Читать книгу Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty - Imbert de Saint-Amand - Страница 13

The moment is at hand when a woman of the middle class, born in humble circumstances, is about to make her appearance on the scene of politics; a woman who, after living in obscurity during thirty-eight years, was to become famous in a few days, and attract the attention of all France first and afterwards that of Europe entire. No figure is more curious to study than hers, and it is not surprising that of late years it has tempted men of great merit, such as MM. Daubant and Faugère, whose publications have shed great light on the Egeria of the Girondins.

At every epoch of history there are certain women who become as it were living symbols, and sum up in their own persons the passions, prejudices, and illusions of their time. They reflect at once its vices and its virtues, its qualities and its defects. Such was Madame Roland. All the distinctive characteristics of the close of the eighteenth century are resumed in her: ardent enthusiasm, generous ideals, aspiration towards progress, passion for liberty, heroic courage in view of persecution, captivity, and death; an absence of religious faith, an implacable vanity, a thirst for emotions, plagiarism of antiquity, declamatory language and sentiments, and childish imitation of Greece and Rome. Nothing is more interesting than to analyze the conceptions of this mind, count the pulsations of this heart, and surprise the inmost secrets of a woman whose psychological importance is as considerable as her place in history. Intellectually as well as morally, Madame Roland is the daughter of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; socially she is the personification of that third estate which, having been nothing, wished at first to be something and afterwards to be all; politically, she is by turns the heroine and the victim of the Revolution, which, under pretext of liberty, engendered tyranny, which used the guillotine and perished by the guillotine, and which after dreaming of light expired in mire and blood.

How was it that this little bourgeoise, the daughter of Philipon the engraver, a man midway between an artisan and an artist, whose very origin seemed to remove her so far from any political rôle, attained to high renown? What influences formed this woman whose qualities were masculine? Whence was drawn the inspiration of this siren, destined to be taken in her own snares and die the victim of her own incantations? A rapid glance at the earliest years of Marie-Jeanne Philipon, the future Madame Roland, is enough to explain her passions and her hopes, her errors and her talents, her rages and her enthusiasms.

She was born in Paris, March 18, 1754, of an intelligent but frivolous father, and a simple, devoted, honestly commonplace mother. From infancy she felt herself superior to those by whom she was surrounded. Thence sprang an unmeasured pride and a continual hunger to produce an impression. The infant prodigy preluded the female politician. Speaking of herself in her Memoirs, she becomes ecstatic over the child who "read serious works, explained very well the circles of the celestial globe, used crayons and the burin, found at eight years that she was the best dancer in an assembly of young persons older than herself," and who, nevertheless, "was often summoned to the kitchen to make an omelette, clean the vegetables, or skim the pot." She admires her own willingness to descend to domestic cares: "I was never out of my element," she says; "I could make soup as skilfully as Philopoemen could chop wood; but no one, observing me, could imagine that this was suitable employment." Still speaking of herself, she celebrates "the little person who on Sundays went to church or out walking in a spick-and-span costume whose appearance was fully sustained by her demeanor and her language." She calls attention to the contrast by which, on week-days, the same child went out alone, in a little cloth frock, to buy parsley and salad at a short distance from home. "It must be owned," she adds, "that I did not like this very well; but I did not show it, and I had the art of doing my errands in such a way as to find some pleasure in it. I united such great politeness to a certain dignity, that the fruit-seller or other person of the sort, took pleasure in serving me first, and even those who came before me thought this proper."

