Manon Phlipon Roland; early years

Front matter

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Contents

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Introductory ix

By Edwin Rowland Blashfield

Chapter I The Portrait Of The Memoirs

To write anew of one who has been so celebrated not only by her contemporaries but by their successors seems perhaps superfluous. She who has received the civic crown from Quinet, Michelet, Louis Blanc, and Carlyle, whose house bears a commemorative tablet, whose statue stands on the fa9ade of the town hall of Paris, may be considered so securely established in her niche in history that further criticism or comment is redundant.

Time, however, has its revelations as well as its revenges. Following in the footsteps of the great harvesters an aftermath may be gleaned. More than a century ago Louvet published the Appeal to Impartial Posterity of the Citoyenne Roland. Forty years have passed since Dauban and Faugere told the secret which had been so piously preserved by Madame Roland's family and friends. These forty years have been extremely prolific in the discovery of historical data relating to the French Revolution. There have been changes in political opinion; families have died out, and consequently certain susceptibilities are no longer to be considered; private papers by gift or sale have become public property; and domestic records have attained the dignity of historical documents. Journals, letters, and household chronicles, as well as secret archives, spies' reports, and diplomats' despatches are now open to the curious. To-day no epoch can be studied more closely than that which Matthew Arnold discriminatingly termed the most animating in history.

It was indeed not only the most animating but a unique moment in the evolution of mankind, in which nothing happened as it had ever happened before. Only the unexpected occurred, the amazing became the normal, and the impossible was the order of the day. A year counted as a lustrum, so crowded was it with events. Speculation was instantly translated into action. Theory was precipitated into practice. The written word quickened into the spoken word, and the spoken word into the immediate deed. Life moved at a quickstep. An episode grew into a drama, and a drama into a tragedy; protagonist and chorus shifted roles with bewildering celerity; at a moment's notice the "super" of a first became the star of a second act. The butcher of yesterday played the victim of to-day. Princesses scrubbed floors, adventuresses trafficked in heads and fortunes, and great ladies trudged as camp-followers behind officers in wadded petticoats. Infantry captured fleets, and victory marched in the ranks of famished tatterdemalions.

On the swift current of events we are swept from surprise to mystery, from mystery to enigma, drawn on by the lure of the unforeseen. Despite Taine's analyses of the Revolution's origins, notwithstanding Sorel's lucid and philosophical explanations of its immediate and remote causes, of its inevitability, in fine, and Jaures's insistence on its economic aspects, the great movement, eluding classification and arrangement, retains the fascination of the impenetrable. And the Revolution is not ended. It is not a past issue. We have not solved all its problems or answered its questions. The rights of man are still to define, the social contract is yet to be made. The sphinx of the Revolution crouches in our path.

To-day its economic history is emerging through the publication of documents from municipal registers and provincial archives.* A new continent of special knowledge is open to the explorer, of measureless value to the historian of democracy. The Revolution's hoard of precious material for savant and student is inexhaustible. As the soil of Egypt after centuries of excavation still yields riches to the treasure-seeker, each season welcomes the publication of some work based on documents from recently discovered stores.

Modern research, though it has not radically changed our estimates of the prominent figures of the Revolution, or invalidated the judgment of its famous historians, has often modified them. Naturally enough the importance of recent discoveries has been magnified owing to the present tendency to reverse the decrees of the past, to smirch quondam saints, and to bleach ci-devant sinners. But, though the minute investigation of modern scholarship has resulted in no special transformation of opinion, it has profoundly altered the general attitude of mind towards all historical work, and has supplied a new modus and a new standard to the historian. A habit of cautious verification, unhesitating rejection of statements unsupported by

* Collection des documents inedits sur Vhistoire iconomique de la revolu' tion fran^aise.

documentary evidence, a disposition to lean more confidingly on a single fact than on a general belief, a growing distrust of the dramatic presentation of events, are gradually changing what was once literature into science.

Gradually only, however. The method is young. The destructive instinct of extreme youth is not entirely outgrown. The denials are less temperately phrased than the assertions. The significance of a small recent discovery is rated above that of the more important but familiar fact. The present levelling tendency is not sufficiently curbed. Style and eloquence are regarded with suspicion, as though they were necessarily misleading. But these are the defects of qualities which further development will correct.

