r and more seductive smile." In prison, when she is nearly
forty, she states that if she has lost some of her attractions, yet she
needs no help from art to make her look five or six years younger.
"Even those who see me every day," she adds, "require to be told my
age, in order to believe me more than thirty-two or thirty-three."
Madame Roland had at first written thirty-three or thirty-four. But
after reflection, finding herself too modest, she made an erasure and
retrenched another year. She adds that she made very little use of her
charms; avowing at the same time, and with the most absolute frankness,
that if she could reconcile her duty with her inclination to utilize
them more fully, she would not be sorry.

Both Marie Antoinette and Madame Roland were political women. But the
one became so in her own despite, in the hope of saving the life of her
husband and the heritage of her son; the other, through ambition and
the desire to play a part for which her origin had not destined her.
In the one, everything is at once noble and simple, natural and
majestic; in the other there is always something affected and
theatrical; one scents the _parvenue_ who will never be a _grande
dame_, even in the Ministry of the Interior or at the house of Calonne.
All is unstudied in Marie Antoinette; Madame Roland, on the contrary,
is an artist in coquetry.

{76}

Bizarre caprice of fate which makes political rivals and adversaries
treating with each other on equal terms of these two women, of whom one
was so much above the other by rank and birth. The Tuileries and the
house of the Minister of the Interior are like two hostile citadels at
a stone's throw from each other. On both sides there is watchfulness
and fear. An impassable abyss, hollowed out by the vanity of the
commoner still more than by the pride of the Queen, forever separates
these two courageous women who, had they united instead of antagonizing
each other, might have saved both their country and themselves.

It is necessary to go back a few years in order to comprehend the
motive of Madame Roland's hatred for Marie Antoinette. It was inspired
in the vain commoner by envy, the worst and vilest of all counsellors.
Madame Roland's special characteristic was the passion for making an
effect. Now the effect produced by Marie Antoinette under the old
regime was immense; that produced by the future Egeria of the Girondin
group was almost null. A simple mortal, r