Heroines of Freethought/Madame Roland (Marie Jeanne Phlipon)
Heroines of Freethought.
MADAME ROLAND.
"DIVINITY! Supreme Being! Spirit of the Universe! Great Principle of all I feel great or good or immortal within myself—whose existence I believe in because I must have emanated from something superior to that by which I am surrounded—I am about to reunite myself to thy essence.”
Such was the invocation which Madame Roland addressed to the Deity she worshiped, at a time when, death by violence seeming unavoidable, she contemplated defeating the cruel guillotine by suicide. There is in it, as in all the acts of her life, the undaunted tone of the truly brave in spirit. Conscious of her own nobility of soul, there is in it no mock humility, no cowardly trusting to the blood of an innocent person to save her from the consequences of her own acts, no weak doubts expressed as to her own merit; only a sublime confidence in the infinite tenderness and love of the God she worshiped —the God who grew to her more all-pervading, more all-absorbent, and more grandly just and wise, as she herself grew broader in intellect and larger in heart.
Marie Jeanne Phlipon, daughter of the drunken engraver, child of the people, wife of the just and conscientious philosopher Roland—in thee we find our ideal woman, as Christendom finds in Jesus its ideal man! Virtuous, loving, lovely, intellectual, self-sacrificing woman, could any Christ live an holier life, or die more nobly than thou didst? As he was put to death by a rude rabble because of his brave utterance of pure principles, so also wast thou. If his crucifixion was a more protracted bodily anguish, the horrible outlines of the blood-begrimed guillotine were no less terrible to thee; while death for him severed no such near and dear human ties as for thee, whose love for husband and child was deep and strong as thine own nature. His tears of anguish in the garden of Gethsemane were not more bitter than thine in the secrecy of thy gloomy prison cell; nor didst thou weakly ask watchers to share those hours of anguished renunciation. Pathetic as his "Father, forgive them!" is thy sorrowful "O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!"
The coming woman—our ideal—can never come in nobler guise than that of Madame Roland. Uplifted by the force of her pure moral character even above the sanguinary waves of that "Reign of Terror" — waves which left their defacing stain upon many of the fairest names that flashed meteor-like across that dismal panorama—the worst which even her Christian biographers have found to say of her is, that she was morally brave enough to avow herself a Deist. Philip and Grace Wharton, in their "Queens of Society," while confessing that "from Cartesian, Madame Roland became Stoic, from Stoic Deist, and from that she never returned," are candid enough to add that "her life was morally faultless." Another Christian writer says of her, "the only God she invoked was the future. A species of abstract and stoical duty, itself its own judge and reward, supplied the place with her of hope, consolation, or piety."
Here, then, in the person of a pure, conscientious, liberty-loving, and historical woman, we find the refutation of the prevalent idea, that perfection of moral character is dependent on a belief in Christianity. Nor was she one to accept any belief unadvisedly. Sincere and earnest in her convictions, she did not, however, trust solely to those convictions without thorough investigation. Loving truth, as her life testified, more than she loved life itself, hers was a character which with less intellectual vigor had been that of a fanatical religious devotee. In early youth, when conscience obeyed to the extreme the dictates of education, she was indeed that; but later her reason and intellect grew strong enough to grapple with and overcome the mysteries of credulity: she could not and cared not to stifle the voice of her intellectual convictions, and bravely avowed them to the world. She who bore for her husband the heaviest burden of the cares of State; who instigated, urged, and upheld him in his most daring measures; who rose equal to all the strange and tragic emergencies which her daring leadership of the purest party of that troubled time thrust upon her; who kept herself and her good name pure and unblemished in the midst of a revolutionary whirl of corruption and general laxity of morals—this woman was not surely one to be either frightened or cajoled into acceptance of the bugbears of a popular belief.
Marie Jeanne Phlipon, born in Paris sometime in 1754, was the only living child of seven, and was therefore the object of much love and care to her parents. Her father, Gratien Phlipon, by trade an engraver, was an ambitious, frivolous, and discontented man. Her mother, a pure-minded, large-hearted woman, possessing rare worth and intelligence, early instilled into the mind of her child those principles of conscientious virtue which afterward added such lustre to the genius of that child—which made her strong and brave in the face of a terrible death, and which made hers the purest public character developed by the Revolution of ‘93.