The scientific method has not yet discrowned the queen of the Gironde. The most distinguished living historian of the Revolution, M. Aulard, still considers her the Egeria of her political party, or rather a goldenvoiced siren defied and punished by sage Ulysses-Danton, who lured the wise and eloquent, as well as the young and enthusiastic, to shipwreck on the rocks of an impossible Utopia.

To Morse Stephens Madame Roland is the ambitious leader of a salon of the Opposition. To Mr. Belloc "Roland's wife is the one character which could have prevented Danton's ascendancy, and have met his ugly strength by a force as determined and more refined." Mr. Austin Dobson, who occasionally takes swallow-like dips into the waters of history, considers Madame Roland as **man by the head and woman by the heart," though he prefers Madame de Lamballe, as is natural to a poet who confesses himself *'not at ease with tragic and majestic figures," and in their presence longs "for the over-sexed woman of Rivarol." M. Perroud, the latest editor of the Roland memoirs and letters, refrains entirely from personal judgments and contents himself with exhaustive annotation and careful emendation of his author's text. His researches have furnished the most valuable additions to our knowledge of Madame Roland since Dauban's work appeared in 1867. No writer unites more genuine enthusiasm for his subject with a more detached attitude towards it, and modern objectivity finds no worthier expositor. Yet the imposing figure of the Girondin lady remains heroic in his documented pages.

The popular M. Lenotre, who illustrates, pushed to its remotest limit, another modern tendency — devout contemplation of detail — has applied his microscope to Madame Roland, or rather to her furniture and her old clothes. To a list of the chairs and curtains in her apartment of the Rue de la Harpe, and of the worn garments left in the wardrobe when she was carried off to prison, he appends an appreciation of the owner's character and aims. This sketch, though scarcely more valuable than the discarded gowns it minutely describes, and curiously hostile in tone, does not deny to its subject the power and charm that impressed every one of her contemporaries who came within the magic circle of her influence. Courage, eloquence, elevated enthusiasm are accorded to her even by those who, through class prejudice or a kind of belated snobbishness, are inclined to judge harshly "the ambitious bourgeoise," the commoner who aspired to play the aristocrat.

Indeed, it almost seems as if the attraction that swayed the minds of men in her own day had endured, and that every writer who came near this puissant personality submitted to the spell of her grace, or the force of her spirit. Royalist, Montagnard, Terrorist, Reactionary, as divided in opinion among themselves as they are from the Girondin leaders, subscribe grudgingly or cordially to the dictum of Antonelle, her political opponent: "(9 Roland, la plus seduisante des femmeSy le plus grand des homines^

The ^^ grand homme" is raised on a pedestal to be observed and judged by every one; the seduisante femme is less known. All the world has seen the palms laid at the feet of the heroine, few have noted the tender tributes of friends and comrades to the charming woman. It is to the more intimate knowledge of her character rather than of her acts or her influence that the research of the last few years has contributed. M. Join-Lambert's publication of the correspondence of M. and Mme. Roland before their marriage, M. Perroud's discovery of the souvenirs of Madame Sophie Grandchamp, and his monumental editions of Madame Roland's letters are the most important of several publications that form a valuable commentary on her own Memoirs.

As yet, however, in spite of new matter, Madame Roland remains her own best biographer, and any study of her Hfe and work, or of the national drama she helped to make will always return again and again to her Memoirs. Fresh material may supplement, it cannot supersede them. She speaks better for herself than any one can speak for her. She tried to plead her own cause before the Revolutionary Tribunal. She longed to justify her husband, to exonerate her friends. She was silenced, as were Vergniaud and all the golden tongues of her eloquent party, but, never losing faith in human justice, she spent the last months of her life in writing an appeal to a more august tribunal — "the judgment," in her own words, "of Impartial Posterity."

