécile Marillier. To her I owe a debt of gratitude for sympathy and help, which I can never repay. Madame Marillier gave me freely the family legends of her grandmother, and in May, 1892, I spent a fortnight at Le Clos, the family home of the Rolands, where Madame Roland passed her happiest, most natural years. The old place is rife with memories of its former mistress, and it was there and afterwards in Villefranche that I found material for Chapters IV. and V.

I cannot close this introductory word without acknowledging, too, my indebtedness to the librarians of the Bibliothèque Nationale, of Paris. During three years I worked there almost daily, and I was treated with uniform courtesy and served willingly and intelligently. Indeed, I may say the same for all libraries and museums of Paris where I had occasion to seek information.

I. M. T.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

MADAME ROLAND

I
THE GIRLHOOD OF MANON PHLIPON

Since the days when all of the city of Paris, save a few mills, fortresses, and donjon-towers, was to be found on the Île de la Cité, the western end of that island has been the quarter of the gold and silver smiths. Here, in the olden times, when this part of the island was laid out in gardens and paths, the sellers of ornaments and metal vessels arranged their wares on the ground or in rude booths; later when peaked-roofed, latticed-faced buildings filled the space, these same venders opened their workshops in them; later still, when good King Henry IV. filled up this western end, built the Pont Neuf and put up the two fine façades of red brick and stone—mates for the arcades of the Place Royale—the same class continued here their trade. Even to-day, he who knows Paris thoroughly seeks the neighborhood of the Quai de l’Horloge and the Quai des Orfèvres for fine silverware and jewels.

Among the master engravers who in the latter part of the eighteenth century plied their trade in this quarter was one Pierre Gatien Phlipon. His shop was in one of the houses of King Henry’s façade—a house still standing almost intact, although the majority of them have been replaced or rebuilt so as to be unrecognizable—that facing the King’s statue on the west and looking on the Quai de l’Horloge on the north.

M. Phlipon’s shop was in one of the best situations in Paris. The Pont Neuf, on which his house looked, was the real centre of the city. Here in those days loungers, gossips, recruiting agents, venders of all sorts, saltimbanques, quacks, men of fashion, women of pleasure, the high, the low, tout Paris, in short, surged back and forth across the bridge. So fashionable a promenade had the place become that Mercier, the eighteenth-century gossip, declared that when one wanted to meet a person in Paris all that was necessary to do was to promenade an hour a day on the Pont Neuf. If he did not find him, he might be sure he was not in the city.

Engraver by profession, M. Phlipon was also a painter and enameller. He employed several workmen in his shop and received many orders, but he had an itching for money-making which led him to sacrifice the artistic side of his profession to the commercial and to combine with his art a trade in jewelry and diamonds. We may suppose, in fact, that the reason M. Phlipon had removed his shop to the Pont Neuf, instead of remaining in the Rue de la Lanterne, now Rue de la Cité, near Notre Dame, where he lived until about 1755, was because he saw in the new location a better opportunity for carrying on trade.

As his sacrifice of art to commerce shows, M. Phlipon was not a particularly high-minded man. He was, in fact, an excellent type of what the small bourgeoisie of Paris was, and is to-day,—good-natured and vain, thrifty and selfish, slightly common in his tastes, not always agreeable to live with when crossed in his wishes, but on the whole a respectable man, devoted to his family, with too great regard for what his neighbors would say of him to do anything flagrantly vulgar, and too good a heart to be continually disagreeable.

His vanity made him fond of display, but it kept him in good company. If he condescended to trade, he never condescended to traders, but carefully preserved the relations with artists, painters, and sculptors which his rank as an engraver brought him. “He was not exactly a high-minded man,” said his daughter once, “but he had much of what one calls honor. He would have willingly taken more for a thing than it was worth, but he would have killed himself rather than not to have paid the price of what he had bought.” What M. Phlipon lacked in dignity of character and elevation of sentiments, Madame Phlipon supplied—a serene, high-minded woman, knowing no other life than that of her family, ambitious for nothing but duty. She is a perfect model for the gracious housewife in La mère laborieuse and Le Bénédicité of Chardin, and her face might well have served as the original for the exquisite pastel of the Louvre, Chardin’s wife.

Madame Phlipon’s marriage had been, as are the majority of her class, one of reason. If she had suffered from a lack of delicacy on the part of her husband, had never known deep happiness or real companionship, she had, at least, been loved by the rather ordinary man whom her superiority impressed, and her home had been pleasant and peaceful.

The Phlipons led a typical bourgeois life. The little home in the second story of the house on the Quai de l’Horloge contained both shop and living apartments. As in Paris to-day the business and domestic life were closely dovetailed. Madame Phlipon minded the work and received customers when her husband was out, helped with the accounts, and usually had at her table one or more of the apprentices. Their busy every-day life was varied in the simple and charming fashion of which the French have the secret, leisurely promenades on Sunday, to Saint-Cloud, Meudon, Vincennes, an hour now and then in the Luxembourg or Tuileries gardens, an occasional evening at the theatre. As the families of both Monsieur and Madame Phlipon were of the Parisian bourgeoisie they had many relatives scattered about in the commercial parts of the city, and much animation and variety were added to their lives by the constant informal visiting they did among them.

The chief interest of the Phlipon household was centred in its one little girl—the only child of seven left—Marie-Jeanne, or Manon, as she was called for short. Little Manon had not been born in the house on the Quai de l’Horloge, but in the Rue de la Lanterne (March 18, 1754), and the first two years of her life had been spent with a nurse in the suburbs of Arpajon. She was already a happy, active, healthy, observant child when she was brought back to her father’s home. The change from the quiet country house and garden, all of the world she had known, to the shifting panorama of the Seine and the Pont Neuf made a vivid impression upon her. The change, in fact, may be counted as the first step in her awakening. It quickened her power of observation and aroused in her a restless curiosity.

Never having known her mother until now, she was almost at once taken captive by the sweet, grave woman who guarded her with tenderest care, yet demanded from her implicit obedience. Madame Phlipon obtained over the child a complete ascendency and kept it so long as she lived. The father, on the contrary, never was able to win from his little daughter the homage she gave her mother. Monsieur Phlipon was often impatient and arbitrary with Manon. The child was already sufficiently developed when she began to make his acquaintance to discriminate dimly. While she was pliable to reason and affection, she was obstinate before force and impatience. She recognized that somehow they were illogical and unjust and she would endure but never yield to them. Thus among Manon’s first experiences was a species of hero-worship on one hand, of contempt for injustice on the other.

An incessant activity was one of the little girl’s natural qualities. This and her curiosity explain how she came to learn to read without anybody knowing exactly when. By the time she was four years old nothing but the promise of flowers tempted her away from her books, unless, indeed, it was stories; and with these the artist friends of M. Phlipon often entertained her, weaving extravagances by the hour, varying the pastime by repeating rhymes to her—an amusement which was even more entertaining to them since she repeated them like a parrot.

Madame Phlipon was a sincere and ardent Catholic and she took advantage of the eager activity of little Manon to teach her the Old and New Testament and the catechism. When the child was seven years old, she was sent to the class to be prepared for her first communion. Here she speedily distinguished herself, carrying away the prizes, much to the glory of her uncle Bimont, a young curé of the parish charged with directing the catechism.

M. Phlipon and his wife, delighted with the child’s precocity, gave her masters,—one to teach her to write and to give her history and geography, another for the piano, another for dancing, another for the guitar. M. Phlipon himself gave her drawing, and the Curé Bimont Latin. She attacked these duties eagerly,—getting up at five in the morning to copy her exercises and do her examples,—active because she could not help it.

But her real education was not what she was getting in these conventional ways. It was what the books she read gave her. These were of the most haphazard sort: the Bible in old French, to which she was greatly attached, the Lives of the Saints, The Civil Wars of Appias, Scarron, the Memoirs of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, a treatise on Heraldry, another on Contracts, many travels, dramas of all sorts, Télémaque, Jerusalem Delivered, even Candide.

The child read with passionate absorption. At first it was simply for something to do, as she did her exercises or fingered her guitar; but soon she began to feel strongly and she sought in her books food for the strange new emotions which stirred her heart, brought tears to her eyes, and awakened her to the mysteries of joy and sorrow long before she was able to call those emotions by name.

In the motley collection of books read by Manon at this period one only made a life-long impression upon her,—it was Dacier’s Plutarch. No one can understand the eighteenth century in France without taking into consideration the profound impress made upon it by Plutarch’s Lives. The work was the source of the dreams and of the ambitions of numbers of the men who exercised the greatest influence on the intellectual and political life of the period. Jean Jacques Rousseau declares that when he first read Plutarch, at about nine years of age, it cured him of his love of romance, and formed his free and republican character, and the impatience of servitude which tormented him throughout his life. Hundreds of others like Rousseau, many of them, no doubt, in imitation of him, trace their noblest qualities to the same source.

When little Manon Phlipon first read the Lives, the stories of these noble deeds moved her almost to delirium. She carried her book to church all through one Lent in guise of a prayer-book and read through the service. When at night, alone in her room, she leaned from the window and looked upon the Pont Neuf and Seine, she wept that she had not been born in Athens or Sparta. She was beginning to apply to herself what she read, to feel that the noble actions which aroused such depths of feeling in her heart were not only glorious to hear of but to perform. She was filled with awe at the idea that she was herself a creature capable of sublime deeds. A solemn sense of responsibility was awakened, and she felt that she must form her soul for a worthy future. When most children are busy with toys she was trembling before a mysterious possibility,—a life of great and good deeds, a possibility which she faintly felt was dependent upon her own efforts.

THE PLACE DAUPHINE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
Mademoiselle Phlipon lived in the second story of the house on the left.

Once penetrated by this splendid ideal, however vague it may have been, it was inevitable that the rites of the Church, full of mysticism and exaltation, the teachings of devotion and self-abnegation, the pictures of lives spent in holy service, should appeal deeply to Manon’s sensitive and untrained consciousness. As the time of her first communion approached, and curé and friends combined to impress upon the child the solemn and eternal importance of the act, she was more and more stirred by dread and exaltation. All her time was given to meditation, to prayer, to pious reading. Every day she fingered the Lives of the Saints, sighing after the times when the fury of the pagans bestowed the crown of martyrdom upon Christians.

The necessary interruptions to her devotions which occurred in the household, disturbed her. At last she felt that she could not endure any longer the profane atmosphere; throwing herself at her parents’ feet, she begged to be allowed to go to a convent to prepare for the sacrament. M. and Madame Phlipon, touched by the zeal of their daughter, consented to let her leave them for a year.

It was not a difficult matter to find a convent suitable for a young girl of any class, in the Paris of the eighteenth century. That selected by the Phlipons for Manon stood in the Rue Neuve Ste. Étienne, a street now known as Rue Rollin and Rue Navarre. The convent, Dames de la Congrégation de Notre Dame, established in 1645, was well known for the gratuitous instruction its sisters gave the children of the very poor as well as for the simplicity and honesty with which the pension for young girls was conducted, a thing which could not be said of many of the convents of that day.

The instruction given by the Dames de la Congrégation was not, however, any better than that of other institutions of the kind, if the morals were. The amount of education regarded as necessary for a French girl of good family at this period was, in fact, very meagre; even girls of the highest classes being allowed to grow to womanhood in astonishing ignorance. Madame du Deffand says that in the convent where she was placed nothing was taught except “reading and writing, a light, very light tinting of history, the four rules, some needle-work, many pater-nosters—that was all.” Madame Louise, the sister of Louis XVI., did not know her alphabet at twelve, so says Madame Campan. Madame de Genlis taught her handsome sister-in-law, the favorite of the Duke of Orleans, to write after she was married. Madame de Genlis herself at twelve years of age had read almost nothing.

Manon Phlipon’s acquirements when she entered the convent, at a little over eleven years of age, were certainly much greater than those of these celebrated women at her age. It is probable that her instruction was far above that not only of the girls of her age in the school, but of the most advanced pupils, perhaps even of some of the good sisters themselves.

The superior training of the new pupil was soon known. The discovery caused her to be petted by all the sisterhood, and she was granted special privileges of study. She continued her piano lessons and drawing, so that she had sufficient work to satisfy her active nature and to make the leisure given her sweet. This leisure she never passed with her companions. Her frame of mind was altogether too serious to permit her to romp like a child. The recreation hours she spent apart, in a quiet corner of the silent old garden, reading or dreaming, permeated by the beauty of the foliage, the sigh of the wind, the perfume of the flowers. All this she felt, in her exalted state, was an expression of God, a proof of his goodness. With her heart big with gratitude and adoration, she would leave the garden to kneel in the dim church, and listen to the chanting of the choir and the roll of the organ.

Sensitive, unpractical, fervent, the imposing and mystic services allured her imagination and moved her heart until she lost self-control and wept, she did not know why.

During the first days at the convent, a novice took the veil,—one of the most touching ceremonies of the Church. The young girl appeared before the altar, dressed like a bride, and in a tone of joyous exaltation sang the wonderful strain, “Here I have chosen my dwelling-place, here I establish myself forever.” Then her white garments were taken from her, and cruel shears cut her long hair, which fell in masses to the floor; she prostrated herself before the altar, and in sign of her eternal separation from the world a black cloth was spread over her. Even to the experienced and unbelieving the sight is profoundly affecting. Manon, sensitive and overstrung, was seized with the terrible, death-in-life meaning of the sacrifice; she fancied herself in the place of the young dévouée and fell to the floor in violent convulsions.

Under the influence of such emotions, intensified by long prayers, retreats, meditation, exhortations, from curé and sisters, she took her first communion. So penetrated was she by the solemnity and the joy of the act that she was unable to walk alone to the altar. The report of her piety went abroad in the convent and in the parish, and many a good old woman whom she met afterwards, mindful of this extraordinary exaltation, asked her prayers.

