In the spring and summer of 1791, which the Rolands spent at the HÔtel Britannique, they formed many relations which lasted throughout the Revolution. In this number was a member of the Constitutional Assembly, FranÇois-Nicolas-LÉonard Buzot, a young man thirty-one years of age, coming from Evreux, in Normandy. Buzot had had the typical Gironde education, had been inspired by the Gironde heroes, and had adopted their theories.

Like Manon Phlipon at Paris, Vergniaud at Bordeaux, Barbaroux at Marseilles, Charlotte Corday at Caen, Buzot had lived an intensely sentimental life, nourishing himself on dreams of noble deeds and relations; like them, he had become devoted to a theory of complete regeneration; and like them, he had proudly flung himself into the Revolution, aspiring, inexperienced, impassioned, and confident.

Son of a member of the court of Evreux, Buzot became a lawyer in that town, and took an active interest with the liberal and enlightened part of the community in the political struggles of the Revolution. When the notables were called together in 1787, he was elected one of them. He aided in naming the deputies to the States-General, in preparing the petition which the Third Estate sent to that body, and later was elected a deputy. But his real political cares began in the Constituent Assembly, where he sat with the extreme Left. His attitude towards the confiscation of the property of the clergy is a specimen of his radicalism at this period. “In my judgment,” he declared, “ecclesiastical property belongs to the nation,” and this was at a moment when the right of the clergy to hold property had not been seriously questioned.

When the Rolands came up to Paris in the spring of 1791, they found Buzot allied with that part of the Assembly most sympathetic to them and he supported, during the time they spent in the city, the measures which they advocated.

He lived near the Rolands, and soon became a constant visitor at the house. His wife, an unattractive woman of no special intellectual cast, was nevertheless amiable and sincere and the four fell into the habit of visiting back and forth and of often going in company to call on PÉtion and Brissot.

Madame Roland was more and more attracted by Buzot’s character as she watched him in the little circle. He not only held the same theories as she, but he developed them with ardor and a sort of penetrating and persuasive eloquence which stirred her sympathetic, oratory-loving nature. His courage was endless, and it was combined with a pride and indifference to popular opinion, which harmonized with her notion that the ideal was to be kept in sight rather than the practical means of working towards it. His suspicion of others, even of some of their associates, based as it was on sentiments of patriotism, struck her as an evidence of unusual insight.

Buzot had less of that gay versatility which annoyed her in many of her circle, and which seemed to her inconsistent with the serious condition of public affairs. His nature was grave and he looked at life with a passionate earnestness which gave a permanent shade of melancholy to his conduct and his thoughts. In affairs of great importance he became tragic in his solemn concern. In lighter matters he was rather sober and reflective. It was an attitude towards life which appealed deeply to Madame Roland.

The gentleness of Buzot’s character, the purity of his life, his susceptibility to sentiment, the strength of his feelings, his love for nature, his habit of revery, all touched her imagination and caused her to select him from the circle at the HÔtel Britannique as one possessing an especially just and sympathetic nature.

When she left Paris, in the middle of September, 1791, she found the parting with Buzot and his wife most trying. She was more deeply attached to them than she knew. But if the two families were to be separated, they were not to lose sight of each other. A correspondence was arranged between them, which soon fell quite into the hands of Madame Roland and Buzot, as the correspondence had done before between the Rolands and other of their friends. Almost nothing remains of the letters exchanged between them from the middle of September, 1791, when she returned to Villefranche, and September, 1792, when Buzot went back to Paris, a member of the Convention from Evreux, where he had been acting as president of the civil court.

But it is not necessary to have the letters to form a clear idea of what they would be. Letters had always been a means of sentimental expansion for Madame Roland. She wrote, as she felt, invariably in the eloquent and glowing phrase which her emotion awakened; now with pathos and longing, frequently with the real grace and playfulness which her more spontaneous and natural moods caused. Her letters were invariably deeply personal. It was her own life and feelings which permeated them, and it was the sentiments, the interests, the tastes of her correspondent, which she sought to draw out and to which she responded. An intimate and sympathetic correspondence of this sort, even if the pretext for it and the present topic of it is public affairs, as it was in this case, soon takes a large part in a life. Close exchange of thought and sentiment, complete and satisfactory, is, perhaps, the finest and truest, as it is the rarest, experience possible between a man and a woman. When once realized, it becomes infinitely precious. Madame Roland and Buzot poured out to each other all their ambitions and dreams, their joys and their sorrows, sure of perfect understanding. At this time the thoughts which filled their minds were one, their emotions were one; both relied more and more upon the correspondence for stimulus.

