the
manor, to see my fowls brood, and take care of my rabbits, I would care
nothing more about the revolutions of empires. But, as soon as I am in
the city, the poverty of the people and the insolence of the rich rouse
my hatred of injustice and oppression: I have no longer any soul or
desire except for the triumph of great truths and the success of our
regeneration."

The die is cast. The daughter of Philipon the engraver is about to
become a political woman. The hour is come when this great actress,
who has long known her part, is at last going on the stage. She has a
presentiment of the risk she is running in assuming a task which is
beyond her sex. But, like soldiers who love danger for danger's sake,
and prefer the emotions of the battle-field to garrison life, she will
joyfully quit her province and throw herself into the seething furnace
of Paris. Even though she is to meet persecution and death at the end
of her new career, she will not recoil. A short but agitated life will
seem better to her than a long and fortunate existence without violent
emotions. A clear sky pleases her no longer. She is homesick for
storms and lightning flashes.

{60}

VI.

MADAME ROLAND'S ENTRANCE ON THE SCENE.

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. {61} But the Revolution was a Saturn who devoured
his children, male and female, and the Egeria o