Fortunately for the child’s development, this excessive mysticism, which was developing a melancholy, sweet to begin with, but not unlikely to become unhealthy, was relieved a few months after she entered the convent by a friendship with a young girl from Amiens, Sophie Cannet by name.

When Sophie first appeared at the Congrégation, Manon had been deeply touched by her grief at parting from her mother. Here was a sensibility which approached her own. She soon saw, too, that the new pensionnaire avoided the noisy groups of the garden, that she loved solitude and revery. She sought her and almost at once there sprang up between the two a warm friendship. Sophie was three years older than Manon; she was more self-contained, colder, more reasonable. She loved to discuss as well as to meditate, to analyze as well as to read. She talked well, too, and Manon had not learned as yet the pretty French accomplishment of causerie, and she delighted to listen to her new friend.

If the girls were different, they were companionable. Their work, their study, their walks, were soon together. They opened their hearts to each other, confided their desires, and decided to travel together the path to perfection upon which each had resolved.

To Manon Phlipon this new friendship was a revelation equal to the vision of nobility aroused by Plutarch; or to that of mystic purity found in the Church. So far in life she had had no opportunity for healthy expression. Her excessive sensibility, the emotions which frightened and stifled her, the aspirations which floated, indefinite and glorious, before her, all that she felt, had been suppressed. She could not tell her mother, her curé, the good sisters. Even if they understood her, she felt vaguely that they would check her, calm her, try to turn her attention to her lessons, to the practice of good deeds, to pious exercises. She did not want this. She wanted to feel, to preserve this tormenting sensibility which was her terror and her joy.

To Sophie she could tell everything. Sophie, too, was sensitive, devout, and understood joy and sorrow. The two girls shared the most secret experiences of their souls. There grew up between them a form of Platonic love which is not uncommon between idealistic and sensitive young girls, a relation in which all that is most intimate, most profound, most sincere in the intellectual and spiritual lives of the two is exchanged; under its influence the most obscure and indefinite impressions take form, the most subtile emotions materialize, and vague and indefinite thoughts shape themselves.

The effect of this relation on the emotional nature of Manon was generally wholesome. Her affection for Sophie gave a new coloring to the pleasure she found in her work, and it dispelled the melancholy which hitherto had tinged her solitude. More important, it compelled her to define her feelings so that her friend could understand them: to do this she was forced to study her own moods and gradually her intelligence came to be for something in all that she felt.

When the year which Manon’s parents had given her for the convent was up, she was obliged to leave her friend. For some time after the parting Sophie remained at the Congrégation, so that they saw each other often; but, afterwards, it was by letters that their friendship was kept up. Never were more ardent love letters written than those of Manon to Sophie. She commiserated all the world who did not know the joys of friendship. She suffered tortures when Sophie’s letters were delayed, and, like every lover since the beginning of the postal service, evolved plans for improving its promptness and its exactness. She read and re-read the letters which always filled her pockets, and she rose from her bed at midnight to fill pages with declarations of her fondness. This correspondence became one of the great joys of her life. All that she thought, felt, and saw, she put into her letters. The effort to express all of herself clearly compelled her to a greater degree of reflection and crystallized her notions wonderfully. Beside making her think, it awakened in her a passion for the pen which never left her. Indeed, it became an imperative need for her to express in writing whatever she thought or felt. Her emotions and ideas seemed to her incomplete if they had not been written out. In her early letters there is a full account of all the influences which were acting on her life, and of the transformation and evolution they produced.

When Manon left the Congrégation, it was with the determination to preserve not only her friend, but her piety. To do the latter, she had made up her mind to fit herself secretly to return to a convent life when she reached her majority. She had even chosen already the order which she should join, and had selected Saint François de Sales, “one of the most amiable saints of Paradise,” as she rightly characterized him, as her patron.

For the time being, however, not a little of the world was mixed with her preparations for religious retirement. When she came back to the Quai de l’Horloge,—her first year out of the convent was spent on the Île Saint Louis with her grandmother Phlipon,—her father and mother began gradually to initiate her into the round of life which presumably would be hers in the future. M. Phlipon took especial pride in his fresh, bright-faced daughter. By his wish she was always dressed with elegance, and she attracted attention everywhere. The tenderness with which he introduced her always touched Manon in spite of the fact that she was often embarrassed by his too evident pride in her. The two went together to all the Salons and the expositions of art objects, and M. Phlipon carefully directed her taste here where he was so thoroughly at home. It was the only real point of contact between them.

Sundays and fête days were usually devoted to promenades by the Phlipons. The gayest paths, gardens, and boulevards were always chosen by M. Phlipon. He enjoyed the crowd and the mirth; and, above all, he enjoyed showing off his pretty daughter. But she, stern little moralist, when she discovered that her holiday toilette really gave her pleasure, that she actually felt flattered when people turned to look at her, that she found compliments sweet and admiring glances gratifying, trembled with apprehension. She might forgive her father’s vanity, but she could not forgive such a feeling in herself. Was it to walk in gardens and to be admired that she had been born? She gradually convinced herself that these promenades were inconsistent with her ideal of what was “beautiful and wise and grand,” and she urged her parents to the country, where all was in harmony with her thoughts and feelings. Meudon, still one of the loveliest of all the lovely forests in the environs of Paris, was her favorite spot. Its quiet, its naturalness, its variety, pleased her better than the movement and the artificiality of such a place as Saint-Cloud. In the forest of Meudon her passion for nature was fully satisfied; here she could study flower and tree, light and shade.

In her love for nature Manon was in harmony with one of the curious phases of the sentimental life of the eighteenth century in France. Nature as food for sentiment seems to have never been discovered until then by the French people. One searches in vain in French literature before Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Rousseau for anything which resembles a comprehension of and feeling for the external world—yet unaided Manon Phlipon became naturalist and pantheist. Never did Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Rousseau, in their tramps in the environs of Paris, rejoice more profoundly over the beauties of the world, enter more deeply into its mysteries, than did she when in her girlhood she wandered in the allées of the forest of Meudon or of the Bois de Vincennes.

But Manon was to see still another side of life,—people in their relations to one another and to herself. Thus far she had been easily first in her little world. She had never known the time when she was not praised for her superiority. Whatever notions of equality she entertained it is certain that she had not yet discovered that Manon Phlipon was secondary to anybody else.

It was on the visits which she began to make with her relatives, that she first discovered that in the world men are not graded according to their wisdom and their love for and practice of virtue. She went one day with her grandmother Phlipon to visit a rich and would-be-great lady, Madame de Boismorel, in whose house Madame Phlipon had, for many years after her husband’s death, acted as a kind of governess. She was wounded on entering by a sentiment not purely democratic—the servants, who loved the old governess and wished to please her, crowded about the little girl and complimented her freely. She was offended. These people might, of course, look at her, but it was not their business to compliment her. Once in the grand salon she found a typical little old Frenchwoman, pretentious, vain, exacting. Her chiffons, her rouge, her false hair, her lofty manner with the beloved grandmamma Phlipon whom she addressed as Mademoiselle,—Mademoiselle to her grandmother, one of the great personages of her life so far,—her assumption of superiority, her frivolous talk, revolted this Spartan maid. She lowered her eyes and blushed before the cold cynicism of the old lady. When she was asked questions, she replied with amusing sententiousness. “You must have a lucky hand, my little friend, have you ever tried it in a lottery?”

“Never, Madame, I do not believe in games of chance.”

“What a voice! how sweet and full it is, but how grave! Are you not a little devout?”

“I know my duty and I try to do it.”

“Ah! You desire to become a nun, do you not?”

“I am ignorant of my destiny, I do not seek to penetrate it.”

Little wonder that after that Madame de Boismorel cautioned the grandmother, “Take care that she does not become a blue-stocking; it would be a great pity.”

Manon went home from this visit full of disdain and anxiety. Evidently things were not as they ought to be when servants dared to compliment her to her face; when her own noble ideas were greeted coldly, and when a vain and vulgar woman could patronize a sweet and bright little lady like her grandmother; when her grandmother, too, would submit to the patronage—perhaps even court it.

She was to observe still more closely the world’s practices. An acquaintance of the family, one Mademoiselle d’Hannaches, was in difficulty over an inheritance and obliged to be in Paris to work up her case. Madame Phlipon took her into her house, where she stayed some eighteen months. Now Mademoiselle d’Hannaches belonged to an ancient family, and on account of her birth demanded extra consideration from those about her and treated her bourgeois friends with a certain condescension. Manon became a sort of secretary to her and often accompanied her when she went out on business. “I noticed,” wrote Manon afterwards, “that in spite of her ignorance, her stiff manner, her incorrect language, her old-fashioned toilette,—all her absurdities,—deference was paid her because of her family. The names of her ancestors, which she always enumerated, were listened to gravely and were used to support her claim. I compared the reception given to her with that which Madame de Boismorel had given to me and which had made a profound impression upon me. I knew that I was worth more than Mademoiselle d’Hannaches, whose forty years and whose genealogy had not given her the faculty of writing a sensible or legible letter. I began to find the world very unjust and its institutions most extravagant.”

Mademoiselle Phlipon had scarcely become accustomed to these vanities in the society which she frequented, before she began to observe equally puzzling and ridiculous pretensions in artistic and literary circles. Through the kindness of her masters and of the friends of M. and Madame Phlipon, she was often invited to the reunions of bels esprits, so common in Paris then and now. It was not in a spirit of humiliation and flattered vanity that so independent an observer and judge as she had become, surveyed the celebrities she was allowed to look upon and to listen to, in the various salons to which she was admitted. She saw immediately the pose which characterized nearly all of the gatherings, the pretentious vanity of those who read verses or portraits, the insincerity and diplomacy of those who applauded. The blue-stockings who read as their own verses which they had not always written, and who were paid by ambitious salon leaders for sitting at their table; the small poets who found inspiration in the muffs and snuff-boxes of the great ladies whose favor they wanted; the bold, and not always too chaste, compliments,—verily, if they made the gatherings délicieuses, as they who followed them declared, there was a deep gulf between Manon Phlipon’s standards and those of the society which her family congratulated her upon being able to see.

It was during Mademoiselle d’Hannaches’ stay with the Phlipons that Manon made a visit of eight days to Versailles, then the seat of the French Court, with her mother, her uncle, and their guest, to whose influence indeed they owed their garret accommodations in the château. Many things shocked and humiliated her in the life she saw there, but she did not go home nearly so bitter and disillusioned as she tried to represent herself to have been, nine years later, when she told the story to posterity as an evidence of her early revolt against the abuses of the monarchy. In fact, the reflections which the week at Versailles awakened were very just and reasonable. We have them in a letter written to Sophie some days after her return:

“I cannot tell you how much what I saw there has made me value my own situation and bless Heaven that I was born in an obscure rank. You believe, perhaps, that this feeling is founded on the little value which I attach to opinion and on the reality of the penalties which I see to be connected with greatness? Not at all. It is founded on the knowledge that I have of my own character which would be most harmful to myself and to the state if I were placed at a certain distance from the throne. I should be profoundly shocked by the enormous chasm between millions of men and one individual of their own kind. In my present position I love my King because I feel my dependence so little. If I were near him, I should hate his grandeur.... A good king seems to me an adorable being; still, if before coming into the world I had had my choice of a government I should have decided on a republic. It is true I should have wanted one different from any in Europe to-day.”

Manon was twenty years old when she wrote this letter to Sophie Cannet. Its reasonable tone is very different from what one would expect from the passionate little mystic of the convent of the Congrégation, the sententious critic of Madame de Boismorel. In fact, Manon’s attitude towards the world had changed. By force of study and reflection she had come to understand human nature better, and to accept with philosophical resignation the contradictions, the pettiness, and the injustice of society. “The longer I live, the more I study and observe,” she told Sophie, “the more deeply I feel that we ought to be indulgent towards our fellows. It is a lesson which personal experience teaches us every day,—it seems to me that in proportion to the measure of light which penetrates our minds we are disposed to humaneness, to benevolence, to tolerant kindness.”

Nor had she at this time any bitterness towards the existing order of government. If she “would have chosen a republic if she had been allowed a choice before coming into the world,” she had so far no idea of rejecting the rule under which she was born. Indeed, she was a very loyal subject of Louis XVI. When that prince came to the throne she wrote to her friend: “The ministers are enlightened and well disposed, the young prince docile and eager for good, the Queen amiable and beneficent, the Court kind and respectable, the legislative body honorable, the people obedient, wishing only to love their master, the kingdom full of resources. Ah, but we are going to be happy!” Nor did her ideas of equality at this period make her see in the mass of the common people equals of those who by training, education, and birth had been fitted to govern. “Truly human nature is not very respectable when one considers it in a mass,” she reflected one day, as she saw the people of Paris swarming even to the roofs to watch a poor wretch tortured on the wheel. In describing a bread riot in 1775, she condemned the people as impatient, called the measures of the ministers wise, and excused the government by recalling Sully’s reflection: “With all our enlightenment and good-will it is still difficult to do well.” And again, apropos of similar disturbances, she said: “The King talks like a father, but the people do not understand him; the people are hungry—it is the only thing which touches them.” Nothing in all this of contempt of the monarchy, of the sovereignty of the people, of the divine right of insurrection.

Manon Phlipon had in fact become, by the time she was twenty years of age, a thoroughly intelligent and reflective young woman. Instead of extravagant and impulsive opinions, results of excessive emotionalism and idealism, which her first twelve years seemed to prophesy, we have from her intelligent judgments. If it was not a question of some one she loved, she could be trusted to look at any subject in a rational and self-controlled way.

This change had been brought about largely by the reading and reflecting she had done since leaving the convent. For some time what she read had depended on what she could get. Her resolution to enter a convent eventually had made her at first prefer religious books, and she read Saint Augustine and Saint François de Sales with fervor and joy. With them she combined, helter-skelter, volumes from the bouquinistes, mainly travels, letters, and mythology. Fortunately she happened on Madame de Sévigné. Manon appreciated thoroughly the charming style of this most agreeable French letter-writer, and her taste was influenced by it, though her style was but little changed.

