Ida Tarbell
Scribner’s/November, 1893
“IN Paris, in order to meet the people you want to see,” said the gossiping Mercier a hundred years ago, “all that is necessary is to promenade an hour a day on the Pont Neuf.” In those times loungers, gossips, recruiting agents, vendors 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.
Today Tout Paris is gone to the boulevards. It is there one stations himself to discover if the person he seeks is in the city; it is there he hears the wittiest pont-neufs, those bon-mots and songs which by their very title recall the ancient centre of Parisian wit and gayety. Gone from the bridge, too, is the familiar pump, La Samaritaine, with its clock whose hands were always lagging, and its chimes which played at the passing of the king; gone the Petite Academie, refuge of pictures refused at the Salon; gone, in short, all the distinctive life of the old bridge. But if the Pont Neuf is no longer the centre of Parisian life, something of its old-time appearance still remains. The masks of Germain Pilon still mock and grin under the cornice, Henri Quatre still sits his steed, and in front of him still stand two old houses, relics of the famous facades in brick and stone with which the good king decorated the Place Dauphine, at the same time that he built the great bridge and constructed the arcades of the Place Royale.
It is for one of these old houses—those facing the north—that we have come to the Pont Neuf. For, in the apartment of the second story, lived in the eighteenth century a little bourgeois girl whose life here, as recorded in her “Letters and Memoirs,” supplies us with the most attractive material we have on her class at that time, the material which, illustrated by the pictures of Chardin, furnishes the de Goncourts of today their most striking descriptions. The life of the little girl in the old house has, however, another claim on us. It was here that she developed sentiments, nourished a character, worked out ideals and theories which made her a few years later one of the active forces in the personnel which overthrew Louis XVI, secured the adoption of the republican form of government by France, and let loose in her country a revolutionary spirit which a hundred years have not entirely calmed. For the little girl, Marie-Jeanne Philipon — Mano Philipon, as she is familiarly called— is to become the Madame Roland of the French Revolution.
The life of the small bourgeoisie of Prance in the eighteenth century was a tranquil, honest affair, a round of the simplest pleasures, the quietest duties. The household of M. Philipon represented most of its virtues, few of its vices. M. Philipon himself was a well-to-do gold and silver engraver whose ambition to be rich had led him to sacrifice somewhat his art to commerce. He was a little 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. What he lacked in dignity of character and elevation of sentiments, Mme. Philipon 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 mere laborieuse and Le benedicite of Chardin, and her face might well have served as the original for the exquisite pastel of the Louvre, Chardin’s wife.
Manon was the only child of seven, left to the Philipon household. She was born in Paris, March 18,1754, not in the house on the Quai de I’Horloge, but in the rue de la Lanterne, now rue de la Cite, near Notre-Dame. The date of the removal of the family to the Quai de I’Horloge is so problematic that the Paris Committee of Inscriptions has never ventured to put up a commemorative plaque on the house. The probable date, however, is 1755. Uncertain as it may be, it is sure that the first two years of the little girl’s life were spent in the country with a nurse—a French custom which still prevails, in spite of Rousseau—and that when she came back to the Ile de la Cite she was large enough to be vividly impressed by its brilliant panoramas. It was the Pont Neuf and the quais which gave her her first education—an education soon supplanted by the catechism and masters, the one to prepare her for her first communion, the other to teach her to read and to write, to give her some ideas of history and geography and even of Latin, and to train her to sing, to dance, and to play the guitar and the violin.
The real education of Manon was not what she was receiving in these orthodox ways, she had begun to read—to read with absorption, energy, ardor. The books which passed through her hands were of the most haphazard sorts. Before she was eleven years old she had read the lives of all the saints, the Civil Wars of Appias, a work on the Turkish theatre, Scarron, many volumes of travels and memoirs, a treaty on Contracts, another on Heraldry—and the latter to such good purpose that she amazed her father by criticising some of his work composed against the rules of the art—Tasso, Telemaque, Candide, Plutarch. The passion for reading consumed her. If books failed she reread the old ones. Her conceptions were intense. She became Eucharis for Telemaque, Erminia for Tancred, and she carried Plutarch to church in guise of a prayer-book, weeping that she had not been born two thousand years ago in Sparta or in Athens.
Her greed for learning, her sensitiveness were accompanied by equal reflective powers. In an unpublished letter written to Roland years later, Manon says of this period of her life and of her development:
“Nature made me sensitive, my solitary education, in concentrating my affections, rendered them more vivid and more profound. I experienced happiness and sorrow before I was able to call them by their names; they became the subjects of my earliest meditations. I was active and isolated, and I reflected at the age when one is usually busy with toys.”
Religion became her first great enthusiasm, and she begged to go to a convent to prepare for her first communion. Her parents consented and chose for her one of those quiet, peaceable retreats for girls and women of the bourgeoisie class, so frequent in the Paris of the eighteenth century—that of the Dames de la Congregation, rue Neuve-Saint-Etienne, near the Jardin des Plantes.
