The Rolands were not long in embroiling themselves in Lyons and in the Beaujolais. Disorganization and disorder were increasing daily there, as in Paris and throughout the country. The aristocracy, clergy, and commercial portions of the community, irritated at the failure of the government to restore tranquillity, and discouraged over the delay of the National Assembly in forcing its way through the difficulties of the situation, grew hard against the Revolution. There was a universal demand for order. Disorder grew from day to day.

The conservative party was firmly convinced that the disorder was the fault of the friends of the Revolution. There was a suspicion of everybody who professed the new doctrines. Those who taught them were regarded as dangerous “agitators.” The reforms to which they had consented, and which they had left to the National Assembly, would never be made, they felt, unless the people could be quieted. They saw a general and universal catastrophe awaiting society if organization was not restored.

On the other hand, the liberals saw in the policy of the aristocrats and clergy a plot against the people; sympathy with the Court. The disorders which occurred they attributed either to the just indignation of the long-oppressed “sovereign,” or to hired agitators, brought in by the conservative party to stir up riots, and thus cover the popular cause with odium.

On either hand there were accusations without proof, suspicions without cause, violence and hatred instead of patience and good-will. All of the generosity, the dignity, the reasonableness, which the different estates had shown a year before in the memorials which they had sent to the States-General, had disappeared.

Roland and his wife were known to be deeply in sympathy with democratic ideas, to preach them constantly. In spite of the fact that his natural relations were with the aristocratic class, Roland was active in the people’s clubs at Lyons; he was called the MÆcenas of Champagneux. He was suspected, if not of inciting to disorder, yet of sympathizing with it, and of regarding it as an instrument for forcing the Court, and driving the Assembly. He began to be considered a “suspect” by the conservatives. Such was the feeling towards him when he was a candidate for mayor, in 1789, that the most improbable stories were circulated about him. The AbbÉ Guillon declares in his Memoirs that Roland disguised himself and went into the taverns, begging the people’s votes; that he joined in their orgies and distributed among them seditious pamphlets. These charges are so inconsistent with the real character of Roland that it is not worth considering them, and they are only worth quoting as a specimen of the violent suspicions of the liberals, or rÉvolutionnaires, held and spread by the conservative party.

About this time a question arose in which Roland took an active interest—that of the octroi. The misery of the people of Lyons demanded that it be removed. It was retained, however, and the people, desperate, rose in revolt. This uprising, said the patriots, was “spontaneous.” It was the “work of agitators,” declared the conservatives. Brissot, in the Patriote franÇais, condemned the riot. Roland wrote, thereupon, a long letter defending it, and remarked in Lyons, one day, that there never had been a revolution yet without bloodshed. This was enough for his opponents to declare him to be the author of the insurrection. “This report has already [21 July, 1790] reached the capitol,” wrote Madame Roland to Bancal, “and in three or four quarters of Lyons, where the mercantile aristocracy is dominant, the strangest things are said against him. You judge that this storm disturbs us very little; we have seen more terrible, and would not mind it if our enemies should cause us to be called to the bar of the National Assembly. Our friend there would be like Scipio before the assembly of the people.”

Every-day matters grew more complicated. The aristocracy, in face of the disorders, called upon the government for troops. The people, like the Parisians the year before, were exasperated at the idea of guards. At the same time rumors of an Austrian and Prussian invasion, organized by the ÉmigrÉs who had been leaving France ever since the days of October 5th, irritated and frightened the Lyonnais. It was said that the enemy would enter by the way of Savoy. The idea of a counter-revolution, centred in Lyons, was spread abroad and inflamed more than ever the nervous and terrified populace.

Madame Roland was convinced of the truth of all these rumors, just as her opponents were convinced that she and her husband meant anarchy and violence by their patriotic and determined support of the people and the Revolution. In every letter to Bancal, since June 22d,—she had been writing him constantly,—she repeated her distrust. In her judgment, it was her duty to report very alarming signs. Her two principles, at this, moment, were “security is the tomb of liberty,” “indulgence towards men in authority tempts them to despotism.”

Throughout the summer and fall of 1790, the rumors of counter-revolution, accusation, denials, suspicion, terror, similar to what Madame Roland was attempting to spread among her friends, agitated Lyons; and the preparations for the elections of the year were made in savage excitement. Roland was again a candidate for a position in the municipality and from day to day was more detested. Madame Roland’s name was everywhere associated with his. “They write me from Lyons,” she says, “that at the mention of my name the aristocrats writhe as those possessed of devils are said to do when holy water is sprinkled on them.”

