Madame Roland (Blind 1886)/Chapter 7
THE CLOS DE LA PLATIÈRE.—JOURNEYS TO ENGLAND AND SWITZERLAND.
The family into which Gatien Phlipon's daughter married on February 4th, 1780, came of a good old stock—many of whose members had had titles that lapsed with their lifetime—but which had gradually become impoverished by extravagance. Roland, the youngest of five brothers, had been destined for the Church, but, feeling no vocation for it, he fled from his father's house, and was fortunate enough to obtain a situation in the office of one of his relations, who was superintendent of a factory at Rouen. In this house, which possessed many ramifications, Roland became deeply versed in the different branches of commerce, in manufactures, and in the principles of political economy. Scrupulously conscientious, painstaking, and observant, he steadily rose in his office, and, having been made inspector of manufactures, part of his time was spent in foreign travel, to study the improvements of industry in the interest of his Government.
Although from youth upwards Roland had been chiefly mixed up with practical life, he was a student by nature, of retiring habits, reserved manners, and a reflective turn of mind. Yet his philosophy was not incompatible with much irritability of temper, owing, in part, to derangement of the digestive functions. Monsieur and Madame Roland passed the first year of their marriage in Paris, where the latter's time was quite engrossed by participation in her husband's work, and the little cares and vexations incident to a fresh kind of housekeeping, with slender means in furnished lodgings. She had less leisure than in her maiden days for inditing those long epistles to Sophie, which now gradually shrank, till they ceased entirely on her husband's return to Amiens. Madame Roland had looked forward with much delight to the society of Sophie and Henriette, when she should be in the same town with them; but, morbidly jealous, at this the beginning of their union, of any affection not given to him, Roland exacted a promise that she would see as little as possible of these dear friends of hers. She resigned herself to it, and, in fact, hardly ever left her husband's side. Living in the same room, studying the same books, sitting at the same table, she wrote to his dictation, copied and revised his manuscripts, and corrected his proofs. This life of constant application was only varied by an occasional walk out of the gates of Amiens. The great discrepancy of age between Roland and his wife gave the former an undue authority in their relations, and for several years after their marriage Madame Roland never ventured to contradict him for fear of seeing a frown clouding his brow. But, owing to this habit of doing everything, in company with his wife, Roland became at last incapable of doing anything without her, so that her genius insensibly gained the influence due to it by nature.
"By dint," says she in her Memoirs, "of occupying myself with the happiness of the man with whom I was associated, I felt that something was wanting to my own. I have never for a moment ceased to see in my husband one of most estimable persons that exist; but I often felt that similarity was wanting between us—that the ascendency of a domineering temper, united to that of twenty years more of age, made one of those superiorities too much."
They remained four years at Amiens, and it was there that Madame Roland's only child, Eudora, was born, in October 1781. Contrary to the universal French custom of sending children out to nurse, she had always considered that mothers should perform the duty of nursing their own offspring, and now, in spite of violent suffering, she persisted in doing so. During her stay at Amiens, her dear friend Sophie—whom Henriette, however, seems gradually to have eclipsed in Madame Roland's affection—married a certain Chevalier de Gomiecourt. Henriette, although of a warmer and more impulsive temperament, eventually united herself to a man of seventy-five, and in the last days of Madame Roland's life evinced a heroism of friendship which places her on a level with her famous friend.
In 1784 Madame Roland, it seems, went to Paris for the purpose of obtaining lettres d'anoblissement—the grant of permanent, indefeasible, and hereditary nobility—various members of Roland's family having held offices which made each of them personally a noble without the title being hereditary. She failed in this, for Roland's stiff-necked persistence and rigorousness of principle had made him very unpopular with his superiors; but it was afterwards made one of the accusations against him by the partisans of the Mountain. Madame Roland succeeded, however, later in obtaining her husband's transfer to the inspectorship of Lyons.
Before settling in the Beaujolais—where Roland's family still possessed a remnant of their property in the Clos de la Platière—Roland decided on taking his young wife on a trip to England. He himself, an accomplished traveller, would now enjoy giving her the benefit of his large experience.
England was at that time the political lode-star of almost every Frenchman with any share of public spirit in him. Our Constitution, our representative system, our liberty of the Press, our home life, were all studied with admiring envy by a nation which, through long-continued misgovernment, seemed almost on the verge of political dissolution. Towards England were turned the eyes of statesmen, ministers, pamphleteers, journalists. To England it was that political writers, in imminent peril of the Bastile—such men as Brissot and Linguet—came for safety and shelter. To England, too, came Marat, where, in 1774, he wrote and published his Chains of Slavery. Rousseau alone had not shared his countrymen's enthusiasm for this country, and under the trappings of liberty he beheld and pointed out horrible sores and social wrongs masked by a semblance of national prosperity.