Memoirs were never composed under greater stress. They were written by stealth, in solitary confinement, under the eyes of a watchful guard, in a tiny, stifling cell, with the shadow of the guillotine falling across their pages. They cover quartos of coarse gray paper supplied by the jailer for the prisoners' correspondence. The sheets are closely written, for space was valuable as well as time, in an elegant, clear hand with hardly an erasure or a correction, though some of the lines are blotted with tear-stains. A biography of this manuscript would read like a romance of adventure. It was smuggled out of prison under a woman's neckerchief, dropped furtively into the court from a barred window, and picked up by a devoted friend literally at the risk of his head. It was hidden for months in a deserted quarry, in the cleft of a rock in the forest of Montmorency, and in the hermitage of Sainte Radegonde. They carried death in their folds like the subtly poisoned billets of the Renaissance, those boldly written pages. Some of them were burned in a panic of fear after the arrest of the friend to whom they were confided, and some of them were concealed within a few feet of the formidable Committee of Public Safety. When the scattered leaves were finally collected and published it was the house friends of Madame Roland, Bosc and Louvet, who gave them to the world.

We owe the Memoirs of Madame Roland to her friends — it was their courage and devotion that preserved and transmitted her Appeal; Champagneux, Bosc, Mentelle, Helena Williams, Sophie Grandchamp each took up the perilous task as suspicion or arrest fell upon one after another of the little group. The contemporaries of Madame Roland raised temples to friendship; the preservation of her papers is not one of the least of these monuments.

The eighteenth century — analytical, self-conscious, curious of the things of the mind, deeply interested in defining the rights and the relations of the individual to the general scheme of existence — sought expression in memoirs. No age is as rich in the personal record of events and emotions. As art had turned to genre and portraiture, deserting Paradise and Olympus, literature, responding even more sensitively to the demands of new-born realism, was occupied with actualities. The seventeenth century had busied itself with the study of divinity and the soul of man, the eighteenth century sought light in the study of humanity and the mind of man. BufFon succeeded to Fenelon, Rousseau's Confessions to the Pensees of Pascal; as spiritual guide the Enchiridion of Epictetus replaced the Philothee of Saint Francis de Sales, and while the Lives of Plutarch were diligently read, the dust gathered on the Lives of the Saints.

If the study of man in general was interesting, the contemplation of the individual man was engrossing. That intimate homo that each one of us knows, or fancies he knows, best, became the object of earnest contemplation and brilliant exposition, given the habit of writing and the perfected instrument of expression that the French language had become in the eighteenth century. To inventory one's own person, to take stock of one's capacities, to plumb the depths of the heart, to sound the shallows of the mind, to balance faults and weaknesses against virtues and excellences, to cast this self-knowledge in a pretty mould of exact terms and deftly turned, epigrammatic phrases, was an intellectual game constantly played in a society that, to the natural absence of reserve of the Latin, united a social instinct so highly developed that reticence was as irksome to it as soHtude. Thus the Portrait, a delicately worded, penetratingly observed study in analysis, was a favorite diversion and a literary exercise in polite circles, and memoirs are but a further development of the full-length portrait with the addition of background and minor figures.

Memoirs are valuable as revelations of character, as pictures of society, as contemporary records of events, and as expressions of the general spirit of their epoch. iEsthetic interest is superadded when they are written with style and grace. They gain in importance as the character of the author is remarkable, as the society depicted is unusual, as the events described are noteworthy. If a fine sense of form governs the arrangement of material they become belles lettres as well as documents. Weighed by any of these standards of lo MANON PHLIPON ROLAND

value the Memoirs of Madame Roland are of capital importance, as precious to the psychologist as to the historian of manners, or events, or letters. No document affords a more intimate view of the Revolution, a more animated picture of the life of the bourgeoisie, or a more searching study of a unique personality — a personality of whom a contemporary, Lemontey, wrote: " ce n'etait pas seulement le caractere le plus j on, mais encore le plus vrai de notre revolution.*^

The carefully finished portrait of the author is only one of a series that covers the ample canvas of the Memoirs — portraits that are occasionally painted in lurid or dark colors, but how keen is the perception, how trenchant the characterization ! The men who made and unmade the Revolution have sat unconsciously for the clear-eyed artist. Dumouriez, Vergniaud, Condorcet, Danton, Marat, Robespierre, are sketched from life. To turn the leaves of the Portraits et Anecdotes is like passing from room to room, from case to case, of the Musee Carnavalet, though no piously guarded relics, no vestiges of the past carefully arranged under glass, can compare as a means of evoking it with the narrative of an eye-witness. The force, the fire, the irresistible movement of the Revolution lives again in Madame Roland's pages.

