egarding 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 Abbe 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 Abbe, 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 Abbe 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 Orfevres. 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 levee of Their Majesties: and
yet he was the rigorist Beaumont.... The ordinary and the ceremonia