The convent did very little for her intellect, but much for her development. It calmed her religious frenzy by giving her plenty of devout exercises, and it furnished her a new outlet for her emotions—a friend, a young girl from Amiens, Sophie Cannet by name. This friendship took at once the form of a passionate devotion, and when the girls parted, they began a correspondence which is undoubtedly the most remarkable correspondence between two girls ever published. Never were there more ardent love letters written than those of Manon to Sophie. She commiserates all the world who does not know the joys of friendship. She suffers tortures when Sophie’s letters are delayed, and, like every lover since the beginning of the postal service, evolves plans for improving its promptness and its exactness. She reads and rereads the letters which always fill her pockets, and she rises from her bed at midnight to fill pages with declarations of her fondness.
This intensity did not prevent Manon including much in her letters which is valuable in a study of her personality. For her to feel, to think, to aspire, was to write. All her life, up to the very evening of the last day, she had the passion for the pen. Her letters to Sophie contain not alone her love, but a detailed and exact, if diffuse, account of her development. Never was a person more interested in himself, more given to reflection on human conduct and relations, more determined to develop a sufficient philosophy. She shows remarkable independence in her judgments, comparisons, and criticisms, having flung authority overboard very early. It began with religion. The eternal condemnation of those who have refused, or have never known, the faith was the first stumbling-block. In the unpublished letter quoted from above, she says: “I rejected the authority which forced me to believe a cruel absurdity. The first step taken, the rest of the route was not long, and I examined all with suspicion.” She certainly examined all conscientiously, reading dutifully all the apologists of the Catholic Church suggested by her good curé, and also reading immediately after— not by the suggestion of the curé, we may be sure—all the philosophers and sceptics whom they pretended to refute.
The philosophers overwhelmed the apologists. Manon did not, however, abandon the church. She explains that she feared to afflict her mother and to give a bad example to the domestic, if she neglected religious forms. Nor did she succeed in adopting any particular system of philosophy. “The same thing happens to me,” she says in one of her letters, “that happened to the prince who went to the courts to hear the pleas. The last lawyer who spoke always seemed to him to be the one who was right.” Her last philosopher was always right. A strange phase in the transformation from Christianity to freethinking which Manon Philipon underwent is that she seems never to have experienced any of the suffering, the bewilderment, the grief which loss of faith causes to so many. It was a characteristic of hers to abandon almost without complaint anything which her reason condemned—a characteristic of only unusually self-sufficient and self-complacent natures.
It would be a wrong to Mlle. Philipon to give the idea that the religious sense died within her. On the contrary, it remained to the end. She arrived in her solitary studies at that religious idealism which consoles itself with the meaning of things and dispenses with the forms. Without knowing it she became a philosopher. Unaided, she reached to nearly all of the advanced conclusions of the eighteenth century. With Bernardin St. Pierre she became a naturalist, and never did he and Rousseau, in their tramps in the environs of Paris, rejoice more profoundly over the beauties of the world, enter more deeply into the mysteries of nature, than did Manon Philipon when in her girlhood she wandered in the allées of the forest of Meudon or of the Bois de Vincennes. With Rousseau she became subjective, cultivator of the Moi, confessor of herself. She read Plutarch, studied the English constitution, watched the growth of the struggling new country across the Atlantic, and as a result became, like thousands of young people all over France at that period, a republican enamoured of ideals of republican simplicity, of justice and of virtue, and above all of equality and of liberty for all men. “If before I had been born, I had been given the choice of a government,” she writes at twenty, “I should have decided on a republic. It is true that I should have wished it to be different from anything at present in Europe.” Though pronouncedly republican in sympathies Manon Philipon was not in her young womanhood a hater of the existing regime, as many have represented her to be from reading her “Memoirs” only. On the contrary, she was a 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!” And again she declares, “If I were in the position to do it, I should serve my prince with as much ardor as the most zealous Frenchman, though never with that blind devotion for his master with which he is born. A good king seems to me to be a creature almost adorable;” and this she wrote at the time of that visit to Versailles which, as described in her “Memoirs,” nineteen years later, has been so often used to prove her to have been, as a girl, envious of all ranking above her and already harboring a hatred of kings and courts. Nor did her ideas of equality at this period make her see in the mass of the common people the 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 reflects one day, as she sees 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 condemns the people as impatient, calls the measures of the ministers wise, and excuses the government by recalling Sully’s reflection—”With all our enlightenment and good-will it is still difficult to do well.” And again, À propos of similar disturbances, she says, “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.
There is much more to be drawn from the letters of Manon Philipon to Sophie Cannet; charming pictures of bourgeoisie life; glimpses into famous resorts, the Academy, the Salon, the Opera, the court of one hundred years ago; excursions in the environs of Paris, as delightful then as today; discussions of the books she reads, numerous lights on the character of Manon herself, her mental superiority, her excessive sensibility, her brilliant imagination, her lack of humor, her self-complacency, her idealism. But we must leave the letters. Her lovers invite us.