Memoirs written during the Terror are rare, those of Meillan, Brissot, Barbaroux, Buzot, Petion, Louvet, and Dumouriez make but a short list, and lack the color and impetus, as well as the literary flavor, of those of Madame Roland. Many of the so-called Revolutionary memoirs were composed after Thermidor and during the Empire. Lapses of memory, changes of

THE PORTRAIT OF THE MEMOIRS ii

political opinion, the unpopularity of republican ideas, and the natural conservatism of age biassed the views and affected the veracity of their authors, so that their souvenirs are less trustworthy as well as less attractive than those hastily penned in the face of events.

There is a peculiar charm in history that has been lived by the historian, and there is an intimate attraction in following the evolution of the historian's mind and character under the influence of the events recorded. When Madame Roland was first imprisoned hope was strong in her; her friends were free, raising the Provinces, gathering an army that she hoped to see enter Paris, re-establishing the rule of law and the rights of all Frenchmen against the despotism of a minority. Through June and July, sustained by letters from Buzot and by visits from her friends, she spent many hours in writing an apologia for her husband's policy as minister of the interior and an explanation of her share in his work. In August the news of the defeat of Wimpfen's army and the flight of the Girondin leaders bereft her of all hope. Her friends were "jmjpects.^' Champagneux was arrested, and the greater part of the work she had confided to him was burned in a panic of terror. Bosc had resigned his position and could see her only rarely. Grandpre, watched and hounded, counted his visits. Her solitude was almost unbroken. She was alone with her disillusions and her sorrows, her lost dreams of a free and happy republican France, her dead faith in the noble aspirations and innate goodness of the people. Anguish far more intolerable even than the loss of belief in lofty ideals pressed on her heart — the thought of her lover, a fugitive and an outlaw in hourly peril of his life.

Madame Roland since her convent days had found her spiritual guide under the Porch, but stoicism, though it fortifies the mind, cannot steel the heart, and the lonely woman, wounded in all her affections, sought asylum from despair, not in the Gospels nor in the Discourses, but in the evocation of her own youth. She stopped her ears against the clamor of her unhappy time, and listened to the voice of memory. As she listened the blood-stained walls of her fetid prison vanished and she was in the dewy forest of Meudon gathering the first violets of the year, or walking in the Jardin du Roi between the glowing flowerbeds in a gay holiday throng, or in her own tiny room overlooking the Seine, among her books — young again, free from the chains of duty and the tyranny of circumstance.

In the Memoires Particuliers present ills are ignored and public life almost forgotten, save only when the firmly woven thread of the narrative is broken by a wail of grief, or a cry of indignation at some new crime against liberty and justice. Once the paper is abruptly cut off, "for no one is sure of living twenty-four hours."

Were it not for these crosses that mark the flowery path of the narrative of sunny early years it would be difficult to realize that it was the work of one about to die. The envoys of the Mountain howl "Mort d la fefnme Roland" under her windows, the hawkers of the Pere Duchesne shout their obscene calumnies within her hearing: insult and peril only speed her pen.

and sweeten and strengthen the memory of her youth. And this record of youthful days has youth's own spontaneous and irresistible charm. Here are no echoes of antiquity, no Roman matron's attitude; for the moment Plutarch is forgotten and Jean Jacques remembered. The citoyenne, the austere republican, has dropped the stylus, and Manon Phlipon has taken up the facile quill of her countrywomen that in her hand becomes a wizard's rod calling up a vanished world. Gayety, tenderness, irony, frolic mirth, a frank abandonment to the young delight of being alive; an unusual capacity for realizing past moods of thought and phases of feeling, concise yet vivid bits of description, penetrating appreciations of character, a style clear and sparkling as youthful eyes that have known neither tears nor vigils; a sureness of touch and lightness of hand that, in spite of a didactic tone (common to most of the late eighteenth-century memoirs), always saves the every-day from becoming the commonplace; by such means is the narrative of the retired, uneventful life of a little Parisian bourgeoise endued with significance and distinction.

