Part 47

She was, nevertheless, the farthest in the world from becoming a literary dragon. All this did not impair the freshness of girlhood. She was meek and pure. Passages in her autobiography, which I can not repeat, yet which ought to be read, establish this. She was throughout entirely domestic. She did the marketing, cooked the food; nursed her mother; kept a sharp eye on the apprentices; nearly fell in love, for when the young painter, Taborel, who was twenty, and blushed like a girl, visited her father's workshop, she always had a crayon or something else to seek there, but at the sight of him ran away trembling, without saying a word.

It was not difficult for her to be both scholar and housewife. Writing in after years, of domestic cares, she says: "I never could comprehend how the attention of a woman who possesses method and activity can be engrossed by them.... Nothing is wanting but a proper distribution of employments, and a small share of vigilance.... People who know how to employ themselves always find leisure moments, while those who do nothing are in want of time for any thing.... I think that a wife should keep the linen and clothes in order, or cause them to be so kept; nurse her children; give directions concerning the cookery, or superintend it herself, but without saying a word about it, and with such command of her temper, and such management of her time, as may leave her the means of talking of other matters, and of pleasing no less by her good humor than by the graces natural to her sex.... It is nearly the same in the government of states as of families. Those famous housewives who are always expatiating on their labors are sure either to leave much in arrears, or to render themselves tiresome to every one around them; and, in like manner, those men in power so talkative and so full of business, only make a mighty bustle about the difficulties they are in because too awkward or ignorant to remove them."

An acquaintance which one of her uncles, who was an ecclesiastic, had with an upper servant of the royal household, enabled her to spend some days at the palace of Versailles. She was lodged with the servants, and enjoyed the servant's privilege of seeing every thing and sparing nothing. Royalty was never put in the focus of eyes so critical. Her comments upon this visit are very brief. She expresses her detestation of what she saw, saying, "It gives me the feeling of injustice, and obliges me every moment to contemplate absurdity."

The studies and experiences which have been described bring us to her fifteenth year. She was then a beautiful woman. In her memoirs she declines to state how she looked when a child, saying that she knows a better time for such a sketch. In describing herself at fifteen, she says: "I was five feet four inches tall; my leg was shapely; my hips high and prominent; my chest broad and nobly decorated; my shoulders flat; ... my face had nothing striking in it except a great deal of color, and much softness and expression; my mouth is a little too wide--you may see prettier every day--but you will see none with a smile more tender and engaging; my eyes are not very large; the color of the iris is hazel; my hair is dark brown; my nose gave me some uneasiness; I thought it a little too flat at the end.... It is only since my beauty has faded that I have known what it has been in its bloom. I was then unconscious of its value, which was probably augmented by my ignorance."

That she understated her personal charms, the concurrent admiration of contemporary men and women fully attests. Her physical beauty was marvelous, and when great men were subjected to its influence, to the imperial functions of her intellect, and to the persuasions of an organization exceedingly spiritual and magnetic, it is no wonder that her influence, domestic woman, housewife, as she always was, became so effectual over them.

Let me here warn my hearers not to forestall this woman in their judgments. She was not a manlike female. No better wife ever guided her husband anonymously by her intuitions, or assisted him by her learning. In the farm house and in the palace she was as wifely and retiring as any of the excellent women who have been the wives of American statesmen. Every one knew her abilities and her stupendous acquirements, and she felt them herself, but, notwithstanding, she never would consent to write a line for publication and avow it as her own, and never did, until that time when her husband was an outlaw, when her child was torn from her, when she herself stood in the shadow of the guillotine, and writhed under the foulest written and spoken calumnies that can torture outraged womanhood into eloquence. She then wrote, in twenty-six days, her immortal Appeal to Posterity, and those stirring letters and papers incident to her defense, from which some extracts have been here presented. She was mistress of a faultless style. Her command over the resources of her language was despotic. She could give to French prose an Italian rhythmus. She had wit and imagination--a reasoning imagination. She was erudite. Probably no woman ever lived better entitled to a high position in literature. But she never claimed it. She holds it now only as a collateral result of her defense in the struggle in which her life was the stake, and in which she lost. She says: "Never, however, did I feel the smallest temptation to become an author. I perceived at a very early period that a woman who acquires this title loses far more than she gains. She forfeits the affections of the male sex, and provokes the criticisms of her own. If her works be bad, she is ridiculed, and not without reason; if good, her right to them is disputed; or if envy be forced to acknowledge the best part to be her own, her character, her morals, her conduct, and her talents are scrutinized in such a manner that the reputation of her genius is fully counterbalanced by the publicity given to her defects. Besides, my happiness was my chief concern, and I never saw the public intermeddle with that of any one without marring it.... During twelve years of my life I shared in my husband's labors as I participated in his repasts, because one was as natural to me as the other. If any part of his works happened to be quoted in which particular graces of style were discovered, or if a flattering reception was given to any of the academic trifles, which he took a pleasure in transmitting to the learned societies, of which he was a member, I partook of his satisfaction without reminding him that it was my own composition.... If during his administration an occasion occurred for the expression of great and striking truths, I poured forth my whole soul upon the paper, and it was but natural that its effusions should be preferable to the laborious teemings of a secretary's brain. I loved my country. I was an enthusiast in the cause of liberty. I was unacquainted with any interest or any passions that could enter into competition with that enthusiasm; my language, consequently, could not but be pure and pathetic, as it was that of the heart and of truth.... Why should not a woman act as secretary to her husband without depriving him of any portion of his merit? It is well known that ministers can not do every thing themselves; and, surely, if the wives of those of the old governments, or even of the new, had been capable of making draughts of letters, of official dispatches, or of proclamations, their time would have been better employed than in intriguing first for one paramour and then for another." "An old coxcomb, enamored of himself, and vain of displaying the slender stock of science he has been so long in acquiring, might be in the habit of seeing me ten years together without suspecting that I could do more than cast up a bill or cut out a shirt."

