fe in these stormy
times, and cloister themselves in rural seclusion, in the calm luxury
of literary and scientific enterprise, or launch forth again upon the
storm-swept ocean of revolution and anarchy. Few who understand the
human heart will doubt of the decision to which they came. The
chickens were left in the yard, the rabbits in the warren, and the
flowers were abandoned to bloom in solitude; and before the snows of
December had whitened the hills, they were again installed in
tumultuous Paris. A new Assembly had just been convened, from which
all the members of the one but recently dissolved were by law
excluded. Their friends were rapidly assembling in Paris from their
summer retreats, and influential men, from all parts of the empire,
were gathering in the metropolis, to watch the progress of affairs.
Clubs were formed to discuss the great questions of the day, to mold
public opinion, and to overawe the Assembly. It was a period of
darkness and of gloom; but there is something so intoxicating in the
draughts of homage and power, that those who have once quaffed them
find all milder stimulants stale and insipid. No sooner were M. and
Madame Roland established in their city residence, than they were
involved in all the plots and the counterplots of the Revolution. M.
Roland was grave, taciturn, oracular. He had no brilliance of talent
to excite envy. He displayed no ostentation in dress, or equipage, or
manners, to provoke the desire in others to humble him. His reputation
for stoical virtue gave a wide sweep to his influence. His very
silence invested him with a mysterious wisdom. Consequently, no one
feared him as a rival, and he was freely thrust forward as the
unobjectionable head of a party by all who hoped through him to
promote their own interests. He was what we call in America an
_available_ candidate. Madame Roland, on the contrary, was animated
and brilliant. Her genius was universally admired. Her bold
suggestions, her shrewd counsel, her lively repartee, her capability
of cutting sarcasm, rarely exercised, her deep and impassioned
benevolence, her unvarying cheerfulness, the sincerity and enthusiasm
of her philanthropy, and the unrivaled brilliance of her
conversational powers, made her the center of a system around which
the brightest intellects were revolving. Vergniaud, Petion, Brissot,
and others, whose names were then comparatively unknown, but whose
fame has since resounded through the civilize