pensable that we should tolerate each other. Every situation has its inconveniences as well as its advantages and duties. In seeking the many benefits of an association, we must not disguise from ourselves that we incur obligations in return, and will need virtues which may be more easily dispensed with in solitude."
Roland himself had no misgivings as to the perfect feasibility of the scheme. Bancal, having paid his friends another visit in the autumn of that year, received from him the following hearty letter, which not only gives one the highest idea of Roland's character, but also of that of his friends. It is a glimpse into an ideal kind of life. "What better can you do than join us?" asks Roland. "We should put our lives in common, and multiply our pleasures, inasmuch as there are more of us to enjoy them. You know our plain, outspoken ways, and one does not, at my age, alter when one has never changed. We talk every day of the approaching meeting, and the Church property at Villefranche offers us an excellent opportunity, it being now on sale to the amount of two or three hundred thousand livres; nor need we despair of finding a house. Perhaps we are building castles in the air about it all; but what a pleasant prospect! We will preach patriotism and enlarge people's ideas; the doctor shall carry on his profession; my wife will be the apothecary of the canton; you and I must have an eye to financial matters; and we will all join in exhorting people to union and concord. In doing all this in common, we shall nevertheless enjoy complete individual freedom, convinced that, in order to inculcate the love of liberty, one must be free oneself, and that we should not so if we entered into an engagement we could not break if necessary."
