the tragic intensity of feelings that seemed already to belong to the departed.
In the eyes of many to whom are thus revealed the inmost recesses of Madame Roland's heart, she may seem reprehensible for having allowed a feeling to take root in her heart opposed to that which she owed to her husband. But the Revolution, by loosening the bonds of custom, by stimulating the vital energies, by communicating her volcanic commotions to her children, prepared the soil for those insurrections of the heart and heroisms of love so pathetically interwoven with its political history. Now it is a Danton, who, convulsed beside the grave of his wife—deceased in his absence—has her dug up, and clasps her inanimate corpse in his arms in transports of despair. Now it is a Vergniaud, for whom to stay in Paris is death, and who stays that he may not shorten by an hour his intercourse with Mademoiselle Candeille, the beautiful actress he adores. Now it is a Lucile, fair young wife of Desmoulins, who glides round the prison like his shadow, and, like his shadow, too, follows uncomplainingly to the guillotine.
That whole generation, while the social fabric was yielding and cracking beneath its feet, and while death encompassed it, was consumed by the thirst for life. Into its brief existence it crammed centuries of thought, action, suffering. It was ready to shatter all obstacles that hindered the current of its passions. The indissolubility of the marriage tie had been cancelled. An interval of a few months sufficed between the rupture of the old union and the formation of the new. In this very month of May, 1793, the records of the Moniteur prove the cases of divorce to have been one-third in proportion to the marriages. Madame