Suitors, she writes, came numerously from her fifteenth year. She marches them off en masse in her memoirs. As is the custom in France, the first overture was made to her father, and usually by letter. Her music teacher was her first devotee. He was followed by her dancing master, who, as a propitiatory preparation had a wen cut out of his cheek; then came a wealthy butcher; then a man of rank; then a dissolute physician, from marrying whom she narrowly escaped; then a jeweler, and many others. The merits of these gentlemen--particularly those of the energetic butcher---were warmly commended by their female friends, who, in France, are brokers in this business on a very extensive scale. It is a unique proof of her ascendancy over every person near her that the letters which her father received, requesting his permission to address her, were submitted by him to her to draft the answer he was to send. So she placed herself loco parentis, and wrote the most paternal letters of refusal; all of which her father dutifully copied and sent, with many a pang when she let riches and rank pass by her. The suitors were dismissed, one and all, and she resumed her books and studies.

Her mother died in 1775. She became the mistress of the house. Her father formed disreputable connections. Late in that year her future husband, Roland de la Platiere, presented himself, with a letter from a friend of her girlhood. He was forty years old; he was a student; his form was awkward and his manners were stiff; his morals were irreproachable, his disposition was exacting, but his ability was great. He was capable of instructing even her on many subjects, and they became well acquainted by the elective sympathy of scholarship. She became the critic and depositary of his manuscripts. Finally, one day, after asking leave, in her father's presence the worthy man actually kissed her, on his departure for Italy. Her father, sinking lower and lower, squandered her little fortune of about three thousand dollars, wasted his own business, and then treated her with brutality. Her only amusement at this time was playing the violin, accompanied by an old priest who tortured a bass viol, while her uncle made a flute complain.

Finally, after an acquaintance of five years, Roland, by letter to her father, proposed marriage. The purity of Roland's life was esteemed by Phlipon such a reproach to his own dissoluteness that he revenged himself by an insulting refusal. He then made his daughter's life at home so insupportable that she took lodgings in a convent. She was visited there by Roland, and they were finally married, without again consulting her father. During the year next succeeding their marriage they remained at Paris. From Paris they went to Amiens, and lived there four years, where her daughter was born. She assisted her husband in the preparation of several statistical and scientific articles for the Encyclopedic. She made a hortus siccus of the plants of Picardy.

In 1784 they removed to the family estate of Roland at Villefranche, near Lyons. She had, in the course of her studies, acquired considerable knowledge of medicine. There was no physician in that little community, and she became the village doctor. Some of her experiences were quite whimsical. A country-woman came several leagues, and offered her a horse if she would save the life of her husband, whom a physician had given up to die. She visited the sick man, and he recovered, but she had great difficulty in resisting the importunities of his wife that she should take the horse.

In 1784 they went to England, and in 1787 they made the tour of Switzerland. Roland was elected member of the constitutional assembly from Lyons, and they went to Paris.

