t her works were printed, and that they produced as
much effect as if they had been written by some great statesman. These
first successes seemed to her to justify the excellent opinion she had
always entertained of herself. She got into a habit of playing the
oracle. No sooner had her lips touched the cup containing this
poisonous but intoxicating beverage than she would have no other. That
alone could refresh, even while it killed her.

{63}

Politics has the immense defect of exasperating, troubling, and
disfiguring souls. Madame Roland was born good, sensible, and
generous. Politics made her at times wicked, vindictive, and cruel.
July 26, 1789, she wrote this odious letter: "You are nothing but
children; your enthusiasm is a fire of straw, and if the National
Assembly does not order the trial of two illustrious heads, or some
generous Decius does not strike them down, you are all ... lost"
(Madame Roland employed a more trivial expression). "If this letter
does not reach you, may the cowards who read it redden to learn that it
is from a woman, and tremble in reflecting that she can create a
hundred enthusiasts from whom will proceed a million others." Roland
had been employed by the Agricultural Society of Lyons to draw up its
reports for the States-General. Madame Roland wrote much more of them
than her husband did. She sent article on article to a journal founded
by Champagneux to forward the revolutionary propaganda. Sixty thousand
copies were printed of one of them in which she described the festival
of the Federation at Lyons. Imagine the joy felt by the
_femme-auteur_, the pupil of Jean-Jacques, the model of George Sand!
Soon afterwards, the municipality deputed Roland to the Constituent
Assembly to advocate the interests of the city, which was involved to
the extent of forty millions, and which asked to have this debt assumed
by the State. Roland and his wife arrived in Paris, February 20, 1791.

{64}

The married pair installed themselves on the third floor of the hotel
Britannique, in rue Guenegaud. There a sort of political reunion was
formed, of which Brissot was the first link. Four times a week a few
friends, and certain deputies and journalists, met around this still
unknown woman, whose wit, charm, and beauty were not long in making a
sensation. It was at this period that she made Buzot's acquaintance.
The day of her first interview with the young and brilliant deputy was
an epoc