The number of suitors for the hand of Manon Philipon is fabulous. One is tempted to believe that more than one of the regiment which files before the reader of the “Memoirs” and the “Letters” is there only by virtue of the heroine’s imagination. She was one of those women who see in every man a possible lover. Only one of the throng shall occupy us here, Pahin de la Blancherie. He is worth attention for two reasons: Manon was very much in love with him, and he is a type of a class which unfortunately did not end with the eighteenth century, the young men of letters who seek to force fame by chefs-d’oeuvre of audacity instead of art. La Blancherie had been through college and made a voyage to America. At twenty-four he published a work called “Extraits du journal de mes voyages.” It is an indescribable account of youthful follies and their distressing results, intended as a warning to fathers and mothers—the last book in the world for a young girl; but La Blancherie gives it to Manon, who finds in it “My own principles, my very soul. He is not a Rousseau, doubtless, but he is never tiresome.” The literary world did not share Mlle. Philipon’s enthusiasm nor read and reread the book as she did. La Blancherie’s next venture was to announce himself as the General Agent for Scientific and Artistic Correspondence, and to open in Paris a salon where he arranged expositions of pictures, scientific conferences, lectures, and literary soirees. After seven years this ambitious undertaking tumbled and La Blancherie 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.
Mme. Roland gives the impression in her “Memoirs” that she had only a moderate interest in La Blancherie. “He interested me and I imagined that I might love him. It was only my head which was at work.” But the letters to Mlle. Cannet show her thoroughly in love. For some six months after her father had refused the young man’s suit she cherished the idea that La Blancherie was working to win her, and she declares repeatedly that if she cannot marry him she will marry no one. Her infatuation was ended oddly enough. Promenading one day in the Garden of the Luxembourg, she met La Blancherie. He wore a feather in his hat—a common enough thing in that day—but such frivolity did not accord with the ideas of republican simplicity, of stern virtue, of high thinking with which she had endowed the young man. To complete the disillusion her companion told her that La Blancherie was known in his circle as “the lover of the eleven thousand virgins.” Manon’s cure was rapid. La Blancherie was, no doubt, a perfect example of the petit maitre whose philosophy Marivaux sums up: “A Paris, ma chere enfant, les coeurs on ne se les donne pas, on se les prete,” and Mlle. Philipon’s idealization of him is an example of her incapacity in judging of the real worth of people whose professions, words, ideas, pleased her; a weakness of judgment essential to understand in considering the relations that she formed in the Revolution.
It was six months before Manon saw the feather in La Blancherie’s cap that she met Roland de la Platiere. He lived at Amiens, was a friend of the Cannets, and was presented to her by them. Roland was at that time forty-two years old and a self-made man. Having quarreled with his family, living near Lyons, he had left home at nineteen, and crossed France on foot, intending to sail for America. At Rouen, however, he found a relative, the inspector of manufactures, entered his service, and rose steadily. At the time Mlle. Philipon met him he was inspector of manufactures at Amiens and was well known in the industrial world of France as a valuable writer on commercial and manufacturing topics. Roland had travelled so much and had studied so profoundly, that for Manon Philipon, impassioned for learning, he was a delightful companion. His rigid virtue delighted her, too. He was in fact a man of the sternest integrity, devoted to details, minute in his dealings, almost rustic in his simplicity; but unfortunately so convinced of his virtue and that because of it he could do and say what seemed to him best, that he frequently antagonized people who only find virtue attractive when it is modest. He was, too, extremely careless in dress and indifferent, even impatient, of formalities, a characteristic which, if it allied him in Manon Philipon’s eyes with the Spartans, only served to exasperate lovers of the conventional.
Soon after their acquaintance Roland left France for a long voyage in Switzerland, Italy, Sicily, and Malta. He wished to embody his observations in a book of travels in the form of letters. He asked Mlle. Philipon to allow him to address the letters to her. She was flattered by the request and saw great possibilities in the relation. In an unpublished letter to Roland written after their betrothal, she reviews her feelings to him at this time: “As your travels continued,” she says, “I received with eagerness your rare letters. I hoped to find in you a friend. I hastened to give you this title, but I thought I discovered in you a certain coldness which made me suffer. You fell sick and the pain your illness caused me seemed to me to be justified by the name of friend which I had given you. I wrote you with warmth. A silence followed which wounded me and made me believe that I was misjudged;” and so on, showing that she went at least half-way in the early days of their acquaintance.
When Roland came back to Paris after an absence of eighteen months, he received a warm welcome and soon afterward sought the hand of the girl. They were married in February, 1780. The account of her courtship and marriage which Mme. Roland gives in her “Memoirs” produces a very different impression from that of the unpublished correspondence between her and Roland. From the first one receives the idea that, while she was sensible of Roland’s value, affection had a small part in deciding her to marry him, that when she did it she cherished no illusions in regard to him, and really charged herself with the happiness of two people. The letters, on the contrary, show her passionately in love— if love-letters mean anything—of which there may be a question.
Had she forgotten? Perhaps. And if she remembered, it was only to smile at her illusion. In love the new effaces the old, and when Mme. Roland wrote her “Memoirs” she was absorbed by what was the profoundest passion of her life. In the presence of it the love which twelve years before had seemed to her necessary to her happiness, had become an affair which she could smile at disinterestedly and explain philosophically.
