h in her sentimental life. Thenceforward, two passions, love
and ambition, the one as fierce and devouring as the other, were to
occupy her ardent soul. Comparing the young orator, whom she perhaps
transformed in her imagination into the president of a more or less
Athenian republic, with the austere and prosaic companion of her
existence, she perceived that, according to her own expression, there
was no equality between her and her husband, and that "the ascendency
of a domineering character, joined to twenty years' seniority, rendered
one of these superiorities too great"--that of age. She was herself
six years older than Buzot. Even though her love for him may have
remained Platonic, she gave him all her heart and soul.

For the majority of women, still beautiful, who mingle in public
affairs, love is the principal thing; politics but the accessory, the
pretext. They imagine they are attaching themselves to ideas, and it
is to men. In this respect the heroines of the Revolution resemble
those of the Fronde. The stateswoman in {65} Madame Roland plays
second to the lover of Buzot. In her mind the Republic and the
handsome republican blend into one. Believing herself a patriot when
she is above all a woman in love, she carries the emotions, the
infatuations, the ardors and exaggerations of her private life into her
public one. With her, angers and enthusiasms rise to paroxysm. She is
extreme in all things.

She detests Louis XVI. as much as she loves Buzot. After the flight to
Varennes, she wrote: "To replace the King on the throne is a folly, an
absurdity, if it is not a horror; to declare him demented is to make
obligatory the appointment of a regent. To impeach Louis XVI. would
be, beyond all contradiction, the greatest and most righteous step, but
you are incapable of taking it. Well then, put him not exactly under
interdict, but suspend him." Here begins the influence of Madame
Roland. The suspension of the royal authority is one of her ideas.
"So long as peace lasted," she says, "I adhered to the peaceful role
and to that kind of influence which I thought fitting to my sex; when
war was declared by the King's departure, it appeared to me that every
one should devote himself unreservedly. I joined the fraternal
societies, being persuaded that zeal and good intentions might be very
useful in critical moments. I was unable to stay at home any longer,
and I went to the houses of worthy people of my