Читать книгу Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty - Imbert de Saint-Amand - Страница 15

The hour of the Revolution had struck, and, ambitious, unbelieving, full of disdain for the leading classes, full of confidence in her own superiority, active, eloquent, impassioned, uniting the language of an orator to the seductions of a charming woman, Madame Roland was ripe for the Revolution. Her epoch suited her, and she suited her epoch. This pagan who, according to her own expression, roamed mentally in Greece, attended the Olympic games, and despised herself for being French; this fanatical admirer of antiquity who, at eight years of age, carried Plutarch to church with her instead of a missal, who styled Roland the virtuous as the Athenians called Aristides the just, who will die like her heroes, Socrates and Phocion; this student who, at another period, would have been rated as an under-bred woman of the middle class, a more or less ridiculous bluestocking, suddenly found herself, in consequence of a general panic and circumstances as strange as they were unforeseen, the very ideal of the society in which she lived. For several months she was to be its fashionable type, its favorite heroine. But the Revolution was a Saturn who devoured his children, male and female, and the Egeria of the Girondins expiated bitterly the intoxication caused by her brief popularity.

In 1777, at the age of twenty-three, she had written: "Gay and jesting speeches fall from this mouth which sobs at night upon its pillow; a laugh dwells on my lips, while my tears, shut up within my heart, at length make on it, in spite of its hardness, the effect produced by water on a stone: falling drop by drop, they insensibly wear it away." In 1791, when she was thirty-eight, she wrote: "The phenomena of nature, which make the vulgar grow pale, and which are imposing even to the philosophical eye, offer nothing to a sensitive person preoccupied with great concerns, but scenes inferior to those of which her own heart is the theatre." The flame consuming the eloquent and ardent disciple of Rousseau was in need of fuel, and, finding this in politics, she threw herself upon it with a sort of ravenous fury, just as she had once abandoned herself to study. At twenty-two she had written to one of her young friends: "You scold me for studying too hard. Bear in mind, then, that unless I did so, love might perhaps excite my imagination to frenzy. It is a necessary distraction. I am not trying to become a learned woman; I study because I need to study, as I do to eat." It was thus that Madame Roland plunged into politics. All her unappeased instincts and repressed forces found their outlet in that direction.

Woman being formed by nature to be dominated, nothing is more agreeable to her than to invert the parts, and in her turn to domineer. To exert influence in public affairs, to designate or support the candidates for great offices of State, to organize or direct a ministry, to make themselves listened to by serious men, to inspire opinions or systems, is to ambitious women a kind of revenge for their sex. Those who have acquired a habit of exercising this sort of power cannot relinquish it without extreme reluctance. If they have once persuaded themselves of their superiority to men, nothing can ever root the conviction from their minds. To be protected humiliates them; what they long for most of all is to be acknowledged as protectresses. Self-deluded, they attribute to their passion for the public welfare what is, especially in their case, the need of petty glory, the thirst for emotions, or the amusement of pride and vanity.

The Revolutionary bluestocking, Madame Roland, was from the very start delighted to see that her works were printed, and that they produced as much effect as if they had been written by some great statesman. These first successes seemed to her to justify the excellent opinion she had always entertained of herself. She got into a habit of playing the oracle. No sooner had her lips touched the cup containing this poisonous but intoxicating beverage than she would have no other. That alone could refresh, even while it killed her.

Politics has the immense defect of exasperating, troubling, and disfiguring souls. Madame Roland was born good, sensible, and generous. Politics made her at times wicked, vindictive, and cruel. July 26, 1789, she wrote this odious letter: "You are nothing but children; your enthusiasm is a fire of straw, and if the National Assembly does not order the trial of two illustrious heads, or some generous Decius does not strike them down, you are all ... lost" (Madame Roland employed a more trivial expression). "If this letter does not reach you, may the cowards who read it redden to learn that it is from a woman, and tremble in reflecting that she can create a hundred enthusiasts from whom will proceed a million others." Roland had been employed by the Agricultural Society of Lyons to draw up its reports for the States-General. Madame Roland wrote much more of them than her husband did. She sent article on article to a journal founded by Champagneux to forward the revolutionary propaganda. Sixty thousand copies were printed of one of them in which she described the festival of the Federation at Lyons. Imagine the joy felt by the femme-auteur, the pupil of Jean-Jacques, the model of George Sand! Soon afterwards, the municipality deputed Roland to the Constituent Assembly to advocate the interests of the city, which was involved to the extent of forty millions, and which asked to have this debt assumed by the State. Roland and his wife arrived in Paris, February 20, 1791.

