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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the prettiest passages in her letters of this period are of her homely duties. She kept the accounts, directed the servants, interested herself in every detail of farm and house. She used her scientific acquirements practically for the benefit of Le Clos and its neighbors. Bosc she continually applied to for information. Now it was a remedy, “sure and easy,” against the bites of the viper, of which there were many in the country—and they still exist; now for the caterpillars which were troubling the apples; again it was against an enemy of her artichokes that she demanded, as a service to the province, a remedy.

She took a lively interest in agricultural discussions, and many were the flowers, from the rich flora of Le Clos, which she sent her friend to analyze, or for a confirmation of her own analysis.

Her devotion to her neighbors was genuine. In her Memoirs she speaks with pride of their love for her, and this was no meaningless recollection. Constantly in her letters there was question of service rendered to this or that one, and we see that it was not without reason that her husband was worried lest she make herself ill in caring for the domestics of Le Clos and the peasants of Boitier and TheizÉ.

She did more than care for them and instruct them,—she set them a good example. Especially in religious matters was she careful to do this. One who has climbed the long steep hill from Le Clos to the church at TheizÉ, has a genuine respect for the unselfishness of a woman who would get out of bed at six o’clock in the morning for her neighbor’s sake,—“climbing up the rocks,” she called it. This she did, though Le Clos possessed its own chapel where the curÉ came to say the Mass.

She exercised a delightful hospitality. Le Clos was always open for their friends. Lanthenas spent much of his time there, and one of the apartments still is called by his name. Bosc she was always urging to come, and she drew him many a pretty picture of their summer companies. There was now and then a friend of Bosc, from Paris, who sought them; for in those days of stage-coaches one had time to stop over en route. There were foreign and French savants who had heard of Roland and came to pay their respects, and there were the country counts and abbÉs.

And there were amusements besides—an occasional petit bal given by a locataire, where she danced “and contre-danced,” and, in spite of her thirty-one years, only retired at midnight from “wisdom and not from satiety.” And there was the watch-meeting which she kept with her people, and the vogue, as the Beaujolais people call their provincial fÊtes. Le Clos had one peculiar to itself—a vogue existing to-day.

It is one of the events of the year at TheizÉ—this vogue—on Ascension Sunday and Monday. The place is invaded the day before for preparation: a stand is put up for the musicians; the wine rooms are cleared out for the lunch tables; the trees and walls are decorated; outside the gate, too, before night there is sure to establish itself one of the travelling lotteries which infest France.

The morning of Ascension Day there comes, between masses, a committee headed by a band to take possession of the place and present the fÊte to Madame. After dinner come the merry-makers,—young and old from all the country round; a friendly, pleasant company who dance and walk and talk, only quitting their sports long enough for the traditional service of cutting the brioche,—a ceremony which begins with a grave promenade of the big cake around the premises, fanfare ahead. This done, the chief of the vogue, in the midst of a respectful silence from all the two or three hundred peasants looking on, cuts the cake with a flourish so solemn that it would be worthy of a sacrifice, and passes around the pieces among the guests.

The brioches eaten, they dance again, and that until after the night falls and the stars come out and the children and the old people go home—a grave dance now and silent; for the night, the wind in the trees, the simpler music too changes the gay and romping mood of the afternoon to one of dreaminess and silence. But Monday they come back gayer than ever and the dance and romp do not end until, late in the evening, Madame declares the vogue over.

In this life at Le Clos Madame Roland’s most serious occupation was the education of her daughter Eudora. She evidently hoped to find in her little girl a second Manon Phlipon,—an infant prodigy in sentiment and taste. She discovered early that Eudora was a rollicking, mischievous, saucy youngster, who would rather frolic than study and who liked to play with her doll better than to read Plutarch. She was in despair over this lack of feeling. At the least sign of sentiment she wrote to her husband or to Bosc, but as a rule she could only complain of the indifference of the little miss.

She had begun by nursing her baby,—Rousseau demands it,—but when she came back from her favor-seeking at Paris the child—three years old—did not recognize her. “I am like the women who do not nurse their children; I have done better than they but I am no farther advanced.” At Le Clos she became thoroughly discouraged and decided to take up Rousseau again and study Émile and Julie on the education of children. She arrived at certain conclusions and as she was about to write her husband of them one day received a letter from him containing similar reflections. She replied with her full plan. The letter, hitherto unpublished, is very sensible.

