Part 20

Le Clos lay in the Beaujolais, some thirty miles north of the city of Lyons and close to a hamlet called Theizé. Here Madame Roland had spent some four years while her husband served as inspector of manufactures at Lyons. The château was little changed, so Madame Marillier told me. The activities were what they had been a hundred years ago. It was a rare chance to see my heroine in a different role, busy with other duties than those of student, tuft-hunter, political diplomat, Providence to a Nation. I needed to see her in a more natural and helpful environment, for I was beginning to mistrust her.

The journey to Le Clos with Madame Marillier, taken in May, was an adventure for both of us. How much she had jeopardized her position in her own family by traveling with a foreigner and a Protestant, I did not realize until the day we spent sightseeing at Dijon. She left me for an hour to visit an important and ancient aunt. “I should not dare take you with me,” she said, “my aunt would cast me out if she knew I was traveling with a heretic.”

To reach Le Clos we left the railroad at Villefranche and climbed in a horse-cart for an hour and more, steadily up hills, across valleys, a high broad country, striped by many colored ribbonlike farms, dotted by stout buildings of dull yellow, the stone of the country, sprinkled with splendid trees, vineyards and orchards. Theizé, the hamlet we sought, lay high. We drove between its walls, turned into a lane, and stopped before a big gate in a yellow wall. Behind it lay Le Clos, a little white château of Louis XIV’s time with corner towers and red-tiled roofs, a court on one side, a garden on the other. From this garden one looked out over a magnificent panorama of hills, mountains, valleys, stretching to the Swiss Alps in the east. On clear evenings the snowcaps were visible and now and then the round crown of Mount Blanc glowed on the sky line like an immense opal.

Within the château there had been little outward change from Madame Roland’s time. There was the same great dark kitchen, with its stone floor, its huge fireplace (although now a stove helped out), the same shining copper vessels on the walls. There was the same brick floor in the billiard room with its ancient table, its guns and caps of successive generations of soldiers on the walls. The brightest place within the house was the salon, done in yellow plush, family portraits on the walls, a piano, books.

I had an apartment to myself looking out on the garden and beyond to the mountains: a bedroom, toilet and workroom, severe as a nun’s cell with its uncovered floor, its unadorned walls, but containing every necessary comfort and a wealth of books—five hundred or more in my workroom, including several magnificent sets. Among them, Voltaire complete in seventy volumes. They nearly all bore eighteenth century dates, and some of them the name of Roland himself. Indeed, the home was rich in books of value. In Madame Marillier’s library there were two thousand or more; but these were only “what was left.” From the collection she had inherited she had given Léon Marillier complete early sets of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot; she had made a collection of scientific books for Louis Lapique, one of the members of her Paris household, and another of historical books for Charles Seignobos, and still there were all these hundreds, many of which I had the right to believe Madame Roland herself had handled. We ransacked them for marginal notes and hunted through the drawers of old desks and bureaus for papers, finding not a few small bits which were grist for my mill.

Books were about all the original possessions of Le Clos that the Revolutionists of the seventeen-nineties had not made away with. The château itself had not suffered seriously, though there were still some slight scars; but, books aside, it had been completely stripped of furnishings. Even today, so Madame Marillier told me, it was not unusual when inquiry was made about the origin of some interesting old piece in a Beaujolais farmhouse to be told, “Oh, that came from Le Clos a hundred years ago.”

The Revolution stripped Le Clos of its possessions and all but ended the family. But it did not succeed in convincing all the Beaujolais of its beneficence. There was not a little outspoken antirevolutionary feeling still abroad. The Marseillaise was never played in Theizé, I was told. The curé and the municipal council would not permit it, nor would they allow the 14th of July to be celebrated. While I was at Le Clos there was a sharp dispute in a neighboring hamlet on the playing of the “Marseillaise.” The bandmaster refused to lead when it was asked. It was put up to the band who voted yes. Thereupon the master laid down his baton and went off in a huff. Madame Roland’s Revolution was not ended.

But I did not think much of such dark matters at Le Clos. They did not belong to the years I had come there to relive. Those were only gay, happy, useful years. I knew from her letters before me she could and did fill the role of a local Providence, adjusting her activities and reforms to what her constituency understood and was willing to accept. She filled her time as I saw my friend Madame Marillier filling hers, busy from morning until night with the affairs of the estate, visiting the people, prescribing remedies for man and beast, vegetables and vines, arranging a marriage for this pair, making an invalid more comfortable, taking care of some peasant’s wayward son, climbing up the steep hillside to early mass to set a good example, discharging naturally and intelligently that responsibility to the family, the estate, the dependent countryside, which the Frenchwoman seems to accept as her contribution to the state. It makes her something steady, wise, superior, a strong factor in the economic, social, and religious stability of France.

