Madame Roland’s plan had carried. Since the beginning of the Revolution she had urged it. In 1789 when she called for “two illustrious heads,” for “the united sections and not the Palais Royal”; throughout 1790 in her demands for “blood, since there is nothing else to whip you and make you go”; in her incessant preaching of civil war; in her remonstrances in 1791 against the seizure of Marat’s sheets, against the arrest of the turbulent, against shutting the doors of the Assembly on those who prevented it doing its work; in the HÔtel of the Interior scoffing at Roland’s weakness in believing in the sincerity of Louis XVI.; in urging Servan to present his plan for a camp of twenty thousand soldiers around Paris without the King’s knowledge; in writing the letter to the King and in pushing Roland to present it to the Assembly; in encouraging Barbaroux in his preparations for the 10th of August,—she had preached the necessity and the wholesomeness of insurrection.

Throughout this period there is not a word to show that she hesitated about the wisdom of her demand. She was convinced, and never wavered. It was her conviction which held Roland. It was her inspiration that fired the Gironde. Now that the force that she had evoked was organized, logically she must unite with it.

Roland began his ministry consistently enough. Within twelve hours after his appointment he had changed every one in his bureaux suspected of sympathy with the constitution. He wrote immediately to the departments describing the Revolution and sending copies of “all the laws and all the pieces relative to the great discoveries of the 10th of August,” and lest the people should not hear of them, he urged the curÉs and officials to read them aloud whenever they could secure a gathering of people.

Everywhere in the departments he upheld the Jacobin party. Thus at Lyons where the directory of Rhone-et-SÂone had been continually at war with the municipality because of its moderation, the former body was deposed and the latter put into power with the compliment that in all cases it had maintained peace and tranquillity in spite of the fanaticism of the enemies of the Revolution. Chalier, who came to Paris to represent the municipality,—Chalier, who believed that calm could only be obtained in Lyons by filling the streets with “impure blood” and who led in the horrible massacres of the city,—was, through Roland’s influence, sent home “with honors.”

Never was Roland’s energy greater. He worked twenty hours out of twenty-four, and even his four hours of repose were often interrupted. By the 20th of August he was able to present the Assembly with a report on the condition of France. In all his work he was logically in harmony with the Second Revolution.

But Roland soon found himself hindered in his activity by an important part of the insurrectionary force which had produced the 10th of August,—the Commune of Paris. The commissioners who had been sent to the Town Hall the night of the 9th, with orders from their sections to devise means to save the country, had refused to go away; large numbers of violent Jacobins had joined the body, among them Robespierre and Marat. The regular municipality had disappeared.

The Commune believed that there was more need of it now than ever. The passions which had been excited to call it into being were more violently agitated than ever. The body felt, and rightly, that only the greatest vigilance would preserve what had been gained on the 10th of August; for now, as never before, the aristocratic and constitutional part of France was against the Jacobin element; now more than ever the allied powers felt that it was the business of kings to reinstate Louis XVI. The Commune understood the force against it, saw that only audacious and intrepid action would conquer it, and went to work with awful energy to “save the country.”

The tocsin was set a-ringing: the conservative printing offices were raided; passports were suspended; barriers were put up; those who had protested against recent patriotic measures were declared unfit for duty; the royal family was confined in the Temple; lists of “suspects” were made out; houses were visited at night to surprise plots, seize suspected persons, examine papers, and search for firearms; a criminal court of commissioners from the sections was chosen; the guillotine was set up in the Carrousel. So much for the interior. To meet the enemy without they seized horses and ammunition, set up stands where volunteers could be enrolled, put every able-bodied man in Paris under marching orders. All of this with a speed, a resolution, a savage sort of fury which terrified the aristocrats, inflamed the populace, rejoiced Marat, and alarmed the Assembly.

From the first Roland found himself in conflict with this new body. He was the law now, and they were called to act above all law. They had a reason, the same that he had held for many months,—the divine right of taking things into your own hands and compelling people to be regenerated according to your notion. But Roland had reached the point where all the essentials in his scheme of regeneration had been gained—the Commune had not. Suddenly he who had been the vigorous champion of revolutions for removing sticks from government wheels, found himself the “stick in the wheel.” If he demanded information of the Commune, he did not receive it. If he complained of its irregularities, he was called a traitor. If he called attention to the law, he was ignored. All through August Roland and the Commune continued to irritate and antagonize one another.

