f the Girondins expiated
bitterly the intoxication caused by her brief popularity.

In 1777, at the age of twenty-three, she had written: "Gay and jesting
speeches fall from this mouth which sobs at night upon its pillow; a
laugh dwells on my lips, while my tears, shut up within my heart, at
length make on it, in spite of its hardness, the effect produced by
water on a stone: falling drop by drop, they insensibly wear it away."
In 1791, when she was thirty-eight, she wrote: "The phenomena of
nature, which make the vulgar grow pale, and which are imposing even to
the philosophical eye, offer nothing to a sensitive person preoccupied
with great concerns, but scenes inferior to those of which her own
heart is the theatre." The flame consuming the eloquent and ardent
disciple of Rousseau was in need of fuel, and, finding this in
politics, she threw herself upon it with a sort of ravenous fury, just
as she had once abandoned herself to study. At twenty-two she had
written to one of her young friends: "You scold me for studying too
hard. Bear in mind, then, that unless I did so, love might perhaps
excite my imagination to frenzy. It is a necessary distraction. I am
not trying to become a learned woman; I study because I need to study,
as I do to eat." It was thus that Madame Roland plunged into politics.
All her unappeased instincts and repressed forces found their outlet in
that direction.

{62}

Woman being formed by nature to be dominated, nothing is more agreeable
to her than to invert the parts, and in her turn to domineer. To exert
influence in public affairs, to designate or support the candidates for
great offices of State, to organize or direct a ministry, to make
themselves listened to by serious men, to inspire opinions or systems,
is to ambitious women a kind of revenge for their sex. Those who have
acquired a habit of exercising this sort of power cannot relinquish it
without extreme reluctance. If they have once persuaded themselves of
their superiority to men, nothing can ever root the conviction from
their minds. To be protected humiliates them; what they long for most
of all is to be acknowledged as protectresses. Self-deluded, they
attribute to their passion for the public welfare what is, especially
in their case, the need of petty glory, the thirst for emotions, or the
amusement of pride and vanity.

The Revolutionary bluestocking, Madame Roland, was from the very start
delighted to see tha