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," {56} 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 Platiere, 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
Platiere, which she calls her dovecot, she appears as a good
housekeeper who looks after everything, from the cellar to the garret;
{57} 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