So the little Philipon wanted to take the chief place in the fruiterer's shop, just as, later on, she desired it on the political stage or the Ministry of the Interior. This enemy of privileges will admit them only for herself. In everything she made pretentions: pretentions to elegance, beauty, distinction, talent, knowledge, eloquence, genius, and, when she wanted to be simple, to simplicity. In her style as in her conversation, in her public as in her private life, what she sought before all things was effect. It was absolutely essential that people should talk about her, that she should be playing a part, or standing on a pedestal. Assuredly, if she had a fault, it was not excess of modesty. She regarded herself as the flower of her sex, a superior woman, made to be loved, flattered, and adored. She speaks of her charms with the precision of a doctor and the enthusiasm of a poet. Not one of her perfections escapes her. It is through a magnifying-glass and before a mirror that she studies and admires herself. She discovers that a society in which a woman so remarkable and so attractive is not thoroughly well known, must be badly organized. Middle-class by birth, and aristocratic by instinct, she represents what one might then have called the new social strata. A secret voice told her that the day was to come when she would make herself feared by the powerful of the earth, those giants with feet of clay who, at the beginning of her career, were still looked at kneeling. Banished by fate from the theatre where the human tragi-comedy is played, she said to herself: "I too will have a part one of these days." In the earliest stage of her existence there was in her a confused medley of uneasiness and ambition, of spite and anger. She had a horror of the slightly disdainful protection of people of quality. She conceived an aversion for persons like that Demoiselle d'Hannaches, "big, awkward, dry, and yellow," infatuated with her nobility, annoying everybody with her titles, and yet, in spite of her ignorance, her stiff manners, her old-fashioned dress and her follies, well received everywhere on account of her birth.

Slowly, but steadily, the future amazon of the Revolution prepared herself for the combat. The books which she read and re-read incessantly were the arsenal whence she drew her weapons. One of those presentiments which do not deceive, promised her a stormy but illustrious destiny. More Roman than French, more pagan than Christian, she longed for glory like that of the heroines of Plutarch, her favorite author. In the humble dwelling of her father, situated at the corner of the Pont-Neuf and the Quai des Orfévres, she caught a glimpse of horizons as wide as her thoughts. "From the upper part of our house," she says, "a great expanse offered itself to my dreamy and romantic imagination. How often from my north window have I contemplated with emotion the deserts of the sky, its superb azure vault splendidly outlined from the bluish dawn far behind the Pont du Change, to the sunset gilded with a faint purplish lustre behind the trees of the Champs Elysées and the houses of Chaillot."

Irritated with the obscurity to which she was condemned by fate, there was but one resource which could have consoled her for the social inequalities which bruised her vanity and her pride. That resource would have been religion. Nothing but an ideal of humility could have appeased the interior revolts of this soul of fire. To such a woman, what is lacking is heaven. Earth, no matter what happens, can give her nothing but deceptions. The only moment of her life when she felt herself really happy was that when she enjoyed the supreme good, peace of heart. Of all parts of her Memoirs, the most pure and touching are those she devotes to her recollections of the convent. One might think that the author of Rolla had remembered them when he described in such penetrating terms the mystic poetry of the cloister, and the regrets often engendered by the loss of faith in the minds and hearts of people who have become unbelievers.

The little Philipon, being in her twelfth year, asked to be sent to a convent, in order to prepare better for her first communion. She was placed with the Ladies of the Congregation, rue Neuve-Saint-Étienne, in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, near Sainte-Pélagie, her future prison: "How I pressed my dear mamma in my arms at the moment of parting from her for the first time! I was stifled, overwhelmed; but I obeyed the voice of God, and crossed the threshold of the cloister, offering Him with tears the greatest sacrifice that I could make. The first night I spent at the convent was agitated: I was no longer under the paternal roof. I felt that I was far from that good mother who was surely thinking of me with tenderness. There was a feeble light in the room where I had been put to bed, with four other children of my own age; I rose quietly and went to the window. The moonlight permitted me to see the garden upon which it looked. The most profound silence reigned; I listened to it, so to say, with a sort of respect; great trees cast their gigantic shadows here and there, and promised a safe refuge for tranquil meditation. I lifted my eyes to the pure and serene sky, and thought I felt the presence of the Divinity, who smiled at my sacrifice and already offered me its recompense in the peace of a celestial abode. Delicious tears flowed slowly down my cheeks; I reiterated my vows with a holy transport, and I enjoyed the slumber of the elect."

As if in these silent cloisters, which she crossed slowly so as to enjoy their solitude more fully, she had a presentiment of the storms in her destiny and her heart, she sometimes stopped beside a tomb on which was engraven the eulogy of a holy maiden. "She is happy!" she said to herself with a sigh. While she was in prison she remembered with emotion a novice's taking the veil: "I experience yet the thrill caused by her faintly tremulous voice when she chanted melodiously the customary versicle: 'Elegi: Here I have chosen my abode, and I will not depart from it forever.' I have not forgotten the notes of this little air; I can repeat them as exactly as if I had heard them yesterday."