To Buzot, harassed by petty criminal trials, and married to a woman who, whatever her worth, could never be more to him than his housekeeper and the mother of his children, this intimacy of thought, and hope, and despair appeared like a realization of the perfect Platonic dream, and Madame Roland became a sacred and glorified figure in his imagination.

But if a man and woman carry on such a correspondence for a few months and then are suddenly thrown into constant intercourse, their relation becomes at once infinitely delicate. It is only experience, wisdom, womanly tact, and an enormous force of self-renunciation which can control such a situation and save the friendship.

When Buzot and Madame Roland first met at the end of September, 1792, she was ill prepared for resistance. The Revolution had suddenly appeared to her fierce, bloody, desperate,—a thing to disown. She could no longer see in it the divinity she had been worshipping. Her disillusion had been terrible. The impotence and languor which follow disillusion enfeebled her will, weakened her splendid enthusiasm, and threatened to drive her to the conclusion that all effort is worthless.

It must have been already evident to her that the men upon whom she relied as leaders were inefficient. Roland, who had been the idol of the people until since the installation of the Commune, was utterly powerless to cope with the new force. She saw him reduced to defending his actions, to answering criticisms on his honesty; she felt that he was no longer necessary to the public cause; it was a humiliation to her, and her interest in Roland lessened as his importance decreased. Brissot had no influence; with a part of the Gironde, Vergniaud, GensonnÉ, Guadet, she was not intimate; Robespierre was alienated; Danton she had refused to work with. But in Buzot there was hope. He had no record at Paris to hurt him. There were infinite possibilities in his position in the new Convention. Why should he not become the leader of the party, the spirit of the war between Gironde and Mountain, the opponent of Danton, the incarnation of her ideals? The hope she had in him as her spokesman, as a saviour of the situation, intensified the interest she felt for him as a friend and comrade.

Personally, too, apart from all public questions, Buzot attracted her. His noble face, elegant manners, careful toilette, pleased her. She was a woman to the tips of her fingers, and Buzot’s courtly air, his deference to her, his attentions, flattered and satisfied her. She found in him something of that “superiority,” that “purity of language,” that “distinguished manner,” the absence of which she had regretted in the patriots of the Constituent Assembly when she first came up to Paris. He presented, too, a relief to Roland’s carelessness in dress, to his indifference to conventionalities. This superiority was the more attractive because it was in a man so young. Buzot’s youth explains something of the ideality of the relation between them. A woman who preserves her illusions, her enthusiasms, her sentiments, as Madame Roland had, up to thirty-eight, rarely finds in a man much older than herself the faith, the disinterestedness, the devotion to ideals, the purity of life and thought which she demands. She is continually shocked by his cynicism, his experience, his impersonal attitude, his indifference. Life with him becomes practical and commonplace. It lacks in hours of self-revelation, in an intimacy of all that she feels deep and inspiring; there is no mystery in it—nothing of the unseen. But with a young man of a character and nature like Buzot, she finds a response to her noblest moods, her most elevated thoughts.

A young man sees in a relation with a woman of such an elevation of thought as Madame Roland the type of his dreams, the woman to whom sentiments and ideals are of far more importance than amusement and pleasure—the woman capable of great self-sacrifice for duty, of untiring action for a noble cause, of comprehension of all that is best in him, of brave resistance to temptation—and yet a woman to the last, dainty in her love of beauty, flattered by his homage, untiring in her efforts to please him, capable of a passion wide as the world.

Buzot’s relation to Madame Roland must have been the dearer to her because at the moment the intimacy which she had had with several of her friends was waning. With Roland working twenty hours out of the twenty-four, tormented by false accusations, conscious of his helplessness, irritated by dyspepsia and over-work, there could have been very little satisfactory personal intercourse. Their relation had come to the point to which every intimate human relation must come, where forbearance, charity, a bit of humorous cynicism, courage, self-sacrifice, character, and nobility of heart must sustain it instead of dreams, transports, passion. She was incapable of the effort.

Bosc was an old friend and a loving one, but their friendship had reached the stage where all has been said that could be, and while there was the security and satisfaction in it which comes from all things to which one is accustomed,—and it was necessary to her no doubt,—there was no novelty, no possible future.

