Part 5

For the majority of women, still beautiful, who mingle in public affairs, love is the principal thing; politics but the accessory, the pretext. They imagine they are attaching themselves to ideas, and it is to men. In this respect the heroines of the Revolution resemble those of the Fronde. The stateswoman in {65} Madame Roland plays second to the lover of Buzot. In her mind the Republic and the handsome republican blend into one. Believing herself a patriot when she is above all a woman in love, she carries the emotions, the infatuations, the ardors and exaggerations of her private life into her public one. With her, angers and enthusiasms rise to paroxysm. She is extreme in all things.

She detests Louis XVI. as much as she loves Buzot. After the flight to Varennes, she wrote: "To replace the King on the throne is a folly, an absurdity, if it is not a horror; to declare him demented is to make obligatory the appointment of a regent. To impeach Louis XVI. would be, beyond all contradiction, the greatest and most righteous step, but you are incapable of taking it. Well then, put him not exactly under interdict, but suspend him." Here begins the influence of Madame Roland. The suspension of the royal authority is one of her ideas. "So long as peace lasted," she says, "I adhered to the peaceful rôle and to that kind of influence which I thought fitting to my sex; when war was declared by the King's departure, it appeared to me that every one should devote himself unreservedly. I joined the fraternal societies, being persuaded that zeal and good intentions might be very useful in critical moments. I was unable to stay at home any longer, and I went to the houses of worthy people of my acquaintance that we might excite each other to great measures." One knows what the {66} Revolution meant by that expression: great measures. Madame Roland became furious. She wanted a freedom of the press without check or limit. She was angry because Marat's newspapers were destroyed by the satellites of Lafayette. "It is a cruel thing to think of," she exclaims, "but it becomes every day more evident that peace means retrogression, and that we can only be regenerated by blood."

Her hatred includes both Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. June 25, 1791, she writes: "It appears to me that the King ought to be sequestered and his wife impeached." And on July 1: "The King has sunk to the lowest depths of degradation; his trick has exposed him completely, and he inspires nothing but contempt. His name, his portrait, and his arms have been effaced everywhere. Notaries have been obliged to take down the escutcheons marked with a flower-de-luce which served to designate their houses. He is called nothing but Louis the False, or the great hog. Caricatures of every sort represent him under emblems which, though not the most odious, are the most suitable to nourish and augment popular disdain. The people tend of their own accord to all that can express this sentiment, and it is impossible that they should ever again be willing to see seated on the throne a being they despise so completely."

Things did not go fast enough to suit Madame Roland's furious hatred. The popular gathering in the Champ-de-Mars, whose aim was to bring about {67} the deposition of the King, was forcibly dispersed on July 17. With six exceptions, all the deputies who had belonged either to the Jacobin Club or that of the Cordeliers, left them on account of their demand that Louis XVI. should be brought to trial. The time for great measures, to use Madame Roland's expression, had not yet arrived. The ardent democrat laments it. "I cannot describe our situation to you," she writes at this moment of the revolutionary recoil; "I feel environed by a silent horror; my heart grows steadfast in a mournful and solemn silence, ready to sacrifice all rather than cease to defend principles, but not knowing the moment when they can triumph, and forming no resolution but that of giving a great example."

The mission which had kept Roland in Paris for seven months being ended, the discouraged pair returned to their province in September. After stopping a few days in Lyons, in order to found a popular society affiliated to the Jacobins of the capital, they went to spend the remainder of the autumn at their country place, the Close of Platière. But calm and silence no longer suited Madame Roland. Repose exasperated her. She missed the struggle and the emotions of revolutionary Paris, of which she had said: "One lives ten years here in twenty-four hours; events and affections blend with and succeed each other with singular rapidity; no such great events ever occupied minds."

