ds of reason. To an union as solemn as marriage, the
pleasure of friendship was necessary. This tyranny of an exclusive
feeling was not compensated by love. Roland demanded every thing from
his wife's compliance. If there was no faltering in her conduct, still
she felt these sacrifices, and joyed over the accomplishment of her
duties as the stoic enjoys his sufferings.

XI.

After some years passed at Amiens, Roland was promoted to the same
duties at Lyons, his native place. In winter he dwelt in the town, and
the rest of the year was passed in the country in his paternal home,
where his mother still lived, a respectable old woman, but meddlesome
and overbearing in her household. Madame Roland, in all the flower of
youth, beauty, and genius, thus found herself tormented and beset by a
domineering mother-in-law, a rough brother-in-law, and an exacting
husband. The most passionate love could scarcely have been proof against
so trying and painful a position. To soothe her she had the
consciousness of discharging her duties, her occupation, her philosophy,
and her child. It was sufficing, and eventually transformed this gloomy
retreat into the abode of harmony and peace. We love to follow her into
that solitude, when her mind was becoming tempered for her struggle, as
we go to seek at Charmettes the still fresh and sparkling source of the
life and genius of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

XII.

At the foot of the mountains of Beaujolais, in the large basin of the
Saone, in face of the Alps, there is a series of small hills scattered
like the sea sands, which the patient vine-dresser has planted with
vines, and which form amongst themselves, at their base, oblique
valleys, narrow and sinuous ravines, interspersed with small verdant
meads. These meadows have each their thread of water, which filters down
from the mountains: willows, weeping birch, and poplars, show the course
and conceal the bed of the streams. The sides and tops of these hills
only bear above the lowly vines a few wild peach trees, which do not
shade the grapes and large walnut trees in the orchards near the houses.
On the declivity of one of these sandy protuberances was _La Platiere_,
the paternal inheritance of M. Roland, a low farm-house, with regular
windows, covered with a roof of red tiles nearly flat; the eaves of this
roof project a little beyond the wall, in order to protect the windows
from the rain of winter and the summer's sun. The walls, strai