Although the little "Manon" (a pet name for Marie) was from earliest childhood extremely fond of study, and anxious to devote most of her time to her books, yet Madame Phlipon, with a discretion rare in the mother of an only and idolized child, did not allow these to engross her mind to the exclusion of household duties and moral lessons. She was also taught by her father, at a very early age, the art of engraving, and was encouraged to exhibit her proficiency therein by preparing with her own hand small engravings as birthday gifts to her friends. Still, in spite of these cautious restraints upon her inordinate thirst for knowledge, she was at eighteen well versed in many things not generally included in the education of her sex—history, philosophy, chemistry, the languages, and mathematics, in addition to the graceful accomplishments usually taught her sex.
As a child she was ardent, enthusiastic, devout, and studious, with a firm will, and vivid imagination. History was her favorite reading, and to her perusal of Plutarch’s "Lives," at nine years of age, she ascribes her first admiration and adoption of republican principles. But these principles would more likely be awakened to the mind of a proud, sensitive, and thoughtful nature, like hers, by the social inequalities and injustices which at that time existed in France, than by the perusal of any book, though the book might help define the unformed thought. The writings of Rousseau were already discussed with freedom by all classes in France, and his republican views accepted by many as the true theory of government. That personal feeling had something to do with her admiration of a free government the following incident will show:
When about twelve years old she accompanied her mother on a visit to a relative who occupied some menial position in the palace at Versailles. After a day or two there, Manon was asked by her mother if she enjoyed being in a palace. Stung with a feeling of humiliation, which the distinction of rank exhibited there caused her, she replied with passionate vehemence, "I like it, if it be soon ended, for, else, in a few more days, I shall so much detest all the persons I see, that I should not know what to do with my hatred!”
“Why, what harm have they done you?” inquired, her mother in surprise.
“They have made me feel injustice and look upon absurdity,” was her reply.
A thoughtful, conscientious child, she began at a very early age to give much attention to matters of religion, and when only eleven years of age was sent to a convent at her own urgent desire, where for several years she remained as a pupil. Here her mind applied itself with all its intense ardor to the study of the Catholic religion. She read with great delight the “Lives of the Saints,” and entertained serious thoughts of taking the veil. To this devout frame of mind at that time may probably be ascribed the clearness with which at a riper age she was enabled to detect the shams and frauds of that same faith.
Lamartine describes her as possessing, at the age of eighteen, "a tall and supple figure, a modest and becoming demeanor; black and soft hair; blue eyes, which appeared brown in the depths of their reflection; the nose of a Grecian statue; a rather large mouth, with splendid teeth; a skin marbled with the animation of life, and veined by blood which the least impression sent mounting to her cheeks; a tone of voice which borrowed its vibrations from the deepest fibers of her heart.”
With such charms of person, added to the expectation of a not inconsiderable fortune, it was not strange that Mademoiselle Phlipon was soon surrounded with applicants for her hand; but among them all she failed to perccive the ideal hero-husband of her imagination, and she dismissed them one after the other, even the most eligible, with a nonchalance which nearly drove her father to despair, for he was anxious to see her settled in life, the wife of some wealthy tradesman.
But Manon, with a good home, many friends, her books, and a free heart, was in no hurry to marry, and her life went on happily and joyously until in 1773 her first real sorrow came to her in the death of her tender, loving mother, to whom she was passionately devoted, and her grief at the death of this dear friend was such as to prostrate her on a bed of sickness and for a while threatened to destroy her reason or her life. But her youth and strength conquered this violent grief in the end, and she recovered.
It was soon after this event that she was first introduced, through her most intimate friend, to M. Roland de la Platiere, Inspector of Manufactures at Lyons, a man of strict probity and high scholastic attainments. He came to Paris on a visit, bearing a letter of introduction from her friend to Mademoiselle Phlipon.