Madame Roland was eager to see this native land of liberty. In her girlhood she had studied De Lolme's History of the English Constitution, and the book had made a lasting impression on her mind. She came prepared to admire everything, from the eloquence of the House of Commons to the powderless yellow curls of cherub-cheeked children in the parks.
On the 1st July 1784, the Rolands landed at Dover, and her first remarks on the country are such as would not occur to women in general. "The soil of the environs," she says in the Journal written on this occasion, "perfectly resembles that of the Boulonnois; light, poor lands over a bed of sand and chalk; the country hilly, entirely broken into sinuosities, which diversify its surface in a striking manner; it is precisely the same soil on either side the water. But a traveller may soon observe which is the best understood and most improved culture. A small breed of sheep were grazing on the downs; they are quite different from ours; the legs short, the body compact, a great deal of wool, even underneath them, the head crowned with a ruff, from which it seems to issue as from a cowl, small ears thrown back into this tuft of wool—this is what at once distinguishes them from other breeds."
The country from Dover to London, by way of Canterbury, in a stage-coach, delighted Madame Roland. Nothing escaped her notice, from the trim-clipped hedges, sleek green fields and hop-gardens to the snug Kentish villages, where every cottage boasted its neatly-kept garden, and "every cabbage had its rose-tree." Some curious glimpses of English manners, as they were just a hundred years since, are afforded by Madame Roland's account of her tour. It sounds very strange and quaint to hear of "watchmen that walk about with a rattle, a lantern, and a long white pole, calling the hours as they struck." These were the flourishing days of highway and other robberies, and our traveller remarks that well-to-do persons, leaving town in the summer, "expect to find their houses robbed on their return; and that, for precaution's sake, they carried what is called the robber's purse along with them, intended to be given up to them in case of an attack. It is here as it was in Lacedemonia, to the vigilance of every individual is left the care of avoiding these little daily losses; besides, it would be apprehended that every well-armed guard, every means of police or of rigour, at first established for the safety of the citizens, would shortly become an instrument of oppression and tyranny." To the Republican-minded Frenchwoman, chafing under the grinding centralization of her own government, this practice of self-help seemed then the paradise of public life. Deeply impressed with the Houses of Parliament, she was present at a debate on the East India Company, when she heard the young Prime Minister Pitt, and Fox, his eloquent antagonist.
Westminster Abbey, with its monuments to great men, the British Museum, the Royal Society—the President of which, Sir Joseph Banks, the Rolands were very intimate with—all gave to Madame Roland the impression of a proud, vigorous national life. Ranelagh, so charmingly described in Miss Burney's Evelina, was then the rendezvous of fashionable society, and Madame Roland was as pleased with the tone of quiet good-breeding pervading these assemblies as with the energy and passion displayed in the public meetings. In fact, in her eyes, as in those of so many of her countrymen, England was then the model nation. Brissot, who, some years afterwards, became the intimate friend of the Rolands, and leader of the Girondin Party, was, about this time, leading a retired yet busy life in the neighbourhood of Brompton, delightedly inhaling its pure country air, and congratulating himself on his happiness in enjoying freedom of thought, instead of living in constant apprehension of the bolts and bars of the Bastile! The grim towers of the Bastile, the impassable moat of the Bastile, the dumb, dull grip of the walls of the Bastile—this was the dreaded object which cast its deadly shadow on the muzzled thought of France! This was the living tomb from which they shrank back aghast, and which made so many of them, as soon as they touched English soil, breathe our heavy, fog-laden, smoke-begrimed atmosphere as if it were the very elixir of life. Had Burke been bred in the shadow of the Bastile, and felt the iron of its chains enter into his flesh, he could never afterwards have made all Europe re-echo to the declamatory blasts of his vehement invective against the French people.
In the beginning of August 1784, the Rolands returned from the political land of Goshen to their own poor, suffering country, then so miserably "cabined, cribbed, confined"; and Madame Roland writing of this tour remarks, flatteringly to English feelings: "I shall ever remember with pleasure a country of which De Lolme taught me to love the constitution, and where I have witnessed the happy effects which that constitution has produced. Fools may chatter, and slaves may sing, but you may take my word for it that England contains men who have a right to laugh at us." Her admiration of Englishwomen is expressed in glowing terms to Bosc: "I wish to heaven I had you in England: you would fall in love with all the women. I was very near doing so, in spite of being one myself. They bear no resemblance to ours, and have in general that oval form of countenance which Lavater commends. Take my word for it, that the individual who does not feel some esteem for the English, and a degree of affection mixed with admiration for their women, is either a pitiful coxcomb, or an ignorant blockhead who talks about what he does not understand."
