road
intelligence and impartial judgment, is often like the ignis fatuus that
plays over the poisonous marsh and lures the unwary to destruction. For
a brief day the magical influence of Mme. de Condorcet was felt more or
less by all who came within her circle. She inspired the equable temper
of her husband with her own enthusiasm, and urged him on to extreme
measures from which his gentler soul would have recoiled. When at last
he turned from those scenes of horror, choosing to be victim rather than
oppressor, it was too late. Perhaps she recalled the days of her power
with a pang of regret when her friends had fallen one by one at the
scaffold, and her husband, hunted and deserted by those he tried to
serve, had died by his own hand, in a lonely cell, to escape a sadder
fate; while she was left, after her timely release from prison, to
struggle alone in poverty and obscurity, for some years painting
water-color portraits for bread. She was not yet thirty when the
Revolution ended, and lived far into the present century; but though the
illusions of her youth had been rudely shattered, she remained always
devoted to her liberal principles and a broad humanity.

The woman, however, who most fitly represents the spirit of the
Revolution, who was at once its inspiration, its heroine, and its
victim, is Mme. Roland. It is not as the leader of a salon that she
takes her place in the history of her time, but as one of the foremost
and ablest leaders of a powerful political party. Born in the ranks
of the bourgeoisie, she had neither the prestige of a name nor the
distinction of an aristocratic lineage. Reared in seclusion, she was
familiar with the great world by report only. Though brilliant, even
eloquent in conversation when her interest was roused, her early
training had added to her natural distaste for the spirit, as well
as the accessories, of a social life that was inevitably more or less
artificial. She would have felt cramped and caged in the conventional
atmosphere of a drawing room in which the gravest problems were apt to
be forgotten in the flash of an epigram or the turn of a bon mot. The
strong and heroic outlines of her character were more clearly defined on
the theater of the world. But at a time when the empire of the salon was
waning, when vital interests and burning convictions had for the moment
thrown into the shade all minor questions of form and convenance, she
took up the scepter in a simpler fashion