Roland was elected a member of the municipal government in spite of the machinations of the aristocrats, the power of whom had been greatly weakened by the discovery in November of an extensive royalist plot. There was no doubt of the plot this time, and the reaction in favor of the Revolution was general.

They left Le Clos after Roland’s election to establish themselves at Lyons, which they had made up their minds not to abandon until after its complete regeneration. So serious were the affairs of the city that the new municipality soon decided to send representatives to Paris to claim from the National Assembly the payment of the debt that the ancient rÉgime had made her take upon herself. Roland was one of the deputies chosen to go. When he went up on this mission his wife accompanied him.

The opinions on the work of the Assembly which Madame Roland carried up to Paris were not friendly. She had watched its work all through the year with critical keenness. All its actions had been tested by her pure republican standards, and wherever they fell short had been sharply condemned. She had absolutely no sympathy with delays, with compromises, with tentative measures, and she was as aggressively suspicious of the patriotism of the members as she was of the sincerity of the aristocrats. The condition of the finances troubled her. She could see no excuse for a delay in giving the country an exact statement of the public accounts. The press had not enough liberty to please her. “A people is not free,” she declared, “and cannot become so, unless each one has the means of uncovering perfidious designs, of revealing the abuses of talent as well as of authority, of exposing the opinions of everybody, of weighing the laws in the scales of universal reason. What does it matter if one is abused, providing one is innocent and always ready to prove it? This kind of war on virtue seems to me excellent; perhaps custom and security do nothing for virtue but take away its energy. It must be attacked to be strong, and it is danger which renders it sublime.”

The manner in which the National Assembly did its work inspired her contempt. It was stupid, mere patch-work. “It jumps perpetually from one thing to another,” she complained, “and is behind with the things of the first importance without our knowing why.”

On account of this feebleness of the Assembly, she insisted that it must be watched; that addresses should be made to it by the clubs; that the bons esprits should unite and sketch the objects which it was suitable for the legislature to consider, to the exclusion of everything else. She failed to see that it was largely just this interference with the Assembly which was preventing its doing its work; that it was because the patriots in their zeal did not mind their own business, but encumbered the sittings with demands of the most varied character, threatened the body with disaster if it did not hear them, sent delegations on errands, now of private and selfish, now of large import, that the continuity she demanded was wanting.

They reached Paris towards the end of February, 1791, and installed themselves at the HÔtel Britannique, in the Rue GuÉnÉgaud, opposite the HÔtel des Monnaies. Here she was within easy reach of all her old neighbors, and whenever she went out on the street which opened on the quay, she could see her old home. She had not been in Paris for five years. In her intimate circle great changes had taken place. Her father had died in the rude winter of 1787–88; her uncle Bimont, the good curÉ of Vincennes, and the CurÉ Roland, whom they loved so well, who made the trip in Switzerland with them, and who had welcomed the Revolution as they did, were both dead. There was left only “the dÉbris of a family, which in the last ten years had become almost extinct.” She took the greatest pleasure in going over the places where her early years had been passed, and the tears of tenderness she shed in looking on these familiar scenes delighted her. They proved that she had not allowed ambition, cares, and petty passions to dry up the springs of her soul.

Her visits to her old friends were scarcely finished before she began to devote herself to public affairs. The Assembly was sitting only a little distance from her hotel, in the ManÈge of the Tuileries, now destroyed, but then running along the north side of the garden, parallel with the Rue de Rivoli, and thither she went frequently, but her first impression of the body saddened and irritated her. All the opinions she had formed at Le Clos were only intensified by the nearer view.

Two years and a half afterwards, when she recalled these visits, she noted an impression which explains unquestionably something of her harshness towards the Assembly. “I saw, with secret resentment, that if reason, honesty, principle, controlled the Left, there were advantages on the Right, that I would have gladly turned over to the good cause because of their great effect on an assembly. I mean that easy and noble elocution, that nicety of expression, that polish in the tones of the voice,—if I am allowed to express myself so,—which a superior education and familiarity with good society give.”

Her pride was wounded by the evident superiority of the aristocrats in manner and in expression. It aroused in her an altogether illogical bitterness against them. She was irritated because she and her friends, who alone, she was convinced, understood unselfish patriotism, who alone held the doctrines in all their purity and simplicity, should yet be inferior in externals to their rivals. This distinction became a personal grievance with her.