There was one man through whom they might have been reconciled,—Danton, he who, with Robespierre and Marat, formed the triumvirate of the new party of Terror. Danton represented the insurrectionary idea in the ministry and it was through him alone that Roland and the Gironde might have worked with the Commune.

But from the first Madame Roland would have nothing to do with Danton. When it was announced to her that he had been chosen to the ministry, she told her friends: “It is a great pity that the Council should be spoiled by this Danton, who has so bad a reputation.” They told her that he had been useful to the Revolution; that the people loved him; that it was no time to make enemies; that he must be used as he was. She could do nothing to keep him out, but she was not convinced of the wisdom of the choice.

He sought her at once; for after the suspension of the King, Danton never ceased to repeat that the safety of France lay in union,—in an effort of all parties against the foreign invaders. “The enemy is at our door and we rend one another. Will all our quarrels kill a Prussian?” was his incessant warning. Few days passed that he did not drop into the HÔtel of the Interior; now it was for the Council meeting, to which he came early, hunting her up in her little salon for a chat before the meeting began: again he dropped in on the days she was unaccustomed to receive, begging a cup of tea before he went to the Assembly. Fabre d’Eglantine often accompanied him. It was not a warm welcome they received. They talked to her of patriotism, and she replied in a tone of superiority and with a tinge of suspicion which was evident enough to Danton and his colleague and could not fail to irritate them. She gave them to understand that she saw through them, that she felt herself incorruptible, and that no consideration would induce her to unite with an element she suspected.

Danton soon realized her inflexibility and before the end of August he had ceased his visits. Madame Roland had refused the only mediator between Gironde and Mountain, and in so doing had lighted another interior blaze. She was too intelligent a woman for one to suppose that she did not see the danger in further disunion. Why then for the Republic’s sake, for humanity’s sake, did she not unite with him?

The only reason she gives is the physical repugnance that Danton inspired in her. She confessed that no one could have shown more zeal, a greater love of liberty, a livelier desire to come to an understanding for the sake of the public cause, than he. Certainly she had based her judgments thus far in the Revolution on such indications, but Danton was of a different nature from the men who surrounded her. A volcanic animal tremendous in passions as in energy, in intellect, in influence. She says that never did a face seem to her to show brutal passion so perfectly. Her imagination had been awakened. All her life she had been the plaything of this imagination, and every face that came under her eyes had been read, its owner’s character analyzed and his rÔle in life assigned. Danton she figured poniard in hand, exciting by voice and gesture a troup of assassins more timid or less bloodthirsty than he. She could not conquer the effect of this vision and for this reason she refused his proffer of reconciliation.

Had Danton offended her by some coarse familiarity? The best reason for rejecting this explanation of her dislike is that she says nothing about it. If an unwarranted gallantry had ever occurred, we may be positive that she would not have kept it to herself. The “confessions” of her Memoirs make such an interpretation impossible; even her friend Lanthenas was not spared on this score. It is impossible to suppose that Danton would have been.

For the first time, Madame Roland found herself face to face with a man who was an embodiment of the insurrectionary spirit. Hitherto that spirit had been an ideal, a theory, an unseen but powerful force which was necessary to accomplish what she wanted. Personally she had never come in contact with it. She had idealized it as an avenging spirit, “terrible but glorious,” cruel but just, awful but divine. That this force had an end to reach, a personal ambition to satisfy, an ideal to attain, that it might come into conflict with her, she had not calculated. In her plan it was simply an avenging fire which she could use, and which, when she had had enough of it, she could snuff out.

But now she saw an insurrection as a bald fact. Danton was a positive, living incarnation of her doctrine. Instead of rhapsodizing over the “divine right of insurrection,” he organized the slums into brigades; instead of talking about Utopia, he gave the populace pikes and showed them how to use them. His policy was one of action. It was a fearful bloody policy, but it was definite and practical, and a logical result of what Madame Roland had been preaching.