The pleasure of seeing her daughter again was not {68} enough to compensate her for the chagrin of having parted from Buzot. Just as she was despairing at the thought of sinking back into all the nullity of the province, as she expresses it, the news came that the inspectors of agriculture had been suppressed. Roland, no longer an official, deliberated with his wife as to their next step. His own inclination was to settle permanently in the country and devote himself to agricultural labors which would surely and safely augment his fortune. But his wife was by no means of the same mind. She must see her dear Buzot again at any cost. She flattered the self-love of her unsuspecting spouse, and persuaded him that Paris was the sole theatre worthy of the virtuous Roland. Roland allowed himself to be convinced. His wife, no longer mistress of herself, was drawn into the Parisian abyss as by an irresistible force. And yet was it not she who had proposed to herself this ideal, so easily to have been realized? "I have never imagined anything more desirable than a life divided between domestic cares and those of agriculture, spent on a healthy and fertile farm, with a little family where the example of its heads and common labor maintain attachment, peace, and freedom." Was it not she who had uttered this profoundly true thought: "I see neither pleasure nor happiness except in the reunion of that which charms the heart as well as the senses, and costs no regrets"? In the most beautiful days of her youth had she not written: "There was a time when I was never content {69} except when I had a book or a pen in my hand; at present I am as well satisfied when I have made a shirt for my father or added up an account of expenses as if I had read something profound. I do not care at all to be learned; I want to be good and happy; that is my chief business. What is necessary but good, honest common sense?" Is it not she, too, who will write at the beginning of her Memoirs: "I have observed that in all classes, ambition is generally fatal; for the few happy ones whom it exalts, it makes a multitude of victims." Why did she not more frequently remind herself of the sentiment so just and well expressed in a letter dated in 1790: "Women are not made to share in all the occupations of men: they are altogether bound to domestic cares and virtues, and they cannot turn away from them without destroying their happiness." But, alas! passion does not reason. Farewell common sense, wisdom, and experience, when ambition and love have taken possession of a woman's heart. Returning to Paris, December 15, 1791, the Rolands established themselves in the rue de la Harpe, and plunged head-long into politics. The wife redoubled her activity, eloquence, and passion. The husband, instead of attending quietly to the management of his retiring pension, was named a member of the Jacobin corresponding committee at the beginning of 1792, a revolutionary centre of which Brissot was the leader. At this period, we are informed by Madame Roland, the intimidated court imagined that the nomination of a {70} minister chosen from among the patriots of the Assembly would cause it to regain a little popularity. Brissot proposed Roland, who, on March 24, 1792, accepted the portfolio of the Interior.

Madame, behold yourself, then, the wife of a minister, and in fact more of a minister than your husband. Your ambitious projects, which have been treated as chimerical, are now realized. You have a cortège like Marie Antoinette. Men seek the favor of a smile, a word, from you. They court, they solicit, they fear you. The monarchy, which you detest, is at last obliged to reckon with you and your friends. Your beauty, your talent, and your eloquence are boasted of. Your name is in every mouth. You are powerful, you are celebrated. Well! you will find out for yourself what bitterness there is at the bottom of this cup of pride which has tempted your lips so long. You will learn at your own expense that renown does not produce happiness, and that, for a woman, twilight is better than the full glare of day. Yes, you will long for the obscurity which weighed upon you. You will long for the house of your father, the engraver, on the Quai des Orfèvres. You will dream of the sunsets which affected you, and of the monotonous but peaceful succession of your days. You, the deist, the female philosopher, will recall with regret the cloisters where in your adolescence you tasted the peace of the elect. In the time of your supreme trial Buzot's miniature will not console you; it is not his image you should cover with your {71} kisses. No; that miniature is not the viaticum for eternity. What you will need is the crucifix, and you respect the crucifix no longer. And yet your imagination will evoke the mystic cloister, with its altars decked with flowers, its painted windows, its penetrating and ineffable poesy. And in thought, also, you will see the country once more, the harvest time, the month of the vintage, the poor who come to the door asking for bread and who go away with blessings on their lips and gratitude in their hearts. Why have you quitted these honest people? What have you come to do in the midst of these ferocious Jacobins, who flatter you to-day and will assassinate you to-morrow? Do you fancy that Marie Antoinette is the only woman who will be insulted, calumniated, and betrayed? Why do you seat at your hospitable table this livid-faced Robespierre, who to-day, perhaps, will address you a madrigal, and to-morrow send you to the scaffold? You will pay very dear for these false and artificial joys, these gusts of commonplace vanity, this pride of a parvenu, and the pleasure of presiding for a few evenings at the dinners given to the Minister of the Interior in Calonne's dining-room. The Legislative Assembly, the Jacobin Club, the journals and the ministry, the souvenirs of Plutarch and the parodies of Jean-Jacques, the noisy crowd of flatterers who are the courtiers of demagogues as they would have been the courtiers of kings, these adulators who are going to change into executioners,--all are vanity! Poor {72} woman, whose power will be so ephemeral, why do you make yourself a persecutor? You will so soon be persecuted. Why labor so relentlessly to shake the foundations of a throne that will bury you beneath its ruins?

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VII.

MARIE ANTOINETTE AND MADAME ROLAND.

Two women find themselves confronted across the chessboard and about to move the pieces in a terrible game in which each stakes her head, and each is foredoomed to lose. One is the woman who represents the old régime--the daughter of the German Cæsars, the Queen of France and Navarre; the other stands for the new régime, the Parisian middle classes--the daughter of the engraver of the Quai des Orfèvres. They are nearly the same age. Madame Roland was born March 18, 1754; and Marie Antoinette, November 2, 1755. Both are beautiful, and both are conscious of their charm. Each exercises a sort of domination over all who approach her.