After having followed the Assembly two months, she left a session at the end of April in anger, persuaded that it was incapable of anything but folly, and vowing never to look at it again,—an engagement she faithfully kept. At the same time she told Champagneux, with whom she and Roland were both in correspondence, that she was not going any more to the theatre: “It is much too frivolous for my taste in such serious circumstances.” And to Bancal she wrote: “In other days the fine arts and all that concern them was the greatest charm of the capital in my eyes, but now that I know that I have a country I feel differently; the solicitude of the patriot leaves but little place for matters of taste.”

To the patriotic clubs she did go, however, and one of them, the Cercle Social, especially interested her. She even sent letters to it sometimes, without signing them, however. “I do not believe that our customs permit women to show themselves yet,” she said; “they ought to inspire and nourish the good, inflame all the sentiments useful to the country, but not appear to take part in political work. They can act openly only when the French shall merit the name of free men; until then, our lightness, our corrupt customs, would make what they tried to do ridiculous; and would destroy the advantage which otherwise might result.” While the Cercle Social pleased them both, the Jacobins were too conservative. “The Jacobins have lost their credit, no longer doing, or doing badly, the duty that they took upon themselves, to discuss the subjects before the Assembly,” Madame Roland wrote. “They are led by their directors’ board, which is under the thumb of two or three individuals who are much more careful about preserving their own ascendency than of propagating public spirit and of serving liberty efficiently. In the club formerly so useful everything is now done by a clique.” “We have seen those precious Jacobins,” Roland wrote to Champagneux. “If objects increase in size as we approach them, it is rare that it is not the contrary with mortals.” No doubt much of their dissatisfaction with the Assembly and the public was due to the difficulty Roland had in pushing the claims of Lyons. Paris was crowded with commissioners from all the towns between Marseilles and Dunkirk, and there was the greatest trouble in getting hearings from the committee charged with such affairs, and in persuading the deputies of the department to present the business to the Assembly. Roland worked night and day almost, to push the claim of his town. “I sleep less and walk much more. Truly I have scarcely time to live.” He besieged the committee rooms, waiting for hours before the doors to collar his man as he entered or retired. He ate his morsel of bread alone in order to run to the Assembly, where one was obliged to arrive early in order to find a seat.

The spirit in which he went into the work was one of declared war to the aristocratic party at Lyons and to the old rÉgime. He was determined to show up the situation, and exhorted his friends at Lyons to uncover all the rascality and pillage of the old administration. The deputies from the Lyonnais were not too sympathetic. They found the persistency, the vertu, the incessant indignation, the insistency of Roland, tiresome. After sitting so many long months, under such exciting circumstances, they were weary. They saw the difficulties of getting a hearing, too, from the Assembly.

Roland poured out all his impatience to Champagneux, who was his confidant and sympathizer. Long letters, written in his fine, nervous, execrable hand, went almost daily to Lyons. They were full of indignation at everything and everybody; especially was the delay irritating to him. “If affairs do not go backwards like the crab,” he says, “at least they go no faster than the tortoise.” The delay disgusted Madame Roland as much as it did her husband. Both committee and Assembly were blamed by her. She even wished that she were a man that she might do something herself.

Of much more importance to their political lives at this moment than Assembly, clubs, or committee meetings, were the frequent gatherings of patriots held at the Rolands’ apartments, in the Rue GuÉnÉgaud. They were “grandly lodged,” the quarter was agreeable, and many of their friends lived but a short distance away. As Roland found it necessary to see the deputies frequently, he gathered them about him in his home. Brissot was the nucleus of the little circle. The relation with Brissot had been, up to this time, purely by correspondence. When they came to Paris naturally they were anxious to see him. They liked him at once. His simple manners, his frankness, his natural negligence, seemed in harmony with the austerity of his principles. A more entire disinterestedness and a greater zeal for public affairs were impossible, it seemed to them. He was admirable, too, as a man, a good husband, a tender father, a faithful friend, a virtuous citizen. His society was charming; for he was gay, naÏve, imprudently confident, the nature of a sweet-tempered boy of fifteen. Such Brissot seemed to Madame Roland, who esteemed him more and more the longer she knew him.