A few weeks after their return from England, the Rolands removed from Amiens, and Madame Roland's correspondence with the excellent and faithful Bosc, the friend she had made there, contains most of the materials for her life between 1782 and 1790. Bosc, like most men who knew her, felt the magnetic attraction of this noble woman, and never swerved in his fidelity to her. When she accompanied her husband to Villefranche, the severing of their intercourse cast him into profound dejection, and it was only little by little that her friendly letters, pervaded as they are by a spirit of calm fortitude, restored him to a state of greater equanimity.
The next few years were passed by her and her husband either at Lyons, the Clos de la Platière, or Villefranche, a provincial town five miles from Lyons, where the Rolands had a family mansion, then inhabited by Roland's mother—who was the same age as the century—and by a very pious elder brother. Roland, who had been for years on bad terms with his conservative family, sought a reconciliation on his marriage, and now came to live with them, although he and his radical wife felt like ducks out of water amidst the retrograde society of the place. Villefranche, far removed from the strong, central pulsation of French life, insignificant even when compared with such a town as Amiens, was, in some respects, a little depressing to the daughter of Paris.
Madame Roland's time at Villefranche was even less at her own disposal than during any other period of her life, and she had very little leisure to devote to the intellectual pursuits so congenial to her. Owing to her mother-in-law's great age, the entire charge of a large household devolved upon her; and this household had to be ordered, not in conformity to her own tastes, but in every minutest particular according to the whims and crotchets of a terrible octogenarian lady, whose tongue and temper more than equalled that of the typical mother-in-law. The brothers, too, did not hit it off very amicably, the elder having as great a passion for domineering as the younger for independence. However, Madame Roland did her best to bring these discordant elements into harmony. Her first care in the morning was her child's and her husband's breakfast; then, leaving them both at work in their respective ways, she went to see after her household affairs. At the stroke of noon the dinner was bound to be on the table and they to be dressed for it, or woe betide! This latter formality, however, was accomplished by Madame Roland in about ten minutes, after which she would sit and talk with her amiable mother-in-law till the arrival of visitors—for the old lady was passionately addicted to company. When thus set at liberty, she retired to her husband's study, where she helped him with his literary work, and collected materials for his articles in the Encyclopédie Nouvelle to which Roland largely contributed, and for which her beautiful hand penned many a page on such unattractive subjects as "Peat," "Furs," "Manure," &c. &c.
This was no doubt a monotonous, sober, if not sombre, kind of existence for such a glowing nature as Madame Roland's. Sometimes she must have yearned for a richer life or even for the golden leisure of the little closet on the Quai de l'Horloge, when she could revel at will in the classics or in the pages of Rousseau. But now had come more austere days; literature had to be laid aside, music and Italian were becoming rusty, yet in the fulfilment of all its duties this fine nature always found the highest satisfaction.
She had consolations, moreover, in the close and ever closer sympathy which grew between her husband and herself, and in the ever fresh interest which she felt in her daughter Eudora—who hardly ever left her mother's side—described as being "a pretty little prattler, as full of mischief as a monkey," and who seems to have taken after her father's family in character and temperament. She showed none of her mother's precocious passion for books, but was an incorrigible romp, whose childish doings, sayings, and ailments are as minutely retailed to the friendly Bosc as if he, too, had been a young mother painfully interested in an infant's growth.
Every autumn M. and Madame Roland left the depressing atmosphere of Villefranche to spend some time at the Clos de la Platière, that remnant of ancestral estates. It resembled a farm more than a manor-house, with a low red-tiled roof and projecting eaves, and from its terrace one saw the white outline of the Alps, Mont Blanc, called "The Cat's Mountain" by the peasant folk, towering above them all. The country, dotted about with innumerable hillocks, was planted with vines, and such value as the Clos possessed was due to its vineyard. To the house itself were attached a kitchen garden, an orchard richly stocked with fruit trees, a yard and outhouses, barns and granaries for the harvest and vintage, &c. Here, if anywhere, Madame Roland felt at home in a wide-reaching activity, for as early as 1778 she had written in her diary: "I never conceived anything more desirable than a life divided between domestic cares and those of agriculture, spent in a healthy and plentiful farm, with a small family, where the example of the master and mistress, and the habit of work in common, produce peace, good-will, and general content.
Now she could at times realise this simple ideal, and her spirits rose visibly whenever she was at the Clos de la Platière—whether in spring, autumn, or even in severe winter weather, when the wide rolling country and valley of the Soane were clogged with snow, and the howling of wolves came from the large forests surrounding them.