Bancal was interested in a Miss Williams, and since he had made that known to Madame Roland, she had been less expansive. No woman will long give her best to a man who holds another woman dearer.

Lanthenas, who had been for years their friend, to whom she had given the title of “brother” and received in a free and frank intimacy, had begun to withdraw his sympathy.

When Buzot came to Paris, it was natural and inevitable that they should see much of each other. All things considered, it was natural, inevitable, perhaps, that love should come from their intimacy; but that Madame Roland should have prevented the declaration of this love we have a right to expect when we remember her opinions, her habit of reflection, and, above all, her experience.

Madame Roland had never accepted, other than theoretically, the idea which at the end of the eighteenth century made hosts of advocates,—that love is its own justification; that any civil or religious tie which prevents one following the dictates of his heart is unnatural and wrong. Nor did she accept for herself the practice then common in France, as it is still, and as it must be so long as marriage remains a matter of business, of keeping marriage ties for the sake of society, but of finding satisfaction for the affections in liaisons of which nobody complains so long as they are discreet, to use the French characterization. Her notions of duty, of devotion, of loyalty, were those of the Nouvelle HÉloÏse and allowed only marriage based on affection and preserved with fidelity to the end. Her theory of life and human relations would not allow her to be false to Roland. With such opinions she could not allow Buzot to declare the affection he felt.

Had she been an inexperienced woman, such a declaration might have come naturally enough without any reproach for her; she would have been unprepared for it. Madame Roland was not inexperienced. She knew all the probability there was of Buzot loving her and she was too skilled in the human heart to believe herself incapable of a new love.

Already she had been absorbed by passions whose realization at the moment had seemed necessary to her life. Her Platonic affection for Sophie Cannet was of an intensity rarely equalled by the most ardent love. For La Blancherie she had been ready to say that if she could not marry him she would marry no one. Roland, before their marriage, she had overwhelmed by her passion, and since she had followed him incessantly with protestations of affection. Certainly she knew by this time that impassioned love may grow cool and that the heart may recover its fire and vehemence.

Nor had all her experience been before her marriage. She had not the excuse of those married women who suppose, in the simplicity of their innocence and purity, that once married there is no deviation of affection or loyalty possible, and who, when circumstances throw them into relations where a new passion is awakened, are overpowered by shame and surprise.

Her relations with different ones of her friends after her marriage had reached points which ought to have taught her serious lessons in self-repression and in tact. Bosc, with whom she was in correspondence from the time the Rolands left Paris for Amiens, became deeply attached to her. Their relation seems to have become more tender during the time that she spent in Paris seeking a title, and this quite naturally because of the loss Bosc suffered then in the death of his father, and because of the very practical aid she had given him in taking care of his sister. Their correspondence, which, while she was at Amiens, was gay and unrestrained, an ideal correspondence for two good friends and comrades, later grew more delicate. Bosc was jealous and moody at times and caused her uneasiness and sorrow. When they passed through Paris, on their way to Villefranche, in September, 1784, he found at their meeting some reason for discontent in their relation with a person he disliked, and left them abruptly and angrily.

The quarrel lasted some two months and was dismissed finally with good sense by Madame Roland telling Bosc playfully, “Receive a sound boxing, a hearty embrace, friendly and sincere—I am hungry for an old-fashioned letter from you. Burn this and let us talk no more of our troubles.”

After this whenever Bosc became too ardent in his letters, or inclined to jealousy, she treated him in this half-playful, half-matronly style. Her principle with him remained from the first to the last that there could be between them no ignorance of the question of their duty.

The experience with Bosc had taught her the strong probability that a man admitted to such intimate relations would, at some period in the friendship, fall more or less in love; and it had shown her, too, that it is possible for a woman to control this delicate relation and insure a healthy and inspiring relation. In short, Madame Roland had reason to congratulate herself, as she did with her usual self-complacency, on her wisdom and her tact in handling l’ami Bosc. Whether she would not have been less wise if she had been less in love with her husband, or Bosc had been of a different nature, a little less dry and choleric, it is not necessary to speculate here.