I am compelled now to pass from the uneventful first ten years of her married life with the single remark that, through them all, she was the devoted wife and mother, the kind neighbor, and the most assiduous student. But her mind bore, as on a mirror, prophetic, shadowy, and pictured glimpses of those awful events which were marching out of futurity toward France. Her letters written during this period show that she gazed upon them with a prescient eye, and heard with keenest ear the alarum of the legions which were gathering for attack. The young men of Lyons, where she and her husband spent the Winters, gathered in her parlors, and heard from the lips of this impassioned seeress of liberty words which, in such formative periods of a nation's life, hasten events with a power that seems like absolute physical force.

Her husband was chosen a member of the national assembly, and she went with him again to Paris in 1791.

Here ends the peaceful period of her life. Here close upon her forever the doors of home; and here open to her the doors of history, which too often admits its guests only to immolate them in splendid chambers, as it immolated her. From this time we miss the pure womanliness of her character, in which she is so lovely, and see her imperial beauty and her regal intellect in all their autocratic power, until that time when her husband, home, child, power, and hope were all forever gone, and her womanhood again shone out, like a mellow and beauteous sunset, when life's day drew near its close.

Nothing had become more certain than that the monarchy would undergo radical constitutional changes. Of this every one was conscious except the king and the nobility. They were struck with that blindness which foreruns ruin. They constituted one party, and this party was the common object of attack by two political and revolutionary divisions, the Girondists and the Jacobins. The Gironde wished reform, a constitution, a monarchy, but one limited and constitutional, equality in taxes. They did not wish to destroy utterly, but they were willing to dislocate and then readjust, the machinery of state. The Jacobins at first said much, but proposed little. They aspired to the abolition of the throne and the establishment of a republic; they wished to overthrow the altar; they promised, vaguely, to wreak upon the rich and titled full revenge for the wrongs of the poor and lowly. Every political and social dream which had found expression for twenty years, every skeptical attack upon things ancient and holy, found in this body of men a party and an exponent. Up to a certain point both of these parties necessarily made common war upon the old order of things. But, beyond that point, it was equally certain that they would attack each other. The Girondists would wish to stop, and the Jacobins would wish to go on.

During the session of this assembly the influence of Madame Roland on men of all modes of thought became most marked. Her parlors were the rendezvous of eminent men, and men destined to become eminent. It is impossible to discover, from the carping records of that time, that she asserted her powers by an unwomanly effort. Men felt in her presence that they were before a great intellectual being--a creative and inspiring mind--and it shone upon them without effort, like the sun. Among these visitors was Maximilien Robespierre, who afterwards took her life. He was then obscure, despised, and had been coughed down when he rose to speak. She discerned his talents, and encouraged him. He said little, but was always near her, listening to all she said; and in his after days of power, he reproduced, in many a speech, what he had heard this wondrous woman say. In this time of his unpopularity she unquestionably saved him from the guillotine by her own personal and persistent intercession with men in power.

By the time that the session of this assembly drew near its close the ground-swell began to be felt of that tempest of popular wrath which eventually swept over France, and which the Jacobins rode and directed until it dashed even them upon the rocks. Squalor came forth and consorted with cleanliness; vice crept from its dens and sat down by the side of purity in high places; atheism took its stand at the altar, and ministered with the priest.

This assembly adjourned, and the Rolands returned, for a short time, to Platiere. By this time it was evident that the monarchy could not stand against the attacks of both its enemies; the king was compelled to yield; he threw himself into the arms of the Girondists, as his least obnoxious foes. He formed a new cabinet, and to Roland was given the ministry of the interior. It was a very great office. Its incumbent had administrative charge of all the internal affairs of France. The engraver's daughter was now the mistress of a palace. From the lowly room where she had read Plutarch until her mind was made grand with ideas of patriotic glory, until she loved her country as once she loved her God, she had gone by no base degrees to an eminence where her beloved France, with all its hopes and woes and needs and resources, lay like a map beneath her--a map for her and hers to change.

By this time the titled refugees had brought the Prussian armies to the frontier; a majority of the clergy had identified themselves with the reaction, were breaking down the revolution among the people, and were producing a reversionary tendency to absolutism. The king was vacillating and timid, but the queen had all the spirit and courage of her mother, Maria Theresa. It is very evident from Madame Roland's memoirs and letters, that these two women felt that they were in actual collision. It is a strange contrast; the sceptered wife, looking from her high places with longing and regret over centuries of hereditary succession, divine right and unquestioned prerogative, calling on her house of Hapsburg for aid, appealing to the kings of the earth for assistance in moving back the irreversible march of destiny:--from another palace the daughter of the people looking not back, but forward, speaking of kings and monarchies as gone, or soon to go, into tables of chronology, listening to what the ancient centuries speak from Grecian and Roman tombs, summoning old philosophies to attest the inalienable rights of man, looking beyond the mobs of kings and lords to the great nation-forming people, upon which these float and pass away like the shadows of purple Summer clouds; and stranger still, the ending of the contrast in the identification of these typical women in their death, both going to the same scaffold, discrowned of all their hopes. Of all the lessons which life has taught to ambition, none are more touching than when it points to the figures of these women as they are hurried by the procession in which they moved to a common fate.