Two years after their marriage the Rolands moved to Villefranche, north of Lyons, Roland having been appointed inspector of manufactures in the latter city. His learning, reputation, energy, and character at once gave them an excellent position in the society of the two towns. He was elected member of both the academy at Lyons and that of Villefranche, and seems to have turned off a great amount of work. He devised means for stimulating the decaying manufacturing interests of Lyons; he furnished many articles to the “Dictionary of Manufactures” and to the “Encyclopedic methodique,” and he read frequent articles before the academies. The subjects of the latter were sometimes rather bizarre. In one he proposed seriously (according to the Abbe Guillon) that the Lyonnais, instead of burying their dead, utilize them in the manufactory of oils and phosphoric acid, and he left the Academy of Villefranche because that body refused to adopt as subject for a coming contest, “Resolved, that it would be to the advantage of morals to establish tribunals for judging the dead.” The subjects were not always purely scientific; thus on one occasion he discussed warmly “one of the methods for understanding a woman.”
In all of this work Mme. Roland took a large part. She had become, indeed, essential to Roland, taking his notes, writing from his dictation, copying, suggesting, polishing. When not with Roland in his library, she was busy with the education of her little girl, her only child, or in directing the household. The family spent a large part of the year at Clos, where they had a country place, and she led there the life of a farmer’s wife, directing the vintage, putting up preserves, looking after the garden, caring for the sick—a busy bucolic existence which, with her love for nature, for the fields and the woods, her taste for botany and zoology, she enjoyed with almost the abandon of a girl. The letters written at this period by Mme. Roland to her friend Bosc, are most of them marked by the gayest humor, the liveliest fancy, the healthiest spirits. Indeed, there is no time of her life when she is so natural, so human, so charming as during the years at Clos. It was out of the life at Lyons that the particular connection of the Rolands with the Revolution came. Their friends, and the position that Roland had taken in the public affairs of the city, were the determining causes. The most important of these friends was Brissot, a Parisian journalist and an ardent reformer, who some time before the beginning of the Revolution had read a work of Roland’s and written a letter to the author praising his principles. A correspondence thus sprang up in which Mme. Roland took an active part, and which was continued for a long time without their seeing one another. At Lyons the most important of their friends was Champagneux, a young man of liberal views and some influence. There were three others closely allied to them at this time: Bosc, a friend of Mme. Roland’s before her marriage, Lanthenas, a friend of Roland’s made in Italy, and Bancal des Issarts, presented to them by Lanthenas. It is from the letters written by Mme. Roland to Bosc and Bancal that we are able to trace the state of mind with which she faced the disorders before the Revolution of 1789, and her opinions upon the duty of the patriots afterward. In the preliminary struggles she was discouraged, she valued poorly the men at the head of affairs. Necker she called a charlatan. The action of the parliament gave her no hope, “Must we vegetate under a single tyrant or groan under the yoke of several united?” she cried. There is nothing for lovers of good government to do, in her opinion, but “wait and see, bless America, and weep on the banks of the river of Babylon.”
At the first blow against the Bastille her tone changed. She saw in the sudden revolution the possibility of the realization of all her dreams. Henceforth there is but one course for her, to “watch and preach to the last breath.” She and her husband at once availed themselves of all possible means of spreading the revolutionary ideas. Roland joined the club at Lyons and took so active a part there that the Revolutionary party became known as Rolandists. The rage for pamphlets had taken possession of the country, and Mme. Roland sowed the neighborhood with all the liberal documents she could get her hands on, varying the distribution with gifts of patriotic pocket handkerchiefs on which the famous Droits de l’Homme was printed. Brissot had established a paper at Paris, the Patriote francais, and Champagneux had started the Courrier de Lyon, both devoted to the principles of 1789, and Mme. Roland became a frequent contributor to both.
In the agitations and disorders which disturbed different parts of France at this time the Rolands recognized only a spontaneous impulse toward liberty, the aspirations of a suffering people toward freedom. That demagogism, a Jacobin machine, was behind a part at least of the disturbances, they did not see, or seeing, justified as a necessary means to a glorious end. Insurrection was now in their opinion a divine right. Their greatest grief was, it was insufficient. A fortnight after the fall of the Bastille Mme. Roland wrote to Bosc, “You (the revolutionists of Paris) are only children. Your enthusiasm is only a straw fire. And if the National Assembly does not put on trial two illustrious heads, or some generous Decius does not take them, you are all mad.” Brissot in his journal condemns a riot in Lyons. Roland writes a long article defending the people, and to an acquaintance who deplores the bloodshed, remarks that there never has been a revolution yet without slaughter. Mme. Roland writes to Boso in January, 1791: “I weep over the blood spilt, but I am glad there is danger—I see nothing else to whip you and make you go.” “Paris,” she complains, “has not enough influence on the Assembly to oblige it to do all that it ought to do.” “It is not the Palais Royal which must do the work, it is your united sections.” Truly, there were few so advanced Jacobins as Mme. Roland during the first eighteen months of the Revolution.
