would have died unknown
and unsuspected. The key that unlocks the treasure house of the soul is
not always found, and its wealth is often scattered on unseen shores.
But it is clear that the part of Mme. Roland could never have been a
distinctively social one. She lived at a time when great events brought
out great qualities. Her clear intellect, her positive convictions,
her boundless energy, and her ardent enthusiasm, gave her a powerful
influence in those early days of the Revolution, that looked towards a
world reconstructed but not plunged into the dark depths of chaos, and
it is through this that she has left a name among the noted women of
France. In more peaceful times her peculiar talent would doubtless have
led her towards literature. In her best style she has rare vigor and
simplicity. She has moments of eloquent thought. There are flashes of it
in her early letters to Sophie, which she begs her friend not to burn,
though she does not hope to rival Mme. de Sevigne, whom she takes for
her model. She lacked the grace, the lightness, the wit, the humor of
this model, but she had an earnestness, a serious depth of thought, that
one does not find in Mme. de Sevigne. She had also a vein of sentiment
that was an underlying force in her character, though it was always
subject to her masculine intellect. She confesses that she should like
to be the annalist of her country, and longs for the pen of Tacitus,
for whom she has a veritable passion. When one reads her sharp, incisive
pen-portraits, drawn with such profound insight and masterly skill, one
feels that her true vocation was in the world of letters. At the close
she verges a little upon the theatrical, as sometimes in her young days.
But when she wrote her final records she felt her last hours slipping
away. Life, with its large possibilities undeveloped and its promises
unfulfilled, was behind her. Darkness was all around her, eternal
silence before her. And she had lived but thirty-nine years.

Mme. Roland does not really belong to the world of the salons, though
she has been included among them by some of her own cotemporaries. She
was of quite another genre. She represents a social reaction in which
old forms are adapted to new ideas and lose their essential quality
by the change. But she foreshadows a type of woman that has had great
influence since the salons have lost their prestige. She relied neither
upon the reflected light of a coterie, the arts of th