How true is her picture } Did she add to the delineation of the girl that she had been, the portrait of the woman she desired to be, or the woman she had become ? Did not the amplitude of a matured style, the reflections of a riper experience enrich the records of her obscure youth ? Undoubtedly. In persons gifted with an abundant inner Hfe the imagination is such a formative factor, such a reality in fine, that it is impossible sharply to divide it from the other reality of fact. There is also in every highly difFerentiated human creature an ego that observes and criticises, as well as an ego that feels and acts. This dualism of the personality inevitably affects the integrity of a retrospective narrative by unconsciously imparting to the primitive ego the larger views and saner judgments of a further stage of mental evolution. Nor can an autobiographer escape a tendency to mould his substance into a fixed form. An author generally possesses an ideal of art even when his life is void of one. Every one has his conventions even when revolting against convention. To be comprehensible we are forced to employ accepted forms; and this obligatory formality dominates the matter it fashions.

With these reservations Madame Roland's account of her life may be taken with less than the proverbial grain of salt. When she wrote — "The daughter of an artist, born in an obscure station but of respectable parents, I spent my youth in the bosom of the fine arts, nourished by the delights of study, ignorant of all superiority but that of merit, of all greatness but that of virtue" — Dauban observes that she sees her childhood as a mirage. But while the style is romantic the statements are indisputable. She did spend her childhood in the studio of her father, a master engraver on metal (graveur de Monsieur le comte d'Artois was his official title), an artist, as he was called in an age that defined the word, "Vouvrier qui travaille avec grand art et avec facilite.*^ There was no chasm then between the industrial and the fine arts. The engraver who decorated snuff-boxes and watch-cases was prepared for his task by an apprenticeship in drawing from the antique and in study of the best models.

Pretty things were not made by the gross then, and each one, if not a separate invention of the maker, was the product of patient, often of enthusiastic, effort, and sometimes was a masterpiece executed under high pressure of fervor and deHght. With less knowledge, perhaps there was more feeling than we possess, — ^'Uouvrier nait au XVI IT siecle et la machine au

xirr

In her father's ateHer the small Manon Phlipon drew from the antique and learned to handle the burin. She had half a dozen masters for dancing, singing, the guitar, the clavecin^ the violin. She did pass her youth in study, reading voraciously and indiscriminately, but usually taking notes and analyzing her reading. If she devoured Candide to-day, to-morrow found her working out algebraic formulae, or filling a letter to Sophie with an abstract of Leibnitz's theory of sensations.

If her girlhood was saddened by a knowledge of her father's dissipation and her mother's anxieties, if in her own home she saw how helpless is goodness to command happiness, such experience does not disprove her words — indeed, the assertion that she was "ignorant of all superiority but that of merit" is a frank admission of the humbleness of her position. Even the least and poorest of nobles was hampered by a thousand different superiorities and greatnesses in the social hierarchy from which the petite bourgeoisie was happily free.

Chapter II Parentage And Childhood

One curious characteristic of these Memoirs, written literally in a race with death, is their air of leisure. The writer begins her story with her own birth and with the portraits of her parents. M. and Mme. Phlipon were painted also by La Tour, and it is interesting to note how these pastels, now in the museum at Lyons, illustrate the pen sketches by their daughter. Gatien Phlipon, in his best coat and lace cravat, in spite of his fine eyes and artist's mouth, is a little vulgar-looking — less so, however, than the portraits of the dukes of Choiseul and Lauzun.

M. Phlipon was "strong and healthy, active and vain." ** Without learning he had that degree of taste and knowledge, which the fine arts give superficially, in whatever branch they are practised." "He could not be said to be a virtuous man, but he had a great deal of what is called honor. He would have no objection to receiving more than it was worth for a thing, but he would have killed himself rather than not pay the price of what he had purchased," Thus Madame Roland with much detachment, and La Tour seems to confirm her judgment.