A larger field of observation and influence awaited her. In February of 1791, Roland was sent to Paris by the municipality of Lyons. Affairs were in a bad way in that city. State help was essential. Roland was to solicit it from the National Assembly. But he finds his task a slow one, for, as he writes, there were commissioners besieging the Assembly for similar favors from all the towns between Marseilles and Dunkirk. He is in consequence some seven months securing what he wants for Lyons.
During this period they established themselves at the Hotel Britannique, rue Guenegaud, across the street from the Hotel des Monnaies. Here a circle of patriots soon gathered, most of them presented by Brissot. The most important of these new acquaintances were Pethion, Buzot, and Robespierre. It was their habit to gather four times a week at Mme. Roland’s. Of her part in these gatherings she says, “I knew the role which suited my sex, and I never forgot it. The conferences were always held in my presence, but without my taking any part in them; yet I never lost a word of what was said, and it happened sometimes that I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying what I thought.”
However discreet Mme. Roland may have been, she gained in this period a veritable supremacy over the group of patriots. There were many reasons for this. She embodied, in a sort of Greek clearness and chastity, the principles they professed. Her convictions, her eloquence, her sincerity were a constant stimulus. She was inflexible in her determination to push to the end, nor did she shrink before the horrors of insurrection and war. They were sacred necessities, and she pushed her friends steadily, inexorable as a Nemesis.
No doubt the personal charm of Mme. Roland had much to do with her influence. All who knew her testify to her attractiveness. Guillon de Montleon, by no means a sympathetic critic, speaks “of her pleasant, piquant face, her active, brilliant mind.” Arthur Young, who saw her in 1789, describes her as “young and beautiful.” Lemontey says of her: “Her eyes, her head, her hair were of remarkable beauty. Her delicate complexion had a freshness of color which, joined to her air of reserve and candor, made her seem singularly young. I found in her none of the elegant Parisian air which she claims in her ‘Memoirs,’ though I do not mean to say that she was awkward.” And he adds, she talked “well, too well.” Indeed, all of her biographers testify to her brilliant conversation. Tissot tells of her “sonorous, flexible voice, infinite charm in talking, eloquence which came from her heart.” As the tradition in the family of Mme. Roland goes, she was short and stout, possessed no taste in dress, and could be called neither beautiful, nor even pretty. However, vivacity, sympathy and intelligence were so combined in her face, and her voice was so mellow and vibrating that she exercised a veritable charm when she talked. She herself considered her chief attraction to be her conversational power. In one of the frequent passages of amusing self-complacency in her “Memoirs” she repeats a remark of Camille Desmoulins, that he could not understand how a woman of her age and with so little beauty had so many admirers, and she comments: “He had never heard me talk.”
Space for one more portrait, that of the keeper of the prison of Sainte Pelagic:
Marie-Jeanne Philipon
Wife of Roland, ex-minister
Aged thirty-nine years, native of Paris
Living rue de la Harpe, No. 6.
Height, five feet.
Hair and eyebrows dark chestnut,
Brown eyes, Medium nose.
Ordinary mouth.
Oval face.
Bound chin.
High forehead.
During the seven months in Paris Mme. Roland followed all that went on in politics. She joined the Societe fraternelle des deux sexes. She went to hear the Jacobins. She frequented the Assembly, but neither she nor Roland were satisfied with the progress of the new ideas. “We have seen those precious Jacobins,” writes Roland to Champagneux; “if in physics objects increase as one approaches them, it is rare that it is not the contrary in morals.” “Throw your pen into the fire, generous Brutus, and go and cultivate your cabbages,” writes Mme. Roland to Brissot, in April, ’91; “the Assembly is now nothing but corruption and tyranny, civil war is no longer an evil. It will regenerate or destroy us, and as liberty is lost without it, we need neither fear nor avoid it.” After having followed the sessions of the Assembly for two months, she left one day toward the end of April, furious and convinced that it would never again do anything that was not shallow-brained. “I promised myself,” she says, in an unedited MS. recounting this experience, “never to see it again—an engagement that I have faithfully kept.” She was disgusted with the new constitution, she distrusted the king’s profession to uphold it. When Louis made his weak attempt to escape in June, 1791, she rejoiced. It proved his perfidy, and she and her friends began to say to each other that this was the moment to prove to the people that the king did not want the constitution, and to prepare public spirit for a republic; and while they talk Robespierre, sneering and biting his fingernails, asks them what they mean by a republic.
When the king was brought back, she declared that “it would have been better if he had not been arrested. Civil war would then have been inevitable, and the nation would have been forced into that great school of public virtues.”
She soon after begins to distrust Lafayette. At the same time the press displeases her. She complains that Brissot makes nothing but a newspaper, when he ought to be giving instruction, and she is indignant that the police seize the journal of Marat. Of the people she is equally in despair. “We must have another revolution, but I doubt if there is enough vigor in the people.”
And thus, dissatisfied with the march of the Revolution, Mme. Roland went back to Lyons in September, 1791, scattering, as she went, a revolutionary address of Robespierre’s.
The Constitutional Assembly dissolved September 30, 1791. One of its last acts was to suppress the office of Inspector of Manufactures. Roland had then no other work than that on the “Encyclopedie methodique.” It could be better done at Paris, and they returned there in December, installing themselves in the rue de la Harpe, one of the picturesque old streets of the University quarter — a street of which only a fragment now remains, the rest having been metamorphosed into the Boulevard Saint Michel.
