ART. VII.-MADAME ROLAND.

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1. Lettres de Madame Roland aux Demoiselles Cannet. C. A. DAUBAN. 2 vols. Paris: Henri Plon. 1867. 2. Roland et Marie Phlipon: Lettres d'Amour. Par CLAUDE PERROUD. Paris: Alphonse Picard. 1909.

3. Le Mariage de Madame Roland. Par A. JOIN-LAMBERT. Paris Plon-Nourrit. 1896.

4. Lettres de Madame Roland. Par CLAUDE PERROUD. 2 vols. Paris Imprimerie Nationale. 1900-1902.

5. Mémoires de Madame Roland. Par CLAUDE PERROUD. 2 vols. Paris Plon-Nourrit. 1905.

6. Life of Madame Roland. By I. A. TAYLOR. London: Hutchinson and Co. 1911.

THE

HE career of Madame Roland has not proved interesting to English people, if we may judge by what has been written about her in our language. Miss Taylor's newly published and interesting book is the only full life of a woman who, in France at any rate, is regarded as a personage of moment. In justice to ourselves however we must admit that neither to French nor German minds has she appeared a suitable object of biography, and this is all the stranger when we realise how ample is the material for a biography in Madame Roland's case. Perhaps the reason that has caused the book-writers instinctively to abandon her is quite simply that her life was dull; that nothing happened in it, as the world counts happenings, till the last hectic months, when amid little men and great events she stood like some Roman vestal, immolating herself and those who loved her on the altar of her country. Unless one is interested in the exploration of souls, there is nothing to say about thirty-five years of her life. If one does care about that mysterious vast inner world of consciousness and emotion, there is much to say. In Ireland there are rivers which flow underground for nearly all their course, till suddenly, emerging to the surface, they create a lake, a waterfall, a fathomless pool, then sink for ever into silence. The course of Madame Roland's life was like one of these rivers; it was restricted and hidden in outward seeming: it was capable on occasion of intense and splendid expansion.

She wrote herself down in letters, and anyone who reads them may know her very intimately. The letters to her two

convent school friends-the demoiselles Cannet-cover the years 1767-80; the letters to Roland before marriage, 17771780; the letters issued by the Imprimerie Nationale in two immense volumes, 1780-87. Besides these letters there are the Mémoires written in gaol. For a woman who said she would sooner 'gnaw off her fingers than become an author,' it is a curious fate to have her name on the back of several bulky volumes.

Manon Phlipon was the only surviving child of quite ordinary people-Maître Phlipon, engraver and dealer in jewels, and Marguerite Bimont, his wife, a 'sweet-faced gentle woman.' The child was born in Paris and sent out to nurse in the country till the age of two, when she went to live on the Quai de l'Horloge, in an apartment into which her parents had newly moved. During her imprisonment, thirty-six years later, she described her childhood. It was a pleasant world to dream about in gaol. I was a child of the Seine,' she said, as she called up pictures of the agreeable quays, the quiet strand where she walked at evening time, and whence, in clear weather, she could see the country. We see from her schoolgirl letters how amazingly formed and educated she was at fifteen, and how she became so through a year's schooling in a convent, the efforts of five or six tutors, and more than all by her own wide and continuous reading. Her uncle, the Abbé Bimont, taught her religion, and at the time of her first communion she went through a not unusual emotional crisis and was regarded by the nuns of the convent as a little saint. Attending a profession' one day she was much broken down by seeing the pall thrown over the recumbent novice. Shivering with terror, she felt as if she herself were in the nun's place. 'If one

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counts life by feeling,' reflected Madame Roland in her prison cell, as she recalled this incident,' I have lived prodigiously.' At the convent Manon made one 'inseparable' friend, Sophie Cannet, to whom she wrote frequently for fourteen years. In her letters to this girl friend she gives a daily account of her experiences and sentiments. In reading them one gets into the current of her life. They are worth more than a cursory glance, because they are so much more sincere than the letters she wrote in later life to anyone save Buzot. Sophie and Buzot both touched her deeper self-others could awake friendship and deep affection but not that inner, intenser life of feeling.

The letters are often very long and they are often very formed in matter as in manner: Here am I, sitting quietly ' in my little room, pen in hand, peace and tenderness in heart,

deliciously occupied in writing to you, to paint my thoughts, 'to express my sentiments.' The thoughts roam over a variety of subjects: we find her at one moment asking, 'Since 'the gentle, timid Indian woman has courage to immolate ' herself upon a funeral pyre, what might not a French woman 'be capable of, if inspired by enthusiasm and virtues?' and a few pages further on saying: 'I read Maupertuis, I am in 'astronomy, I amuse myself vastly.' She contrasts the views of Voltaire and Pope on God. She admires the Rape of the Lock,' and Young's Night Thoughts' divert her when beclouded. But on the whole sentiments prevail, and Phlipon, as she signs herself to her dear Cannet, finds it easier to feel than to think :

'I feel that I have a cosmopolitan soul, humanity-sentiment make me one with all that breathes. A Caribee interests me, the fate of a Kaffir touches me. Alexander longed for other worlds to conquer, I should long for other worlds to love if I did not know an Infinite Being who can absorb all my sentiments.'