M. Roland, though more than twenty years her senior, and with a heart hitherto untouched by womanly charms, was so attracted by her rare genius, her beauty, and her purity of character that he very soon besought her hand in marriage. She referred him dutifully to her father. M. Phlipon, who had become since the death of his wife reckless, dissipated, and savage, returned to M. Roland’s letter a rude and contemptuous negative reply. His daughter's home life had been for some time rendered extremely unhappy through M. Phlipon’s harshness debauchery and improvidence. He had also made sad inroads upon the fortune left her by her mother; her expostulations were met with anger and injustice on his part, and after his rudeness to M. Roland—a rudeness which had deeply wounded the feelings of that gentleman—she decided that it was useless to attempt to live with him in peace, and she retired from home, hiring rooms in a convent, where she lived for six months alone. At the end of that time M. Roland sought her out, and renewed his proposals of marriage. They were married in the winter of 1779, she being then twenty-five years of age, while he was forty-seven.
Previous to her marriage she had already dabbled in literature, and had written and published occasional criticisms and essays, among others one on a subject proposed by the Academy of Besancon, ‘‘How Can the Education of Women Conduce to the Education of Men?” But for some years after her marriage her writing was confined mainly to copying, translating, and correcting articles for the “Dictionary of Manufactures,” upon which M. Roland was engaged. This dry and tiresome labor undertaken to assist her husband was afterward, she remarks, of decided benefit to her in strengthening her style and in teaching her to systematize and arrange her own thoughts for publication.
For the first ten years of her married life, few events worthy of note occurred to her. Her own distaste for fashionable society, together with the studious habits of her husband, caused them to live upon their estate in a secluded and retired manner. A few choice friendships were formed, and the birth of their only child, a little girl named Eudora, brought happiness to the hearts of both.
In 1784, the monotony of this quiet life —a life which she sometimes felt to be almost unendurably quiet—was broken up temporarily by a trip to England and to Switzerland—a tour which she enjoyed intensely, embodying the observations made during its progress in a book of travel. Her father, M. Phlipon, died during the winter of 1787. She had been ever a dutiful daughter to him, as an extract from her memoirs proves:
"My father," she writes, ‘neither married, nor made any very ruinous engagements. We paid a few debts he had contracted, and, by granting him an annuity, prevailed upon him to leave a business in which it had become impossible for him to succeed. Though suffering so much for his errors, and though he had reason to be highly satisfied with our behavior, his spirit was too proud not to be hurt at the obligations he owed us."
In 1789, events preceding the Revolution had thrown France into a state of ferment. Every one in whose soul one spark of the divine fire of liberty burned felt himself forced to take an interest and a part in the events and politics of the times. Political meetings were held over all France, and the slow-burning fires of insurrection and revolution broke out here and there into sudden and no-longer-to-be repressed flame.
Among the first to declare themselves admirers and advocates of a new and republican form of government, as a panacea for the national distress, were M. and Madame Roland. In the prospective downfall of Royalty in France they beheld glorious visions of another France, a new American Republic, a republic void of aristocratical distinctions, where merit and not rank should demand and receive homage.
Madame Roland, filled with enthusiastic energy, wrote from Lyons to the Paris journals political letters of the most radical stamp, thus unwittingly helping to kindle the blaze which lit her own funeral pyre. But in joining the Revolutionists she had declared, "We must be ready for everything, even to die without regret!" Whatever may have been the mistakes which made the French Revolution so terrible a failure, it is certain that most of its original leaders were at first animated by only the purest and most devoted patriotism and love of liberty.
From the letters written by Madame Roland at this time I cannot forbear quoting a few brave sentences:
“If we do not die for liberty, we shall soon have nothing left to do but to weep for her. Do you say we dare no longer speak?—Be it so. We must thunder then!”
“The insolence of the rich and the misery of the people excite my hatred against injustice and oppression, and I no longer ask for anything but the triumph of truth and the success of the Revolution.”
"I am glad there is danger. I see nothing else capable of goading you on. It is impossible to rise to freedom from the midst of corruption without strong convulsions. They are the salutary crises of a serious disease.”