She was quite as happy in directing her relations with Dr. Lanthenas, whom it will be remembered Roland had picked up in Italy before their marriage, who had come back with him, who had visited them often at Amiens, and who had lived with them at Le Clos, where an apartment on the first floor is still called Lanthenas’ room. He was associated in all their planning, and in 1790, when Roland, disgusted with the turn politics had taken, sighed for Pennsylvania, Lanthenas suggested that the Rolands, and one of his friends at Paris, Bancal des Issarts, and he himself should buy a piece of national property—the State had just confiscated some millions’ worth of clerical estates and was selling them cheap—and should establish together a community where they could not fail to lead an existence ideal in its peace, its enthusiasm, its growth.

This Utopia was discussed at length in their letters, and several pieces of property near Lyons and Clermont, where Bancal lived, were visited. Roland was thoroughly taken with the idea, but Madame Roland, while she saw all the advantages, discovered a possible danger. If she had been able to resist the siege to her heart by Bosc and Lanthenas, even to win them over as allies, her relation with Bancal des Issarts had taken almost immediately a turn more serious for her. She was herself touched and interested, and her policy when she felt her heart moved was most questionable. Instead of concealing her feelings and mastering them, she poured them out to Bancal himself in a way to excite his sympathy and to inflame his passion. Indeed, the turn their correspondence took in a few months reminds one forcibly of the letters of Manon Phlipon to M. Roland in the days when, feeling herself moved by his attentions, she drew a declaration out of him by portraying a state of heart which no man who was as decidedly interested as Roland was, could resist.

It was the new community which troubled her. Bancal had shown himself so eager for it, she herself saw such a charm in it, that she became alarmed. To a letter of Bancal’s, which we can suppose to have been fervid, but which was not so much so that Roland was annoyed by it, it being he who had received it and sent it on to her, she replied: “My mind is busy with a thousand ideas, agitated by tumultuous sentiments. Why is it that my eyes are blinded by constant tears? My will is firm, my heart is pure, and yet I am not tranquil. ‘It will be the greatest charm of our life and we shall be useful to our fellows,’ you say of the affection which unites us, and these consoling words have not restored my peace. I am not sure of your happiness and I should never forgive myself for having disturbed it. I have believed that you were feeding it on a hope that I ought to forbid. Who can foresee the effect of violent agitations, too often renewed? Would they not be dangerous if they left only that languor which weakens the moral being and which makes it unequal to the situation? I am wrong. You do not experience this unworthy alternative, you could never be weak. The idea of your strength brings back mine. I shall know how to enjoy the happiness that Heaven has allotted me, believing that it has not allowed me to trouble you.”

She was quite conscious of her inconsistency, but with the feminine propensity for finding an excuse for an indiscretion, she charged it on the construction of society,—a construction which, it should be noted, she had years ago convinced herself to be necessary, and which she had repeatedly accepted, so that there was not the excuse for her that there is for those who have never reflected that human laws and codes of morals are simply the best possible arrangement thus far found for men and women getting on together without a return to the savage state, and have never made a tacit compact with themselves to be law-abiding because they saw the reason for being so.

“Why is it,” she writes, “that this sheet that I am writing you cannot be sent to you openly? Why can one not show to all that which one would dare offer to Divinity itself? Assuredly I can call upon Heaven, and take it as a witness of my vow and of my intentions; I find pleasure in thinking that it sees me, hears me, and judges me.... When shall we see each other again? Question that I ask myself often, and that I dare not answer.”

Bancal went to Le Clos, and evidently, from passages in their subsequent letters, there passed between them some scene of passion.

Later, Bancal went to London to propagate the ideas of the patriots, but Lanthenas and Roland became anxious that he return to Paris to help them there. Madame Roland dared not advise him to return, though she could not conceal her pleasure at the idea that he might, and that, too, after she was again at Paris.

“Do as you think best,” she wrote; “at any rate I shall not have the false delicacy to conceal from you that I am going to Paris, and shall even push my frankness to confessing that this circumstance adds much to my scruples in writing you to return. There is, in this situation, an infinite number of things which one feels but cannot explain, but that which is very clear, and which I say frankly to you, is that I wish never to see you bend to light considerations or to half affections. Remember that if I need the happiness of my friends this happiness is attached, for those who feel like us, to an absolute irreproachability.”

It was by this constant return to the subject that she kept the relation between herself and Bancal “interesting.” It was by holding up her duty—the necessity of “virtue”—that she provoked him. It was the “coquetry of virtue” which Dumouriez found in her.

