own incantations?
A rapid glance at the earliest years of Marie-Jeanne Philipon, the
future Madame Roland, is enough to explain her passions and her hopes,
her errors and her talents, her rages and her enthusiasms.

She was born in Paris, March 18, 1754, of an intelligent but frivolous
father, and a simple, devoted, {48} honestly commonplace mother. From
infancy she felt herself superior to those by whom she was surrounded.
Thence sprang an unmeasured pride and a continual hunger to produce an
impression. The infant prodigy preluded the female politician.
Speaking of herself in her Memoirs, she becomes ecstatic over the child
who "read serious works, explained very well the circles of the
celestial globe, used crayons and the burin, found at eight years that
she was the best dancer in an assembly of young persons older than
herself," and who, nevertheless, "was often summoned to the kitchen to
make an omelette, clean the vegetables, or skim the pot." She admires
her own willingness to descend to domestic cares: "I was never out of
my element," she says; "I could make soup as skilfully as Philopoemen
could chop wood; but no one, observing me, could imagine that this was
suitable employment." Still speaking of herself, she celebrates "the
little person who on Sundays went to church or out walking in a
spick-and-span costume whose appearance was fully sustained by her
demeanor and her language." She calls attention to the contrast by
which, on week-days, the same child went out alone, in a little cloth
frock, to buy parsley and salad at a short distance from home. "It
must be owned," she adds, "that I did not like this very well; but I
did not show it, and I had the art of doing my errands in such a way as
to find some pleasure in it. I united such great politeness to a
certain dignity, that the fruit-seller or other person {49} of the
sort, took pleasure in serving me first, and even those who came before
me thought this proper."

So the little Philipon wanted to take the chief place in the
fruiterer's shop, just as, later on, she desired it on the political
stage or the Ministry of the Interior. This enemy of privileges will
admit them only for herself. In everything she made pretentions:
pretentions to elegance, beauty, distinction, talent, knowledge,
eloquence, genius, and, when she wanted to be simple, to simplicity.
In her style as in her conversation, in her public as in her private
life, what she sought