1st of January.

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V.

THE BEGINNINGS OF MADAME ROLAND.

The moment is at hand when a woman of the middle class, born in humble
circumstances, is about to make her appearance on the scene of
politics; a woman who, after living in obscurity during thirty-eight
years, was to become famous in a few days, and attract the attention of
all France first and afterwards that of Europe entire. No figure is
more curious to study than hers, and it is not surprising that of late
years it has tempted men of great merit, such as MM. Daubant and
Faugere, whose publications have shed great light on the Egeria of the
Girondins.

At every epoch of history there are certain women who become as it were
living symbols, and sum up in their own persons the passions,
prejudices, and illusions of their time. They reflect at once its
vices and its virtues, its qualities and its defects. Such was Madame
Roland. All the distinctive characteristics of the close of the
eighteenth century are resumed in her: ardent enthusiasm, generous
ideals, aspiration towards progress, passion for liberty, heroic
courage in view of persecution, captivity, and death; an absence of
religious faith, an implacable vanity, a {47} thirst for emotions,
plagiarism of antiquity, declamatory language and sentiments, and
childish imitation of Greece and Rome. Nothing is more interesting
than to analyze the conceptions of this mind, count the pulsations of
this heart, and surprise the inmost secrets of a woman whose
psychological importance is as considerable as her place in history.
Intellectually as well as morally, Madame Roland is the daughter of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau; socially she is the personification of that
third estate which, having been nothing, wished at first to be
something and afterwards to be all; politically, she is by turns the
heroine and the victim of the Revolution, which, under pretext of
liberty, engendered tyranny, which used the guillotine and perished by
the guillotine, and which after dreaming of light expired in mire and
blood.

How was it that this little _bourgeoise_, the daughter of Philipon the
engraver, a man midway between an artisan and an artist, whose very
origin seemed to remove her so far from any political role, attained to
high renown? What influences formed this woman whose qualities were
masculine? Whence was drawn the inspiration of this siren, destined to
be taken in her own snares and die the victim of her