In 1792, when Roland enters the ministry, Marie Antoinette is no longer thinking of coquetry, luxury, or dress. The heroine of the Gallery of the Mirrors, the crowned shepherdess of the Trianon, the queen of elegance, pleasure, and fashion is not recognizable in her. The time for splendors is over, like the time for pastorals. No more festivals, no more distractions, no more theatres. Incessant anxieties and unremitting labor; writing throughout the day and reading, {74} meditating, and praying throughout the night, are now the unfortunate sovereign's whole existence. She hardly sleeps. Her eyes are reddened by tears. A single night, that of the arrest on the journey to Varennes, had sufficed to whiten her hair. She wears mourning for her brother, the Emperor Leopold, and for her ally, the King of Sweden, Gustavus III., and one might say that she is also wearing it for the French monarchy. All trace of frivolity has disappeared. The severe and majestic countenance of the woman who suffers so cruelly as queen, spouse, and mother, is sanctified by the double poetry of religion and sorrow.

Madame Roland, on the other hand, is more coquettish than she has ever been. The actress who has at last found her theatre and is very proud to play her part, wishes to allure, desires to reign. She delights in presiding at these political dinners where all the guests are men, and of which her grace and eloquence constitute the charm. She has just completed her thirty-eighth year. Her husband is nearly fifty-eight; Buzot is only thirty-two. Possibly she is still more preoccupied with love than with ambition. To use one of her own expressions, "her heart swells with the desire to please," to please Buzot above all; she takes pains to celebrate her own beauty, which, in spite of showing symptoms of decline, has the brilliance of sunset. In her Memoirs she describes her "large and superbly modelled bust, her light, quick step, her frank and open glance, at once keen and {75} soft, which sometimes amazes, but which caresses still more, and always quickens." She writes: "My mouth is rather large; there are a thousand prettier, but none that has a softer and more seductive smile." In prison, when she is nearly forty, she states that if she has lost some of her attractions, yet she needs no help from art to make her look five or six years younger. "Even those who see me every day," she adds, "require to be told my age, in order to believe me more than thirty-two or thirty-three." Madame Roland had at first written thirty-three or thirty-four. But after reflection, finding herself too modest, she made an erasure and retrenched another year. She adds that she made very little use of her charms; avowing at the same time, and with the most absolute frankness, that if she could reconcile her duty with her inclination to utilize them more fully, she would not be sorry.

Both Marie Antoinette and Madame Roland were political women. But the one became so in her own despite, in the hope of saving the life of her husband and the heritage of her son; the other, through ambition and the desire to play a part for which her origin had not destined her. In the one, everything is at once noble and simple, natural and majestic; in the other there is always something affected and theatrical; one scents the _parvenue_ who will never be a _grande dame_, even in the Ministry of the Interior or at the house of Calonne. All is unstudied in Marie Antoinette; Madame Roland, on the contrary, is an artist in coquetry.

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Bizarre caprice of fate which makes political rivals and adversaries treating with each other on equal terms of these two women, of whom one was so much above the other by rank and birth. The Tuileries and the house of the Minister of the Interior are like two hostile citadels at a stone's throw from each other. On both sides there is watchfulness and fear. An impassable abyss, hollowed out by the vanity of the commoner still more than by the pride of the Queen, forever separates these two courageous women who, had they united instead of antagonizing each other, might have saved both their country and themselves.

It is necessary to go back a few years in order to comprehend the motive of Madame Roland's hatred for Marie Antoinette. It was inspired in the vain commoner by envy, the worst and vilest of all counsellors. Madame Roland's special characteristic was the passion for making an effect. Now the effect produced by Marie Antoinette under the old régime was immense; that produced by the future Egeria of the Girondin group was almost null. A simple mortal, regarding Olympus from below, she said to herself with vexation, that in spite of her talents and her charms there was no place for her among the gods and goddesses. Versailles was like a superior world from which it maddened her to be excluded. She was twenty years old when, in 1774, she visited it with her mother, her uncle, the Abbé Bimont, and an aged gentlewoman, Mademoiselle d'Hannaches. They all lodged at the palace. One of Marie Antoinette's {77} women, who was acquainted with the Abbé, and who was not then on duty, lent them her apartment. The only object of the excursion was to give the young girl a near view of the court.

In recalling this souvenir in her Memoirs, Madame Roland displays her aversion for the old society. She is annoyed even with the companion of her visit, because she was, according to the expression then in use, a person of quality. "Mademoiselle d'Hannaches," she says, "went boldly wherever she chose, ready to fling her name in the face of any one who tried to stop her, thinking they ought to be able to read on her grotesque visage her six hundred years of established nobility. The fine figure of a pedantic little cleric like the Abbé Bimont, and the imbecile pride of the ugly d'Hannaches were not out of keeping in those scenes; but the unpainted face of my worthy mamma, and the modesty of my dress, announced that we were commoners; if my eyes or my youth provoked remark, it was almost patronizing, and caused me nearly as much displeasure as Madame de Boismorel's compliments." It was this Madame de Boismorel who, although she found the little Philipon very pleasing, had said to the grandmother of the future Madame Roland: "Take care that she does not become a learned woman; it would be a great pity."