This stock was not exhausted before she had the happiness to be turned loose in the library of an abbé—a friend of her uncle. It was a house where her mother and Mademoiselle d’Hannaches went often to make up a party of tric-trac with the two curés. As it was necessary always to take her along, all parties were satisfied that Manon could lose herself in a book. For three years she found here all she could read: history, literature, mythology, the Fathers of the Church. Dozens of obscure authors passed through her hands; now and then she happened on a classic—something from Voltaire, from Bossuet. Here too she read Don Quixote.

But the good abbé died, the tric-trac parties in his library ceased, and Manon had to turn to the public library for books. She chose without any plan, generally a book of which she had heard. So far her reading had been simply out of curiosity, from a need of doing something. Usually she had several books on hand at once—some serious, others light, one of which she was always reading aloud to her mother. The habit of reading, especially aloud, was one of the chief means advised by the French educators of the time for carrying on a girl’s education. Madame de Sévigné, Fénelon, Madame de Maintenon, L’abbé de Saint-Pierre, the authorities at Port Royal, all had made much of the practice. Manon read their treatises, and finding that she had herself already adopted methods similar to those of the wisest men and women of her country, continued her work with new vigor.

All that she read she analyzed carefully, and she spent much time in making extracts. Through the courtesy of one of the descendants of Mademoiselle Phlipon, M. Léon Marillier of Paris, I had in my possession at one time, for examination, a large number of her cahiers prepared at this period. They are made of a coarse, grayish-blue paper, with rough edges, and are covered with a strong, graceful handwriting, almost never marred by erasures or changes, much of it looking as if it had been engraved; more characteristic and artistic manuscript one rarely sees.

The subjects of the quotations in the cahiers are nearly always deeply serious. In one there are eight pages on Necessity, long quotations on Death, Suicide, the Good Man, Happiness, the Idea of God. Another contains a long analysis of a work on Divorce Legislation, which had pleased her. Buffon and Voltaire are freely quoted from.

The passages which attracted her are philosophic and dogmatic rather than literary and sentimental, or devout. In fact, Manon became, in the period between fourteen and twenty-one, deeply interested in the philosophic thought of the day. Soon she was examining dispassionately, and with a freedom of mind remarkable in so unquestioning a believer as she had been, the entire system of religion which she had been taught. Once started on this track, her reading took a more systematic and intelligent turn. She read for a purpose, not simply out of curiosity.

It was the controversial works of Bossuet which first induced Manon Phlipon to apply the test of reason to her faith. Soon after she began to study the Christian dogma rationally, she revolted against the doctrines of infallibility and of the universal damnation of all those who never knew or who had not accepted the faith. When she discovered that she could not accept these teachings, she resolved to find out if there was anything else which she must give up, and so attacked eagerly religious criticism, philosophy, metaphysics. She analyzed most thoroughly all she read and compared authorities with unusual intelligence.

As her investigations went on, she found that her faith was going, and she told her confessor, who immediately furnished her with the apologists and defenders of the Church, Abbé Gauchat, Bergier, Abbadie, Holland, Clark, and others. She read them conscientiously and annotated them all; some of these notes she left in the books, not unwittingly we may suspect. The Abbé asked her in amazement if the comments were original with her.

These annotations were, in fact, calculated to startle a curé interested in conserving the orthodoxy of a parishioner. Part of those she made on the works of the Abbé Gauchat fell into my hands with the extracts spoken of above. They are the bold, intelligent criticisms of a person who has resolved to subject every dogma to the test of reason. They are never contemptuous or scoffing, though there is frequently a tone of irritation at what she regards as the feebleness of the logic. They are free from prejudice and from sentiment, and show no deference to authority.

Another result of the curé’s loan of controversial works was to intimate to Manon what books they refuted, and she hastened to procure them one after another. Thus the Traité de la tolérance, Dictionnaire philosophique, the Questions encyclopédiques, the Bons sens and the Lettres juives, of the Marquis d’Argens, the works of Diderot, d’Alembert, Raynal, in fact all the literature of the encyclopedists passed through her hands.

Manon Phlipon did not change her religious feelings or devout practices during this period. She was living a religious life of peculiar intensity, all the time that she was deep in the examination of doctrines. The one was for her an affair of the heart, the other of the head. Her letters to Sophie, after the question of doubt had once been broached between them, are filled, now with philosophical analyses of dogma, now with glowing piety, now with severe rules of conduct. It was some time after she took to reasoning before the subject came up. Sophie’s own faith was troubled and she pictured her state to her friend. Manon, touched by this confidence, greater than her own had been, freely portrayed afterwards her own mental and spiritual condition. From these letters we find that she reached, very early in her study, certain conclusions which she never abandoned, and upon these as a basis erected a system which satisfied her heart and mind and which regulated her conduct.

When she first wrote Sophie she was so convinced of the existence of God for “philosophical reasons” that she declared the authority of the world could not upset her. With this went the immortality of the soul. These two dogmas were enough to satisfy her heart and imagination. She did not need them to be upright, she said, but she did to be happy. She did right because she had convinced herself that it was to her own and to her neighbor’s interest. She was happy because she had a reasonable basis for goodness and nobility, and because she believed in God and in immortality. On this foundation further study became an inspiration. “My sentiments have gained an energy, a warmth, a range,” she wrote to Sophie after reading Raynal’s Philosophical History, “that the exhortations of priests have never given them—the General Good is my idol, because it must be the result and the reasonable end of everything. Virtue pleases me, inflames my imagination because it is good for me, useful to others, and beautiful in itself. I cherish life because I feel the value of it. I use it to the best advantage possible. I love all that breathes, I hate nothing but evil, and still I pity the guilty. With a conduct conformed to these ideas, I live happy and tranquil, and I shall finish my career in peace and with the greatest confidence in a God whom I dare believe to be better than I have been taught.”

She had her fundamentals, but she had not by any means finished her investigations. Each system she examined, fascinated her. In turn she was Jansenist, stoic, deist, materialist, idealist.

“The same thing happens to me sometimes,” she wrote Sophie, “that happened to the prince who went to the Court to hear the pleas,—the last lawyer who spoke always seemed to him to be right.” “I am continually in doubt, and I sleep there peacefully as the Americans in their hammocks. This state is best suited to our situation and to the little we know.”

Whatever her mental vagaries, she never altered her religious practices. She did not wish to torment her mother, or to set a bad example to those who took her as a model; for instance, there was her bonne whom she desired should keep her faith. “I should blame myself for weakening it,” she said, “as I should for taking away her bread.”

Only two months before the end of her life Madame Roland summed up her religious and philosophical life in a passage of her Memoirs. It is simply a résumé of what in her girlhood she wrote at different times to Sophie. The main points of this philosophy have been given above.

II
LOVERS AND MARRIAGE

Until she was twenty-one years of age, Manon Phlipon’s life was singularly free from care. Her studies, her letters to Sophie, her hours with her mother, her promenades, filled it full. Suddenly in 1775 its peace was broken by the death of Madame Phlipon. Manon’s veneration and affection for her mother were sincere and passionate, her dependence upon her complete. Her death left the girl groping pitifully. The support and the joy of her life seemed to have been taken from her. But the necessity of action, her obligations to her father, the kindness of her friends, her own philosophy, finally calmed her, and she made a brave effort to adjust herself to her new duties. Her real restoration, however,—that is, her return to happiness and to enthusiasm, was wrought by a book—the Nouvelle Héloïse, of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

In the middle and in the latter half of the eighteenth century France passed through a paroxysm of sentiment. Man was acknowledged a reasoning being, to be sure, but it was because he was a sensitive one that he was extolled. His mission was to escape pain and seek happiness. To laugh, to weep, to vibrate with feeling, was the ideal of happiness. This sensitiveness to sentiment was shown in the most extravagant ways. Words ran out in the efforts to paint emotion. Friends no longer saluted, they fell into each other’s arms. Tears were no longer sufficient for grief, they were needed for joy. Convulsions and spasms alone expressed sorrow adequately. At the least provocation women were in a faint and men trembling. Acute sensibility was cultivated as an Anglo-Saxon cultivates reserve.

The prophet of this sentimental generation was Jean Jacques Rousseau, the hand-book he gave his followers the Nouvelle Héloïse. Here sentimentalism reaches the highest point possible without becoming unadulterated mawkishness and sensuality, if, indeed, it does not sometimes pass the limit. To France, however, the book was a revelation. Rousseau declares that Frenchwomen particularly were intoxicated by it, and that there were few ladies of rank of whom he could not have made the conquest if he had undertaken it. It is only necessary to read the memoirs of the day, to see that Rousseau tells the truth. The story that George Sand tells of her grandmother, and those Madame de Genlis relates of the reception of the book by the great ladies of the Palais Royal, are but examples of the general outburst of admiration which swept through feminine hearts.

The Nouvelle Héloïse was a revelation in sentiment to Manon Phlipon. The severe studies of the past few years had checked and regulated the excessive and uncontrolled emotions of her girlhood. She had become an intelligent, reflecting creature. But the death of her mother had overthrown her philosophy for the moment; then came the Nouvelle Héloïse. Its effect on her was like that of Plutarch twelve years before. It kindled her imagination to the raptures of love, the beauty of filial affection, the peace of domestic life, the joy of motherhood.

Her vigorous, passionate young nature asserted itself; her mind burned with the possibilities of happiness; sentiment regained the power temporarily given to the intellect, and from that time was the ruling force of her life.

“I fear that he strengthened my weakness,” Manon wrote of Rousseau towards the end of her life, and certainly he did destroy the fine harmony that she had established between her reason and her feelings, making the latter master. She was quite right in thinking it fortunate that she had not read him earlier. “He would have driven me mad; I should have been willing to read nobody but him.”

The Nouvelle Héloïse was not, however, the first of Rousseau she had read. Émile had passed through her hands, and her religious convictions had unquestionably been influenced by the Profession of Faith of the Vicar of Savoy. But she had read him critically so far. Now all was changed. She plunged enthusiastically into his works. She found there clearly and fully stated what she herself had vaguely and imperfectly felt; the sentiments he interpreted had stirred her; many of the principles he laid down for conduct she had been practising. In less than a year she was defending his works to Sophie.

“I am astonished that you wonder at my love for Rousseau. I regard him as the friend of humanity, as its benefactor and mine. Who pictures virtue in a nobler and more touching manner? Who renders it more worthy of love? His works inspire a taste for truth, simplicity, wisdom. As for myself, I know well that I owe to them all that is best in me. His genius has warmed my soul, I have been inflamed, elevated, and ennobled by it.

“I do not deny that there are some paradoxes in Émile, some proceedings that our customs make impracticable. But how many profound and wholesome opinions, how many useful precepts! how many beauties to save the faults! Moreover, I confess that observation has led me to approve things that at first I treated as foolish and chimerical. His Héloïse is a masterpiece of sentiment. The woman who can read it without being better or at least without desiring to become so, has only a soul of clay, a mind of apathy. She will never rise above the common.... In all that he has done one recognizes not only a genius, but an honest man and citizen.... And a scaffold has come near being erected for this man, to whom, in another century, one will perhaps raise altars!”

Manon Phlipon had found in Rousseau her guide. The feminine need of an authority was satisfied. She accepted him en bloc, and to defend and follow him became henceforth her concern.

Manon’s first appreciation of Rousseau was, naturally enough, an attempt to play Julie to a fancied Saint-Preux. It is not to be supposed that this is the first time in her life that her attention was turned towards a lover. Ever since her piety began to cool under the combined effects of study and observation, and her natural vanity and love of attention began to assert themselves, she had thought a great deal of her future husband. In a French girl’s life a future husband is a foregone conclusion, and Manon, like all her countrywomen, had been accustomed to the presentation of this or that person whom some zealous friend thought a fitting mate for her. The procession of suitors that passes before the readers of her Memoirs is so long and so motley that one is inclined to believe that more than one is there by virtue of the heroine’s imagination. Manon Phlipon was one of those women who see in every man a possible lover.

The applications for her hand began with her guitar master, who, having taught her all he knew, ended by asking her to marry him. Then there was a widower who had prepared himself for his courtship by having a wen removed from his left cheek; the family butcher, who sought to win her regard by sending her the choicest cuts of steak, and appearing on Sunday in the midst of the Phlipons’ family promenade, arrayed in lace and fine broadcloth; and in turn all the eligible young men and widowers of the Place Dauphine. They were, without exception, peremptorily declined by the young woman through her father. Had she read Plutarch and all the philosophers, only to tie herself up to a merchant bent on getting rich and cutting a good figure in his quarter?

Her parents, flattered and amused by this cortège, did not at first try to influence Manon to accept any one, but at last her father became anxious. The disdain with which she refused all representatives of commerce annoyed him a little, too. “What kind of a man will suit you?” he asked her one day.

“You have taught me to reflect, and allowed me to form studious habits. I don’t know to what kind of a man I shall give myself, but it will never be to any one with whom I cannot share my thoughts and sentiments.”

“But there are men in business who are polished and well educated.”

“Yes, but not among those I see. Their politeness consists in a few phrases and salutations. Their knowledge is always of business. They would be of little use to me in the education of my children.”

“Raise them yourself.”

“That task would seem heavy to me if it were not shared by my husband.”

“Don’t you think L——’s wife is happy? They have just gone out of business; they have bought a large property; their house is well kept; and they see a great deal of good society.”

“I cannot judge of the happiness of others, and mine will never depend upon wealth. I believe that there is no happiness in marriage except when hearts are closely united. I can never give myself to one who has not the same sentiments as I. Besides, my husband must be stronger than I; nature and the laws make him my superior, and I should be ashamed of him if he were not so.”

“Is it a lawyer that you want? Women are never too happy with such men; they are bad tempered and have very little money.”

“But, papa, I shall never marry anybody for his gown. I don’t mean to say that I want a man of such and such a profession, but a man that I can love.”

