founder, even though he were to perish with its crew.

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