Part 6

It is a sad thing to say, but even their community in suffering did not disarm Madame Roland's hate for Marie Antoinette. It was in prison, on the eve of ascending the scaffold herself, that she wrote concerning Louis XVI. and the Queen: "He was led away by a giddy creature who united the presumption of youth and grandeur to Austrian insolence, the intoxication of the senses, and the heedlessness of levity, and was herself seduced by all the vices of an Asiatic court, for which she had been too well prepared by the example of her mother." Ah! why {82} were not these cruel lines effaced by the tears Madame Roland shed in floods over the pages she was writing, and of which the traces still remain on the manuscript of her Memoirs? Why did she not sympathize in the grief of Marie Antoinette, separated from her children, when in speaking of her daughter Eudora, she wrote: "Good God! I am a prisoner, and she is living far from me! I dare not even send for her to receive my embraces; hatred pursues even the children of those whom tyranny persecutes, and mine, with her eleven years, her virginal figure, and her beautiful fair hair, could hardly appear in the streets without creatures suborned or deluded by falsehood pointing her out as the offspring of a conspirator. Cruel wretches! how well they know how to tear a mother's heart!"

Why were these two women political adversaries? Both sensitive, both artistic, with inexhaustible sources of poetry and tenderness at heart, they were born for gentle emotions and not for horrible catastrophes. Who, at their dawning, could have predicted for them such an appalling night? Like Marie Antoinette, Madame Roland loved nature and the arts. She felt the profound and penetrating charm of the fields. She drew, she played on the harp, guitar, and violin, and she sang. "No one knows," she wrote a few moments before her death, "what an alleviation music is in solitude and anguish, nor from how many temptations it can save one in prosperity." She had sung the same romances {83} as the Queen. The same poets had inspired and affected each.

Does not this most feminine passage in Madame Roland's Memoirs recall the character of the mistress of the Little Trianon? "I always remember the singular effect produced on me by a bunch of violets at Christmas; when I received them I was in that condition of soul often induced by a season favorable to serious thought. My imagination slumbered, I reflected coldly, and I hardly felt at all; suddenly the color of these violets and their delicate perfume struck my senses; it was an awakening to life.... A rosy tinge suffused the horizon of the day." Would not this cry of Madame Roland in her captivity suit Marie Antoinette as well? "Ah! when shall I breathe pure air and those soft exhalations so agreeable to my heart?" And might not the daughter of the great Maria Theresa have cried, like the daughter of Philipon the engraver? "Adieu! my child, my husband, my friends. Adieu! sun whose brilliant rays brought serenity to my soul, as if they were recalling it to the skies. Adieu! ye solitary fields which have so often moved me."

What must not these two keenly sensitive women have had to suffer at the epoch when France became a hell? They have each believed in the amelioration of the human species and the return of the golden age to earth, and what will their awakening be, after such alluring dreams? Men will be as unjust, as wicked, as cruel to the republican as to the queen. {84} She, too, will be drenched with calumnies and outrages. They will insult her also in the most cowardly and ferocious manner. Under the very windows of her dungeon she will hear the hawkers crying: "Great visit of Père Duchesne to Citizeness Roland, in the Abbey prison, for the purpose of pumping her." The ignoble journalist will call her "old sack of the counter-revolution." He will say to her with his habitual oaths: "Weep for your crimes, old fright, before you expiate them on the scaffold!" The wife of Louis XVI. and the wife of Roland will die within twenty-three days of each other: one on October 16, the other on November 8, 1793. They will start from the same prison of the Conciergerie, to be led to the same Place Louis XV., to have their heads cut off by the blade of the same guillotine. The commoner who had been so jealous of the Queen, can no longer complain. If the lives of the two women have been different, they will at least have the same death; and the doer of the noble deeds of the régime of equality, the headsman, will make no distinction between the two victims, between the veritable sovereign, the Queen of France and Navarre, and the sovereign of a day, whom Père Duchesne, as insolent to one as to the other, will no longer speak of except under the sobriquet of Queen Coco.

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VIII.

MADAME ROLAND AT THE MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR.

Roland took the portfolio of the Interior, March 24, 1792, and installed himself and his wife in the ministerial residence, then occupying the site afterwards built on by the _Théâtre Italien_. This very beautiful and luxurious mansion had formerly been the controller's office, and both Calonne and Necker had lived in it. Madame Roland found no small pleasure in queening it under the gilded canopies of the old régime. It was not at all disagreeable to her to give dinners in the sumptuous banqueting hall erected by the elegant Calonne, nor did the austere admirer of the ancients set the black broth of Sparta before her guests.