I had never seen anything which seemed to me more useful than what Madame Marillier was doing, and I had opportunity to judge, for everywhere she went she took me with her. Her invariable card of introduction to these natural-born skeptics of the value of all persons not born and raised in France was, “Mademoiselle comes from the same country as your vines.” That was enough for them. Their vines had been devastated by repeated visitations of the phylloxera, and it was not until the introduction of American roots that the vineyards had recovered. They were looking well now. I was welcome at once; they treated me as if I were the benefactor, yet I doubt if any of them knew where America was. Most of them with whom I talked placed it somewhere in Africa. Africa they did know, as a name at least, because many of their sons went there for military service. One of the most surprising things to me among the French, high and low, was their utter indifference to the geography of the rest of the world. Why should they bother about the rest of the world? There was only one land about which they should know: that was France, and that they should know to the last corner. Even many educated people I met did not distinguish North from South America. In Madame Darmesteter’s drawing room I met cultivated people who believed that all Americans carried weapons in their pockets, and that Indians walked the streets of Chicago. When I protested that it was against the law to carry a revolver, and that the only Indians in Chicago were those that were imported as they imported the Dahomans, they smiled incredulously.

Many of them, I concluded, got their notions of what America was like from the exhibits in a certain public hall on the Grand Boulevards. Here you paid a sou or two to look through stereoscopes at amusing and sometimes very improper pictures. Here the walls were decorated with illustrated newspapers from different countries, and among them were always copies of the Police Gazette. As a matter of fact it was in this hall of the Grand Boulevard of Paris that I saw the first copy of the Police Gazette that I had seen since those days back in Rouseville when my friend and I carefully studied the underworld in the sheets that we could slip away from the bunkhouse of my father’s workmen.

The visit to Le Clos with its grist of impressions, the conviction that I had seen Madame Roland herself, in her happiest as well as her most useful days, completed the study of source material for her life on which I had been working as I found time through the twenty months I had been in Paris. It rounded out the woman she was, softened the asperity which I was beginning to feel for her; also it strengthened my suspicion that while a woman frequently was a success as the Providence of a countryside she did no better than a man when she attempted to fill that function for a nation.

Now I was ready to write my book. Of course while I was doing this I must keep the wolf from the door, and it was not so easy in the year 1893 for a stray journalist in Paris to get out of the distracted American market orders or pay for orders. The depression of the nineties, now in its third year with five years more to go, was working havoc everywhere. It was hard to get your money even if your debtors consented you had earned it. I was depending at the moment largely upon the new magazine, McClure’s. It had started in the summer of 1893, an undertaking which only the young and innocent and the hopelessly optimistic would ever have dared. It has always been a marvel to me that Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips were able to hold on through that dreadful year; but they did, and with a resourcefulness, even gaiety, that nobody but those who saw it can appreciate.

I knew perfectly well that if the magazine lived I should get all the money I earned, but in the summer of 1893 they did not have it. It came to a serious pass with me, a point where I did not have a sou or anybody to whom I could confide my predicament. Not for the world would I have told my devoted Madame Marillier that there was no money in my purse; not for the world would I have confided it to Madame A; and, as for the Americans on the scene, I was bent on impressing them with the fact I was really getting on. At all events it must not go back to Titusville or Meadville, Pennsylvania, that this questionable venture of mine had brought me so low.

And so one warm summer day I took my sealskin coat, which really was a very good one quite out of keeping with the rest of my wardrobe—by this time close to scandalous—I took the coat and marched over town to the Mont de Piété. They were polite to me; but I was a foreigner, that coat might be stolen, probably was. What credentials did I have, whom could I give as reference? There was nobody in the town that I was willing to have know what I was doing. But did I have documents to prove my identity?

Yes, I said, I had; and I would bring them. So I left my coat and raced back to the Left Bank for my credentials. And what were they? What did I have? There were letters from my publishers; there was my checkbook—exhausted but nevertheless a checkbook. Without thinking it would be of any particular use I took my Allegheny College diploma. The inspector passed lightly over the letters of editors, the stubs in my checkbook, but the diploma impressed him; and so it was on my Allegheny College diploma I made the loan which helped me over the bad months of 1893 while I was waiting for a check from a land in the grip of one of the most serious money famines that it had ever known.

Although there might be anxious moments over money I was freer to work on my book than I had ever been. And work I did, as hard as I could, all that terrifically hot summer. My friend Madame Marillier had gone to Brittany. She begged me to come along; but I had used up all my vacation money in my trip to Le Clos—a trip I had extended to Switzerland and to a chain of French towns where there were beautiful things I wanted to see, to Bourg, Mâcon, Cluny, Autun. There was nothing that I wanted to do more except finish up and go home.

But the finishing up was not so easy. I had undertaken the study of this woman in order to clear up my mind about the quality of service that women could give and had given in public life, particularly in times of stress. I had hoped to come out with some definite conclusions, to be able to say: “The woman at this point will be a steady, intuitive, dependable force. She will never lend herself to purely emotional or political approaches to great social problems; she knows too much of human beings. Her business has always been handling human beings. Building families has been her job in society. You can depend upon her to tell you whom to trust, whom to follow, whom to discard. These intuitions of hers about people are born of centuries of intimate first-hand dealing with human beings from babyhood on—they are among the world’s greatest values. And she will be no party to violence. She knows that solutions are only worked out by patient cooperation, and that cooperation must be kindly. She knows the danger of violence in the group as she knows the danger of selfishness. She has been the world’s greatest sufferer from these things, and she has suffered them in order that she might protect that thing which is her business in the world, the bearing and the rearing of children. She has a great inarticulate wisdom born of her experience in the world. That is the thing women will give.”

