Part 19

I did not have the consolation of a fixed political formula to pull me out of my muddle. It is very easy to put everything in its place when you have that and are armed with its faith and its phrases. But here was I with a heroine on my hands whose formula and methods and motives I was beginning to question as I was questioning the formula, the methods and motives of France of the moment.

What kept me at my task, prevented me from throwing up Madame Roland and going on a blind research for the nature and roots of revolution, was the brilliant and friendly intellectual circle into which my quest of Madame Roland had led me.

Among the names I had been advised to include in my series on the writing women of Paris was that of A. Mary F. Robinson, an Englishwoman of the pre-Raphaelite school, a poetess of delicacy and distinction who had married one of the eminent scholars of France, James Darmesteter, a Hebrew and a cripple. One had only to look into his face to know that here was a great soul. And what interested me so was that this something in his face, his remarkable head, wiped out all sense of incongruity between the mating of this slender and exquisite woman with this man of alien race and crippled body. I never felt for a moment an incongruity.

When Monsieur Darmesteter learned I was after Madame Roland he was immediately helpful. “You must know Léon Marillier of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. He is a great-great-grandson of Madame Roland. He has papers which have never been given to the public. I will write you a letter.” Which he did, a letter which brought me an invitation to dinner.

This dinner was the gate to a whole new social and intellectual world. Here was a French academic household of the best sort, simple, hard-working, gay. Léon Marillier was an excellent and respected scholar. Jeanne, his wife, a sister of the Breton poet, Anatole Le Braz, was not only a skillful household manager but, like the wives of many French scholars, her husband’s amanuensis, copy and proof reader, and general adviser. She had particular charm among Parisians, for she was a Bretonne who loved her pays and kept its distinguishing marks without being provincial. Here I found, too, eager to go over the papers which Léon Marillier spread out after dinner for my inspection, one who was to prove a most helpful and delightful friend, Charles Borgeaud the eminent Swiss scholar, a friend of my friends the Vincents now back at Johns Hopkins.

But this was not the end of it. There was a closer connection, Léon Marillier’s mother, the great-granddaughter of Madame Roland, and they quickly passed me on to her.

Here again I was invited to dinner, and here I discovered a circle different from anything I had ever known, a household of brilliant men presided over by Madame Marillier, a most gracious woman, of fine intelligence, freed and mellowed by a tragic life, as I was to learn. More than any woman I have ever known, Madame Marillier came to stand in my mind and heart as the personification of that quality which the French hold so high—bonté.

The leader of the group of men was a Sorbonne professor of history—Charles Seignobos. He was a learned man who carried his learning not as an accomplishment but as a social utility. Seignobos was a not too dogmatic socialist and materialist, a good pianist, a marvelous talker, a lovable and pungent personality. Around him there gathered every Wednesday evening for dinner at Madame Marillier’s table a number of young men—all serious students, liberal minds, hard workers. After dinner six or eight more habitués of the house were sure to drop in for coffee and for talk.

Among these regular habitués was Lucien Herr, who at that moment was seeking to convert to socialism the two men who in the years since have done most to make the doctrine an impregnable factor in political life in France—Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum, the recent premier of France. Herr at that time was the librarian at the Ecole Normale, as well as managing editor of the Revue de Paris. In both positions he met many young would-be scholars and writers. When one of them seemed to him to have the makings of a liberal thinker he worked over him as a missionary works to save a soul. He was so working in the early nineties over Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum.

Occasionally Lucien Herr brought to the Seignobos circle one of those whom he was seeking to convert. If Jaurès and Blum were ever among them they made no particular impression on me, much as I dislike to think so. They were simply a couple of Lucien’s young men.

Although Herr believed the socialistic state he sought would and could come by a peaceful evolution, the thing I remember best about him was an exhibit of indifference to bloodshed which shocked me to the core. The night that Vaillant threw the bomb in the Chamber of Deputies the group was dining with Madame Marillier; Lucien was late, not an unusual happening. We were halfway through when he came in, pale, exalted. We all turned in our seats as he standing told us how he had been in the Chamber when the bomb was thrown, of the explosion in mid-air, of the wounded all about him. He had no word of the suffering, only of the political bearings of the deed.

“But the wounded, Lucien,” broke in Seignobos, who could not endure the thought of pain.

“Cela ne me fait rien,” said Lucien.

His opposition to bloodshed was intellectual, not emotional like that of Seignobos.