Once arrived at power, was this great enemy of nobility and prescription simple, and easy of approach? Not in the least. There is often more arrogance displayed by parvenus of both sexes than by those who are aristocrats by birth. Madame Roland was extremely proud of her new dignity, and at once resolved, as she tells us in her Memoirs, neither to make nor receive visits. Her attitude and {86} manners while at the ministry were those of an Asiatic sovereign. She secluded herself, permitting only a small number of privileged courtiers to enter her presence. Under the old régime, the wives of ministers and ambassadors, dukes and peers, had never felicitated themselves on "cultivating their private tastes" to the detriment of the proprieties and obligations of good breeding. But the Revolution had changed all that. French politeness was now mere old-fashioned rubbish. At the Ministry of the Interior, the etiquette whose "severity" is vaunted by Madame Roland was more rigorous than that of the court of Versailles, and it was easier to see the wife of the King than the wife of the minister. With what hauteur the latter expresses herself concerning "the self-seeking crowds who throng about those who hold great places"! Assuredly, the Queen had never spoken of her subjects in this tone of disdainful patronage.

Madame Roland, who "was tired of fools," incommoded herself for nobody. The agreeable side of power was all she wanted. Suppressing the receptions which annoyed her, she gave none but men's dinners, where she perorated and paraded, and where, being the only woman present, she had no rivals to fear. Self-sufficiency and insufficiency are, for the most part, what fall to the share of parvenus. What would have been said in the old days of a noble dame who did the honors of a ministry so strangely, who never invited another woman to {87} dinner, and admitted no one to her presence but a little clique of flatterers? Everybody would have accused such a lady as lacking in good breeding. But to Madame Roland all that she did was right in her own eyes. How could a woman so superior be expected to submit to the tyranny of polite usages? Was not the first of all despotisms the very one to be shaken off? and ought not a person so proud of the originality of her genius feel bound before all things, as she said herself, "to preserve her own mode of being"? Madame Roland did at the ministry just what she did from her cradle to her grave: she posed.

"To listen to Madame Roland," said Count Beugnot in his witty and curious Memoirs, "you would have thought she had imbibed the passion for liberty from reading the great writers of antiquity.... Cato the Elder was her hero, and it was probably out of respect for this hero that she showed a lack of courtesy towards her husband. She was unwilling to see that there was as much difference between Roland's wife and the Roman minister as there was between the Brutus of the Revolutionary Tribunal and him of the Capitol. Self-love was the means by which this woman had been elevated to the point where we have seen her; she was incessantly actuated by it, and does not dissimulate the fact." It was she, and not her husband, who was Minister of the Interior. If the aristocrats treated Roland as a minister _sans-culottes_, it might have been added that the {88} breeches which he lacked were worn by his spouse. Out of all the rooms composing a vast apartment, she had chosen for her own daily use the smallest that could be converted into a study, and kept her books and writing-table in it. It was from this boudoir, half literary, half political, that she conducted the ministry according to her own whims. "It often happened," says she, "that friends or colleagues desiring to speak confidentially with the minister, instead of going to his own room, where he was surrounded by his clerks and the public, came to mine and begged me to have him called thither. Thus I found myself in the stream of affairs without either intrigue or idle curiosity. Roland took pleasure in talking these subjects over with me afterwards with that confidence which has always reigned between us, and which has brought our knowledge and our opinions into community."

On this head, M. Dauban makes the very just remark: "A community in which there is no equilibrium of forces, becomes a sort of omnipotence for the strongest." The omnipotence in this case was not on the side of the beard, but of Madame Roland. The wife wrote, thought, and acted for her husband. It was she who drew up his circulars and reports to the National Assembly. "My husband," she tells us, "had nothing to lose in passing through my hands. Roland, without me, would have been none the less a good administrator; with me, he has made more sensation, because I imparted to my writings {89} that mixture of force and sweetness, that authority of reason and charm of sentiment, which perhaps belongs only to a sensitive woman, endowed with sound understanding." And the "virtuous" Roland took pride in the magnificent phrases which he naïvely believed to be the expression of his own genius, when his wife had saved him not merely the trouble of writing, but even of thinking. "He often ended," she says, "by persuading himself that he had really been in a good vein when he had written such or such a passage which proceeded from my pen."