M. Phlipon's position was financially and socially an agreeable one. Though he kept a shop where he sold his own and his pupils' work, and occasionally dealt in jewels on commission, he was enough of an

i6 artist in sentiment and knowledge to consort with more gifted confreres. His family and that of his wife, though plebeian, were in no sense peuple. His forebears had always owned their own shops and been their own masters. His father, Gatien Phlipon, was a wine-merchant. His mother, Marie Genevieve Rotisset, who had relations among la grande bourgeoisie, opposed her sister's marriage to the well-to-do intendant of a fermier general as a derogation from the family dignity. M. Phlipon himself married a dowerless girl, Marie Marguerite Bimont, the daughter of a mercer, who became the mother of Madame Roland on March 18, 1754.

Madame Roland's ancestry was made the subject of a careful study based on public documents, by M. Jal in the Dictionnaire critique de biographic et d'histoire, article "Roland." It is therefore surprising that M. Lenotre in his Salon de Madame Roland (Paris Revolutionnaire, p. 172, ed. 1906) should have commenced his sketch by the utterly unfounded statements that Madame Roland's grandfather Rotisset was the head cook of the Marquis de Crequy, that he married the chambermaid of the marquise, and that their daughter, Fanchon Rotisset, became the wife of Gatien Phlipon and the mother of his illustrious daughter.

M. Lenotre does not give his authority for these misstatements. It is not far to seek, however. The Crequys' apocryphal cook and chambermaid are only two of the fictitious characters invented by the pamphleteer Causen de Courchamps in his spurious Souvenirs de la Marquise de Crequy (VII, p. 192, ed. of 1840). It was Causen's fabrications of this kind that betrayed the counterfeit character of these cleverly forged memoirs. Though they have recently been abbreviated, translated into English, and presented to the American public as a genuine eighteenth-century production, they were discredited shortly after their appearance in 1840.

M. Lenotre's repetition of Causen's fiction is the more incomprehensible because M. Lenotre acknowledges his indebtedness to M. Perroud for all the material of his Mort de Roland. Now M. Perroud published (in his Lettres de Madame Roland, 1902) an abstract of M. Jal's genealogical study of the Rolands, and a correction of M. Lenotre's careless repetition of Causen's invention. A mere glance at these notes would have prevented M. Lenotre from prematurely despising Madame Roland as the upstart offspring of a couple of servants, and viewing her career with consequent severity. A sufficient acquaintance with the documents in the case to prove that Manon's grandparents were well-to-do bourgeois connected with la haute finance would not only have mitigated the asperity of M. Lenotre's judgment, but would have imposed fewer reserves on our future enjoyment of his entertaining glimpses of history.

Madame PhHpon's portrait forms a sharp contrast to that of her rather positive, blunt-featured husband; in her face there is no lack of delicate edge, of a certain pensiveness refining its evident amiability; she also is in gala dress, and wears her furs and laces with fine unconsciousness. She is a thoughtful and dignified person quite worthy of a place among La Tour's fine ladies. Of the deep love and veneration she inspired

GATIEN PHLIPOX— FATHER OF MADAME ROLAND Pastel by Latour in the Museum of Lyons in her discriminating daughter the Memoirs bear constant witness. It was to this mother of "the heavenly mind and the charming face" that Madame Roland not only owed the sense of duty which proved a sanctuary to her ardent temperament, but a youth exempt from those household cares that devour time and strength. A large leisure for study, a serene and cheerful home life, which soothed the nerves and modified an excess of sensibility, were the gifts of this wise parent to a highly strung, precocious child. And the child of the bourgeoise was fortunate when her mother was judicious as well as tender, for mother and daughter were literally inseparable in the families of the Third Estate, and though the little Manon Phlipon, born before Rousseau's gospel had literally laid the baby on its mother's breast, was put out to nurse in the country, she passed her girlhood, with the exception of a year in a convent, under the maternal wing. The care of her daughter was the occupation and the diversion of the austerely bred bourgeoise; to this one little subject of her kingdom Madame Phlipon relaxed the discipline that often narrowed and alienated filial tenderness by imposing on it a specific character that distinguished it from the other free and natural affections, but this amiable mamma's frown or the substitution of "Mademoiselle" for " ma filler" wsls more effective than M. Phlipon's birch rod. Discipline of a more spiritual sort Maman Phlipon was not chary of, and her daughter's education was a practical preparation for the duties of life as well as its opportunities. The training of heart and mind began when the little Manon was sent home to Paris (1756)