the country, whose endless variations of hill and vale and sky and color
she has so tenderly and so vividly noted. In her last days a piano and
a few flowers lighted the darkness of her prison walls, and out of
these her imagination reared a world of its own, peopled with dreams and
fancies that contrasted strangely with the gloom of her surroundings.
This poetic vein was closely allied to the keen sensibility that
tempered the seriousness of her character. With the mental equipment of
a man, she combined the rich sympathy of a woman. Her devotion to her
mother was passionate in its intensity; her letters to Sophie throb with
warmth and sentiment. She is tender and loving, as well as philosophic
and thoughtful. Her emotional ardor was doubtless partly the glow of
youth and not altogether in the texture of a mind so eminently rational;
but there were rich possibilities behind it. A shade of difference in
the mental and moral atmosphere, a trace more or less of sunshine and
happiness are important factors in the peculiar combination of qualities
that make up a human being. The marriage of Mme. Roland led her into a
world that had little color save what she brought into it. Her husband
did not smile upon her friends. Sympathy other than that of the
intellect she does not seem to have had. But her story is best told in
her own words, written in the last days of her life.

"In considering only the happiness of my partner, I soon perceived that
something was wanting to my own. I had never, for a single instant,
ceased to see in my husband one of the most estimable of men, to whom I
felt it an honor to belong; but I have often realized that there was
a lack of equality between us, that the ascendency of an overbearing
character, added to that of twenty years more of age, gave him too much
superiority. If we lived in solitude, I had many painful hours to pass;
if we went into the world, I was loved by men of whom I saw that some
might touch me too deeply. I plunged into work with my husband, another
excess which had its inconvenience; I gave him the habit of not knowing
how to do without me for anything in the world, nor at any moment.

"I honor, I cherish my husband, as a sensible daughter adores a virtuous
father to whom she would sacrifice even her lover; but I have found the
man who might have been that lover, and remaining faithful to my duties,
my frankness has not known how to conceal the feelings which I subjected
to