The ministry insisted that the king should proclaim war against those who were threatening invasion, and that he should proceed stringently against the unpatriotic clergy. He refused to take either course against his ancient friends. It was at this time that Madame Roland wrote to the king in advocacy of those measures that celebrated letter which her husband signed, and to which all of the ministers assented. It is a most statesmanlike appeal for the nation. It is predictive of all the woes which followed. No Hebrew prophet ever spoke bolder to his king. She writes: "I know that the words of truth are seldom welcome at the foot of thrones; I know that it is the withholding truth from the councils of kings that renders revolution necessary."

The king, instead of adopting the policy recommended, dismissed his ministers. The letter was then made public through the newspapers. Few state papers have ever produced such an effect. It became a popular argument, and the people demanded the restoration of the ministry for the reasons which it contained, and for expressing which the ministry had been dismissed.

While the Girondists were supporting the ministry of their choice, they, with the king, were the object of furious attacks by the Jacobins. When the ministry was dismissed the Gironde renewed its attacks upon the monarchy, emulated the Jacobins in the severity of its assaults, and began to conspire for a federative republic, similar to the United States, which to Madame Roland was the ideal of a free government.

Madame Roland went from the palace to hired lodgings, and in the temporary fusion which followed of the revolutionists of all parties, the most eminent leaders gathered around her again. Robespierre came, but said little, for he was waiting his hour. Danton laid his lion mane in her lap, all his savagery for the moment tamed. Vergniaud, Buzot, and all the chiefs of the Gironde, gathered around this oracle of liberty. Anarchy supervened. Paris and all France were filled with riotings and murder. The king finally declared war, but battles went against France. Riot and murder increased. A mob of twenty thousand invaded the Tuileries then occupied by the royal family. It was divided into three divisions. The first was composed of armed and disciplined men, led by Santerre. The male ruffians of Paris, blood-thirsty and atrocious beyond any thing that civilization has ever produced, formed the second division. The third, most terrible of all, was composed of the lost women of Paris, led by Theroigne de Mericourt, clad in a blood-red riding dress, and armed with sword and pistol. This notorious woman had acted a prominent part in former scenes. She led the attack upon the Bastille. She led the mob which brought the king from Versailles to Paris. In the subsequent riots life and death hung upon her nod, and in one of them she met her betrayer. He begged piteously for her pardon and his life, and this was her answer, if we believe Lamartine: "My pardon!" said she, "at what price can you buy it? My innocence gone, my family lost to me, my brothers and sisters pursued in their own country by the jeers of their kindred; the maledictions of my father; my exile from my native land; my enrollment among courtesans; the blood by which my days have been and will be stained; that imperishable curse of vice linked to my name instead of that immortality of virtue which you once taught me to doubt--it is for this that you would buy my forgiveness--do you know of any price on earth sufficient to purchase it?" And he was massacred. She died forty years afterwards in a mad-house, for in the fate of the revolution, she was stripped and whipped in the streets to madness by the very women she had led.

These loathsome cohorts forced their way into the palace. They invaded the rooms of the king and queen. They struck at him with pikes, and forced upon his head the red bonnet of the Jacobins, while the most wretched of her sex encircled the queen with a living wall of vice, and loaded her with obscene execrations, charges, and epithets.

Although this outbreak has been charged to both the great political parties, it is probably nearer to truth to say that it originated spontaneously with that demoniac mob soon to rule France, and which from this time carried all political organizations with it. The Girondists, however, still retained enough of their constitutional conservatism to be the only hope which royalty could have for its preservation. The king again threw himself into their arms. Roland was reinstated in his ministry, and the palace again received his wife.