“What a pleasure to find that we are one in our ideas as in our feelings, and for one never to have a plan that the other has not already thought of. For the last twenty-four hours I have been trying the method that you suggest with our little one. I had re-read Julie’s plan, and I had decided that we were too far away from it. Controlled by circumstances, we have either thought too much or not enough of our child. Busy in a kind of work which demands quiet, we have kept her at her tasks and her lessons, without taking time to cultivate a taste in her for them, or of choosing the times when she was the most disposed for them. When she has rebelled, and we have wanted her to be quiet, we have been willing to do anything to silence her, so that we could go on with our work.

“‘That which makes children cry,’ Julie says, ‘is the attention that is paid to them. It is only necessary to let them cry all day, a few times, without paying any attention to them, to cure them of the habit. If one pets them or threatens them, it has no effect. The more attention that you give to their tears, the more reason they have for continuing them. They will break themselves of the habit very soon when they see that no one takes notice; for, great and small, no one cares to give himself useless trouble.’ There, my good friend, is where we have been wrong. Julie’s children were happy and peaceable under her eyes, but they were subject to no one and only obliged to allow others the same liberty they enjoyed themselves.

“We want to be left in peace; that is just, but sometimes we constrain our child, and she takes her revenge as she can. Moreover, there is no use denying it, our little one has a strong will, and she has no sensibility and no taste. It must be that this is, in part, our fault, and because we have not known how to direct her. More than that, we risk making a still greater mistake in conquering her by force or by fear, though we have believed that it could be done in no other way. In acting thus, we are going to be unhappy, and our child is going to develop a hard and an unendurable obstinacy.

“I have resolved: first, never to get angry, and always to be calm and cold as justice itself when it comes to a question of correction.

“Second, never to use either whip or blow, movement or tone, which show impatience. Blows of whatever kind seem to me odious. They harden, debase, and prevent the birth of sentiment. On this score we have been guilty. When, as an infant, Eudora put her hands on something that she ought not to have touched, and did not take them off at the first word, it seemed to us that a little blow on her rebellious hand might have good effect. But that little blow has led to the whip; the child has become a torment, and we are annoyed by it; that little blow was a great mistake; it is time that we began over again, and we have not a moment to lose.

“Third, the child must be happier with us than with any one else; it is a question then of making her time pass more pleasantly when she is in our presence than it does elsewhere. That would not be very difficult if the mother was sewing or at housework, was free to talk with her sometimes and to teach her little tasks. In a library, between two desks, where severe research is going on and where silence is necessary, it is quite natural that the child grow weary; above all, if she is forbidden to sing or to chatter, and cannot play with any one.

“None of those persons who have written treatises on education have considered the student or those of a similar profession; they have treated the father or the mother as occupied solely in carrying out their duties, everything else being set aside for them. But the case is different here; you must carry on your work, and I am only too happy to aid you in it. I am a wife as well as a mother, and was the one before becoming the other.

“Let us try, then, while at our desks to have our child with us, and to see to it that she is happy beside us. For that we must leave her free as much as possible. If nature has not fitted her for study, let us not insist. Let us form her character as well as we can, and let the rest come by inspiration, not by punishment or caresses. Let us hold ourselves to these rules, and I am sure that the child will soon feel the justice and the necessity as well as the effect of our tenderness.

“For three days now I have not compelled her to do anything. She reads five or six times a day to amuse herself, and she seems to think that it is a good act. Without entirely lending myself to her little hypocrisy, I nevertheless pretend to be partially, at least, her dupe. In the evening she begs for music and I make a thousand excuses in order to have the lesson short, gay, and easy. The great thing is obedience. There have been scenes, I have punished her and she has wept; but I have pretended not to notice it, and have gone on with my work in perfect indifference. She has been obliged to stop some time, and it has never been very long.”

The success was something, for by another spring, when the little one was “six years six months and two days old,” she had commenced to dislike being blamed as much as she did being put on dry bread; she loved a caress better than her doll; reading amused her when she had nothing better to do; and she loved to write and dance,—neither of which fatigued her head,—but could not endure a story which was more than a half hour long; and was still “a hundred leagues from Robinson.”

Madame Roland’s return to Rousseau was not confined to his system of education. She went back to him at this time for inspiration. In going to Le Clos she had an ideal,—Julie at Clarens. Probably she found that in practice there was much more hard work and patient endurance in her Clarens than there were pastorals and sweet emotions. Much as she approved these stern virtues, considered abstractly, they aroused less enthusiasm when applied, and she sought her prophet; not without reward, for again and again she wrote Roland of her delight:

“I have been devouring Julie as if it were not for the fourth or fifth time. My friend, I shall always love that book, and if I ever become dÉvote, it is the only one I shall desire. It seems to me that we could have lived well with all those people and that they would have found us as much to their taste as we them to ours.”