Brissot brought several of his friends to see them. Among the most important of these were PÉtion and Robespierre. The most interesting of the group was Buzot, of whom we shall hear much, later. To PÉtion, Robespierre, and Buzot were added ClaviÈre, Louis Noailles, Volfius, Antoine, Garran (“Cato Garran”), GrÉgoire, Garaud, and several others. In April Thomas Paine appeared. So agreeable and profitable were these informal reunions found to be that it was arranged to hold them four times a week. The guests came between the close of the sessions of the Assembly and the opening of the Jacobins. The condition of affairs in general and of the Assembly in particular was discussed; the measures which should be taken were suggested, and means of proposing them arranged; the interests of the people, the tactics of the Court and of individuals, were constantly criticised.

To Madame Roland these gatherings were of absorbing interest. She calculated carefully her relation to them, the place she ought to occupy in them, and she affirms that she never deviated from it. “Seated near a window before a little table on which were books, writing materials, and sewing, I worked, or I wrote letters while they discussed. I preferred to write; for it made me appear more indifferent to what was going on, and permitted me to follow it almost as well. I can do more than one thing at a time, and the habit of writing permits me to carry on my correspondence while listening to something quite different from what I am writing. It seems to me that I am three; I divide my attention into two as if it were a material thing, and I consider and direct these two parts as if I were quite another. I remember one day, when the gentlemen, not agreeing, made considerable noise, that ClaviÈre, noticing the rapidity with which I wrote, said good-naturedly that it was only a woman’s head which was capable of such a thing, but he declared himself astonished at it all the same. ‘What would you say,’ I asked, smiling, ‘if I should repeat all your arguments?’

“Excepting the customary compliments on the arrival or departure of the gentlemen, I never allowed myself to pronounce a word, although I often had to bite my lips to prevent it. If any one spoke to me, it was after the club work and all deliberation were at an end. A carafe of water and a bowl of sugar were the only refreshments they found, and I told them it was all that it seemed to me appropriate to offer to men who came together to discuss after dinner.”

She was not always satisfied with the results of these gatherings. There were plenty of good things said, but they rarely ended in a systematic rÉsumÉ. Ideas were advanced, but few measures resulted. It was fruitless conversation, in short, and she generalized: “The French do not know how to deliberate. A certain lightness leads them from one subject to another, but prevents order and complete analysis. They do not know how to listen. He who speaks always expands his own idea; he occupies himself rather in developing his own thought than in answering that of another. Their attention is easily fatigued; a laugh is awakened by a word and a jest overthrows logic.” A more just observation on French conversation would be impossible. It is its delight. A constant bound from one idea to another, indifference to the outcome if the attention is kept, insistence by each individual upon expressing his thought at will, with eloquence and with fantasy, lawlessness, recklessness of expression, characterize all groups of clever Frenchmen who meet to talk. But this is conversation for pleasure, not discussion for results. It was in mistaking this intellectual game of words and sentiments for reflections and reason that one of the greatest mistakes of the Rolands lay. It was these vagaries of speech in public, in private, in print (the pamphlets which poured from the press were little more than random bits of conversation and as little reflective), which kept the public, the Assembly, the Court, in a constant state of ebb and flow. But Madame Roland herself was a victim to this popular weakness. Her letters, which are almost invariably outbursts of feeling rather than of reflection, may safely be considered an index to what she was in conversation.

Another real trouble of the moment which Madame Roland notes, though she does not see that she shares it, she expressed to Bancal:

“I have had the opportunity of seeing, since my sojourn here, that it is much more difficult to do good than even reflecting men imagine. It is not possible to do good in politics, save by uniting efforts; and there is nothing so difficult as to unite different minds to work persistently for the same end. Everybody believes only in the efficacy of his own system, and his own way. He is irritated and bored by that of another, and because he does not know how to bend to an idea a little different from his own, he ends by going alone, without doing anything useful. For more than a century, philosophy has been preaching tolerance; it has begun to root itself in some minds; but I see little of it in our customs. Our fine minds laugh at patience as a negative virtue. I confess that in my eyes it is the true sign of the force of the soul, the fruit of profound reflection, the necessary means for conciliating men and spreading instruction, in short, the virtue of a free people. We have everything to learn on this subject.”

Madame Roland’s letters written at this period abound in similar just criticisms on the Revolutionary temper. Her remarkably virile and comprehensive intellect penetrated the real weaknesses of the movement whenever she considered men and measures impersonally. Then she grasped perfectly the meaning of things, and her observations were profound, her insight keen, her judgments wise, and her conclusions statesmanlike.