“But, if I understand you, such a man cannot be found in business?”

“Ah! I confess that seems to me very probable; I have never found any one there to my taste; and then business itself disgusts me.”

“Nevertheless, it is a very pleasant thing to live tranquilly at home while one’s husband carries on a good business. Look at Madame A——; she knows good diamonds as well as her husband; she carries on the business in his absence; she will continue to carry it on if she should become a widow; their fortune is already large. You are intelligent; you would inspire confidence; you could do what you wanted to. You would have a very agreeable life if you would accept Delorme, Dabreuil, or Obligeois.”

“Hold on, papa; I have learned too well that in business one does not succeed unless he sells dear what he has bought cheap; unless he lies and beats down his workmen.”

“Do you believe, then, that there are no honest men in commerce?”

“I am not willing to say that; but I am persuaded that there are but few of them; and more than that, that those honest men have not the qualities that my husband must have.”

“You are making matters very difficult for yourself. What if you do not find your ideal?”

“I shall die an old maid.”

“Perhaps that will be harder than you think. However, you have time to think of it. But remember, one day you will be alone; the crowd of suitors will end,—but you know the fable.”

“Oh, I shall revenge myself by meriting happiness; injustice cannot deprive me of it.”

“Ah, there you go in the clouds.”

The first of Manon’s suitors who really interested her was Pahin de la Blancherie, a bel esprit who frequented a salon where she was often seen. He had been attracted by the girl and had by a clever trick, which Madame Phlipon had seen fit to ignore, gained an entrance to the house. He interested Manon more than her usual callers. He had read the philosophers; he expressed noble views; he had been to America; he was writing a book. This was much better than the young man who plied a trade and repeated the gossip of the Pont Neuf, and when she learned from her father that he had asked her hand, but had been dismissed because of his lack of fortune, she told the loss rather coldly to Sophie.

“He seemed to me to have an honest heart, much love for literature and science, art and knowledge. In fact, if he had a secure position, was older, had a cooler head, a little more solidity, he would not have displeased me. Now he has gone and without doubt thinks as little of me as I do about him.”

This was nearly two years before Madame Phlipon’s death and Manon saw almost nothing of La Blancherie until some four months after her loss, when he came unexpectedly one evening to see her, pale and changed by a long illness. The sight of the young man agitated her violently. It recalled her mother, recalled, too, the fact that he alone of all her suitors had seemed worthy of her. Her agitation embarrassed him. With tears she told him her grief. He tried to console her and confided to her the proof-sheets of his forthcoming book.

Manon described the meeting to Sophie and added her appreciation of the book. “You know my Loisirs,[^[1]] do you not? Here are the same principles. It is my whole soul. He is not a Rousseau, doubtless, but he is never tiresome. It is a beautiful morality, agreeably presented, supported by facts and an infinite number of historic allusions and of quotations from many authors. I dare not judge the young man because we are too much alike, but I can say of him what I said to Greuze of his picture, ‘if I did not love virtue, he would give me a taste for it.’”

[1]. Manon Phlipon wrote before her marriage a series of philosophical and literary essays which she called Œuvres de loisir or Mes Loisirs. They are reflections on a great variety of subjects, generally following closely the books she read. Fragments from many of these essays are found in the letters to Sophie Cannet. It was Mademoiselle Phlipon’s habit to lend the manuscript of her productions to her intimate friends and Sophie, of course, was familiar with them all. The greatest part of the Loisirs were published in 1800 in the edition of Madame Roland’s works prepared by Champagneux.

Manon’s imagination was violently excited by this interview and she received La Blancherie’s visits with delight. Her father, however, was displeased and insisted that the young man cease coming to the house. This was all that was needed for Manon to persuade herself that she was in love. She went farther—she was convinced La Blancherie loved her, was suffering over their separation, and she shed tears of sympathy for him. She comforted herself with dreams of his noble efforts to better his situation and to win her in spite of her cruel father. She wrote Sophie long letters describing their mutual efforts to be worthy of each other, letters drawn entirely from her own fancy.

THE PONT NEUF IN 1895.
The house in which Madame Roland lived as a girl is the second of the two to the right of the picture.

“We are trying to make each other happy by making ourselves better, and in this sweet emulation virtue becomes stronger, hope remains. If he has an opportunity to do a good action, I am sure that he will do it more gladly when he thinks that it is the sweetest and the only homage that he can render me.” All this she assumed, but she thought she had sufficient reason for her opinion. “I judge him by my own heart, nothing else is so like him. We do not see each other, but we know we love each other without ever having avowed it. We count on each other. We hasten along the path of virtue and of sacrifice that we have chosen; there at least we shall be eternally together.”

She wrote him a fervent letter, which Sophie delivered, telling him that it was not her will that he was forbidden the house. She saw that he had a card for the Mass celebrating her mother’s death. She idealized him in a manner worthy of Julie herself, without knowing anything in particular of him, and without his ever having made her any declaration.

A sentimental young woman rarely conceives her lover as he is. Certainly the actual La Blancherie was a very different young man from the paragon of stern virtue Mademoiselle Phlipon pictured, and when the creation of her imagination was brought face to face, one day in the Luxembourg, with the flesh and blood original, the latter made a poor showing. To begin with, he had a feather in his cap, a common enough thing in that day—“Ah, you would not believe how this cursed plume has tormented me,” she wrote Sophie. “I have tried in every way to reconcile this frivolous ornament with that philosophy, with that taste for the simple, with that manner of thinking which made D. L. B. [it is thus that she designates La Blancherie in her letters] so dear to me.” But she did not succeed. No doubt her inability to forgive the feather was made greater by a bit of gossip repeated to her the same day by a friend who was walking with her, that La Blancherie had been forbidden the house of one of her friends because he had boasted that he was going to marry one of the daughters, and that he was commonly known among their friends as “the lover of the eleven thousand virgins.”

Her cure was rapid after this, and when, a few months later, La Blancherie succeeded in getting an interview with her and represented his misfortunes and his hopes, she listened calmly, and told him, at length, that after having distinguished him from the ordinary young man, and indeed placed him far higher, she had been obliged to replace him among the large class of average mortals. For some four hours they debated the situation, and at last La Blancherie withdrew.

Manon’s first love affair was over, and she sat down with rare complacency to describe the finale to Sophie. She had no self-reproach in the affair. As always, she was infallible.

La Blancherie was, no doubt, an excellent example of the eighteenth-century literary adventurer. His first book, a souvenir of college life and his travels in America, was an impossible account of youthful follies and their distressing results, and seems never to have aroused anybody’s interest save Manon’s, and that only during one year. His next venture was to announce himself as the General Agent for Scientific and Artistic Correspondence, and to open a salon in Paris, where he arranged expositions of pictures, scientific conferences, lectures and art soirées. In connection with his salon La Blancherie published from 1779 to 1787 the Nouvelles de la république des lettres et des arts, and a catalogue of French artists from Cousin to 1783. Both of these works, now extremely rare, are useful in detailed study of the French art of the eighteenth century, and were used by the De Goncourts in preparing their work on this subject.

In 1788 La Blancherie’s salon was closed, and he went to London. By chance he inhabited Newton’s old house. He was inspired to exalt the name of the scientist. His practical plan for accomplishing this was to demand that the name of Newton should be given alternately with that of George to the Princes of England, that all great scientific discoveries should be celebrated in hymns which should be sung at divine services, and that in public documents after the words the year of grace should be added and of Newton.

In short, La Blancherie was in his literary life vain and pretentious, without other aim than to make a sensation. In his social relations he was a perfect type of le petit maître, whose philosophy Marivaux sums up: “A Paris, ma chère enfant, les cœurs on ne se les donne pas, on se les prête” (In Paris, my dear, we never give our hearts, we only lend them). Manon Phlipon’s idealization and subsequent dismissal of La Blancherie is an excellent example of how a sentimental girl’s imagination will carry her to the brink of folly, and of the cold-blooded manner in which, if she is disillusioned, she will discuss what she has done when under the influence of her infatuation.

No doubt the decline of Manon’s interest in La Blancherie was due no little to the rise of her interest at this time in another type of man,—the middle-aged man of experience and culture whom necessity has forced to work in the world, but whom reflection and character have led to remain always aloof from it.

The first of these was a M. de Sainte-Lettre, a man sixty years of age, who, after thirteen years’ government service in Louisiana with the savages, had been given a place in Pondicherry. He was in Paris for a year, and having brought a letter of introduction to M. Phlipon, soon became a constant visitor of his daughter. His wealth of observation and experience was fully drawn upon by this curious young philosopher, and probably M. de Sainte-Lettre found a certain piquancy in relating his traveller’s tales to a fresh and beautiful young girl whose intelligence was only surpassed by her sentimentality, and whose frankness was as great as her self-complacency. At all events they passed some happy hours together. “I see him three or four times a week,” she wrote Sophie; “when he dines at the house, he remains from noon until nine o’clock. There is perfect freedom between us. This man, taciturn in society, is confiding and gay with me. We talk on all sorts of subjects. When I am not up, I question him, I listen, I reflect, I object. When we do not wish to talk, we keep silent without troubling ourselves, but that does not last long. Sometimes we read a fragment suggested by our conversation, something well known and classic, whose beauties we love to review. The last was a song of the poet Rousseau and some verses of Voltaire. They awakened a veritable enthusiasm,—we both wept and re-read the same thing ten times.”

To this odd pair of philosophers a third was added,—a M. Roland de la Platière, of whom we are to hear much more later on. Manon began at once to effervesce. “These two men spoil me,” she declared to Sophie; “I find in them the qualities that I consider most worthy my esteem.”

But Roland and de Sainte-Lettre both left Paris, the latter retiring to Pondicherry, where he died some six weeks after his arrival. Before going away, however, he had put Mademoiselle Phlipon into relation with an intimate friend of his, a M. de Sévelinges, of Soissons, a widower some fifty-two years of age, of small fortune but excellent family and wide culture. This acquaintance was kept up by letter, and in a few months M. de Sévelinges asked her hand. Now Mademoiselle Phlipon had but a small dot and that was fast disappearing through the dissipation of her father, who, since her mother’s death, had taken to amusing himself in expensive ways. M. de Sévelinges had children who did not like the idea of his marrying a young wife without fortune. It was to imperil their expected inheritance. Manon appreciated this and refused M. de Sévelinges. But he insisted and they hit upon a quixotic arrangement which Mademoiselle Phlipon describes thus to Sophie:

“His project is simply to secure a sister and a friend, under a perfectly proper title. I thank him for a plan that my reason justifies, that I find honorable for both, and that I feel myself capable of carrying out.... My sentiments, my situation, everything drives me to celibacy. In keeping it voluntarily while apparently living in an opposite state, I do not change the destiny which circumstances have forced upon me, and at least I contribute by a close relation to the happiness of an estimable man who is dear to me.... How chimerical this idea would be for three-fourths of my kind! It seems as if nobody but M. de Sévelinges and I could have conceived it, and that you are the only one to whom I could confide it. The realisation of this dream would be delightful it seems to me. I can imagine nothing more flattering and more agreeable to one’s delicacy and confidence than this perfect devotion to pure friendship. Can you conceive of a more delicate joy than that of sacrificing oneself entirely to the happiness of an appreciative man?”

The affair with M. de Sévelinges came to nothing, and as Manon gradually ceased to think of him she became more and more interested in the M. Roland already mentioned.

M. Roland de la Platière was a man about forty-two years of age when he first met Mademoiselle Phlipon, in 1776. He held the important position of Inspector-General of Commerce in Picardy, and lived in Amiens, the chief town of the province. In his specialty he was one of the best known men in France. His career had been one of energy and patience. Leaving his home in the Lyonnais when but a boy of eighteen, rather than to take orders or to go into business as his family proposed, he had spent two years studying manufacture and commerce in Lyons, and then had gone to Rouen, where, through the influence of a relative, he had passed ten years in familiarizing himself with the methods of the factories of Normandy, at that time one of the busiest manufacturing provinces in France. M. Roland’s work at Rouen had not been of a simple, unintelligent kind. He had studied seriously the whole subject of manufacturing in its relations to commerce, to government, to society, and had worked out a most positive set of opinions on what was necessary to be done in France in order to revive her industries. He had already begun to write, and his pamphlets had attracted the attention of the ablest men in his department of science.

In 1764 he had been sent to look after the manufacturing interests of Languedoc, then in a serious condition, and in 1776 the position of Inspector in Picardy, the third province of the country from a manufacturing point of view, was given to him. For a man without ambition, the duties of the office were simple. They required him to see that the multitude of vexatious rules which were attached then to the making of goods and articles of all kinds, were carried out; that the regulations governing masters and workmen were observed; that the formalities attending the establishment of new factories were not neglected; that everything of significance that happened in the factories in his province was reported; and that all suggestions for improvement which occurred to him were presented. Evidently an ordinary man, well protected, could fill the position of an inspector of manufactures and have an easy life.

But M. Roland did not understand his duties in this way. The value of the position in his eyes was that it permitted the regulation of disputes, allowed criticism, invited suggestions, encouraged study, and welcomed pamphlets. From the beginning of his connection with Picardy he had displayed an incredible activity in all of these directions. The various industrial interests of the province were clashing seriously at the moment, and the lawyers and councils were only making the disagreement greater. Roland dismissed all interference and became himself “the council, the lawyer, and the protector of the manufacturer.” He became familiar with every master workman of Picardy, with every industry, with every process, and in the reports sent to the Council of Commerce at Paris, he attacked, praised, suggested voluminously. At the same time he was studying seriously. Nothing was foreign to his profession as he understood it, and though already he had the reputation of being a savant he went every year to Paris to do original work in natural history, physics, chemistry, and the arts.