But when Madame Roland went up to Paris she found other interests, new friends. Bancal received less attention, and he, occupied in making new friends, gave less attention; gradually the personal tone dropped from their letters, and by the fall of 1792 the correspondence had become purely patriotic. The friendship became of still less moment to Madame Roland when Bancal revealed to her his love for Miss Williams, a young English girl who had been attracted to Paris by the Revolution, and there had become associated with the Girondins.

The affair with Bancal des Issarts proves Madame Roland to have had no more discretion than an ordinary woman when her heart was engaged, and drives one to the reluctant conclusion that in her case, as in the majority of cases, she was saved from folly by circumstances.

By experience and by reflection, then, she was armed. Indeed, on whatever side we regard the revelation of her love to Buzot, she was blamable save one—and that of importance. In the general dissolution of old ideas, in the return, in theory, to the state of nature, which intellectual France had made, every law of social life, as every law of government, had been traced to its origin, and its reasonableness and justice questioned in the light of pure theory. Marriage had come under the general dissection. Love is a divine law, a higher wisdom. It is unjust, unreasonable, unnatural, to separate those who love because of any previous tie. It is the natural right of man to be happy.

This opinion in the air had affected Madame Roland. She found it “bizarre and cruel” that two people should be chained together whom differences of age, of sentiment, of character, have rendered incompatible; and although she would not consent to take advantage of this theory and leave Roland, it justified her in loving Buzot and in telling him so.

It was not only the new ideas on love and marriage which influenced her. In the chaos of laws, of usages, of ideas, of aspirations, of hopes in which she found herself, there seemed nothing worth saving but this. The Revolution was stained and horrible. Her friends were helpless, she herself seemed to be no longer of any use,—why not seize the one last chance of joy? When the efforts and enthusiasms of one’s youth suddenly show themselves to be but illusions, and the end of life seems to be at hand, can it be expected that human nature with its imperious demand for happiness refuse the last chance offered? Remember, too, that never in the world’s history had a class of people believed more completely in the right to happiness, never demanded it more fully.

At all events Madame Roland and Buzot declared their love. But this was not enough for her; she felt that she could not deceive Roland and she told him that she loved Buzot, but that since it was her duty to stay with him (Roland) she would do it, and that she would be faithful to her marriage vows. All considerations of kindliness, of reserve, of womanly tenderness, of honor, should have dictated to Madame Roland that if she really had no intention of yielding to her love, as she certainly never had, it was useless and cruel to torment Roland at his age, with failing health, and in his desperate public position, with the story of her passion. He loved her devotedly, and she had incessantly worked to excite and deepen this love—to be told now that she loved another must wound him in his deepest affections. But she had a sentimental need of frankness. She loved expansion; she must open her heart to him. In doing it she heaped upon the overburdened old man the heaviest load a heart can carry, that of the desertion of its most trusted friend and companion, and that after years of association and almost daily renewal of vows of love and fidelity.

Absorbed by her passion, she found it unreasonable and vexing that Roland should take her confession to heart, that he did not rejoice over her candor and accept her “sacrifice” with gratitude and tears. In her Memoirs she says of Roland’s attitude towards the affair:

“I honor and cherish my husband as a sensitive daughter adores a virtuous father, to whom she would sacrifice even her lover; but I found the man who might have been my lover, and while remaining faithful to my duties, I was too artless to conceal my feelings. My husband, excessively sensitive on account of his affection and his self-respect, could not endure the idea of the least change in his empire; he grew suspicious, his jealousy irritated me. Happiness fled from us. He adored me, I sacrificed myself for him, and we were unhappy.”

Such was the delicate and painful situation in which Madame Roland, Buzot, and Roland were placed during the struggle between the Gironde and Mountain. We might expect despair and indifference from them in the face of the enormous difficulties in the Convention. But they never faltered. Their courage was superb from first to last. Furthermore, there is no sign left us of distrust and irritation towards one another. Buzot supported Roland in every particular. Madame Roland and her husband were associated as closely as ever in public work. Roland and Buzot, both of them, were held to an almost Quixotic state of forbearance and strength by the exalted enthusiasm of this woman of powerful sentiments and affections. Neither of the men ever looked upon her with dimmed love and respect. In spite of all she made them suffer, inspired by her faith in their virtue, they accepted a Platonic life À trois, and for many months were able to work together.