Writing letters she finds as necessary to her as daily bread, and reading is to her as the water of life. The works of Descartes, the poems of Voltaire, the letters of St. Jerome, 'Don 'Quixote,' all was grist to that busy mill, her mind. She became impassioned for the reformers of inequality. I was Gracchus 'at Rome'' I was the people retiring to the Aventine''I should have voted for the tribunes-Plutarch disposed me 'to become Republican; and inspired me with true enthusiasm 'for public virtues and liberty. Rousseau showed me to what 'domestic happiness I might pretend.'

The impression produced by this girl on grown-up people was not altogether agreeable; her virtues and learning were annoying, and Mme. de Boismorel, in whose family her mother had once been governess, talked to her cheerfully one day about having a lucky hand for lotteries,' and was repelled by the frigid answer: Madame, I do not like games of chance.' I suppose you want to be a nun?' gaily continued the old lady. I ignore my destiny,' replied Manon, 'I do not seek as yet to decide it.' 'How sententious,' exclaimed Mme. de Boismorel, and we echo it heartily, remembering, however, that most men and women who distinguish themselves in later life are unpleasantly inhuman in their youth.

At the beginning of the correspondence with Sophie Cannet she was walking peaceably by the enrapturing light of the 'torch-faith; ' but as years go on her views on religion become more and more 'philosophic.' She says rather proudly that a certain Abbé had exhausted himself and his library to keep

her' croyante,' and that finally he was pleased enough if she went to the Holy Table two or three times a year through 'philosophic tolerance as it was not the work of faith'; and again 'it must be granted that the Catholic religion, though very unsuitable for a sane mind, is very apt to captivate 'the imagination.'

Interspersed with reading and contemplation were excursions on fête days into the country; and always Manon chose rather to go to Meudon, with its wild woods, solitary ponds, avenues of firs and high hedges, than to St. Cloud, where there were people, and where her father-a very sociable person-liked to promenade. To Meudon she insisted on going with a volume of Rousseau or of Corneille in her hand. There in the dark green spaces she would sometimes see a deer, and when her parents were sleeping after luncheon she contemplated the majesty of the silent woods,'' admired 'nature,' 'adored Providence.' How well we know these moods of adolescence; sometimes we feel that great things are accomplished only by those persons who preserving through life the sentiment and the enthusiasm of youth, never congeal into materialism. There was a great deal of time for thinking in Manon's life, and since the prospect from her window included the Seine, the Pont Neuf, the poplars on the river bank and the steep roofs of the Louvre she spent much time looking out of window. Sometimes, however, it was better not to look out, for sometimes dreadful things happened in the road below. One day she writes that she has hidden at the back of the apartment because two criminals are to be broken on the wheel. I hide from these scenes of horror -I have just been fetched to see, not the execution, but the 'crowd. It is enormous, and people throng every roof and 'window applauding the shrieks of the victims by clapping ' and cheers.' Later in the same day she writes that she could not keep the shrieks of the parricide' out of her ears even in bed. He had been on the wheel for twelve hours and for all that time had been mobbed by a delighted crowd. Scenes like this led her to the conclusion that 'human nature is not respectable in the mass,' and to say: 'Every day my aversion for common souls grows.'

Sometimes she discusses matrimony in her letters and fancies herself in love with various gentlemen; sometimes she is not averse from the idea of marriage,' at other times 'she would renounce it.' From the time she was fifteen prosperous tradesmen, including a jeweller, a goldsmith, a butcher and a doctor, paid court to her, and Manon amused

herself dictating answers to all those persons who asked her father for her hand. She was twenty-one when her mother died, and a friend, in order to divert her a little from melancholy thoughts, gave her a complete edition of Rousseau's works. Somehow she had not known anything of Rousseau before, and was quite overwhelmed by the beauty of his writing and the intensity of his feeling. Her friend Sophie Cannet did not sympathise with this new taste, and Manon writes to her in a spirit of admonishment:

'Why are you astonished at this enthusiasm for Rousseau, the friend of humanity, its benefactor and mine? The woman who reads "La Nouvelle Héloïse" without feeling better or wishing to become better has a soul of mud, an apathetic spirit. She will never rise above the common.'

Six months after her mother's death and while she was still ' in that state of gentle melancholy which succeeds to violent 'grief,' Manon made the acquaintance of M. Roland de la Platière. He had presented himself as the friend of Demoiselle Cannet of Amiens, and Sophie's letter of introduction with which he was armed described him as an enlightened man of strict morals, whose only reproach was his great admiration 'for the ancients at the expense of the moderns, whom he ' depreciates, and the weakness of liking to speak too much of 'himself.' Manon took a liking to the man, and soon he began to pay her infrequent but long visits- he seemed, so to speak 'without sex,' 'a philosopher who only lived through reason.'

This quiet, well-informed person of forty-two, sure of himself, of his facts, of his value in the world, impressed Manon, and his friendship was a new and flattering experience. Knowing him seemed to put her in relation with the great world of affairs, for he knew the physiocrats and was in touch with the economic interests of the country. He was excessively industrious and had published many memoirs on different subjects; indeed he had acquired such a quantity of exact knowledge that he was able to undertake a vast treatise for the Encyclo'pædia' from his own monographs without interfering with his work. He was continually travelling in France, the Rhine provinces, and Belgium, and as continuously writing: 'Je ne porte en effet dans mes voyages d'autre ambition que celle 'd'apprendre, c'est même chez moi une soif qui tient un peu de 'celle des ivrognes.' He was a cautious man in business as in love, was well-mannered, grave, remote, with a faint tolerant smile, a great talker in short informing sentences, the matter and not the manner of which interested people. And yet