Madame Roland had at her orders a man of letters, salaried by the Ministry of the Interior, who was the official defender of the minister and his policy. "It had been felt," she tells us, "that it was needful to counteract the influence of the court, the aristocracy, the civil list and their journals, by popular instructions to which great publicity should be given. A journal posted up in public places seemed to be the proper thing, and a wise and enlightened man had to be found for its editor." This wise and enlightened man was Louvet, the author of the _Amours de Faublas_. He was the writer whom Madame Roland esteemed most capable of instructing and of moralizing the masses. "Men of letters and persons of taste," she says, "know his charming romances, in which the graces of imagination are allied to lightness of style, a philosophical tone, and the salt of criticism. He has proved that his skilful hand could alternately shake the bells of folly, hold the burin of history, and {90} launch the thunderbolts of eloquence. Courageous as a lion, simple as a child, a sensible man, a good citizen, a vigorous writer, he could make Catiline tremble from the tribune, dine with the Graces, and sup with Bachaumont."

Madame Roland admired the author of _Faublas_, now become the editor-in-chief of the _Sentinelle_; but among her intimates there was a man whom she admired much more. This was Buzot. With what complacency she draws in her Memoirs the portrait of this man "of an elevated character, a haughty spirit, and a vehement courage, sensitive, ardent, melancholy; an impassioned lover of nature, nourishing his imagination with all the charms she has to offer, and his soul with the principles of the most touching philosophy; he seems formed to enjoy and to procure domestic happiness; he could forget the universe in the sweetness of private virtues practised with a heart worthy of his own." Needless to say that in Madame Roland's thought, this heart worthy of the heart of Buzot was her own. "He is susceptible," says she, "of the tenderest affections" (always for Madame Roland), "capable of sublime flights and the most generous resolutions." Into what ecstasies she falls over the noble face and elegant figure of this handsome man, in whose costume "reigns that care, cleanliness, and decency which manifest the spirit of order, taste, the sentiment of decorum, and the respect of an honest man for the public and himself"! How she contrasts with {91} men who think patriotism consists in "swearing, drinking, and dressing like porters, in order to fraternize with their equals," this attractive, this irresistible Buzot, who "professes the morality of Socrates and the politeness of Scipio"!

Clearly, the veritable idol of the Egeria of the Girondins is not the republic, but Buzot. He is so elegant, so distinguished! His mind and his person have so many charms! Poor Roland! You think that your better half is solely occupied with your ministry. Alas! this learned woman has other thoughts in her head. Your position as a minister has not augmented your prestige in the region of sentiment. Though you lord it in the Hotel Calonne, yet, in spite of the throng of petitioners and flatterers who surround you, you will never be a Lovelace, and your romantic spouse will not allow herself to be affected by your appearance, like that of a Quaker in Sunday clothes. You thought you were doing wonders in presenting yourself at the council of ministers with lanky, unpowdered locks, a round hat, and shoes minus buckles. This peasant costume, which so greatly scandalized the master of ceremonies, doubtless made the best impression at the Jacobin Club, but your wife prefers the careful dress of her too dear Buzot.

Madame Roland, who had just completed her thirty-eighth year, was still very charming. Lémontey thus paints her portrait as she appeared at this epoch: "Her eyes and hair were remarkably {92} beautiful; her delicate complexion had a freshness and color which made her look singularly young. At the beginning of her husband's ministry she had lost nothing of her air of youth and simplicity; her husband resembled a Quaker whose daughter she might have been, and her child hovered round her with hair floating to her waist; one might have thought them natives of Pennsylvania transported to the drawing-room of M. de Calonne."

Count Beugnot, who was the companion of her captivity in the Conciergerie, is severe on the female politician, but he admires the pretty woman. "Her figure was graceful," he says, "and her hands perfectly modelled. Her glance was expressive, and even in repose her face had something noble and subtly attractive in it. One surmised her wit without needing to hear her speak, but no woman whom I have ever listened to, spoke with more purity and elegance. She must have owed her faculty of giving to French a rhythm and cadence veritably new, to her familiar knowledge of Italian. The harmony of her voice was still further heightened by graceful and appropriate gestures and the expression of her eyes, which grew animated in conversation. I daily experienced new charm in listening to her, less on account of what she said than because of the magic of her delivery."

If Madame Roland, a prisoner, crushed by misfortune, on the very threshold of the scaffold, after so many sleepless nights and so many tears, had {93} preserved such attractions, what a charm must she not have exercised at the Ministry of the Interior, when hope and pride illumined her beautiful face, and when, after appearing to her electrified adorers as the Muse of the new régime, the magician, the Circe of the Revolution, she touched so profoundly their minds and hearts! She who knew so well how to love and how to hate, who felt so keenly, who had so much energy, so much vigor, what fascination must she not have exerted with her glance of fire, her long black tresses, her more than ornate eloquence, her inspired, lyric, enthusiastic bearing, and that consummate art which, according to the remark of Fontanes, made one believe that in her everything was the work of nature!