It was through these letters, ablaze with the passionate fire of the love of liberty, that she first became known to the liberal party as the radiant priestess of that liberty. M. Roland was sent as Deputy Extraordinary to the Constituent Assembly at Paris in 1791, whither Madame Roland accompanied him on the 20th of February. Here she attended daily the sittings of the Assembly and watched with earnest anxiety every movement of that body. So earnest and enthusiastic was their belief in the free future of France, and so zealously did they disseminate their views, that the modest dwelling of the Rolands soon became the headquarters and rendezvous of the leading patriots, where those who afterward became the chiefs of the Revolution consorted to discuss their views and mature their plans. Here, also, at first, those met as friends and co-laborers who afterward became bitter enemies. Robespierre, Danton, Vergniaud, Brissot, and Condorcet, shared alike at this time in the friendship and confidence of Madame Roland. Still, though her soul was afire with patriotic flame, her true womanly modesty asserted itself at these meetings. While Roland and the others discussed the leading topics of the day, she sat silently by, apparently engaged with her writing or her embroidery, speaking only when her advice was asked or judgment appealed to; but her few words were always direct, strong, and inspiring.
Quiet, modest, but quick-thoughted and energetic, led on by the deep interest she felt in the affairs of the nation, Madame Roland soon, almost unconsciously to herself, became the life and leader of the Girondists, the party of impetus at that time, but afterward, under Robespierrean rule, the party of moderation.
But this leadership, dangerous to most women as it would have been, was yet not so to her pure soul. Beautiful as she was, and loose as was the morality of that period, no thought, much less word, of evil, was associated with her name. Men who had hitherto looked upon women only as the pretty sensuous playthings of an hour met this woman forgetful of her sex, in the deep interest of the questions of the day. Looking into the lovely changeful eyes, they saw therein only the fire of high resolve; they gazed upon the perfect form, and remembered only that it was animated by the spirit of liberty; they clasped firmly the white shapely hands with no thought of their dainty beauty, but knowing only that they worked right earnestly in defense of their mutual rights. A common danger threatened, a common sympathy joined them, and the baser parts of their natures were hushed into silence before the nobler qualities of humanity evoked by the needs of the hour.
In September, the Rolands returned again to Lyons, but only for a few months, for M. Roland's office as Inspector of Manufactures having been annulled by a law of the Assembly, they decided to return at once to Paris, for the double purpose of obtaining greater facilities for the prosecution of his labor on the Encyclopaedia and of watching more closely the progress of events. In March, 1792, Roland was chosen Minister of the Interior, in order to conciliate the malcontents, but he continued in that office only until the following June. On the 11th of June, having read before the king that famous letter of remonstrance to Louis XVI, said to have been written by Madame Roland, he was dismissed the next day from his office. That the people might understand the reason of his removal, Roland read this letter before the National Convention. Filled as it was with bold republican truths, its publication still further inflamed the people against the king, and popularized Roland; and when, after the terrible 10th of August, Royalty in France was for the time being put an end to, he was recalled under the new administration, and reinstated in the Ministry.
True to their principles, M. and Madame Roland did not allow any change of station to alter the republican simplicity of their manners. She paid no visits and received only those visitors whom her husband’s public position and duties obliged her to receive. By the adoption of this course, she found time for her studies, and to remodel and enliven, if she did not originate, many of the State papers which appeared over Roland’s signature.
In regard to this phase of her life, Carlyle writes of her thus: “Envious men insinuate that the wife of Roland is Minister, not the husband. It is, happily, the worst they have to charge her with. For the rest, let whose head soever be getting giddy, it is not this brave woman's. Serene and queenly here, as she was of old in her own hired garret of the Ursuline Convent.”