Unhappily, religious ideas were soon to undergo a change in the mind of the future Madame Roland. Returning to the paternal dwelling, she was badly brought up there; her mother let her read everything, even Candide. Voltaire, Helvétius, Diderot, had no secrets for this young girl. Extreme disorder and confusion in mind and heart were the result. When she had the misfortune to lose her mother at the age of twenty-one, the book in which she sought consolation was the Nouvelle Héloise. Jean-Jacques became her god. "It seems," she says, "as if he were my natural aliment and the interpreter of the sentiment I had already, and which he alone knew how to explain to me.... To have the whole of Jean-Jacques," she says again, "to be able to consult him incessantly, to enlighten and elevate one's self with him at all times of life, is a felicity which can only be tasted by adoring him as I did." Such reading robbed her of faith. It made her a free-thinker and a bluestocking. It inspired her with an unhealthy ambition, sullied her imagination, and troubled the peace of her heart. It deprived her of that moral delicacy, lacking which, even virtue itself loses its charms. She was no longer anything but a young girl, well-conducted but not pure, honest but shameless.

Was not a day coming when, a prisoner and on the point of getting into the fatal cart, she would throw off the terrible anxieties of her situation in order to imitate the impurities of the Confessions of Jean-Jacques, and retrace indecent details with complacency? Do not seek in her that flower of innocence which is the young girl's grace. The charming puritan does not commit great faults, but she has astonishing licenses of thought and speech. For her, Louvet's Faublas is "one of those charming romances known to persons of taste, in which the graces of imagination ally themselves to the tone of philosophy." Is not this woman, who begins her life like a saint and ends it as a pupil of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the symbol of that troubled eighteenth century which opened in fidelity to religious faith and closed in the depths of the abyss of incredulity? The ravages caused by bad reading in the soul of this young girl explain the catastrophes of the entire century.

From the time when she replaced the Gospels by the Contrat Social and the Imitation of Jesus Christ by the Nouvelle Héloise, there was no longer anything simple or natural remaining in the young philosopher. All her thoughts and actions became declamatory. There was something theatrical in her attitudes and gestures, and even in the sound of her voice. Her speech was rhythmical, cadenced, marked by a special accent. Even her private letters often resemble the amplifications of rhetoric rather than the effusions of friendship. One might say that their author had a presentiment that they would be printed. She wrote to Mademoiselle Sophie Cannet, January 3, 1776: "In any case, burn nothing. Though my letters were one day to be read by all the world, I would not hide the only monuments of my weakness, and my sentiments." Monuments of weakness—is not the expression worthy of the bombast of the time?

Not finding love, Mademoiselle Philipon married philosophically. Her union bears a striking imitation to that of Héloise with M. de Volmar. "Looking her destiny peacefully and tenderly in the face, greatly moved but not infatuated," she united herself to a man whom she esteemed but did not love. This was Roland de la Platière, who was descended from an ancient and very honorable middle class family. Though not rich, he was at least comfortably well off. "Well educated, honest, simple in his tastes and manners, he fulfilled his duties as inspector of manufactures in a notable way. The marriage was celebrated on February 4, 1780. Roland was forty-six years old, while his wife was not yet twenty-six. Thin, bald, careless in his dress, the husband was not at all an ideal person. It had taken him five years to declare his passion, and this hesitation, as his wife was to write thirteen years later, "left not a vestige of illusion in his sentiments." "I have often felt," says she, "that there was no similarity between us. If we lived in retirement, I spent many painful hours; if we mingled in society, I was loved by persons among whom I perceived there were some who might affect me too much; I plunged into labor with my husband.... It was a long time before I gained courage to contradict him."