Their old friends seek them, and they introduce many new ones, members of the Legislative Assembly, which had come into session during their sojourn at Clos. This new assembly is composed of 745 new men, for the preceding assembly, in dissolving, had voted its members ineligible to the succeeding body. They are young, the majority thirty or under. They have been formed in the clubs of the Revolution. They are eloquent, patriotic, extravagant. They possess much rhetoric, much determination to give France a government of the people, and little practical sense. The chief party among them is known as the Girondins. It is among them that the republican theories are conceived most purely and defended most eloquently. All of them have read Plutarch, Cicero, Rousseau. All of them have been inflamed by the story of the American Revolution. They have come to the Legislative Assembly as Buzot came to the Constitutional. “The head and heart full of Greek and Roman history and of the grand characters who, in those ancient republics, honored most the human race.” But what the Girondins have gotten from Plutarch and Rousseau and America is personal aspirations, not clear conceptions. They have formed an ideal of a government where all men shall be free, but how to create and work this government they have no practical idea. They have sublime faith, superb audacity. They are young and brave and virtuous, and they do not hesitate to overthrow whatever exists, trusting boldly to themselves to make a new government out of their ideals. That there is danger to themselves in such hardihood they know, but that is part of the glory of their undertaking. That there is danger to the country, to humanity, to their ideal, they do not see at all. The Girondins under the lead of Brissot, then at the head of the diplomatic committee, soon came to power in the Assembly, allying themselves with the extreme left—Danton, Robespierre, Couthon, etc. The menaces of the Prussians against France were increasing. The suspicion of the emigres grew from day to day. The king was forced to dismiss his ministers of the constitutional party and to seek new ones from among the patriots, that is, at the indication of the Girondins. When Brissot and his friends came to make their selection, they decided on Roland for the portfolio of the interior. The appointment was made in March of 1792, and the Rolands moved at once into the Hotel of the Interior, rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs.
Mme. Roland’s salon became the rendezvous of her party. To it and to the work of her husband’s department she gave all her time, neither receiving nor making visits, and never inviting women to the frequent dinners at which she gathered the ministers, deputies, and all persons whom Roland wished to see. The conferences between Roland and his colleagues were held in her presence. It was she who went over the vast correspondence with the minister, directed the answers to many letters, prepared many of the numerous circulars and reports for the departments and the Assembly, guarded the policy of the journals, edited in the interests of the ministry. It was she, above all, who was the impelling force of the new ministry, for she alone knew what she wanted, and had a clear idea of how it was to be secured.
In her opinion, the reforms essential can never be secured through a union with the court. Others may vacillate in their suspicions of the king’s intentions; she, never. “I never could believe in the constitutional vocation of a king born under a despotism, raised by it, and accustomed to it.” And when Roland, who at the beginning of his ministry was delighted with Louis, goes off confidently to the seances, she tells him: “I never see you go off that way that I am not sure you are going to commit a sottise.” And when he comes home with less done than she demands, she declares that the council is nothing but a café, and the ministers the dupes of the king.
She suspected everybody who by birth or training was allied with the aristocratic party. Dumouriez, the most skillful diplomat in the cabinet, and by her own testimony, “diligent and brave—capable of great enterprises,” she declared to have a “false eye,” and warned Roland against him. When Dumouriez presented to her his first associate, she remarked to a friend: “All these handsome fellows seem to me poor patriots. They have the air of thinking too much of themselves. They prefer themselves to the country, and I can never escape the temptation to shock their self-complacency by pretending not to see the merit on which they pride themselves.”
In this relentless attitude there is something more than political principle. In the letter to Sophie Cannet written in October, 1774, where she described her visit to Versailles, Manon Philipon said, “I have a character which would be most harmful to the state and to myself if I were placed at a certain distance from the throne. In my present condition I love my prince because I feel my dependence but little, but if I were too near him I should hate his grandeur.” Mme Roland is now at that “certain distance,” where she “hates his grandeur.”
Under her influence Roland and his Girondin colleagues soon became factious with the king, “killing him by pin pricks,” says Dumouriez.
One of the first duties of the Department of the Interior was “the surveillance and execution of the laws relative to the safety and tranquility of the interior of the state.” Terrible disorders were rending France: grain did not circulate, chateaux were burned, municipalities besieged, men murdered, and Roland, to restore tranquility, wrote letters and posted up circulars. Of these documents the following is a specimen. It is a reply to a call for troops from a department where the disorders are great. The minister replies that the Department of War has no troops to spare, and that if force is essential they must call on the National Guard.
“But,” says he, “must I admit the latter course? … . As soon as an administration employs arms in order to execute laws, not only it admits that it has not known how to make itself loved, but that it is never going to do so. . . . Instruct your administrations and if they fail to observe your rules, employ that sweetness which commands so easily, that persuasion which leads necessarily to the repentance of a fault, often involuntary. It is so easy for a superior administration to make itself loved by those it has under its care, that, in truth, I believe I might declare that it is always the fault of the first when harmony is broken.”