The splendors of Versailles did not dazzle the daughter of the engraver of the Quai des Orfèvres. The apartment she occupied was at the top of the {78} palace, in the same corridor as that of the Archbishop of Paris, and so near it that it was necessary for the prelate to take precautions lest she should overhear him talk. "Two poorly furnished rooms," she says, "in the upper end of one of which space had been contrived for a valet's bed, was the habitation which a duke and peer of France esteemed himself honored in possessing, in order to be closer at hand to cringe every morning at the levée of Their Majesties: and yet he was the rigorist Beaumont.... The ordinary and the ceremonial table-service of the entire family, eating separately or all together, the masses, the promenades, the gaming, the presentations, had us for spectators during a week." What impression was made on her by this excursion to the royal palace? She herself will tell us nineteen years later, in her prison. "I was not insensible," she says, "to the effect of so much pomp and ceremony, but I was indignant that its object should be to exalt certain individuals already too powerful and of very slight personal importance: I liked much better to look at the statues in the gardens than at the persons in the palace; and when my mother asked if I was satisfied with my visit, 'Yes,' I replied, 'provided it will soon be over; if I stay here many days longer, I shall detest the people so much that I shall be unable to hide my hatred.' 'What harm are they doing you, then?' 'Making me feel injustice, and constantly behold absurdity.'"

How this impression is emphasized in the really {79} prophetic letter written by the future heroine of the Revolution to her friend, Mademoiselle Sophie Cannet, October 4, 1774: "To return to Versailles. I cannot tell you how greatly all I have examined has made me value my own situation, and thank Heaven that I was born in an obscure condition. You think, perhaps, that this sentiment is based on the slight esteem I attach to the worth of opinion, and my sense of the reality of the penalties attached to greatness. Not at all. It is based on the knowledge I have of my own character, which would be very detrimental both to me and to the State if I were placed at a little distance from the throne; because I would be keenly shocked by the extreme inequality which sets so many thousands of men below a single individual of the same species!" What a prediction! The most unforeseen events were one day to bring this young plebeian near that royalty formerly so far above her. The engraver's daughter will be the wife of a minister of State. And then what will happen? According to her own expression, her rôle will be very detrimental to herself and to the State.

In the same letter she had written: "A beneficent king seems to me an almost adorable being; but if, before coming into the world, the choice of a government had been given me, my character would have made me decide for a republic." She will end by hating the beneficent King, and probably no one will contribute more than she towards establishing the republican régime in France.

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Supposing that, instead of being merely an insignificant commoner, Madame Roland had been born in the ranks of aristocracy, had enjoyed the right of sitting down in the presence of Their Majesties at Versailles, and had shone at the familiar entertainments of the Trianon, she would doubtless have shared the sentiments and ideas of the women of the old régime, and, like the Princess de Lamballe or the Duchess de Polignac, have shed tears of compassion over the Queen's misfortunes. Fate, in placing her in a subordinate position, made her an enemy and a rebel. She anathematized the society in which her rank bore no relation to her lofty intelligence and her need of domination. When, from the upper window of her father's house on the Quai des Orfèvres, beside the Pont-Neuf, she saw the brilliant retinue of Marie Antoinette pass by on their way to Notre Dame to return thanks to God for some happy event, she grew angry at all this pomp and glitter, so much in contrast with her own obscure condition. What crimes have been engendered by the sentiment of envy! The furies of the guillotine were above all things envious. They were delighted to see in the fatal cart the woman whom they had formerly beheld in gala carriages resplendent with gold. Madame Roland certainly ought not to have carried her hatred to such a pitch; but had she not demanded in 1789, when speaking of Louis XVI. and the Queen, that "two illustrious heads" should be brought to trial? Who knows? If, in 1784, she had obtained the {81} patent of nobility for her husband which at that period she solicited so ardently, she might have become sincerely royalist! But having remained, despite herself, in the citizen class, she retained and personified, to her latest hour, its rancor, pettiness, and wrath. What figure could she have made at Versailles, or even at the Tuileries? In the midst of great lords and noble ladies the haughty commoner would have been out of place; she would have stifled. It was chiefly on that account that she attached herself to the new ideas. She told herself that so long as royalty lasted, she would always be of small importance; while, if the republic were established, she might aspire to anything. Though her husband was one of the King's ministers, she became daily more adverse to the monarchy, and Roland, following her counsels, was like a pilot whose whole intent is to make the vessel founder, even though he were to perish with its crew.