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IX.

DUMOURIEZ, MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS.

Madam Roland had wished to reign alone. She saw an influential rival in Dumouriez, and at once conceived for him an instinctive repugnance and suspicion. She met him first on March 23, 1792, at the time when, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, he came to salute Roland, just named Minister of the Interior, as his colleague. As soon as he departed: "There," said she to her husband, "is a man with a crafty mind and a false glance, against whom it is probably more necessary to be on one's guard than any other person; he expressed great satisfaction at the patriotic choice he was deputed to announce; but I should not be at all surprised if he were to have you dismissed some day." She thought she recognized in Dumouriez at first sight, "a witty roué, an insolent chevalier who makes sport of everything except his own interests and glory."

Later on she drew the following portrait of him: "Among all his colleagues, he had most of what is called wit, and less than any of morality. Diligent and brave, a good general, a skilful courtier, writing well and expressing himself with ease, capable of {95} great enterprises, all he lacked was character enough to balance his mind, or a cooler brain to carry out the plans he had conceived. Agreeable to his friends, and ready to betray them, gallant to women, but not at all suited to succeed with those among them who are susceptible to affectionate relations, he was made for the ministerial intrigues of a corrupt court."

The nomination of Dumouriez as Minister of Foreign Affairs is one of the most curious and unforeseen events of this strange epoch. Few men have had a career so adventurous and agitated as his. A complex and mobile nature, where the intriguer and the great man were blended into one, he never commanded esteem, but at certain moments he secured admiration. Napoleon I. seems to have been too severe when he said of him that he was "only a miserable intriguer." The man who opened the series of great French victories, and who saved his country from invasion by his admirable defence of the defiles of Argonne, merited more than this disdainful mention. It is none the less certain, however, that one scents, as it were, an air of Beaumarchais in the Memoirs of Dumouriez, and that there is more than one link of character and existence between the author of the _Mariage de Figaro_ and the victor of Jemmapes. Both were men without principles, but full of resource, wit, and fascination. Both were lovable in spite of their great defects, because of their humanity and kindness. Both belonged at the same time to the {96} old régime and the Revolution. Before arriving at celebrity, each had a stormy youth, tormented by the love of pleasure, the need of money, and a sort of perpetual restlessness: they flattered every power of the time, sought fortune by the most circuitous ways, were diplomatic couriers, and secret agents; before coming out into open daylight, they made trial of their marvellous address in obscurity, and signalized themselves among those men of action and initiative whom governments, which make use of them in occult ways, first launch, then compromise, disavow, and sometimes imprison.

Born at Cambrai, January 25, 1739, Dumouriez belonged to a family of the upper middle class. Entering the army early, he distinguished himself by his high spirits and courage. As a cornet of the Penthièvre cavalry, he served in the German campaigns from 1758 to 1761, and was invalided in 1763. He spent twenty-four years at the wars and brought back nothing but twenty-two wounds, the rank of captain, a decoration, and some debts. Seeking then a new career, he entered, thanks to his connection with Favier, the secret diplomacy of Louis XV., and was sent to Corsica, Italy, and Portugal. He returned to the army in 1768, and made a brilliant record in the Corsican campaign, obtaining successively the grades of adjutant-major general, adjutant-quartermaster, and colonel of cavalry. It was he who seized the castle of Corte, Paoli's last asylum. In 1771, he again became a secret agent. Louis {97} XV. wished to befriend Poland in its death-struggle, but without betraying his hand. Dumouriez was sent to the Polish confederates. He was reputed to be merely acting on his own impulses. He organized troops and fought successfully against Souvaroff, the future adversary of the French Republic, but could not save Poland--that Asiatic nation of Europe, as he called it. He came back to Paris in 1772, and the government, complying with the demands of Russia, shut him up for a year in the Bastille, where he had leisure to meditate on the ingratitude of courts. This captivity strengthened his taste for study, and, far from allaying his ambition, gave it renewed force.

Louis XVI. put him in command at Cherbourg, and it was he who conceived the plan of making that town a station for the French marine. He was fifty years old when the Revolution of 1789 broke out. At once he saw in it an opportunity for success and glory. Full of confidence in his own superiority, he merely awaited the hour when events should second his ambition. He said to himself that the emigration, by making a void in the upper ranks of the army, was going to leave him free scope, and that he would be commander-in-chief of the French troops under the new régime. To attain this end he decided to serve the King, the Assembly, and the factions; to assume all parts and all masks, and to be in turn, and simultaneously if need were, the courtier of Louis XVI. and the favorite of the Jacobins.