And again after an evening in the chimney corner with Rousseau: “I shall read him all my life, and if ever we should be in that condition of which we no longer think, when you, old and blind, make shoe-laces while I do needle-work, all the books I shall want will be those of Jean Jacques. He would make us shed delicious tears and would arouse sentiments which would make us forget our lot.”

“Delicious tears” are as always her gauge of happiness. She never learned that the amount of living one is doing, cannot always be measured by the emotion one experiences.

In the days at Villefranche and Le Clos, Roland was as dear to her as ever. She served him with touching devotion, finding her greatest delight in being useful to him. The long and tiresome extracts on wool and hides, bleaching and tanning, were never too long and tiresome for her to copy, in her vigorous, beautiful hand; the numerous academic papers and public pamphlets never too numerous for her to apply all her literary skill and her enthusiasm to polishing and brightening. She arranged everything to make his life easy and to advance his work, and her affection was poured out as freely as in the days before their marriage. He is the “friend par excellence.” “I love you madly and I am disposed to snap my fingers at the rest,” she told him. Her letter-writing, in his absence, she calls “the dearest of her occupations,” and it must have been, to judge from the following letter written seven years after her marriage:

“I had told —— to go after it [Roland’s letter]. I awaited it in vain all the evening. He had forgotten to go. I sent him again when I sat down to supper. While I ate I waited, my heart was troubled. The servant seemed to me to be gone a long time. My heart jumped at every noise I heard at the door. Overcome, I said: News from him was never dearer, never awaited with more tender impatience. I scarcely heard what brother said and I answered yes at random. It was worse still when the package came. My heart went out to it beforehand. I examined the writing with strange haste, I opened it, I read. The mutual sentiment which inspires us leaves me incapable of feeling anything else. I scarcely spoke the rest of the evening.”

Unquestionably she believed in the endurance of this affection for Roland, so far as there is any indication in her letters. Perhaps something of the secret of the peculiar tenderness between Madame Roland and her husband at this time was that Roland was but little at home. Where the imagination has the habit of idealizing situations and persons, it is difficult to quiet it—it must have its craving satisfied. But no idealized object will resist long the friction of every-day life and the disillusion which is inevitable from constant association. Madame Roland never ceased her habit of idealization, but, fortunately, her life with Roland was so broken by his repeated absences that her imagination did still find pleasure in busying itself with him.

For several years after they went to Beaujolais there was but one break in this busy life for Madame Roland,—a trip to Switzerland taken in 1787 with her husband and her brother-in-law, the CurÉ of Longpoint. She wrote full notes of her trip for Eudora, as she had done of her trip to England. They were printed by Champagneux in the year 1800. They are less spontaneous than those on England, following almost entirely Roland’s letters of ten years before. This trip into Switzerland was to have been followed by one to Italy, which never was taken.

And so their life went on from 1784 to 1789. On the whole, it was happy, as it certainly was useful and honorable. To be sure, they were not quite satisfied. They still felt keenly that the title and privileges they had asked had been refused, and they still cherished hopes of being retired. Madame Roland, especially, kept the matter in view and worked to bring it about; thus, in September of 1787 we find her directing Roland: “Write to the bear and pay him the compliment of your encyclopedic work. I have imagined a little letter of which I send you the idea. To flatter a person’s pretensions is a means of capturing his good-will. If it is true that he has a mistress, Lanthenas must unearth her, as well as the sides on which she is accessible. They will be convenient notes to have in the portfolio, and can be used as one does certain drugs in desperate cases.”

On the whole, Madame Roland was very well off, and her life would undoubtedly have gone on thus to the end, broken after a while, perhaps, with the much desired pension; perhaps, by even the title of nobility; she then would have had the “paradise” she so much desired—“the pretty apartment in town and a bijou at Le Clos”; she might, on the other hand, have had her sad sentimental picture realized and Roland, blind, have made shoe-laces and she done needle-work, while they both shed delicious tears over Rousseau, had there not been something in the air which was about to take away all from him that had and to give it to him who had not; to make leaders of country lawyers, and doctors, and schoolmasters, and to send the diplomats and courtiers a-begging.

The French Revolution was coming, and to trace briefly how it grew in the Lyonnais and how our friends in particular regarded it and were drawn to side with it, is our next affair.