Roland had only been long enough in Picardy to organize his office well when he began to urge the Council to try to introduce into France some of the superior manufacturing processes of other countries. The idea seemed wise and he was invited to undertake a thorough study of foreign and domestic manufacturing methods. This commission led him into many countries. Before M. Roland met Mademoiselle Phlipon, in 1776, he had been through Flanders, Holland, Switzerland, England, Germany, and France in pursuit of information. He had studied lace-making at Brussels, ironware at Nuremberg, linen-making in Silesia, pottery in Saxony, velvet and embroidered ribbons on the Lower Rhine, paper-making at Liège, cotton weaving and printing in England.

His observations had been limited to no special step of the manufacturing. He looked after the variety of plant which produced a thread and studied the way it was raised. He knew how native ores were taken out in every part of Europe. The processes of bleaching, dyeing, and printing in all countries were familiar to him. He understood all sorts of machines and had improved many himself. His ideas on designing were excellent and had been enlarged by intelligent observation of the arts of many countries.

On all of his travels Roland had amassed samples of the stuffs he had seen, had taken notes of dimensions, of prices, of the time required for special processes, of the cost of materials, had gathered the pamphlets and volumes written by specialists, often had brought back samples of machines and utensils. All of this he had applied faithfully in Picardy, and before the time he comes into our story he had had the satisfaction of seeing, as a result of his efforts, the number of shops in his domain tripled, the utensils gradually improved, a great variety of new stuffs made, the old ones improved, and many new ideas introduced from other countries.

At the same time the full reports made of his investigations had won him honors; the Academy of Science in Paris, the Royal Society of Montpellier, had made him a correspondent; the academies of Rouen, Villefranche, and Dijon, an honorary member; different societies of Rome, an associate.

He had, too, something besides technical knowledge. He was quite up to the liberal thought of the day and had ranged himself with the large body of French philosophers who were working for greater freedom in commerce, in politics, in religion. In short, M. Roland de la Platière was a man of more than ordinary value, who had rendered large services to his country. But with all his value, and partly because of it, he was not an easy man to get along with. His hard work had undermined his health and left him morose and irritable. He was so thoroughly convinced of his own ability and usefulness that he could not suffer opposition even from his superiors, and he used often, in his reports, an arrogant tone which exasperated those who were accustomed to official etiquette. A large quantity of Roland’s business correspondence still exists, and throughout it all is evidence of his pettish, unbending superiority. In fact, some very serious controversies arose between him and his associates at different times, in which if Roland was usually right in what he urged, his way of putting it was offensive to the last degree.

Roland prided himself not only on his services, but on his character. He was independent, active, virtuous. He admired noble deeds and good lives. He cultivated virtue as he did science and he made himself a merit of being all this. Nothing is more offensive than self-complacent virtue. Be it never so genuine, the average man who makes no pretensions finds it ridiculous and is unmoved by it. Goodness must be unconscious to be attractive.

Above all, Roland prided himself on the perfect frankness of his character, and to prove it he refused to practise the amiable little flatteries and deceits which, under the name of politeness, keep people in society feeling comfortable and kindly. Shoe-buckles were a vain ornament, so he wore ribbons, though by doing it he offended the company into which he was invited. To tell a man he was “charmed” to see him when he was merely indifferent, was a lie, therefore he preserved a silence. He would not follow a custom he could not defend philosophically, nor repeat a formality which could not be interpreted literally. By the conventional, what is there to be done with such a character? They may respect his scientific worth, but they cannot countenance such contempt for the laws of life as they understand them.

Mademoiselle Phlipon, however, was not conventional. She admired frankness and Roland’s disregard of formalities seemed to her a proof of his simplicity and honesty. She was not offended by the man’s display of character. She herself was as self-conscious, as convinced of her own worth, and as fond as he of using it as an argument. As for his irritability and scientific arrogance, she had little chance to judge of it. He was so much wiser than she, that she accepted with gratitude and humility the information he gave.

It was in 1776 that Roland first came to visit Manon, to whom he had been presented by Sophie Cannet, with whose family he was allied in Amiens. The acquaintance did not go far; for in the fall of that year Roland started out on one of his long trips, this time to Switzerland, Italy, Sicily, and Malta. It was his plan to put his observations into letter form and on his return to publish them. He needed some one to whom he could address the letters, who would guard the copy faithfully in his absence, and would edit it intelligently if he should never return. Manon seemed to him a proper person, and so he requested her to permit his brother, a curé in Cluny College, in Paris, to bring the letters to her. She naturally was flattered, and the letters which came regularly were a great delight to her.

Now the sole object of Roland was evidently to have a safe depot for his manuscript, yet as the trip stretched out Manon became more and more interested. Might it not be that this grave philosopher had a more personal interest in her than she had thought? Might he not be the friend she sought? Her fancy was soon bubbling in true Rousseau style. The long silences of M. Roland and the formal letters he wrote were not sufficient to quiet it. An excuse for this premature ebullition was the fact that Roland seemed to be the only person in her little world upon whom for the moment she could exercise her imagination. De Sainte-Lettre was dead, M. de Sévelinges had withdrawn. True, there was a Genevese of some note, a M. Pittet, at that time in correspondence with Franklin, whom she often saw. M. Pittet wrote for the Journal des dames and talked over his articles beforehand with Mademoiselle Phlipon, even answering in them objections she had made. She was flattered, it is evident from her letters to Sophie, by their relation and only waited a sign to transfer her interest to this eminent Genevese, but the sign was never given.

Another reason for her exercising her imagination on Roland was the dulness of her life at the moment. Though Manon had a large number of good-natured and devoted relatives and friends who exerted themselves to please her, she went out but little save to visit her uncle the curé Bimont. The curé lived in the château at Vincennes. Manon was a real favorite with the bizarre and amusing colony of retired officers and their wives, discarded favorites of the Court, and nobles worn out in the service, to whom a home had been given there. Some of the persons she met at Vincennes are highly picturesque. Among others were a number of Americans from Santo Domingo on a visit to an officer. She quickly came to an understanding with them, and questioned them closely on the revolution in progress in the neighboring colony.

In Paris she went out rarely, but when she did go it was usually for a visit which, at this distance, is of piquant interest. An amusing attempt she made to see Rousseau is recounted in a letter to Sophie. Not that she was entirely original in this effort. It was the mode at the moment to practise all sorts of tricks to get a glimpse of the sulky philosopher, and Mademoiselle Phlipon, devoted disciple that she was, could not resist the temptation. A friend of hers had an errand to Rousseau, of which he spoke before her. He saw immediately that she would like to discharge it in order to see the man, and kindly turned it over to her. Manon wrote a letter into which she put many things besides the errand, and announced that she would go on such a day to receive the answer. The visit she describes:

“I entered a shoemaker’s alley, Rue Plâtrière. I mounted to the second story and knocked at the door. One could not enter a temple with more reverence than I this humble door. I was agitated, but I felt none of that timidity which I feel in the presence of petty society people whom at heart I esteem but little. I wavered between hope and fear.... Would it be possible, I thought, that I should say of him what he had said of savants: ‘I took them for angels; I passed the threshold of their doors with respect; I have seen them; it is the only thing of which they have disabused me.’

“Reasoning thus, I saw the door open; a woman of at least fifty years of age appeared. She wore a round cap, a simple clean house-gown, and a big apron. She had a severe air, a little hard even.

“‘Is it here that M. Rousseau lives, Madame?’

“‘Yes, Mademoiselle.’

“‘May I speak to him?’

“‘What do you want?’

“‘I have come for the answer to a letter I wrote him a few days ago.’

“‘He is not to be spoken to, Mademoiselle, but you may say to the person who had you write—for surely it is not you who wrote a letter like that—’

“‘Pardon me,’ I interrupted—

“‘The handwriting is a man’s.’

“‘Do you want to see me write?’ I said, laughing.

“She shook her head, adding, ‘All that I can say to you is that my husband has given up all these things absolutely. He has left all. He would not ask anything better than to be of service; but he is of an age to rest.’

“‘I know it, but I should have been flattered to have had this answer from his mouth. I would have profited eagerly by the opportunity to render homage to the man whom I esteem the highest of the world. Receive it, Madame.’

“She thanked me, keeping her hand on the lock, and I descended the stairs with the meagre satisfaction of knowing that he found my letter sufficiently well written not to believe it the work of a woman.”

Not all of her visits were so unsuccessful, as her description of one to Greuze shows:

“Last Thursday, Sophie, I recalled tenderly the pleasure that we had two years ago, at Greuze’s. I was there on the same errand. The subject of his picture is the Paternal Curse. I shall not attempt to give you a full description of it; that would be too long. I shall simply content myself with saying that, in spite of the number and the variety of the passions expressed by the artist with force and truthfulness, the work, as a whole, does not produce the touching impression which we both felt in considering the other. The reason of this difference seems to me to be in the nature of the subject. Greuze can be reproached for making his coloring a little too gray, and I should accuse him of doing this in all his pictures if I had not seen this same day a picture of quite another style, which he showed me with especial kindness. It is a little girl, naïve, fresh, charming, who has just broken her pitcher. She holds it in her arms near the fountain, where the accident has just happened; her eyes are not too open; her mouth is still half-agape. She is trying to see how the misfortune happened, and to decide if she was at fault. Nothing prettier and more piquant could be seen. No fault can be found with Greuze here except, perhaps, for not having made his little one sorrowful enough to prevent her going back to the fountain. I told him that and the pleasantry amused us.

“He did not criticise Rubens this year. I was better pleased with him personally. He told me complacently certain flattering things that the Emperor said to him.... I stayed three-quarters of an hour with him. I was there with Mignonne [her bonne] simply. There were not many people. I had him almost to myself.

“I wanted to add to the praises that I gave him:

On dit, Greuze, que ton pinceau

N’est pas celui de la vertu romaine;

Mais il peint la nature humaine:

C’est le plus sublime tableau.

I kept still, and that was the best thing I did.”

In the quiet life Manon was leading her habits of study and writing served her to good purpose, and the little room overlooking the Pont Neuf, where she had worked since a child, was still her favorite shrine. Almost every day she added something to the collection of reflections she had begun under the title of Mes loisirs, or prepared something for the letters to Sophie; for these letters to her friend, outside of the gossip and narrative portions, were anything but spontaneous. Her habit was to copy into them the long digests she had made of books she read and of her reflections on these books. Among the manuscript lent me by M. Marillier I found several evidences of the preparations she made of her letters.

In spite of friends, visits, books, and letters, however, Manon was sad at this period. Her father was leading an irregular life, which shocked and irritated her. No two persons could have been more poorly prepared for entertaining each other than M. Phlipon and his daughter. He was proud of her, but he had no sympathy with the sentiments which made her refuse the rich husband her accomplishments would have won her. He found no pleasure in talking with her of other than ordinary events. He recognized that she felt herself superior to him in many ways, and though he probably cared very little whether she was or not, he was annoyed that she felt so.

Manon, on her part, lacked a little in loyalty towards her father, as well as in tenderness. She considered him an inferior and always had. When he took to dissipation, after her mother’s death, in spite of the honest effort she made to keep his house pleasant and to be agreeable to him, her pride, as well as her affection, was hurt, and she sometimes took a censorious tone which could not fail to aggravate the case. There were often disagreeable scenes between them, after which M. Phlipon went about with averted eyes and gloomy brow.

Manon complained to her relatives of the condition of her home, and the private lectures M. Phlipon received from them only made him more sullen. Sometimes, to be sure, there were returns to good feeling and Manon felt hopeful, but soon an extravagant or petty act of her father brought back her worry. In her despair she was even tempted to give up her philosopher and marry one of the ordinary but honest and well-to-do young men her friends and relatives presented.

Manon was thus occupied and annoyed when M. Roland came back from Italy in the spring of 1778. As he was much in Paris, the relation between them soon became very friendly, and he was often at the Quai de l’Horloge. But we hear almost nothing of him in the letters to Sophie. The reason was simply that M. Roland had requested his new friend to say nothing to the Cannets about his visits. Probably he foresaw gossip in Amiens if it was known he saw much of Mademoiselle Phlipon. Then, too, Henriette, an older sister of Sophie, was interested in him and he feared an unpleasant complication in case she knew of his attentions. Manon carried out his wishes implicitly in spite of her habit of writing everything to her friend. She even practised some clever little shifts to make Sophie believe that she did not see M. Roland often and then only on business connected with his manuscript, or to ask him some questions about Italian, which she had begun to study.

The frankness on which she prided herself was completely set aside—a thing of which she would not have been capable if she had not been more anxious to please her new friend than she was to keep faith with the old. Probably, too, she was very well pleased to have an opportunity to give Roland this proof of her feeling for him.

In the winter of 1778–79 Roland told her that he loved her. Manon, “en héroine de la délicatesse,” as she puts it, felt that in the state of her fortune, which her father was threatening to finish soon, and with the danger there was of M. Phlipon bringing a scandal on the family, it was not right for her to marry. She told all this to Roland, who agreed with her, and they hit on a sort of a Platonic arrangement which went on very well for a time. They openly declared their affection to each other; they worked and studied together; they confessed to each other that the happiness of their lives lay in this mutual confidence and sympathy. But love is stronger than philosophy, and Roland was ardent. Manon became unhappy. Was her dream going to fade? Restless and uncertain, she wrote Roland, who had returned to Amiens, of her fears, and a correspondence began which soon put an end to their Platonic idyl, and landed them amid the irritating details which attend a French betrothal. As this correspondence has never been published, and as it throws much light on the sentimental side of Manon Phlipon’s life, it is quoted from rather fully in the following pages.

Roland had laughed at her first letter complaining of his fervor. In answer she wrote him a voluminous epistle in which she traced the birth and growth of her sentimental nature.

“You laugh at my sermon, now listen to my complaints. I am sad, discontented, ill. My heart is heavy, and burning tears fall without giving me relief ... I do not understand myself ... but let me tell you once for all what I am and wish always to be.

