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These Mémoirs, now one of the French classics, contain the narrative of Madame Roland's private life from infancy to the date of her marriage. Modelled on Rousseau's Confessions, they yet bear the impress of a strong, original nature. Terse and limpid in style, they are free from that academic sententiousness characteristic of Manon's youthful letters, uniting shrewdest criticism and description of character with the idyllic sentiment so dear to the eighteenth century—a book with a life crushed out on its leaves: the life of a woman in the plenitude of existence, yet already practically cut off from it. The circumstances under which this autobiography was written, give it the strangest pathos. These fresh pictures of child-life, these vernal hours of youth, that seem to scent the pages containing them, are painted on the dark background of a prison. Leaning against the bars of her window, the captive author sees again the bowers and avenues of Meudon, the pleasant garden, in whose arbour of honeysuckle she has sat with her parents on the long-past summer days. As she recalls the convent, with its sacred chaunts and solemn organ-peals, the vision is cruelly dispelled by the oaths and curses with which thieves and forgers interlard their speech. Even while describing those tranquil months passed under her grandmother's roof on the Île St. Louis, she breaks off abruptly with the remark, "I feel the resolution of continuing my undertaking grow weaker. The miseries of my country torment me; the loss of my friends affects my spirits; an involuntary sadness benumbs my senses, darkens my imagination, and weighs heavy on my heart. France is become a vast amphitheatre of carnage, a bloody arena, in which her own children are tearing one another to pieces."