The married pair installed themselves on the third floor of the hotel Britannique, in rue Guénégaud. There a sort of political reunion was formed, of which Brissot was the first link. Four times a week a few friends, and certain deputies and journalists, met around this still unknown woman, whose wit, charm, and beauty were not long in making a sensation. It was at this period that she made Buzot's acquaintance. The day of her first interview with the young and brilliant deputy was an epoch in her sentimental life. Thenceforward, two passions, love and ambition, the one as fierce and devouring as the other, were to occupy her ardent soul. Comparing the young orator, whom she perhaps transformed in her imagination into the president of a more or less Athenian republic, with the austere and prosaic companion of her existence, she perceived that, according to her own expression, there was no equality between her and her husband, and that "the ascendency of a domineering character, joined to twenty years' seniority, rendered one of these superiorities too great"—that of age. She was herself six years older than Buzot. Even though her love for him may have remained Platonic, she gave him all her heart and soul.

For the majority of women, still beautiful, who mingle in public affairs, love is the principal thing; politics but the accessory, the pretext. They imagine they are attaching themselves to ideas, and it is to men. In this respect the heroines of the Revolution resemble those of the Fronde. The stateswoman in Madame Roland plays second to the lover of Buzot. In her mind the Republic and the handsome republican blend into one. Believing herself a patriot when she is above all a woman in love, she carries the emotions, the infatuations, the ardors and exaggerations of her private life into her public one. With her, angers and enthusiasms rise to paroxysm. She is extreme in all things.

She detests Louis XVI. as much as she loves Buzot. After the flight to Varennes, she wrote: "To replace the King on the throne is a folly, an absurdity, if it is not a horror; to declare him demented is to make obligatory the appointment of a regent. To impeach Louis XVI. would be, beyond all contradiction, the greatest and most righteous step, but you are incapable of taking it. Well then, put him not exactly under interdict, but suspend him." Here begins the influence of Madame Roland. The suspension of the royal authority is one of her ideas. "So long as peace lasted," she says, "I adhered to the peaceful rôle and to that kind of influence which I thought fitting to my sex; when war was declared by the King's departure, it appeared to me that every one should devote himself unreservedly. I joined the fraternal societies, being persuaded that zeal and good intentions might be very useful in critical moments. I was unable to stay at home any longer, and I went to the houses of worthy people of my acquaintance that we might excite each other to great measures." One knows what the Revolution meant by that expression: great measures. Madame Roland became furious. She wanted a freedom of the press without check or limit. She was angry because Marat's newspapers were destroyed by the satellites of Lafayette. "It is a cruel thing to think of," she exclaims, "but it becomes every day more evident that peace means retrogression, and that we can only be regenerated by blood."

Her hatred includes both Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. June 25, 1791, she writes: "It appears to me that the King ought to be sequestered and his wife impeached." And on July 1: "The King has sunk to the lowest depths of degradation; his trick has exposed him completely, and he inspires nothing but contempt. His name, his portrait, and his arms have been effaced everywhere. Notaries have been obliged to take down the escutcheons marked with a flower-de-luce which served to designate their houses. He is called nothing but Louis the False, or the great hog. Caricatures of every sort represent him under emblems which, though not the most odious, are the most suitable to nourish and augment popular disdain. The people tend of their own accord to all that can express this sentiment, and it is impossible that they should ever again be willing to see seated on the throne a being they despise so completely."

Things did not go fast enough to suit Madame Roland's furious hatred. The popular gathering in the Champ-de-Mars, whose aim was to bring about the deposition of the King, was forcibly dispersed on July 17. With six exceptions, all the deputies who had belonged either to the Jacobin Club or that of the Cordeliers, left them on account of their demand that Louis XVI. should be brought to trial. The time for great measures, to use Madame Roland's expression, had not yet arrived. The ardent democrat laments it. "I cannot describe our situation to you," she writes at this moment of the revolutionary recoil; "I feel environed by a silent horror; my heart grows steadfast in a mournful and solemn silence, ready to sacrifice all rather than cease to defend principles, but not knowing the moment when they can triumph, and forming no resolution but that of giving a great example."

The mission which had kept Roland in Paris for seven months being ended, the discouraged pair returned to their province in September. After stopping a few days in Lyons, in order to found a popular society affiliated to the Jacobins of the capital, they went to spend the remainder of the autumn at their country place, the Close of Platière. But calm and silence no longer suited Madame Roland. Repose exasperated her. She missed the struggle and the emotions of revolutionary Paris, of which she had said: "One lives ten years here in twenty-four hours; events and affections blend with and succeed each other with singular rapidity; no such great events ever occupied minds."