However discreet Madame Roland may have been at the gatherings in her salon, however silent she may have kept, she gained at 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. No one had a clearer conception of the ideal government which France should have; no one expressed more eloquently all this government ought to do; no one idealized the future with more imagination, more hopefulness. No one gave himself more fully to the cause than this woman who would not go to the theatre because the country was in peril; who could not look at pictures; who was ashamed to send Bancal a song in exchange for one he had sent her, because it was not grave enough for the circumstances; who was even “ashamed to write of songs.” She became in a way the ideal Revolutionary figure, a Greek statue, the type of the Republic of which they dreamed.

Her inflexibility was as great a power over her friends. They wavered, compromised, stopped at practical results instead of pushing to ideal ones. She had decision, firmness of purpose, the determination to reach the end, and her influence over them was powerful because of this unyielding attitude. Nothing daunted her. Riot and war were sacred necessities. To die was their duty. Nothing could have been more inspiring than her firmness of purpose, her superb indifference to consequences. This high attitude had something of the inspired sibyl in it. Their “Greek statue” became their prophetess. Her very cruelty was divine. It was the “wrath of the gods,” the “righteous indignation” of the moralist.

No doubt the personal charm of Madame Roland had much to do with her influence. All who knew her testify to her attractiveness. Guillon de MontlÉon, 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.” Dumont declares that to “every personal charm” she joined “all merits of character.” Dumouriez, who certainly knew all the beautiful women of his day, found her most attractive, and speaks especially of her taste and elegance in dress. 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 her contemporaries 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 Madame 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 self-complacent passages 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.”

The portraits of Madame Roland, of which there are numbers, nearly all show a singularly winning and piquant face. Several good collections of these portraits are in existence. The Coste collection of Lyons contained thirty-three different engravings and medallions of her, and the print department of the Carnavalet Museum and of the BibliothÈque Nationale have both rather good specimens. By far the best collection, however, is in the town museum of Versailles—a recent donation of M. Vatel, a well-known collector of Gironde and Charlotte Corday documents and curios.

The only surely authentic portrait of Madame Roland is that facing this page. The original is in red crayon and much faded, but a faithful copy in black, well preserved, bearing the date of 1822, is in the possession of the great-granddaughter of Madame Roland, Madame Marillier of Paris. If one compares this portrait with that of Heinsius at Versailles, he will see that they have nothing in common. Heinsius’ portrait was bought in Louis Philippe’s time, and bore the name of Madame Roland up to 1865, when the placard was taken off because nothing proved that it was she. However, it still figures in the catalogue as Madame Roland, and photographs made after it are sold in all Paris shops. The director of the Versailles Gallery was preparing in 1893 to revise the catalogue, and purposed then to take the necessary steps to establish the authenticity of the painting, but as late as May, 1894, it still was marked Madame Roland. The family do not regard the picture as authentic; one point they make against it is that it is a full-face view, while, according to their traditions, Madame Roland never allowed anything but a profile to be made. It bears no resemblance to other authentic portraits, and is especially displeasing because of the full eyes, and the bold expression. These characteristics, however, Heinsius gave to all his portraits of French women; thus, the portraits of Mesdames Victoire and Adelaide at Versailles are almost coarse in expression, and in striking contrast to the other pictures of them which hang in the same gallery. The best reason for supposing Heinsius’ portrait to be Madame Roland is a sketch owned by the Carnavalet bearing the inscription M. J. Phlipon, gravÉ par son pÈre À 19 ans, which strikingly resembles it.

The reproduction of the painting at the MusÉe Carnavalet, as well as that of the cameo head, is due to the kindness of the director, M. Cousins. The painting is a new acquisition of the museum, exhibited for the first time in April, 1892. It is more apocryphal even than the picture of Heinsius. It is a picture of the time—that of a very charming woman, but it has almost nothing in common with Madame Roland. The eyes are blue and hers were brown, the hair is lighter, the chin is not so round and firm, the neck is longer. Besides it is a full-face view, thus contradicting the family tradition. As for the cameo head, it is evidently made after the family picture or the engraving of Gaucher, which latter possesses all the characteristics of the former.

One other portrait should not be forgotten; it is that traced in June, 1793, on the records of the prison of Sainte PÉlagie by her jailer.

Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, wife of Roland, ex-minister, aged thirty-nine years, native of Paris, living Rue de la Harpe, No. 5.

Height, five feet; hair and eyebrows dark chestnut; brown eyes; medium nose; ordinary mouth; oval face; round chin; high forehead.