A letter like that, written in June, 1792, by the French Minister of the Interior, is either a proof of incomparable naivete or of tacit alliance with the Jacobin idea.
Mme Roland succeeded at last in bringing matters to a focus between Louis and the ministry. War against Austria had been proclaimed in April. It had opened badly, and the terror of the people, suspicious of the court and the emigrés, was great. The disorders caused by the presence of great numbers of priests who had refused to take an oath of allegiance to the constitution was serious. To meet these difficulties two measures were adopted by the ministry: a camp of twenty thousand men drawn from the different communes of Paris to protect the city from foes within and without, and the proscription of the priests. Louis refuses both. Mme Roland is determined that the future support of the Girondins to the court shall hinge on the acceptance of these measures. To put the matter clearly, she proposes to Roland that a letter be written to the king by the ministers, stating that they feel that the safety of the country depends upon the acceptance of the decrees, and that if he persists in his veto they must resign. It is la citoyenne Roland who writes the letter. The council discusses it, and declines signing it. Thereupon Madame persuades Roland to send it in his own name. He does so on June 11th, and on the 13th is asked to resign.
The ultimatum had been refused. Henceforth there was nothing to do but bring about the overthrow of the king —a work accomplished on August 10th. This famous day was the work of the Jacobins, but to it the Grirondins gave their moral support and their sympathy. Roland attributed it later to the “letter to the king,” which had “demonstrated to all France the king’s blindness and obstinacy.” Mme Roland says that it was in her salon that, after the fall of the ministry, the patriots talked of the possibility of establishing a republic in the south, if the court succeeded in subjugating the north; that there Barbaroux announced that he had brought the Marseillese to Paris, and that if they were seconded by the Parisians the court would be reduced. She adds, “We were sure without his explaining further that he prepared an insurrection.”
Immediately after the fall of Louis XVI, an Executive Council was formed in which Roland was given his old portfolio. But he and his colleagues found themselves fronting a new power—the Commune of Paris. The demand which Mme Roland had made eighteen months before, “More influence by Paris on the Assembly,” “not the Palais Royal, but the united sections,” is realized. Paris not only influences but controls, and Roland is immediately engaged in a struggle with the new power. “Persuaded,” he wrote in a report made to the Convention in November, 1792, “that the impetuous movements which make a revolution, cannot be long continued without injury to the state, I exercised the greatest vigilance to restore the reign of law . . . the Commune often took measures or made demands which were not legal . . . thus there was established an inevitable struggle between its temporary power acting above the laws and the minister charged to execute those laws.”
There was one man through whom the ministry and the Commune might have worked, Danton. He was a colleague of Roland in the council, a power in the Assembly, at the Hotel de Ville, among the people, but Mme Roland detested him. In her imagination he always appeared, “poignard in hand, exciting by voice and gesture a band of assassins, more timid or less ferocious than he.” Before August 10th, such a force was necessary, but now it was not, and inflexible and impractical as an idealist and a woman, she refused the alliance which seems to have been the only safety for the Girondins, and which Danton himself offered, coming to her salon every day, dropping in early to talk before the official diners, and often to beg a soup between times. Before the end of August, however, he had discovered the incompatibility between them and ceased his visits.
The massacres of September completed the proofs of the impotency of Roland in the Commune. Before the slaughter was ended Mme Roland knew that she and her friends were outwitted. “We are under the knife of Robespierre and Marat,” she writes to Bancal on the 5th. On the 9th the disillusion is complete. “My friend Danton directs everything. Robespierre is his mannequin, Marat holds his torch and his poignard. . . . You know my enthusiasm for the Revolution. All, well, I am ashamed of it. It is soiled by villany. It has become loathsome. It is humiliating to remain in position.”
But it was not alone horror at the September butcheries which oppressed la citoyenne Roland. Repeated reports of Roland show that he excused the beginning of the massacres as the “vengeance” of the people “terrible in their justice,” that he was willing to “cast a veil” over the affair. To the horror she felt at the inability of Roland to stop the anarchy, was added the crushing realization that a power infinitely superior to her own was at work, and at war with her. She must have seen, too, that this power was the logical result of her policy and doctrines. La citoyenne Roland and her friends were, in fact, in the position of the keepers of wild animals who, to clear a garden of spectators, let loose their charges. The spectators are driven out, but when the keepers attempt to whistle in the beasts they find themselves in turn obliged to flee.
The Convention succeeded the Legislative Assembly, meeting in September of 1792. Mme Roland hoped much from this new body, in which Buzot was her chief spokesman. Between them there was a relation which began in 1791, at the time of Mme Roland’s visit to Paris, had been continued by correspondence during the time of the Legislative Assembly, and which—we do not know exactly when, but certainly before the end of the inter of 1792-93—had become a deep and tormenting love. How much this passion had to do with Mme Roland’s inflexible attitude toward Danton—a woman in love is never a good politician—with the discouragement and irritability of Buzot in the Convention, and with the pitiful impotency of Roland, is rather the study of a psychologist than a narrator. That it had an influence, however, is unquestionable.