The revolt she experienced against Danton’s brutality made her unwilling that the insurrectionary force should be longer recognized. She suddenly became conservative, as the radical who has gotten what he wants always must. She was jealous, too, for her party. They were the patriots, and they must be the ruling element in the new government. It would be a shame to share their power with so terrible a Hydra. It was but a little time before Roland under her influence was at cross-purposes with Danton in the Council. Roland was destined to run athwart a more relentless and savage enemy than Danton could ever be,—Marat, l’Ami du Peuple; that Marat the destruction of whose journal by the “satellites of Lafayette” Madame Roland had complained of but a year ago. The most violent and uncontrolled type of the Revolutionary fury, Marat had won his following by his daring l’Ami du Peuple, where in turn he had bombarded every personality of the Revolution who seemed to him to favor anything but absolute equality, who worked to preserve any vestige of the old rÉgime, or who hesitated at any extreme of terrorism. In the spring of 1792, the “Brissotine faction” had been his target. His complaint against it was the making of the war. Roland he had practically ignored, for until now Roland had been the defender of Marat’s methods.

The 11th of August Marat had had his people carry off from the national printing office four presses,—his due, he claimed, for those that the old rÉgime had confiscated. It was a bit of lawlessness that Roland felt he should rebuke. It was a first point against the minister. Soon after the Department of the Interior received a large amount of money for printing useful matter. Marat considered his productions of the highest importance to the country. He asked for fifteen thousand livres. Roland replied wisely that it was too large a sum for him to give without knowledge of the object to which it was to be put, but that if Marat would send him his manuscripts he would submit them to a council to see if they were suitable to be published at the expense of the nation. But this was questioning the purity of Marat’s patriotism, submitting to scrutiny the spokesman of the people, and Marat was angry. He felt, as Roland had since the beginning of the Revolution, that the right to cry out against all that he suspected, and to voice all the terrors that swarmed in his head, was unlimited and divine.

Thus Roland had antagonized the Commune, Danton, and Marat, before the September massacres, but he had done nothing to show the public that he would not support their policy. On the second day of the massacres, however, acting on the advice of Madame Roland, he put himself in open conflict with them.

It was on the second day of September that the riot began. Revolted by the barbarity of the slaughter, stung by the insult offered them in a raid on their hÔtel, half-conscious, too, that they must do something or their power would slip from them, they determined on the 3d, that Roland should protest to the Assembly against the massacre. But to protest was to put himself in antagonism with the Commune, with Robespierre, Marat, Danton. It was to make himself forever a suspect, to take his life in his hand. But that was immaterial to Roland and to his wife. To die was part of the Gironde programme, and they were all of them serenely indifferent to death if they could only serve the public by dying. Roland wrote a letter to the Assembly, which is an admirable specimen of the way in which he applied theories to situations which needed arms and soldiers—a letter of platitude and generalities. He called attention to the danger of disorganization becoming a habit; explained where power legally belonged, and what the duties of the people were in circumstances like those they then faced. As for the massacre, he said: “Yesterday was a day over whose events it is perhaps necessary to draw a veil. I know that the people, terrible in vengeance, showed a kind of justice. They do not seize as victims all who fall in their way. They take those whom they believe to have been too long spared by the law, and whom they are persuaded in the peril of the moment should be sacrificed without delay. But I know that it is easy for agitators and traitors to abuse this effervescence, and that it must be stopped. I know that we owe to all France the declaration that the executive power was unable to foresee and prevent these excesses. I know that it is the duty of the authorities to put a stop to them or to consider themselves crushed. I know, further, that this declaration exposes me to the rage of certain agitators. Very well, let them take my life. I desire to save it only to use it for liberty, for equality.”

These were bold words considering the situation. They were an open defiance to the Mountain. They showed that the Minister of the Interior, hitherto the enemy of the party of Order, had put himself at the head of that party; that he had suddenly determined that he was going to snuff out the candle he had gone to so much pains to light. He did not consider it a serious task. It was only a question of appealing to the people. “The docile people at the voice of their legislators will soon feel that they must honor their own work and obey their representatives.”

The next day, September 4th, Roland wrote to the commander general of the National Guard, Santerre, to employ all the forces that the law gave him to prevent that either persons or property be violated. He sent him a copy of the law and declared that he threw the responsibility of all future disorder on Santerre. It was fully two days after this however, before the massacre was stopped.