That was what I had hoped to find Madame Roland giving; and I had found a politician with a Providence complex. I had also found what I had been trying to shove aside, as women do, new proof of that eternal and necessary natural law that the woman backs up her man. Madame Roland had been Royalist, Republican, Revolutionist, according to the man she loved. She had served her man with unyielding conviction, would not temper or cooperate, intolerant, inflexible.

But what woman in America seeking the vote as a sure cure for injustice and corruption would listen to such a message? That, of course, was no affair of mine. My affair was clearing my own mind. So far I had only succeeded in adding to its confusion, even in destroying faiths I had held. There was the ancient faith that you could depend upon the woman to oppose violence. This woman had been one of the steadiest influences to violence, willing, even eager, to use this terrible revolutionary force, so bewildering and terrifying to me, to accomplish her ends, childishly believing herself and her friends strong enough to control it when they needed it no longer.

The heaviest blow to my self-confidence so far was my loss of faith in revolution as a divine weapon. Not since I discovered the world not to have been made in six days of twenty-four hours each, had I been so intellectually and spiritually upset. I had held a revolution as a noble and sacred instrument, destroying evil and leaving men free to be wise and good and just. Now it seemed to me not something that men used, but something that used men for its own mysterious end and left behind the same relative proportion of good and evil as it started with.

Never did I so realize my ignorance of life and men and society as in the summer of 1894, when I packed up the manuscript of my life of Madame Roland to take it back to America for its final revision in the peace of my home.

Of course, I told myself, I would go through with it. I would put down what I had found as nearly as I could, even if I had not got what I came for. And then came the question, Can I get what I came for? Is it to be found—the real answer to my question about woman in society, the point or position where she can best serve it? Can I find an answer to this other question that has so disturbed me—the nature of revolution? Apparently, I told myself, as I packed my bag finally to go back to America, you have only begun; but at least you have a new starting point. Cheer up, make a new plan. And I was making a new plan. I had been making one for some time. It was laid down economically, professionally, and socially with as much precision as the plan with which I had come to Paris in 1891. It was a plan for my return to Paris.

I would go home, get my book into shape, try to convince the Scribners that it was worth their publishing. I would get a good long visit with my family, the only thing I felt now to be worth while in life. I wanted to be sure they were there, that the house was there, that my father’s chair stood by the living-room center table under the drop gas reading light, that the family Sunday dinner was what it had always been. I wanted to hear my father ask the blessing at the table, to sit with my sister and mother afternoons out on the shady side of the lawn. I wanted all the home flowers I could gather—and it was queer what a big place flowers took in my dreams of home. My mother was one of those women for whom, they say, “anything will grow.” And she had had flowers, summer and winter. One of the deprivations of not having money in Paris had been that I could not buy flowers. I had to content myself with lounging around the flower markets on the Square of Notre Dame. I lingered there almost as much as I did over the bookstalls along the Seine. But at home I could gather all I wanted.

I would come back to France on different terms. My friendly publishers would give me work. I had schemes for books and articles which I felt sure would interest the Scribners, that history of women, for instance. Then there was this lively, friendly, aggressive, delightful McClure’s. There were plenty of things I could write for them.

I would take an apartment in the Latin Quarter up high where I could look over the roofs, see the sky. I would have a salon like Madame Marillier’s. She would find me a bonne à tout faire, and I could have people in to dinner—Madame Marillier, Seignobos, and perhaps Lucien Herr and Louis Lapique and Charles Borgeaud would come. The summer would bring over my precious American friends—the Vincents, Emerys, Hazens, and my sister must join me. Life would be full and satisfying while I cleared up my mind on women and revolution and continued my search for God in the great cathedrals.

It was with this baggage and a terrible thirst for a long drink of family life that in June, 1894, I said “Au revoir” to my friends. I felt so sure it was Au revoir.

The first two months after I reached America I spent at home convincing myself that my family in spite of the trials it had been suffering was unchanged in its ways, its loyalties, and its philosophy. If life was not as easy materially for my father and mother as their long years of labor and self-denial gave them the right to hope, I found that they were enjoying that most precious experience, the evidence of the continuity of their lives. My brother and his fine wife with their children, two girls and a boy, lived only a few doors away, and the grandchildren were as much in one home as in the other. They gave, I found, a continual fresh zest to the household and its doings. My father again had the legitimate excuse for going to the circus which our growing up had taken from him: “The children want to go.” My mother had as strong a justification for family picnics and birthday celebrations on which she tired herself out: “The children enjoy them so.”

For me those children were a challenging experience. Three years had made the youngsters keen observers, and I found them appraising me in the fashion of natural unspoiled children. Launched on one of the long narrative monologues to which I am addicted with intimates I would suddenly be checked by the cool impersonal stare of nieces or nephew. They did not know they were doing it, but I knew they were taking my measure. They were not only an unending interest and joy to me but a salutary correction, as they have continued to be to this day.