“It is almost twenty-five years since I received life from a mother whose gentleness, wisdom, and goodness would be an eternal reproach if they were not an inspiration. The death of this loved mother caused the deepest grief I have ever known. By nature I am sensitive (should I pity or congratulate myself?); a solitary education concentrated my affections, made them more fervid and profound. I felt happiness and sorrow before I could call them by name. It was on them that I first reflected. I was active and isolated.... I was meditating when usually a child is busy with toys.

“I have often told you how I was stirred by religious ideas, and how the restless and vague sentiments which had oppressed me were finally fixed on certain determined objects. Soon I awoke to the joy of friendship, and before one would have supposed that I knew I had a heart, it was overflowing. Young, ardent, happily situated, unconscious of the clash of interests which makes men wicked, love of duty became a passion with me and the mere name of virtue aroused my enthusiasm.

“Eager to know, I began to read history. It became more and more interesting to me. The story of a brave deed excited me almost to a delirium. How many times I wept because I had not been born a Spartan or a Roman! As my horizon enlarged, I began to think about my creed, and my faith was overthrown. Humanity was dear to me, and I could not endure to see it condemned without distinction and without pity. I threw over the authority which would force me to believe a cruel absurdity. The first step taken, the rest of the route was soon travelled, and I examined all with the scrupulous defiance which one gives to a doctrine false in an essential point. The philosophic works that I read at this time aided me, but did not determine me to come to a decision. Each system seemed to me to have its weakness and its strength. I held to some of my brilliant chimeras; I became sceptical by an effort, and I took for my creed beneficence in conduct and tolerance in opinion.

“These changes in my ideas had no influence on my morals. They are independent of all religious system because founded on the general interest which is the same everywhere. Harmony in the affections seem to me to constitute the individual goodness of a man; the justice of his relations with his kind, the wisdom of the social man. The multiplied relations of the civil life have also, without doubt, multiplied laws and duties, and those peculiar to each one should be the first subject of his study.

“The place which my sex should occupy in the order of nature and of society very soon fixed my curious attention. I will not say what I thought of the question which has been raised as to the pre-eminence of one sex over the other. It has never seemed to me worthy of the attention of a serious mind. We differ essentially, and the superiority which in some respects is yours does not alter the reciprocal dependence in happiness which can only be the common work of both.

“I appreciated the justice, the power, and the extent of the duties laid upon my sex. I trembled with joy on finding that I had the courage, the resolution, and the certainty of always fulfilling them.... I resolved to change my condition only for the sake of an object worthy of absolute devotion. In the number of those who solicited (my hand), one only of whom I have talked to you (M. de Sévelinges) merited my heart. For a long time I was silent, and it was only when I realized all the barriers between us that I asked him to leave me. I have had reason since to congratulate myself on this resolution, which was painful for me beyond expression.

“Many changes have come since, but I have steadily refused to marry except for love. I have lost my fortune and my pride has increased. I would not enter a family which did not appreciate me enough to be proud of the alliance or which would think it was honoring me in receiving me. I have felt in this way a long time, and have looked upon a single life as my lot. My duties, true, would be fewer and not so sweet, perhaps, but none the less severe and exacting. Friendship I have regarded as my compensation, and I have wished to taste it with all the abandon of confidence. But you are leading me too far, and it is against that that I would protect myself.

ROLAND DE LA PLATIÈRE.
After the painting by Hesse.

“I have seen in your strong, energetic, enlightened, practical soul, the stuff for a friend of first rank. I have been delighted to regard you as such, and to all the seriousness of friendship I wanted to add all the fervor of which a tender soul is capable. But you have awakened in my heart a feeling against which I believed myself armed. I have not concealed it. I showed it unreservedly and I expected you to give me the generous support which I needed. But far from sparing my weakness, you became each day rasher, and you have dared ask me the cause of my pensiveness, my silence, my pain. Sir, I may be the victim of my sentiments, but I will never be the plaything of any man.... I cannot make an amusement of love. For me it is a terrible passion which would submerge my whole being and which would influence all my life. Give me back friendship or fear—to force me to see you no more.

“O my friend, why disturb the beautiful relation between us? My heart is rich enough to repay you in tenderness for all the privations it imposes upon you.... Spare me the greatest good that I know, the only one which makes life tolerable to me,—a friend sincere and faithful. I have not enough of your philosophy or I have too much of another which does not resemble yours in this point only, to give myself up inconsiderately to a passion which for me would be transport and delirium.

“My friend, come back more moderate, more reserved, let us cherish zealously, joyfully, and confidently the tastes which can strengthen the sweet tie which unites us....”

This letter threw Roland into confusion. He had taken her at her word when she suggested an intimate friendship. He had taken her at her word when she told him her affection was becoming love. He had been, perhaps, too fervent, but how was one to regulate so delicate a situation? He wrote her a piteous and helpless sort of letter in which he declared he was unhappy. Manon replied in a way which did not help him particularly in his quandary:

“In the midst of the different objects which surround and oppress me, I see, I feel but you. I hear always, ‘I am unhappy.’ O God! how, why, since when, are you unhappy? Is it because I exist or because I love you? The destruction of the first of these causes is in my power and would cost me nothing. It would take away with it the other, over which I have no longer any control.”

Even after this Roland was so obtuse that he was uncertain of her feeling for him, but finally he asked her squarely if it could be that all this meant that she loved him. Very promptly she replied: “If I thought that question was unsettled for you to-day, I should fear it would always be.” Will she marry him then, oui ou non? He asked the question despairingly, in the tone of a man who expected a scene to follow, but could see nothing else for him to do honorably. In a letter of passionate abandon Manon promised to be his wife. Roland was the happiest of men.

“You are mine,” he wrote. “You have taken the oath. It is irrevocable. O my friend, my tender, faithful friend, I had need of that yes.”

Manon’s joy was unbounded and she told it in true eighteenth-century style. “I weep, I struggle to express myself, I stifle, I throw myself upon your bosom, there I remain, entirely thine.” Immediately they entered upon a correspondence, voluminous, extravagant, passionate. Manon explained to Roland the beginning and the development of her affection for him, and labored to harmonize two seemingly incongruous experiences,—her interest in Roland during the time he was in Italy and the marriage she had contemplated with M. de Sévelinges. The harmony seems incomplete to the modern reader, but probably Roland was not exacting since he was sure of his possession.

In every way she tried to please him, even keeping their betrothal a secret from Sophie—this at Roland’s request. They planned, confided, rejoiced, and made each other miserable in true lover-like style. For some time the worst of their misunderstandings were caused by delays in letters, but, unfortunately, there were to be annoyances, in the course of their love, more serious than those of the postman. There was M. Phlipon; there was Roland’s family; there were all the vexatious formalities which precede marriage in France. M. Phlipon was the most serious obstacle to their happiness. Since his wife’s death he had been constantly growing more dissipated and common. Roland regarded him with the cold and irritating disapproval of a man convinced of his own infallibility, and M. Phlipon, conscious of his own shortcomings, disliked Roland heartily. For some time Roland refused to ask M. Phlipon for his daughter, but he counselled her to insist upon having the remnant of her dowry turned over.

She began to talk to her father of this, and he, incensed at the suspicion this demand implied, became surly and defiant. He talked to the neighbors of his desire to live alone and accused Manon of ingratitude and coldness. She held to her rights, however, and succeeded finally in having her estate settled. She found at the end that she had an income of just five hundred and thirty francs a year.

The disagreement with her father made her unhappy. She wrote Roland letters full of complaints and sighs. She saw everything black. She declared that they were farther apart than ever, that her heart was breaking. After a few weeks of melancholy she came to an understanding with her father and wrote joyously again. This occurred several times until at last Roland grew seriously out of patience with her. He told her that it was her lack of firmness that was at the bottom of her father’s conduct; that she was “always irresolute, always uncertain, reasoned always by contraries.” His letters became brief, dry, impatient. Finally, however, he wrote M. Phlipon, asking for Manon.

The difficulty that Roland had foreseen with his prospective father-in-law was at once realized. The old gentleman, incensed that his daughter would not give him Roland’s letters to examine before he replied, answered in a way which came very near ending negotiations on the spot. Since his daughter had taken her property into her own hands and since she refused to let him see the correspondence which had passed between her and Roland, she could enjoy still further the privileges her majority gave her and marry without his consent.

Roland wrote to Manon, on receiving this curt response, that the soul of M. Phlipon horrified him; that he loved her as much as ever, but—“your father, my friend, your father,” and delicately hinted that it would be impossible for him to present such a man to his own family. This was in September. For two months they lived in a state of miserable uncertainty. Roland accused Manon of irresolution, of inconsistency, and inconsequence; she accused him of fearing the prejudices of society, of caring less for her than for his family’s good-will. With M. Phlipon Manon alternately quarrelled and made up. Wretched as the lovers were, their letters nearly always ended in protestations of affection and appeals for confidence.

The first of November Mademoiselle Phlipon brought matters to a crisis by leaving her father for good and retiring to the Convent of the Congregation. She wrote Sophie, who, of course, had known nothing of her affair with Roland, but to whom she had often written freely of her trouble with her father, that she had taken this resolution in order to save her family, if possible, from further disgrace.

In going into the convent she had broken with Roland. They were to remain friends, but dismiss all projects of marriage; but they continued to write heart-broken letters to each other. She told him, “I love you. I feel nothing but that. I repeat it as if it were something new. Your agonized letters inflame me. I devour them and they kill me. I cover them with kisses and with tears.”

Roland was quite as unhappy. He had taken Manon at her word again when she declared that their engagement was at an end, and that they would remain friends; but he could not support her unhappiness; he was too wretched himself. The worst of it was that he could not make out what she wanted: “You continually reproach me,” he wrote her in November, “of not understanding you. Is it my fault? Do you not go by contraries?”—“You complain always of what I say, and you always tell me to tell you all.... You protest friendship and confidence at the moment you give me proofs of the contrary. All your letters are a tissue of contradictions, of bitterness, of reproaches, of wrangling.”

This unhappy state continued until January, when Roland went to Paris and saw Manon. Her sadness and her tears overcame him, and again he begged her to marry him. This time the affair was happier, and in February Manon Phlipon became Madame Roland.

Twelve years later, in her Memoirs, Madame Roland gave an account of this courtship and marriage, which is a curious contrast to that one finds in the letters written at the time. If these letters show anything, it is that she was, or at least imagined herself, desperately in love; that after having outlined a Platonic relation she had broken it by telling Roland she loved him too well to endure the restrictions of mere friendship; that she had been extravagantly happy in her betrothal, and correspondingly miserable in her liberation; and that when the marriage was finally effected she was thoroughly satisfied.

But in her Memoirs she says of Roland’s first proposal: “I was not insensible to it because I esteemed him more than any one whom I had known up to that time,” but—“I counselled M. Roland not to think of me, as a stranger might have done. He insisted: I was touched and I consented that he speak to my father.” She gives the impression that as far as she was concerned her heart was not in the affair, that she merely was moved by Roland’s devotion, and that she saw in him an intelligent companion. Of his coming to her at the convent, she says that it was he alone who was inflamed by the interview, and she gives the impression that his renewed proposal awakened in her nothing but sober and wise reflections: “I pondered deeply what I ought to do. I did not conceal from myself that a man under forty-five would have hardly waited several months to make me change my mind, and I confess that I had no illusions.... If marriage was, as I thought it, a serious tie, an association where the woman is for the most part charged with the happiness of two persons, was it not better to exercise my faculties, my courage, in that honorable task, than in the isolation in which I lived?”

But at the time that Madame Roland wrote her Memoirs she was under the influence of a new and absorbing passion. The love, which twelve years before had so engulfed all other considerations and affections that she could for it break up her home, desert her father, take up a solitary and wretched existence, even contemplate suicide, had become an indifferent affair of which she could talk philosophically and at which she could smile disinterestedly.

III
SEEKING A TITLE

The first year of their marriage the Rolands spent in Paris. New regulations were being planned by the government for the national manufactures, and Roland had been summoned to aid in the work. It was an irritating task. His principles of free trade, and free competition, were sadly ignored, even after all the concessions obtainable from the government had been granted, and Madame Roland saw for the first time the irascibility and rigidness of her husband when his opinions were disregarded.

They lived in a hôtel garni, and she gave all her time to him, preparing his meals even, for he was never well, and spending hours in his study aiding him in his work. Roland’s literary labors seem to have awed her a little at first, and she took up copying and proof-reading with amusing humility and solemnity. It was not an inviting task for a young and imaginative mind accustomed to passing leisure hours with the best thinkers of the world. Roland was writing on manufacturing arts and getting his letters from Italy ready for the printer. As always, he was overcrowded with work. He was particular and tenacious, careless about notes, and wrote an execrable hand,—about the most aggravating type possible to work with. But his wife accommodated herself to him with a tact, a submission, a gentleness which were perfect. He found her judgment so true, her devotion so complete, her notions of style so much better than his own, that he grew to depend upon her entirely. It was the object she had in view. She wanted to make herself indispensable to him.

Thus the first year of her marriage was largely an apprenticeship as a secretary and proof-reader. In order to be better prepared for her duties, she determined to follow the lectures in natural history and botany at the Jardin des Plantes. This study, begun for practical reasons, was in reality a delight and a recreation; for she had already a decided taste for science, and was even something of an observer. The lectures led to her forming one of the most satisfactory relations of her life, that with Bosc, a member of the Academy of Sciences, and well known in Paris for his original work. Bosc took an active interest in Madame Roland and her husband, and was of great use to them in their studies, as well as a most congenial comrade. In fact, they saw almost no one but him at this time. Absorbed in her husband and her new duties, Madame Roland relished no one who was not in some way essential to that relation. Even Sophie was neglected; only six letters to her during the year 1780, after the marriage, appearing in the published collection, and evidently from their contents they are about all she wrote.

