, inspired, and
animated that most mischievous group with all the concentrated fires of
envy, jealousy, and revenge, which had smouldered in her own heart from
the time when, as a girl of seventeen, she had passed a week 'in the
garrets' of the palace at Versailles with Madame Le Grand, one of the
tirewomen of the Dauphiness. The firmness with which Madame Roland met
her own fate on the scaffold has been sufficiently celebrated in poetry
and in prose. But it is wholesome also to remember the ferocity with
which, in the 'glorious' month of July, 1789, a fortnight after the
capture of the Bastille, she clamoured for the blood of Marie Antoinette
and Louis XVI. In 1771 Marie Phlipon, the engraver's daughter, a girl of
seventeen, educated, as her own Memoirs tell us, on 'Candide,' the
'Confessions of Rousseau,' and the 'Adventures of the Chevalier de
Faublas,' came away from Versailles so gangrened with envy of the
glittering personages among whom she had been condemned to play the part
of a humble spectator, that 'she knew not what to do with the hatred in
her heart.' In 1780 she took as her husband M. Roland, a small
Government official. He styled himself M. Roland de la Platiere, from
the name of a small estate which belonged not to him but to his elder
brother, an excellent priest and canon of Villefranche (who, by the way,
was guillotined at Lyons in 1793), and in 1781 his young wife made him
take her to Paris, where they spent some time in vain efforts to secure
letters patent of nobility! The efforts failing, they went back to live
at Lyons, where M. Roland was an inspector of manufactories, and from
Lyons, in July, 1789, Madame Roland, now become at last a most
classical Republican, wrote to her friend M. Bosc (who afterwards
published her Memoirs), a letter denouncing the timidity of their
political friends. 'Your enthusiasm,' she exclaims, 'is only a fire of
straw! _If the National Assembly does not regularly bring to trial two
illustrious heads, or if some generous imitators of Decius do not strike
them down, you will all go to the devil._'

I soften and tone down the final phrase of this extraordinary outburst,
for though in the original it is but an indecorum as compared with that
famous passage in the 'Memoirs of Madame Roland' which M. de
Sainte-Beuve gracefully describes as 'an immortal act of indecency,' it
is yet an indecorum of a sort more tolerable in the French than in the
English tongue. If the style i