Before the end the revolt of the Rolands was complete and terrible. They, with the Gironde, were, indeed, very much in the position of keepers of wild beasts, who, to clear their gardens of troublesome visitors, let loose the animals. The intruders are driven out, but when they would whistle in their beasts they find themselves obliged to flee or to be torn in pieces in turn. “We are under the knife of Robespierre and Marat,” Madame Roland wrote on the 5th of September, and a few days later:

“Marat posts every day the most frightful denunciations against the Assembly and the Council. You will see both sacrificed. You will believe that is possible only when you see it done, and then you will groan in vain over it. My friend Danton directs everything, Robespierre is his mannikin, Marat holds his torch and his knife; this fierce tribune reigns and we are only waiting to become its victims. If you knew the frightful details of this affair,—women brutally violated before being torn to pieces by these tigers, intestines cut off and worn as ribbons, bleeding human flesh eaten.... You know my enthusiasm for the Revolution. Well, I am ashamed of it. It is stained by these wretches. It is become hideous. It is debasing to remain in office.”

She had begun to experience one of the saddest disillusions of life,—the loss of faith in her own undertaking, to see that the thing she had worked to create was a monster, that it must be throttled, that it was too horrible to live.

The massacre was scarcely ended before Marat attacked Roland. He called him a traitor trying to paralyze the means necessary to save the country; his letter to the Assembly he stigmatized as a chef-d’oeuvre of cunning and perfidy; he accused him of securing the nomination of as many Brissotins as possible, of scattering gold by the handful to secure what he wanted; again it was “opium” he was scattering to hide his conspiracy with the traitors of the National Assembly. Madame Roland was immediately brought to the front in Marat’s journal, he giving her the credit of her husband’s administration.

“Roland,” he says, “is only a frÈre coupe-choux that his wife leads by the ears. It is she who is the Minister of the Interior under the direction of L’IlluminÉ L’AntÉnas, secret agent of the Guadet-Brissot faction.” In the same number of his journal there is an article under the heading “Bon mot À la femme Roland,” where she is accused of squandering national funds and of having Marat’s posters pulled down.

The quarrels between the various factions of the republicans were so serious before the end of September that the best men of all parties saw the imperative need of sacrificing all differences and antagonisms, in order to combine solidly against the enemies of the new rÉgime.

Roland made overtures to Dumouriez, then at the head of the army, and was welcomed. Danton did his best to persuade the Girondins to forget the September massacres, and turn all their attention to protecting the country. A portion of the party was ready to compromise, but others refused; they were the circle about Madame Roland. Dumouriez, who came to Paris after the important victory of Valmy in September, did his best to reconcile her. In his judgment, “there was but one man who could support the Gironde, save the King and his country,—that man was Danton,” but he was unsuccessful in spite of his diplomacy.

The experiences of September, the desperate condition of affairs, the need of concentrating the entire force of the nation against the invaders, the disorganization which was increasing on account of the dissension among the patriots, the impotence of Roland, the power of the Commune,—all seemed calculated to force Madame Roland to compromise with the insurrectionary force as represented by Danton. That she would not see the necessity of it, that she, so intelligent when she was unprejudiced, so good a politician when she undertook a cause, should refuse the only relation which could have enabled the Gironde to keep the direction of the new government, was no doubt due partly to the fact that she was at this time under the influence of the deepest passion of her life.

A woman in love is never a good politician. The sentiment she experiences lifts her above all ordinary considerations. All relations seem petty beside the supreme union which she desires. The object of her passion becomes the standard for her feelings towards others. She is revolted by natures which are in opposition to the one which is stirring hers. The sentiments, the opinions, the course of action of her lover, become personal matters with her. She is incapable of judging them objectively. She defends them with the instinctive passion of the animal, because they are hers. Intelligence has little or nothing to do with this defence. Even if she be a cool-headed woman with a large sense of humor and see that her championship is illogical, she cannot give it up.

Madame Roland’s antipathy to Danton was intensified by her love for a man who was in every way his opposite. The reserved, cold dignity of the one made her despise the tempestuous oratory of the other. His ideals and theories made Danton’s acts and riots more odious. His refinement and melancholy put in insupportable contrast the brutality and joviality of the great Commune leader. She could not see Danton’s importance to the success of the Second Revolution, when absorbed in a personality so different. All political tactics and compromises seemed to her insignificant, trivial, unworthy in connection with her great passion. Undoubtedly, too, she hoped to see her lover take a position in the new legislature,—the Convention,—of which he was a member, which would make the Gironde so strong that it would not need Danton.