Then every revolutionary element began at once to combine against the king and the party which was thus supporting him. It was soon apparent that the king and the Girondists could neither govern the country nor save themselves if they acted together. The Gironde, from about this time, pusillanimously conceded point by point to the anarchic demands made by their enemies and the king's. Madame Roland did not join them in this, but when she saw that her husband was but a minister in name, that he and his associates were powerless to punish murder and prevent anarchy, doubtless the vision which she had seen of a people regenerated and free began to fade away. The Gironde consented to the imprisonment of the royal family in the Temple. This was not concession enough. The Jacobins, with the mob at their back, accused them not only of lack of works, but of lack of faith, and when such an accusation against a party becomes the expression of a popular conviction, that party has nothing to do except to die. To prove this charge untrue, the Gironde united with their enemies in abolishing the monarchy and establishing a republic. Madame Roland drew up a plan for a republic, but it was too late for such a one as she desired. Her scheme was federative, like our own, in which the provinces of France should have the status of states. This plan was a blow at the mob of Paris, which, through the Jacobin clubs, with which France was thickly sown, controlled the nation. The republic which followed was such only in name. The mob of Paris now stepped from behind the transparent screen, whence it had moved all parties like wire-hung puppets, and stood disclosed before the world in all its colossal horror, stained with blood, breathing flames, and grasped directly the springs of power. The national assembly was like a keeper of lunatics captured by his patients. Its members were crowded in their seats by blood-thirsty men, depraved women, and by merciless visionaries, who clamored for extirpation and destruction, absolute and universal.

The power of Roland as a minister became as feeble as a shadow's hand. The blade of the guillotine rose and fell automatically. Thousands fled from the city, upon which heaven itself seemed to rain fire and plagues. The armies of foreign kings were upon the soil of France, and were fast advancing, and the wild rumors of their coming roused the people to panic, and frenzied resolutions of resistance and retribution. Thousands, whose only crime was a suspected want of sympathy, were crowded into the prisons of Paris. Hoary age, the bounding boy, the tender virgin, the loving wife, the holy priest, the sainted nun, the titled lady, filed along with the depraved of both sexes in endless procession through those massive gates, never more to see the sky and the green earth again. For the mob had resolved to extirpate its enemies in the city before marching against foreign invaders. It went from prison to prison, bursting in the doors, and slaughtering without distinction of age, sex, or condition. Madame Roland was nearly frantic over these scenes. Her divinity had turned to Moloch in her very presence. Her husband called for troops to stop the horrible massacre, but none were furnished, and it went on until men were too tired to slay. These acts were doubtless incited by the Jacobin leaders, though they cloaked with secrecy their complicity in these great crimes. The Jacobins became all-powerful. The Girondists became the party of the past, and from this time their history is a record of a party in name, but in such act of dissolution as to make its efforts spasmodic, clique-like, and personal; sometimes grand, sometimes cruel, and often cowardly. They were under the coercion of public opinion, but were dragged instead of driven by it. They frequently held back, but this was merely a halt, which accelerated the rapidity of the march which left them at the scaffold, where they regained their heroism in the presence of death, while the bloody mob went on to a similar ending a little distance beyond.

When the lull came, after the massacre, the two parties stood looking at each other across the river of blood. The Jacobins accused the Girondists of being enemies of the country. It is characteristic of revolutionary times to accuse vaguely and to punish severely. Socrates died as an alleged corrupter of youth. Pilate, after acquitting Jesus of the crime of high treason, suffered him to be executed for "teaching throughout all Jewry." "Roundhead" and "Cavalier" were once expressive terms of condemnation. In our own times the words "slave-holder," "abolitionist," "loyal," "disloyal," and "rebel" have formed the compendious summing up of years of history. An indictment is compressed into an epithet in such times. In the time of Madame Roland, to be "a suspect" was to be punishable with death. So the Jacobins suspected the Girondists, and accused them of being enemies of France. They introduced measures which pandered to the bloodthirst of the mob, and for which the Girondists were compelled either to vote or to draw upon themselves its vengeance. Madame Roland urged and entreated the Girondists to make one last struggle for law, liberty, and order, by moving to bring to justice the ringleaders in the massacre, including the Jacobin chiefs, who instigated it. This issue was made in the assembly, but it was voted down before the tiger-roar of the mob which raged in the hall. The Jacobins resolved to destroy Madame Roland, whose courage had prompted this attack upon them, and for which she had become the object of their intensest hate. They suborned an adventurer named Viard to accuse her of being privy to a correspondence with the English Government for the purpose of saving the life of the king. She was summoned before the assembly to confront her accuser. She appeared in the midst of her enemies, armed with innocence, resplendent with beauty, defended by her own genius. Her very presence extorted applause from reluctant lips. She looked upon her accuser, and he faltered. By a few womanly words she tore his calumny into shreds, and left amid plaudits. Justice thus returned once more to illumine that place by a fleeting gleam, and then with this woman left it forever.