Although on her marriage with M. Roland she had confessed that she esteemed more than she loved him, yet never was wife more devoted to husband than she; never was husband happier in a wife than he. In her memoirs she thus bears testimony to the mutual confidence and sympathy subsisting between them:
“During twelve years I shared in my husband's intellectual labors, as I did in his repasts; because one was as natural to me as the other. As we had ever a perfect intercommunity of knowledge and opinions, he talked to me in private of political measures with entire confidence. If he wrote treatises on the arts, I did the same, though the subject was tedious to me. If he wished to write an essay for some Academy, we sat down to write in concert, that we might afterward compare our productions, choose the best, or compress them into one. I never interfered with his administration, but if a circular, letter, or important State paper were wanted, we talked the matter over with our usual freedom, and, impressed with his ideas and teeming with my own, I sometimes took up the pen, which I had more leisure to conduct than he had. Without me, Roland would have been quite as good a Minister, for his knowledge, his activity, and his integrity were all his own; but I infused into his writings that mixture of spirit and gentleness, of authoritative reason and seducing sentiment, which is only found in the language of a woman who has a clear head and a feeling heart.”
At the time of Roland’s second ministry, the tide of anarchical revolution had already begun to overflow unhappy France. The rotten barriers of an effete monarchy gave way before the surging waves of that seething sea of infuriated men and women. Those who sprang to guide the helm of the Ship of State in this tempest were one after another washed overboard, and perished. In spite of their upright honesty, their purity of intention, their conscientious earnestness, it was impossible for the Rolands to escape long the fury of the storm.
Filled with horror at the shocking massacres of September, Roland wrote an address of remonstrance to the Assembly on that occasion, which gave great offense to the Robespierrean party, that was already in power. Danton, Robespierre, and Marat were at this time the bitter enemies of the Rolands. Danton especially circulated against them all kinds of rumors calculated to madden and inflame the populace against them. Recognizing “the power behind the throne,” it was Madame Roland against whom these slanders were chiefly directed. It was Madame Roland who, on the 7th of December, 1792, was summoned before the bar of the Convention to answer those charges. She plead her own cause, standing erect before that tribunal of fierce-eyed men, a bright, regal-browed, beautiful woman, strong and brave in the face of their scowls, conscious of having pursued the right through all. She answered quietly, firmly, eloquently, undauntedly, all their questions, and they were obliged to dismiss her, with a secret sense of shamefacedness at their own discomfiture, but none the less determined to accomplish the ruin of her and hers.
Recognizing how vain were all efforts to stem the tide of terror and anarchy (then deluging the country with blood), and disliking to have their name associated with those who really held the reins of power, Roland resigned in January, 1793. That resignation could not now save them. In May, Roland was arrested, and held a prisoner in his own house. His wife arose from a bed of sickness to demand his release at the bar of the Convention; waited vainly all day to get a hearing, and came home at night nearly discouraged; to be rejoiced by the tidings that he had made his escape. Her earnest wishes kept him in concealment after that against his own desire.
Knowing her danger, friends begged her to escape in disguise while there was yet time to save herself. But against this her Spartan soul revolted. “I am ashamed,” she said, ‘of the part you would have me play. I will neither disguise myself nor leave the house. If they wish to assassinate me, it shall be in my own home. This example is due from me, and I will afford it.” She was threatened in order to make her divulge the secret of her husband’s hiding place. Her only reply to their threats was, “I scorn to tell a falsehood. I know his plans, but I neither ought nor choose to tell them.”
When in June, 1793, she was, as she expected to be, arrested, her domestics clung weeping around her, "These people love you,” observed one of the officers sent to convey her to prison. She turned her proud, calm face toward him: “I never had those about me who did not,” was her reply. The maddened, ignorant mob hooted, and shouted derisively around the carriage in which she was seated. "Shall we close the blinds of the carriage?” asked one of the officials, politely wishing to spare her feelings.
"No, gentlemen,” she said calmly; “I do not fear the eyes of the populace. Innocence should never assume the guise of crime.”
“Madame,” said the officer, “you have more strength of mind than many men; you wait patiently for justice.” “Justice!” she exclaimed; "were justice done I should not be here. But if I am destined for the scaffold, I shall walk to it with the same firmness and tranquillity with which I now go to prison. I never feared anything but guilt.”
During the five months of imprisonment that followed her arrest, although surrounded by all the horrors of the Revolution, and though tortured by her anxiety in regard to her husband and child, she kept up before her fellow-prisoners a dignified, courageous deportment, cheering and comforting the faint-hearted and despairing with rare serenity and heroic calmness.