On the face of it nobody could have been less at home in such a group than I, a tongue-tied alien, all eyes and ears, contributing nothing but my presence; yet it came about before many weeks that “Mademoiselle Mees,” as Seignobos called me, had a place at the weekly dinners. Undoubtedly the friendship that sprang up quickly between Madame Marillier and me, as well as the fact that I asked nothing but to listen, explained it. I could afford to listen; I had never heard such talk. There was nothing on earth that was foreign or forbidden. Opinions were free as the air, but they had to fight for their lives. There was a complete absence of pretense, and sophistry was thrown as soon as it came to its feet. That it was a friendly circle, its acceptance of me was proof enough.

Friendliness began at the door when I arrived Wednesday evening. It was always Seignobos who came rushing to meet me, seized my hand, helped me off with my wraps, danced about me asking eager boyish questions about what I had been doing since I was there last. The talk begun, I was forgotten unless by chance he suddenly recalled me. Then he would jump up, run over, demand, “What do you think of that?” Half the time I was thinking less about what they were saying than about their exciting personalities. They seemed to be vividly related to life, but much of their talk was based on something that was not life—abstract literature, learning, speculation. I realized this when they talked of America. Seignobos saw it only as he had read about it in books. It seemed to him not to be producing that intellectual élite on which he felt the salvation of society depended—a group capable of doing the thinking and planning for a world of lesser men. It was the lesser men who were coming to the top in America. Confronted with superiority from America, he refused to believe it native. One summer I presented to him a friend of mine, a woman of exquisite mind and manner. “She is not American?” he said. “They do not produce that kind in America. Where was she born—where was she educated?”

“In Kansas,” I said. He bounded out of his chair like a ball. “It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be. Kansas is only a half-settled state. One has only to look to see this is a rare type that you have brought here. She never came out of Kansas.”

I never saw him more outraged than one day when pressure was brought to bear on him to accept a position in the University of Chicago at a handsome salary. Jumping up, he raced around the room. “Chicago! What can a man of intelligence find there? You can’t build an intellectual center on money and organization. It is a growth. Five hundred years from now Chicago may be fit for scholars, but not now.”

He mistrusted the intelligence of the United States, but less than that of England. Americans were not stupid: Englishmen were. He wanted none of them in his circle. I met this prejudice head-on when I asked permission to introduce to him a brilliant young English friend, H. Wickham Steed.

I had never known a young man who was surer of what he wanted to do in life or who was preparing for it in a more thorough and logical fashion than Steed. His ambition was to become a foreign correspondent of the London Times. He knew that for this it was necessary for him to be familiar with the languages, the history, the men, the politics of the leading countries of the Continent. He began by taking some two years in Germany. Now he was acquainting himself with the French language, literature, politics, leaders. I found Steed especially interesting on a subject of which I knew little, although we were having reverberations in the United States. This was the philosophy of Karl Marx. Steed was familiar with its then status in Germany, knew its leaders—Liebknecht and Engels. He envied me my relations with the group at Madame Marillier’s, envied me my Wednesday night dinner, as he might very well.

“Could you not present me?” he asked.

I knew how jealous they were of their circle, and knew, too, they thought the English a stupid bigoted race and wanted none of it. But Steed was certainly not stupid. Besides, he was young, and I had a feeling that nothing would be better for him than contact with these enlightened friends of mine. And so with some hesitation I told Seignobos about him and asked him if I might bring him.

“Never! The English are stupid.”

“You are wrong about Steed,” I argued. “You ought to be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

After some arguments I was allowed to present my protégé. As I expected, they pounced on him mercilessly. It was fine to see the way he held his own and a relief when, after an hour or more of baiting, Seignobos came to my corner and in a tone of surprise and wonder said, “Mademoiselle Mees, your Englishman is intelligent.”

When they came to that conclusion they took Steed in, and from that time on he was welcome. All through the years of his brilliant career as a correspondent and later through the war as foreign editor of the London Times, the association with Seignobos continued. In his recollections, “Through Thirty Years,” Steed tells of his introduction to the circle—“a sort of entrance examination” which convinced his examiners he was less stupid than he ought to have been.

This then was the group in which my interest in Madame Roland had landed me. As the weeks went on, the intimacy grew greater. Whatever occurred to them that might help me in my work, they suggested. It was through their introduction that I was given every opportunity in the manuscript room of the National Library to work over the large collection of Roland manuscripts which had just been catalogued. Indeed, I was the first person to work on them in the Library.

Delightful as well as important to my enterprise was the invitation Madame gave me in the spring of 1893 to go with her for a fortnight to Le Clos, a country estate which had been in the Roland family for at least a hundred years before the Revolution. After the death of Monsieur and Madame Roland in 1793 Le Clos had passed to their daughter. It now belonged to Madame Marillier, who managed it, giving special care to its chief yield, grapes—made into wine on the place.