his
communion which creates parties.

The ardent and pure mind of a female was worthy of becoming the focus to
which converged all the rays of the new truth, in order to become
prolific in the warmth of the heart, and to light the pile of old
institutions. Men have the spirit of truth, women only its passion.
There must be love in the essence of all creations; it would seem as
though truth, like nature, has two sexes. There is invariably a woman at
the beginning of all great undertakings; one was requisite to the
principle of the French Revolution.[12] We may say that philosophy found
this woman in Madame Roland.

The historian, led away by the movement of the events which he retraces,
should pause in the presence of this serious and touching figure, as
passengers stopped to contemplate her sublime features and white dress
on the tumbril which conveyed thousands of victims to death. To
understand her we must trace her career from the _atelier_ of her father
to the scaffold. It is in a woman's heart that the germ of virtue lies;
it is almost always in private life that the secret of public life is
reposed.

II.

Young, lovely, radiant with genius, recently married to a man of serious
mind, who was touching on old age, and but recently mother of her first
child, Madame Roland was born in that intermediary condition in which
families scarcely emancipated from manual labour are, it may be said,
amphibious between the labourer and the tradesman, and retain in their
manners the virtues and simplicity of the people, whilst they already
participate in the lights of society. The period in which aristocracies
fall is that in which nations regenerate. The sap of the people is
there. In this was born Jean Jacques Rousseau, the virile type of Madame
Roland. A portrait of her when a child represents a young girl in her
father's workshop, holding in one hand a book, and in the other an
engraving tool. This picture is the symbolic definition of the social
condition in which Madame Roland was born, and the precise moment
between the labour of her hands and her mind.

Her father, Gratien Phlippon, was an engraver and painter in enamel. He
joined to these two professions that of a trade in diamonds and jewels.
He was a man always aspiring higher than his abilities allowed, and a
restless speculator, who incessantly destroyed his modest fortune in his
efforts to extend it in proportion to his ambitious yearnings. He adored
his dau