When alone, however, the feelings of the wife and mother triumphed at times over her philosophical endurance, and she wept with passionate, womanly vehemence. But of these yieldings to despondency her fellow-sufferers were allowed to see no trace, and beheld in her only the Spartan firmness of a soul at peace with itself.
Knowing how uncertain, or, rather, how certain, her fate was, she employed much of her time in writing her memoirs, every page of which had to be concealed and carried to a place of safety by those friends who gained admittance to her prison. She wrote at first historic memoirs of all the principal actors in the Revolution; but the friend to whose care the manuscript had been confided, fearing its discovery, felt obliged to destroy it.
Toward the close of her imprisonment a form of trial and conviction was gone through with, but she knew well that she was pre-sentenced to the guillotine, and so built no false hopes on that trial. Once she thought of writing to Robespierre, who owed to her a debt of gratitude for having been the means of saving his life in 1791 while Roland was in power; but on consideration she tore the letter she had written to him into pieces, disdaining even in this her great need to ask her life from him. Once, too, she entertained the thought of suicide, rather than endure a public execution; but feeling that this would be construed into an act of cowardice, she threw the opium procured for that purpose away.
During their imprisonment the prisoners were allowed to see and converse with each other, and she exerted herself at such times to the utmost to cheer and encourage her fellow-prisoners, She showed them a face bright and buoyant with a brave spirit, if not with hope. Young men and old, looking upon that face in its defiance of the power of death, listening to the brave words of that unflinching soul, grew strong to meet the martyrdom they had dared for dear Liberty's sake, and learned to smile gravely even under the grim shadow of the guillotine, feeling that, after all, their lives had not been lived in vain, when they were to give them up in sacrifice to freedom in such glorious companionship.
Riouffe, one of her fellow-prisoners, who subsequently escaped, says of her: “Something more than is usually found in the looks of women painted itself in those large dark eyes of hers, full of expression and sweetness, She spoke to me often at the grate, with the freedom and courage of a great man. Such republican language in the mouth of a beautiful French woman preparing for the scaffold was a miracle of the Revolution for which we were not prepared. We listened to her in admiration and astonishment.”
Her brave soul having proved itself equal to every other emergency was now to prove itself equal to the last great emergency— Death! She rose up equal to the level of that occasion, and in the language of Robert Browning seemed to say:
"I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old!
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad, life’s arrears
Of pain, darkness, and cold.”
The 8th of November, 1793, was the day set apart for her martyrdom. She was calm, radiant, pitying, to the last. The car of the condemned might have been that of a conquering queen as it moved slowly amid the jeering crowd toward the place of execution, bearing that erect white-robed figure whose tender eyes were bent pityingly on the maddened faces around her, her own bearing a look of high steadfast resolve. Carlyle describes her on her way to execution as, “A noble white vision, with its high queenly face, its soft proud eyes, long black hair flowing down to her girdle, and as brave a heart as ever beat in woman's bosom. Like a white Grecian statue, serenely complete she shines in that black wreck of things. Graceful to the eye, more so to the mind; genuine, the creature. of sincerity and nature in an age of artificiality, pollution, and cant; there, in her still completeness, she, if thou knew it, is the noblest of all French women.”
There was a pause—a stir, at the foot of the guillotine. Would she faint, this brave woman, at the horrors prepared for her—at the headsman's basket and sharp hungry machine of death? She bent reverently to the statue of Liberty which with strange mockery was set up near the guillotine; uttered her world-famed apostrophe to it, “O Liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!” spoke a few cheering words to the old man, La Marche, who shared her fate; begged the executioner to spare those aged eyes the horror of witnessing her death; asked, as her face grew eloquent with the sublime thoughts which this supreme hour of her life evoked, for pen and paper to which to commit them —asked only to be brutally refused. With unfaltering step, unblanched face, and serene eyes, she stepped upon the scaffold, and stepped a moment later into the unknowable, and, through that cruel death, into at least an earthly immortality. So perished, at the age of thirty-nine, one of the purest, if not the purest character evoked by the French Revolution. Much as I revere the character of the man Jesus, I doubt whether his death was more sublime than was hers. I doubt also whether any belief in his atoning virtues could have made this woman's death more heroic than did her faith in “all that was great, and good, and immortal,” within herself, and her belief of the truths she advocated, and for which she died.