M. Roland was sent to Amiens, where his wife presented him with a daughter, whom she nursed, and afterwards brought up with the utmost tenderness and devotion. In 1784, he was summoned to Lyons, where he found himself once more in his native region. Thenceforward he spent two of the winter months in Lyons, and the remainder of the year on his paternal domain, the Close of Platière, two leagues from Villefranche, surrounded by woods and vineyards, and opposite the mountains of Beaujolais. While her husband went to take possession of his new post, Madame Roland, not yet a republican, remained a few weeks in Paris in order to obtain, if possible, the patent of nobility so ardently desired by the family. Her solicitations proved unsuccessful, and the married pair, despairing of becoming nobles, consoled themselves by a frank avowal of democracy.

Up to the time of the Revolution, Madame Roland's life glided peacefully away without any remarkable incidents. In the Close of Platière, which she calls her dovecot, she appears as a good housekeeper who looks after everything, from the cellar to the garret; who plays the doctor among the poor villagers; who is delighted to find in nature a savor of frank and free rusticity. The life she leads is not merely honest, but edifying. She is very careful at this period to hide her philosophy. She writes to Bosc, one of her friends, February 9, 1785: "My brother-in-law, whose disposition is extremely gentle and sensitive, is also very religious; I leave him the satisfaction of thinking that the dogmas are as evident to me as they appear to him, and my exterior actions are such as become the mother of a family out in the country, who is bound to edify everybody. As I was very devout in my early youth, I know my prayers as well as my philosophy, and I prefer to make use of my first erudition." She wrote again to Bosc, October 12, 1785: "I have hardly touched a pen for a month, and I think I am acquiring some of the inclinations of the beast whose milk refreshes me; I am extremely asinine, and I busy myself with all the petty cares of the hoggish country life. I make preserved pears that are delicious; we dry grapes and plums; we wash and make up linen; we have white wine for breakfast, and we lie down on the grass to rest; we follow the vintagers; we repose in the woods and fields."

Before looking at the female politician, let us glance once more at the woman in private life, the charitable, devoted, honorable mother of a family, such as she paints herself in a letter of November 10, 1786: "From the corner of my fire, at eleven o'clock, after a quiet night and the various morning cares, my husband at his desk, my little girl knitting, and I chatting with one and superintending the other's work, enjoying the happiness of being snugly in the bosom of my dear little family, writing to a friend, while the snow is falling on so many wretches weighed down by poverty and sorrow, I am touched with compassion for their fate; I turn back sweetly to my own, and at this moment I count as nothing the annoyances of relations or circumstances which seem occasionally to mar its felicity."

Alas, why did not Madame Roland stay in her modest country-house to dry her grapes and plums, to superintend her washing, mend her linen, and spread out in her garret the fruits for winter use? Were not obscurity, repose, peace of heart, better for her than that fictitious glory which was to pass so quickly and end upon the scaffold? One might say that before quitting nature, that great consoler which calms and does not betray, in order to plunge herself into the odious world of politics, which spoils and embitters the most beautiful souls, she experiences a certain vague regret for the sweet and tranquil joys which her folly was about to cause her to renounce forever.

"The weather is delightful," wrote Madame Roland, May 17, 1790; "the country has changed almost beyond recognition in only six days; the vines and walnuts were as black as they are in winter, but a stroke of the magic wand does not alter the aspect of things more quickly than the heat of a few fine days has done; everything turns green and leafs out; a soft verdure is visible where there was nothing but the dull and faded tint of torpor and inaction. I could easily forget public affairs and men's controversies here; content to arrange the manor, to see my fowls brood, and take care of my rabbits, I would care nothing more about the revolutions of empires. But, as soon as I am in the city, the poverty of the people and the insolence of the rich rouse my hatred of injustice and oppression: I have no longer any soul or desire except for the triumph of great truths and the success of our regeneration."

The die is cast. The daughter of Philipon the engraver is about to become a political woman. The hour is come when this great actress, who has long known her part, is at last going on the stage. She has a presentiment of the risk she is running in assuming a task which is beyond her sex. But, like soldiers who love danger for danger's sake, and prefer the emotions of the battle-field to garrison life, she will joyfully quit her province and throw herself into the seething furnace of Paris. Even though she is to meet persecution and death at the end of her new career, she will not recoil. A short but agitated life will seem better to her than a long and fortunate existence without violent emotions. A clear sky pleases her no longer. She is homesick for storms and lightning flashes.