her a
personal triumph in which her pride delighted. The parvenue enjoyed
the humiliations of the daughter of the German Caesars. Her jealous
instincts feasted on the afflictions of the Queen of France and Navarre.

Lamartine, indignant at this cruelty on Madame Roland's part, has
repented of the eulogies he gave her in his _Histoire des Girondins_.
In his _Cours de Litterature_ (Volume XIII. Conversation XXIII.), he
says: "I glided over that medley of intrigue and pomposity which
composed the genius, both feminine and Roman, of this woman. In so
doing, I conceded more to popularity than to truth. I wanted to give a
Cornelia to the Republic. As a matter of fact, I do not know what
Cornelia was, that mother of the {373} Gracchi who brought up
conspirators against the Roman Senate, and trained them to sedition,
that virtue of ambitious commoners. As to Madame Roland, who inflated
a vulgar husband by the breath of her feminine anger against a court
she found odious because it did not open to her upstart vanity, there
was nothing really fine in her except her death. Her role had been a
mere parade of true greatness of soul." What Lamartine finds fault
with most of all is her hostility to the martyr Queen. He adds: "She
inspired the Girondins, her intimate friends, with an implacable hatred
against the Queen, already so humiliated and so menaced; she had
neither respect nor pity for this victim; she points her out to the
rebellious multitude. She is no longer a wife, a mother, or a
Frenchwoman. She poses as Nemesis at the door of the Temple, when the
Queen is groaning there over her husband, her children, and herself,
between the throne and the scaffold. This ostentatious stoicism of
implacability is what, in my view, kills the woman in this female
demagogue."

Alas! if Madame Roland was guilty, she was to be punished cruelly. The
colleague of the _virtuous_ Roland was the organizer of the September
massacres. The republican sheepfold dreamed of by the admirer of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was invaded by ferocious beasts. Human nature
had never appeared under a more execrable aspect than since its
so-called regeneration. Madame Roland was filled with a naive
astonishment. After having sown the wind she was {374} utterly
surprised to reap the whirlwind. What! she said to herself, my husband
is minister, or, to speak with great exactness, I am the minister
myself, and yet there are people in France who are dissa