The year was broken towards its close by a two months’ visit to the Beaujolais, where Roland’s family lived. That she was heartily welcomed by her new relatives and charmed by her visit, her reports to Sophie show. “We are giving ourselves up like school children to the delights of a country life,” she wrote from Le Clos, “seasoned by all that harmony, intimacy, sweet ties, pleasant confidences, and frank friendship can give. I have found brothers to whom I can give all the affection that the name inspires, and I share joyfully bonds and relations which were unknown to me.” When she returned to Paris she declared that she was delighted with her trip, that the separation from her new family was painful in the extreme, and that the two months with them were passed in the greatest confidence and closest intimacy.

From Paris they went to Amiens, which was to be their home for some time. The old city, with its glorious cathedral, its remnants of middle age life, and its industrial atmosphere, interested her but little. In fact, she never had an opportunity to get very near to it. The first year of her stay she was confined by the birth of her only child, Eudora. Good disciple of Rousseau that she was, she concluded to nurse her baby herself, in defiance of French custom, and naturally saw little of Amiens society.

When she was able to go out, Roland’s work had become so heavy that she had little time for anything but copying and proof-reading. He was preparing a serious part of the famous Encyclopédie méthodique, the continuation of the work of Diderot and D’Alembert. Of this great undertaking four volumes—numbers 117–120—are devoted to manufactures, arts, and trades; the first three of these are by Roland, and appeared in 1784, 1785, and 1790.

The plan Roland followed in this work is an excellent example of the methodic mind of the man, bent on analyzing the earth and its contents, and putting into its proper place there each simplest operation, each smallest article. He devised an ingenious diagram in which he classified according to the historic, economic, or administrative side everything he treated—one is obliged to master this system before he can find the subject he wants to know about. A botanical analysis is play beside it. Roland’s contributions to the Encyclopédie méthodique are valuable no doubt, but one needs a guide-book to find his way through them.

Roland’s attempt to run over everything which directly or indirectly concerned his subject, and the enormous number of notes he made, encumbered his work wofully. He could not resist the temptation to use everything he had at hand, and as a result his articles are frequently diffuse and badly arranged, though always full of instruction, even if it is sometimes a little puerile. Neither could he resist the temptation to condemn and to argue.

But though burdened with details sometimes irrelevant, not properly and sufficiently digested, too personal, indulging in much criticism of his authorities, not to say considerable carping, the volumes on manufactures and arts are a colossal piece of work, most valuable in their day, but which never had their full credit because of the stormy times in which they appeared, and, perhaps, not a little too, because of the chaotic series of encyclopedias to which they belonged; for certainly there could with difficulty be a greater mass of information published in a more inaccessible shape than that in the Encyclopédie méthodique.

It was in arranging notes, copying, polishing, and reading proofs of articles on soaps and oils, dyes and weaving, skins and tanning, that Madame Roland spent most of her time from 1780 to 1784. A part of the work which was more happy was the botanizing they did. During their four years at Amiens, she made, in fact, a very respectable herbarium of Picardy.

Of society she saw less than one would suppose, since the Cannets were here, and since her husband occupied so prominent a place. She did, of course, see Sophie and Henriette, but not often. Roland did not wish her to be with them much, and she, obedient to his wishes, complied. They had one intimate friend—a Dr. Lanthenas that Roland had met in Italy, and who, since their marriage, had become a constant and welcome visitor in their home. Then there were their acquaintances in the town—but for them she cared but little.

Indeed, she was thoroughly submerged in domestic life. She seems to have had no thought, no desire, no happiness outside of her husband and her child. A great number of her letters written at this period to Roland, who was frequently away from home, have been preserved; one searches them in vain for any interest in affairs outside her house. She wrote pages of her bonnes, of the difficulty of finding this or that in the market, of the price of groceries, of the repairs to be made, above all, of her own ills and of those of Eudora, and she counselled Roland as to his plasters and potions. Her absorption in her family went so far that public questions rather bored her than otherwise, as this remark in a letter in 1781 shows:

“M. de Vin [one of their friends at Amiens] came to see me yesterday expressly to tell me of our victory in America over Cornwallis. He saluted me with this news on entering, and I was forced to carry on a long political conversation—I cannot conceive the interest that a private person, such as he is, has in these affairs of kings who are not fighting for us.”

Her calm domestic life was broken in 1784. Roland was dissatisfied at Amiens. His health was miserable. His salary was small. He was out of patience with the men and circumstances which surrounded him. His idea was to seek a title of nobility. Such a concession would give him the rights of the privileged, freedom from taxes of all sorts, a certain income, a position in society. He would be free to pursue his studies. There were grounds on which to base his claim. His family was one of the most ancient of Beaujolais. Then there were his services,—over thirty years of hard work, long tedious travels, solely for the good of the country.

It was decided, in the spring of 1784, that Madame Roland undertake the delicate and intricate task of presenting the matter at Versailles. In March she went to Paris, armed with the mémoire which set forth Roland’s claim. It is a collection of curious enough documents; showing how one must go back to very ancient times to find the origin of the Rolands in Beaujolais, how the name is “lost in the night of time, a tradition placing it between the eleventh and twelfth centuries.”

The memoir which presents this family tree of Roland is further strengthened by the names of the foremost of Beaujolais, testifying that it is “sincère et véritable”; and by a row of big black seals. Of actual connected genealogy the memoir goes no further than 1574. Roland, however, took a lofty tone, and declared his services were a more solid and real reason for granting his request. Evidently they had thoroughly studied the situation, had gathered all the facts which would support their case, and had enlisted all their relations of influence, so that when Madame Roland began her diplomatic career she was furnished with all the arms which reflection on a desired object give a woman of imagination, eloquence, and beauty.

The daily letters which they exchanged in the period she was in Paris, give a fresh and charming picture of favor-seeking in the eighteenth century. They wrote to each other with frankness and good humor of everything—rebuffs or advancement. They evidently had concluded to leave nothing unturned to secure the reward which they were convinced they deserved.

Madame Roland established herself, with her bonne, at the Hôtel de Lyon, Rue Saint Jacques, then the Boulevard Saint Michel of the Left Bank. Her brother-in-law, a prior in the Benedictine Order of the Cluny, lived near by and helped her settle; brought her what she needed from his own apartment; passed his evenings with her; did her errands, and helped her generally. She seems not to have seen her father at all.

In order to secure the grant of nobility, a favorable recommendation to the King from the Royal Counsel of Commerce, of which body the conseiller ordinaire was M. de Calonne, Contrôleur-général des finances, was necessary. To obtain this all possible recommendations must be brought to M. de Calonne’s attention; particularly was it necessary to cultivate the directors of commerce, with whom the Controller-general consulted freely, and on whom he depended for advice. They had arranged, before she left Amiens, a list of the people upon whom they could rely directly or indirectly for letters of introduction and for other favors.

No sooner was she settled than she began the work of seeing them. At the very commencement she encountered prejudice and irritation against Roland. One of her friends, who evidently had been investigating affairs ahead, assured her that Roland was viewed everywhere with dissatisfaction, and that the common opinion was, though he did a great deal of work, he did not know how to keep his place. One of the directors told her: “Take care how you present him to us as a superior man. It is his pretension, but we are far from judging him as such.” “Pedantry, insupportable vanity, eagerness for glory, pretensions of all sorts, obstinacy, perpetual contradiction, bad writer, bad politician, determination to regulate everything, incapable of subordination,” were among the criticisms upon her husband, to which Madame Roland had to listen.

All of these complaints she faced squarely, writing them to Roland with a frankness which is half-amusing, half-suspicious. One wonders if she is not taking advantage of the situation to tell her husband some wholesome truths about himself. She did not hesitate, in repeating these criticisms, to add frequent counsels, which support the suspicion and show how thoroughly she realized the danger of Roland’s fault-finding irritation. “Above all, as I told you before my departure, do not get angry in your letters, and let me see them before they are sent. You must not irritate them any more. Your pride is well enough known, show them your good nature now.”

The criticisms on Roland’s character did not disconcert her. She pressed ahead, talked, reasoned, urged, obtained promises; in short, showed herself an admirable intrigante. She was afraid of no one. “As for my rôle, I know it so well that I could defend it before the King without being embarrassed by his crown,” she wrote Roland. After she had secured what she wanted from each person, she did her best to keep them friendly; for she had decided to ask for a pension if she did not secure the letters. She succeeded admirably, even M. de Tolozan, one of the directors whom she called her “bear,” telling her one day: “You have lost nothing by this trip, Madame. We all do honor to your honesty and your intelligence, and I am very glad to have made your acquaintance.”

She seems not to have despised rather questionable methods even: “Did I not let a certain person who was asking about my family, and who was astonished that I should take so much trouble for a daughter, believe that I expected an heir in a few months? That makes the business more touching. They look at me walk and I laugh in my sleeve. I do not go so far, though, as to tell a deliberate lie, but, like a good disciple of Escobar, I give the impression without talking.”

Whenever she was successful she was frankly delighted, and she began to think herself capable of great things in diplomacy: “If we were at Paris with just fifteen thousand livres income, and I should devote myself to business—I almost said intrigue—I should have no trouble in doing many things.” Her friends at Paris had as good opinion of her ability as she herself did. Bosc wrote Roland of her surprising finesse in managing difficult relations, in interesting people, and of turning even objections to her own credit. “In fact, she is astonishing,” he says.

But it was not easy after all. There were delays which wore out her spirit. And she experienced to the full the effects of the French vice of doing nothing on time. The continual trips back and forth to Versailles exasperated her. Then the business of each counsel was so great that even after she had gotten to M. de Calonne she was obliged to wait her turn. The money all this cost was, of course, a constant annoyance. They were poor and could not afford the carriage hire, the finery, and the presents that favor-seeking in the simplest way cost. The business of solicitation in itself was much less rasping for her than one would suspect. In fact, she seemed to enjoy it. Her successes set her writing bubbling letters to Roland. She rarely showed irritation, almost never impatience of the greatness of others, nor any sign of feeling her position as a solicitor. It was only the failure to see her cause advance rapidly that disheartened her.

The uncertainty lasted until the middle of May, when it became evident all had been done that could be, and that the title was impossible. She decided to retire to Amiens and to return later to seek a pension. Suddenly she got a new bee in her bonnet. When making her farewell calls, she heard a bit of news which persuaded her that changes were to be made in the department of commerce by which Roland might be sent to Lyons as inspector. It was a larger and more interesting city than Amiens. It was near his home. The salary would be larger, the work easier. There was no time to consult Roland. If done at all, it must be done on the spot. She went to work and almost immediately secured her request. The directors with whom she had been laboring so long to secure the impossible, were glad enough to grant her what appeared to them reasonable. At the same time that she received word of the appointment, a letter came from Roland saying that the change to Lyons, of which she had written him as soon as it came into her head, would suit him if it would her.

Roland took this leadership and decision on the part of Madame in most excellent spirit. The change was the best that they could do, he wrote; as for the work, that would go on “in slippers.” He even showed no resentment at a curtain lecture she gave him adroitly by the way of a third person, telling him of his duties at Lyons. He cast out of the account her fears for his health and peace of mind. It was she who occupied him—if the change pleased her he had no other care.

Indeed, from the beginning of the campaign, Roland’s letters to his wife were full of consideration for her position, of anxiety for her health, of longing for her return. Every ache or fatigue she wrote of caused him the greatest anxiety. Throughout the correspondence, the expression of confidence, of mutual help, of tenderness, was perfect. Their interest extended to every detail of the other’s life, Madame Roland insisting upon her husband’s wearing a certain plaster for some of his ailments, and he counselling her not to come home without a new hat.

They gave each other all the news of Paris and Amiens, and there are many pages of her letters, especially, which are interesting for those studying the life of that day: thus, during her stay in Paris, two famous pieces—the Danaïdes of Gluck and the Figaro of Beaumarchais—were given for the first time, and her letters on them are long and vivid. More curious than opera or theatre is the place mesmerism takes in the letters; the Rolands had taken up the new fad, presumably to see what it would do for Roland, and were members of the Magnetic Club of Amiens; Madame Roland repeated to her husband everything she heard on the subject.

Wire-pulling, favor-seeking, letter-writing, theatre-going and Mesmer-studying were over at last, and the end of May she started home, and glad to go. The separation had been severe for them both. There is scarcely a letter in the two collections not marked by tenderness; many of them are passionate in their warmth and longing. It is evident that at this time Madame Roland had no life apart from her husband.

Madame Roland reached Amiens early in June. The first day of July she and her husband left for a trip in England which they had long planned. She counted much on it; for many years she had been an enthusiastic admirer of the English Constitution and its effects on the nation. Roland had been there before and was somewhat known, and naturally she saw what he thought best to show her.

The journey lasted three weeks and she wrote full notes of what she saw for her daughter. These notes were published in Champagneux’s edition of her works. They are in no respect remarkable for originality of observation, or for wit. But they are always intelligent and practical, a result, no doubt, of Roland’s companionship. They touch a wide range of subjects and they are entertaining as a look at what an eighteenth-century traveller saw. It is easy to see that Madame Roland, as most travellers do, sought to confirm her preconceived ideas. England, for her, was the country of freedom, and she saw that which was in harmony with her ideas.

IV
COUNTRY LIFE

It was in September of 1784 that the Rolands arrived in Beaujolais. Although Roland’s new position kept him the greater part of the time at Lyons, they settled for the winter some twenty-eight kilometres north, in Villefranche-sur-Saône. It was mainly for economical reasons that they did not go to Lyons. Roland’s mother had a home at Villefranche and they could live with her through the winter. The summers and autumns they meant to spend at Le Clos de la Platière, the family estate about eleven miles from Villefranche, which had recently come under their control. With such an arrangement it was necessary to take only a small apartment at Lyons. As M. Roland could come often to Villefranche and Le Clos, Madame planned to spend only about two months of the year at Lyons.

Villefranche, their first home in the Beaujolais, is to-day a manufacturing town of perhaps twelve thousand inhabitants. There is a wearisome commonplace about its rows of flat-faced houses, a dusty, stupid, factory atmosphere about it as a whole. It seems to be utterly destitute of those genre pictures which give the flavor to so many French towns, utterly lacking in those picturesque corners which make their charm.

