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