It never caused anyone of them to shrink from his public duty. Mme Roland did not cease to urge her friends to activity. “If it is too late for us (to save ourselves), at least let us save the rest of the country.” Roland’s industry was never greater. Buzot was constantly at the front in the Convention. But against the fury of the Commune and the Mountain, their efforts were straws.
It was in vain that Roland proposed Mme Roland’s plan, so effective in the first ministry—the establishment of a guard drawn from the departments to protect the Convention; that he proposed perpetual banishment for the emigres and the Bourbons, and death for whomsoever should propose under any form the restoration of the monarchy; that he opposed himself to the fury of the Mountain, attacked Robespierre, proposed a decree against those that incited to murder, signaled the abuses of power, declared himself weary of despotism.
It was in vain that Roland poured forth circulars telling of his virtue, courage, and the exactness of his accounts; that he urged the priests to stop singing the Domine salvum fac regen and to translate their services into French; that he managed a vast correspondence through his Bureau of Public Opinion and recommended a national revolutionary costume.
They were disillusioned at last. “It is useless to deny it,” says Buzot, “the majority of the French people sighed for the royalty and the constitution of 1791.” “This people has been made republican by the strokes of the guillotine,” but “our dream was too beautiful to abandon.”
Roland remained in position until January 22, 1793. The persecution of the Commune and the Mountain, which had begun on the night of September 2d with an invasion of the Hotel of the Interior and an order for his arrest, had not ceased. Mme Roland had been ridiculed in the Convention and insulted in the journals of Marat and Hubert. Their lives had been in danger, the most false and absurd charges were made against them: misuse of funds, theft of state treasures, extravagance, federalism, royalism, corruption of public opinion. Roland was le roi Roland, Madame la reine Roland; at last, in sheer weariness of his impotency, Roland resigned.
His enemies were not done with him. On the night of May 31st he was presented with an order of arrest, but succeeded in evading the officers and escaping from Paris.
Mme Roland never saw her husband again. The same night she was arrested and taken to the prison of the Abbaye, just behind the church of Saint Germain-des-Pres. Twenty-four days afterward she was released. She flew home to the rue de la Harpe and had started to ascend the stairs, when she heard a call, “Citoyenne Roland!” She turned to be presented with an order of re-arrest. That night she slept at Sainte Pelagie, a prison still in existence, and only a stone’s throw from the convent where as a girl she had prepared for her first communion.
She remained for four months at Sainte Pelagie. But no imprisonment could break her spirit. From her cell she wrote to Buzot, “Continue your generous efforts, my friend. Brutus on the fields of Philippi despaired too soon of the safety of Rome.” With a sangfroid incomparable she arranged her quarters, sending out for flowers and books. She divided her time systematically, studying English and drawing. She even tried an interesting experiment in regard to her diet. During her imprisonment she wrote her “Notes on the Revolution, Portraits and Anecdotes,” and her charming “Memoirs.” It was only when the news of some new atrocity was brought to her ears that she broke the current of her firm, smooth narratives to record her hatred of the tyranny which was disgracing France, or to sigh for a refuge in America. It is almost never that the woman appears and one sees tears on the pages.
What was the secret of this intrepidity? this superb indifference? this self-sufficiency, which at times is almost irritating? Courage, natural and nourished by a life of devotion to duty; profound faith in her ideals, a faith which no shock of experience ever destroyed; still profounder faith in herself; consciousness that she was living and writing, poring for posterity; a belief that the future would vindicate her and her friends; and the exaltation of love, the love that made her “not sorry to be arrested,” and which led her to write to Buzot from the Abbaye, “Since I owe it to my jailor that I can reconcile my love and my duty, do not pity me.” She was not to be pitied. Life and death were kinder to her than they are to the most of those upon whom falls the supreme misfortune of loving where law and convention forbid love to go. They took the struggle out of her hands.
On the first day of November, 1793 la citoyenne Roland was taken to the Conciergerie. On the eighth she came out from the Revolutionary Tribunal condemned to death, as “author and accomplice in a conspiracy against the unity and indivisibility of the republic, and against the liberty and safety of the French people.” The cart awaited her in the prison court. Standing on the Pont au Change and looking down the Seine, is one of those fascinating river views of Paris where a wealth of associations dispute with endless charm the attention of the loiterer. The left of the view is filled by the Norman towers of the Conciergerie, the facades of the prison, the irregular fronts of the houses facing on the Quai de I’Horloge, and ends in an old house of Henry IV’s time. It is the house where Manon Philipon passed her girlhood. When the cart drove across the Pont au Change Mme Roland had before her the window from which as a girl she had leaned at sunset, and “with a heart filled with inexpressible joy, happy to exist, had offered to the Supreme Being a pure and worthy homage.”
She faces death now as she faced life then. The girl and the woman, in spite of the drama between, are unchanged: the same ideals, the same courage, the same faith. Not even this tragic last encounter with the home of her youth moves her calm, for she passed the Pont Neuf, writes one who saw her, “upright and calm—her eyes shining, her color fresh and brilliant—a smile on her lips; trying to cheer her companion, a man overwhelmed by the terror of approaching death.”
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