s the man, the style is also the woman. In
1771 Marie Phlipon 'knew not what to do with the hatred in her heart.'
In 1789 Marie Roland, then on the eve of her appearance upon the public
stage of the Revolution, had found 'what to do with the hatred in her
heart.'

In this letter to Bosc we have the 'soul of the Gironde' _tout entiere a
sa proie attachee_. She clung to her regicide purpose with the tenacity
of a tigress. Everything which furthered it she approved, everything
which retarded it she denounced. When the king and queen were brought
back captives from Varennes to Paris in June 1791 she wrote, in an
ecstasy of delight, to Bancal des Issarts, that 'thirty or forty
thousand National Guards surrounded our great brigands'; and her desire
was that 'the royal mannikin should be shut up, and his wife brought to
trial.' She was then inclined to favour the scheme of a regency, of
which her ally Petion should be the chief. We know from his own
nauseating account of his conduct while journeying back from Varennes to
Paris with the unfortunate royal family, how unbridled were Petion's
dreams of his own probable share in this regency; and by a very curious
coincidence a passage in the diary of Gouverneur Morris confirms, on the
authority of Vicq d'Azyr, the Queen's physician, Petion's odious
revelations of his own vanity and vulgarity.

Under the spell of this scheme Madame Roland seems for a time to have
suspended her merciless pursuit of the sovereign whom she hated. She
even got so far as almost to regret the failure of the royal fugitives
to escape. Why? Because their escape 'would have made civil war
inevitable!' These are her own words in a letter written to Bancal des
Issarts, June 25, 1791: 'We can only be regenerated by blood!' This was
the horrible core of her Republican creed.

It made her the ally, the accomplice, the apologist by turns of all the
most sanguinary wretches who grasped at power in her distracted
country--of Marat, when in a spasm of unusual energy La Fayette sought
to suppress his abominable journal; of Robespierre, whose eventual
triumph was to seal her own fate and that of all her personal friends,
including the one man whom in all her life she seems to have
passionately loved; and of Danton, red with the blood of the helpless
prisoners butchered in these massacres of September 1792, of which her
husband, then a member of what called itself a 'Government' in France,
did not hesitate publicly,