As soon as M. Roland heard of her execution, filled with anguish and despair he emerged from his concealment at Rouen, and started on the road to Paris, probably with some vague thought of avenging her death; but, unable to endure his poignant grief, killed himself with his sword, by the wayside, leaving a note by which to identify his body, in which he said, “Indignation, not fear, induced me to quit my retreat. When I heard of the fate of my wife, I no longer wished to live in a world so polluted with crime!" His corpse was found under a tree by the roadside.
Madame Roland had declared that her husband would never consent to survive her execution, and the event justified her prophetic fear. Beautiful faith of a wife in a husband's love! and noble testimony of the husband to the merit of his wife! A writer in the London Critical Review says, in regard to her, “The objections to her character are those common to her with mast of the French writers and politicians of that period. They are philosophers without wisdom, and moralists without religion.” "Her life,” say Philip and Grace Wharton, “was morally faultless; but she was a Deist.” Even the liberal-hearted Lydia Maria Child remarks, “I might enlarge upon other points of her character, which qualify my respect for Madame Roland; but the times in which she lived were corrupt, and religion cast away as an idle toy, fit only for the superannuated.”
All of which means only that the one blemish to be found in her by her biographers was that which soon shall be accounted the highest evidence of her clear insight—that she had dared to think for herself in religious as in other matters, and being a brave as well as conscientious woman, had boldly avowed herself a Deist, and a disbeliever in the “divine right” of priests as well as of kings. Having lived a pure, true life, she died trusting to her own merits rather than to those of any mediator. Her Deism, it appears, did not corrupt her morals, or make her any less lovingly brave; did not make her a less dutiful daughter, less faithful wife, less loving mother, less warm-hearted friend; did not make her even fear death. She was a clear thinker, a wise pilot at the helm of State, a daring patriot, an earnest, courageous soul. She was a true woman, who acted out in freedom, and untrammeled, the highest attributes of the feminine nature.
“A perfect woman, nobly planned
To warn, to comfort, and command.”
Mrs. Barbauld speaks in the following enthusiastic terms of Madame Roland’s “ Appeal to Impartial Posterity”:
“What talents! What energy of character! What powers of description! But have you seen the second part, which has not been printed here, and which contains memoirs of her life from the earliest period to the death of her mother, when she was one-and-twenty? It is surely the most singular book that has appeared since the ‘Confessions of Rousseau,' a book that none but a French woman could write, and wonderfully entertaining. I began it with a certain fear upon my mind: What is this woman going to tell me? Will it be anything but what will lessen my esteem for her? If, however, we were to judge of the female and male mind by contrasting these confessions with those, the advantage of purity will be greatly on the side of our sex.”
“Madame Roland,” says Margaret Fuller, “is the fairest specimen we yet have of her class; as clear to discern her aim, as valiant to pursue it, as Spenser's Britomarte; austerely set apart from all that did not belong to her, whether as woman or as mind. She is an antetype of a class to which the coming time will afford a field— the Spartan matron, brought by the culture of the age of books to intellectual consciousness and expansion. Self-sufficingness, strength, and clear-sightedness were in her combined with a power of deep and calm affection.”
In 1795 the Memoirs of Madame Roland were published in two volumes, and sold for the benefit of her young daughter Eudora, by the friend who had undertaken the care of the child.
In 1800 appeared an edition of her works in three volumes, containing all her writings, consisting of ‘‘An Appeal to Impartial Posterity,” "Works of Leisure Hours, and Various Reflections,” "A Journey to Sans Souci, and Travels in Switzerland.”
These writings are marked by fervid grace and discriminating thought, warmed by enthusiasm and vivacious earnestness. Her life required of her heroic action, which filled up to completeness the measure of its possibilities; yet she could not, even had it been otherwise, have passed away from us without leaving to posterity some record of the greatness of her nature, the nobleness of her thought. Her more mature writings would, I am convinced, have evidenced to the world what manner of woman she was.