The pleasure of seeing her daughter again was not enough to compensate her for the chagrin of having parted from Buzot. Just as she was despairing at the thought of sinking back into all the nullity of the province, as she expresses it, the news came that the inspectors of agriculture had been suppressed. Roland, no longer an official, deliberated with his wife as to their next step. His own inclination was to settle permanently in the country and devote himself to agricultural labors which would surely and safely augment his fortune. But his wife was by no means of the same mind. She must see her dear Buzot again at any cost. She flattered the self-love of her unsuspecting spouse, and persuaded him that Paris was the sole theatre worthy of the virtuous Roland. Roland allowed himself to be convinced. His wife, no longer mistress of herself, was drawn into the Parisian abyss as by an irresistible force. And yet was it not she who had proposed to herself this ideal, so easily to have been realized? "I have never imagined anything more desirable than a life divided between domestic cares and those of agriculture, spent on a healthy and fertile farm, with a little family where the example of its heads and common labor maintain attachment, peace, and freedom." Was it not she who had uttered this profoundly true thought: "I see neither pleasure nor happiness except in the reunion of that which charms the heart as well as the senses, and costs no regrets"? In the most beautiful days of her youth had she not written: "There was a time when I was never content except when I had a book or a pen in my hand; at present I am as well satisfied when I have made a shirt for my father or added up an account of expenses as if I had read something profound. I do not care at all to be learned; I want to be good and happy; that is my chief business. What is necessary but good, honest common sense?" Is it not she, too, who will write at the beginning of her Memoirs: "I have observed that in all classes, ambition is generally fatal; for the few happy ones whom it exalts, it makes a multitude of victims." Why did she not more frequently remind herself of the sentiment so just and well expressed in a letter dated in 1790: "Women are not made to share in all the occupations of men: they are altogether bound to domestic cares and virtues, and they cannot turn away from them without destroying their happiness." But, alas! passion does not reason. Farewell common sense, wisdom, and experience, when ambition and love have taken possession of a woman's heart. Returning to Paris, December 15, 1791, the Rolands established themselves in the rue de la Harpe, and plunged head-long into politics. The wife redoubled her activity, eloquence, and passion. The husband, instead of attending quietly to the management of his retiring pension, was named a member of the Jacobin corresponding committee at the beginning of 1792, a revolutionary centre of which Brissot was the leader. At this period, we are informed by Madame Roland, the intimidated court imagined that the nomination of a minister chosen from among the patriots of the Assembly would cause it to regain a little popularity. Brissot proposed Roland, who, on March 24, 1792, accepted the portfolio of the Interior.

Madame, behold yourself, then, the wife of a minister, and in fact more of a minister than your husband. Your ambitious projects, which have been treated as chimerical, are now realized. You have a cortège like Marie Antoinette. Men seek the favor of a smile, a word, from you. They court, they solicit, they fear you. The monarchy, which you detest, is at last obliged to reckon with you and your friends. Your beauty, your talent, and your eloquence are boasted of. Your name is in every mouth. You are powerful, you are celebrated. Well! you will find out for yourself what bitterness there is at the bottom of this cup of pride which has tempted your lips so long. You will learn at your own expense that renown does not produce happiness, and that, for a woman, twilight is better than the full glare of day. Yes, you will long for the obscurity which weighed upon you. You will long for the house of your father, the engraver, on the Quai des Orfèvres. You will dream of the sunsets which affected you, and of the monotonous but peaceful succession of your days. You, the deist, the female philosopher, will recall with regret the cloisters where in your adolescence you tasted the peace of the elect. In the time of your supreme trial Buzot's miniature will not console you; it is not his image you should cover with your kisses. No; that miniature is not the viaticum for eternity. What you will need is the crucifix, and you respect the crucifix no longer. And yet your imagination will evoke the mystic cloister, with its altars decked with flowers, its painted windows, its penetrating and ineffable poesy. And in thought, also, you will see the country once more, the harvest time, the month of the vintage, the poor who come to the door asking for bread and who go away with blessings on their lips and gratitude in their hearts. Why have you quitted these honest people? What have you come to do in the midst of these ferocious Jacobins, who flatter you to-day and will assassinate you to-morrow? Do you fancy that Marie Antoinette is the only woman who will be insulted, calumniated, and betrayed? Why do you seat at your hospitable table this livid-faced Robespierre, who to-day, perhaps, will address you a madrigal, and to-morrow send you to the scaffold? You will pay very dear for these false and artificial joys, these gusts of commonplace vanity, this pride of a parvenu, and the pleasure of presiding for a few evenings at the dinners given to the Minister of the Interior in Calonne's dining-room. The Legislative Assembly, the Jacobin Club, the journals and the ministry, the souvenirs of Plutarch and the parodies of Jean-Jacques, the noisy crowd of flatterers who are the courtiers of demagogues as they would have been the courtiers of kings, these adulators who are going to change into executioners,—all are vanity! Poor woman, whose power will be so ephemeral, why do you make yourself a persecutor? You will so soon be persecuted. Why labor so relentlessly to shake the foundations of a throne that will bury you beneath its ruins?