Save Notre Dame des Marais and the hospital, it has no buildings of note, but Notre Dame des Marais makes up for a multitude of architectural deficiencies. It is an irregular fifteenth-century Gothic church whose unbalanced façade is enriched with an absolute riot of exquisite carvings. Every ogive is latticed with trefoils and flowing tracery, every niche is peopled, every line breaks into tendrils, everywhere is the thistle in honor of the house of Bourbon, everywhere are saints and angels, devils and monsters. A hundred years ago Villefranche must have been more interesting than it is now. Certainly it was more picturesque; for its towers and crenellated walls were still standing, and at either extremity of its chief thoroughfare were massive gates, doubled with iron. Its picturesqueness interfered somewhat with its comfort and sanitary condition in Madame Roland’s eyes. She detested particularly its flat roofs, its little streets, with their surface sewers. In its organization it was much more complicated than to-day, and it possessed at least one institution, since disappeared, which placed it among the leading French towns of the period, that is, an academy, one of the oldest in the realm.

The household which the Rolands entered at Villefranche was made up of Madame de la Platière, Roland’s mother, and an older brother, a priest of the town. The latter is a pleasant example of the eighteenth-century curé, half man of pleasure, half priest, spirited and versatile in conversation, something of a diplomat, faithful to his dogmas and duties, bon enfant in morals, but in questions of politics and religion, domineering and prejudiced.

The chanoine Roland occupied an excellent position at Villefranche. He was one of the three dignitaries of Notre Dame des Marais; he was the spiritual adviser of the sisters at the hospital, and he had been for over thirty years an Academician. With these offices, his family, and his agreeableness, he was of course received by all the families of the town and country worth knowing.

Madame Roland was on very good terms with the chanoine in all the early years in Beaujolais, caring for him when sick, making visits with him, talking with him over the fire winter evenings when Roland was away from home. No doubt he found her a welcome addition in a house which up to that time had been under the more or less tyrannical rule of his mother, a woman “of the age of the century,” and “terrible in her temper.” Madame Roland found him a welcome relief from the care of her mother-in-law, whom she seems to have regarded rather as an object for patience and philosophy than for affection. The old lady was trying. She had the child’s vice of gormandizing, and after each petite débauche, as her daughter-in-law called it, was an invalid for a few days. Then she invited recklessly, a habit that made much work and expense, and was particularly obnoxious to Madame Roland because the company passed all their time at cards. To see the house filled every evening with people who had not intellect and resources to entertain each other intelligently was exasperating.

All these annoyances Madame Roland repeated to her husband in the long letters she sent him almost every day. More questionable than her habit of writing these petty vexations to him was her retailing of them to Bosc, with whom she was in constant correspondence.

In spite of the drawbacks there was much brightness in the new home, much of that close intimacy which is the charm of the French interior. Madame Roland realized this and frequently painted pleasant pictures to Bosc as contrasts to the disagreeable ones she gave him.

Although Madame Roland was greeted cordially at Villefranche by the leading people, as became the wife and sister-in-law of two prominent men, she never came any nearer to what was really good and enjoyable in the place than she had in Amiens. The town displeased her, as it naturally would, since she insisted on comparing it with Paris. She amused herself in studying the soul of the place, and she found it frequently small, false, and distorted. Now an analysis of one’s surroundings is certainly amusing and instructive, but if one is to be a good neighbor and agreeable member of the society he dissects, he must keep his observations to himself; must place humanity and courtesy higher than analysis. Madame Roland did not do this; she showed often what she thought and felt, and became unpopular in return. Roland, too, made himself disliked in the Academy of Villefranche by his domineering ways.

The Abbé Guillon de Montléon, of Lyons, who was a fellow academician of Roland’s, relates that whenever he went to the town to attend Academy meetings, Madame Roland and her husband tried to secure him as their guest, and he suggests that this attention was due simply to the fact that they were on bad terms with their townsmen and were obliged to find their company in outsiders. It seems that a satire on a number of the leading people of the town had been sent from Paris, and that it was believed to be the work of M. and Madame Roland. Whether true or not, those who had been caricatured revenged themselves by cutting them and by ordering sent to them each day from Paris satirical epigrams and songs.

The Abbé Guillon also tells that Roland left the Academy of Villefranche in a pet because that body refused in 1788 to adopt the subject he had suggested for a prize contest—“Would it not serve the public good to establish courts to judge the dead.”

However, all that the Abbé tells of Roland must be regarded with suspicion. He wrote after the Revolution, with his heart full of bitter contempt and hatred of everybody who had been connected with the movement which led up to the Reign of Terror in Lyons, and, at that moment, was not capable of impersonal judgments.

Madame Roland was not much better pleased with Lyons than with Villefranche. She did not love the place too well. At Lyons she mocked at everything, she said. She was well situated there, however. Their apartment was in a fine house in a pleasant quarter, and Madame had the equipage of a friend to use when she would. She saw many celebrities who passed through the town; was invited constantly; made visits; in fact, had an admirable social position, as became the wife of one of the most active citizens of the town, and Roland certainly was that. His reputation for solid acquirements had preceded him. On arriving in Lyons he was made an honorary member of the Academy, and afterwards an active member, and from that time he constantly was at the front in the work of the institution.

In the archives of the Academy of Lyons there are still preserved a large number of manuscripts by Roland, some of these in the hand of his wife. They discuss a variety of subjects: the choice of themes for the public séances of the provincial academies; the influence of literature in the country and the capital (this paper was given a place in the published annals); the outlook for a universal language—to be French of course. One peculiar paper, to come from so dry a pen as his, is on the “Means of Understanding a Woman.” Plutarch comes in for a eulogy, and there is an exhortation on the wisdom of knowing our fellows. Most of the manuscripts are purely scientific, and treat the subjects in which M. Roland was particularly at home,—the preparation of hides and leather, of oils and soaps; the processes of drying. Others consider means for quickening the decaying manufacturing interests of Lyons. Altogether, it is a very honorable collection. The annals of the Academy contain also a full printed report of a contest over cotton velvet which had embroiled Roland in the North. Both sides of the discussion, which Roland’s efforts to spread the knowledge of the new industry awakened, are given.

I have examined all of these manuscripts, as well as Roland’s printed articles in the Encyclopédie, and elsewhere, for a trace of the idea the Abbé Guillon de Montléon credits to him, in his Memoirs,—that dead bodies, instead of being buried, be utilized for the good of the community, the flesh being used for oil and the bones for phosphoric acid. This idea was advanced, it is said, to settle a dispute over the cemeteries, which had long agitated Lyons; but as there is no reference to it in any of Roland’s manuscripts or printed articles, it is probable that it was never pushed to public attention, as the Abbé would have his reader believe. The story is told too naturally not to have at least a shadow of truth, and such a proposition is so like the utilitarian Roland that, if anybody in France suggested such a thing, it probably was he.

If their life in Villefranche and Lyons was not satisfactory, that at their country home was entirely so; indeed, Madame Roland seems never to have been so happy, so natural, so charming, as she was at Le Clos, where she spent much time each year.

Le Clos is easily reached from Villefranche. One goes to-day, as one hundred years ago, in carriage, or, as Madame Roland usually did, on horseback, by one of the hard, smooth roads which have long formed a network over the Lyonnais. The road runs from the town along a narrow valley of luxuriant pasture land, strewn in May, the month in which I visited the place, with purple mints and pure yellow fleur-de-lys. On either hand are low, steep hillsides, all under cultivation, but so divided under the French system of inheritance that they look like patch-work quilts or Roman ribbons. A kilometre from town one begins to wind and climb. Hill after hill, mountain after mountain, is passed; the country opens broad and generous. There is a peculiar impression of warmth and strength produced by the prevailing color of the soil and building-material. This part of the Lyonnais is clad in a dark stone, and walls and churches, roads and fields, are all in varying tones of terra-cotta; here is the fresh, bright reddish-yellow of a plot recently cultivated and not yet planted; there the dull and worn-out brown of an ancient wall; but, though the shades are varied, the tone is never lost. The green of the foliage and fields is peculiarly dark and positive in contrast with this coloring of the stone. The whole makes a landscape of originality and a certain rude strength. It looks like a country where men worked and where there was little to tempt them to idleness. When one comes to Beaujolais, after the soft gray tone of the Côte-d’Or and the Seine-et-Marne, or the dull slate which prevails in Bourbonnais, the contrast is harsh and a little saddening.

It is a thickly settled country, and one passes many hamlets, all in terra-cotta, with high walls and old churches topped by Romanesque towers. At the centre of these hamlets are ancient crucifixes, some of them of grotesque carvings. On the distant hillsides are châteaux.

After climbing many hills, one passes along the side of a mountain ridge. At the end of this ridge one sees a yellow town, of some fifty houses, a château with its tower razed to the roof, and a small chapel. It is the village of Theizé.

While his eyes are still on the village, he falls into a hamlet, at the end of whose one street is a high wall and gate. It is Le Clos. Shut in by high yellow walls,—one might almost say fortifications, they are so long and so high,—the quaint country house, dating from the first of the last century, is a tranquil, sheltered spot which gives one the feeling of complete seclusion from the world. On one side of the house lies the court, with its broad grass-plot, its low wall, its long rows of stone farm, and vintage buildings; on the other, lies an English garden, planted thickly with maples, sycamores, and hemlocks, with lilac clumps and shrubs, with roses and vines. Enclosing this garden on two sides is a stone terrace, forming a beautiful promenade. From here all the panorama of the Beaujolais hills, mountains, and valleys opens, with their vineyards, yellow houses, forests, and here and there a tower—the bellevue of some rich nineteenth-century proprietor or the relic of some ancient château. Far beyond the farthest, faintest mountain outline rises, on clear nights, the opal crest of Mont Blanc.

To the left of garden and house are vines and fruit trees; to the right, a long lane and vegetable garden; and everywhere beyond are vines, vines, vines, to the very brook in Beauvallon at the foot of the hillside.

In Madame Roland’s time the country about Le Clos was much more heavily wooded than now. There was less of vine raising and more of grain, but many features are unchanged. These trees are of her time no doubt, these vines, these walls, and she doubtlessly gathered blossoms, as one does to-day, from the long hedge of roses panachés, the wonderful striped roses of Provence now almost unknown in France, though still rioting the full length of one of the walls of Le Clos,—fanciful, sweet things which by their infinite variety set one, in spite of himself, at the endless search of finding two alike, as in the play of his childhood with the striped grass of his grandmother’s yard.

LE CLOS DE LA PLATIÈRE.

From the terrace she saw, as we do, in the valley at the right, the château of Brossette, the friend of Boileau; and on the hillside in front, the curious little chapel of Saint Hippolyte; and she must often have heard the story the country folk still tell of the place, how centuries ago the Saracens ravaged all the country as far as this valley, but here were driven back. The Franks, in honor of their victory, raised a chapel to Saint Hippolyte and many miracles were performed there, and the people came to the shrine in pilgrimage from long distances. Now, certain neighbors, wishing to possess this miracle-working statue of Saint Hippolyte, had it carried off, but at the moment that the person carrying the saint attempted to cross the brook in Beauvallon, the holy image jumped from his shoulder and ran at full speed back to the chapel. The pious thieves, seeing the preference of the saint, like good Christians, gave up their project.

The mountains of Beaujolais changed from faintest violet to darkest purple for her as for us, and the crest of Mont Pilate, or the Cat Mountain as the Lyonnais peasants call Mont Blanc, startled and thrilled her by its mysterious opalescent beauty when now and then it appeared on the horizon suddenly, like some celestial thing.

The house, a white, square structure, with pavilions at the corners of the court side, and red tiled roof, is unchanged without, though rearranged somewhat within. Nevertheless, there are many things to recall the Rolands and their immediate friends; the ancient well; the brass water-fountain; now and then a book, with Roland de la Platière on the fly-leaf, in the well-filled cases which one finds in every room; a terra-cotta bust of Roland himself (by Chinard, dated 1777); portraits of the family, including one called Madame Roland, which nobody supposes to be she; photographs of the beautiful La Tour pastels of M. and Madame Phlipon, now in the museum of Lyons; an oil of the chanoine; a few fine old arms in the collection which decorates the billiard room; a table whose top is made of squares of variegated marbles brought from Italy by Roland.

There is now and then a sign about the house of what it suffered in the Revolution; for Le Clos was pillaged then and stripped of its contents at the same time that the château above had its towers razed. On several of the heavy doors is still clinging the red wax of the official seal placed by the revolutionary officers. The chanoine’s crucifix is there, a graceful silver affair darkly oxidized from long burying, he having hid it in the garden. In the raids on the property nearly all the furniture was taken, and for many years the peasants were said to account for new pieces of furniture in their neighbors’ houses by saying, “Oh, it came from Le Clos.” Some time after the Revolution, M. Champagneux, who married Eudora, the daughter of Madame Roland, received a notice from the curé at Theizé that a sum of “conscience money” had been given him for the family.

Life must have been then at Le Clos—a hundred years ago—much what it is now,—a busy, peaceful round of usefulness and kindliness, of generous hospitality, of unaffected intelligence. Madame Roland entered it with sentiments kindled by Rousseau. Her imagination had never been more actively at work than it had over the prospect of this country retirement. She had shed tears over the prospect of their future Clarens, its bucolic pleasures, the delicious meditations, the sweet effusions of friendship, the healthy duties. And Le Clos realized many of her dreams; largely because she took hold of the practical life of the house and farm with good-will and intelligence. She was no woman to allow work to master her,—she managed it. Nor was she weak enough to fret under it or to regard it as “beneath her.” She respected this most dignified and useful of woman’s employments and gave it intelligence and good-will. This acceptance of and cheerfulness over common duties is one of the really strong things about Madame Roland.