Some of the most playful letters ever written by Madame Roland are dated from the Clos, and her life there was not altogether so sad and joyless as the warm-hearted Michelet would have us believe. It was more the life of a farmer's wife, perhaps, than of a lady—not so much a pleasant country holiday passed in leisurely rambles and pleasure excursions, as real unmistakable out-door work, which left barely any time for more studious occupations; but such as it was, it suited Madame Roland's hardy temperament, and through some of her epistles to Bosc there pierces a vein of "sunburnt mirth" quite foreign to her tone in town. Adapting Lafontaine's well-known "Eh, bonjour, Monsieur le Corbeau," she begins one of her letters:—
And good morning to you, our friend! It is long, indeed, since I wrote you last; but, then, I have not put pen to paper within the month, and I fancy that I must be imbibing some of the tastes of the good animal whose milk is restoring me to health. I am growing asinine by dint of attending to the little cares of a piggish country life. I am preserving pears, which will be delicious; we are drying raisins and prunes; are in the midst of a great wash, and getting up the linen; we breakfast on white wine, and then lie on the grass till its fumes have passed off; after superintending the vintage, we take a rest in the shade of the woods or meadows; knock down the walnuts, and, after gathering our stock of fruit for the winter, spread it in the garrets. Adieu; there is some talk of breakfasting and going in a body to gather the almonds.
On another mellow October day, she thus banteringly addresses the same friend (with a passing allusion to Henry IV.'s letter):—
"Hang thyself, dainty Crillon!" we are making jams and jellies, and sweet wine, and sweetmeats, and you are not here to taste them! These, elegant Sir, are my present occupations. The vintage in the meantime is going on apace, and very shortly it will only be in the cellar of the master, and in the cupboard of the mistress of the house, that the wine and the delicious fruit will be found. This year's wine will be excellent; but we shall hare little of it, on account of the visit paid us by the bail: an honour which always leaves a dear and lasting remembrance behind it. Why, pray, do you not write to us? you who have no vintage to attend to; can there be any other occupation in the world beside?
Madame Roland's industry was by no means restricted to the care of her own household, where she was forced by circumstances to practise the strictest economy. Her bounteous activity overflowed the narrow limits of the family circle, and for miles round her unassuming dwelling the peasants looked upon her as a kind of Bona Diva, and turned to her confidingly in trouble or disease. Before medical women were thought of, she became the village doctor of her district, and within a circuit of two or three leagues the sick would send for her. Sometimes, in urgent cases, bringing a horse for her to ride, would come a country yeoman, praying her instantly to save the life of some dying relative. Madame Roland deprecates the notion of peasants not being grateful for kindness shown them. She declares, on the contrary, that she met with the greatest affection in return. And if the court-yard of her abode was often thronged on a Sunday with poor invalids imploring relief, others came too, bringing loving little presents: baskets of chesnuts, goats-milk, cheeses, or apples from their orchards.
Thus the laborious years passed, marked by few outward changes. In 1787 Madame Roland's father died of a catarrh, aged upwards of sixty. He had never become quite reconciled to his daughter's marriage, and yet after running through everything he possessed, he had been obliged to retire on an annuity provided by his son-in-law. The discrepancy of character between himself and the latter must have chafed his self-love all the more that he could not escape the obligations bestowed on him.
In the same year, 1787, the Rolands paid a visit to Switzerland, whither Roland, who was frequently ailing, repaired in search of health. His wife kept a record of her tour, but for us of the latter half of the nineteenth century, to whom Switzerland has become the hackneyed playground of Europe, it contains nothing that is not already perfectly familiar. What does strike one as new and strange is the fact that there were then no big, barrack-like hotels, defacing with pompous tastelessness the beautiful solitude of the Alps. No; the pupil of Rousseau—whose pulses must have beat higher as she trod the sacred ground of Clarens, and "measured with her eye the height of the rocks of Meillerie"—had the good fortune to see the Swiss valleys with their peasantry in their original freshness. So little accommodation for strangers was to be found in the Bernese Oberland, in those days, that the travellers were hospitably entertained by a good pastor, who, with his wife and seven children, resided in the village of Lauterbrunnen. These kindly people gave the wayfarers (nine of them sat down to their homely fare) of their best, and loaded the flower-loving Madame Roland, who hardly knew how to be grateful enough, with a profusion of roses on parting. Her description of this incident reads like an idyl, as compared with the spirit of greed which now adulterates even the honey from the honeycomb.
The rocks and woods, the valleys and waterfalls, the bristling ravines and rushing rivers, the stillness of the aromatic meadows, only broken by the ranz des vaches, the star-bright glory of the Jungfrau and her Silberhorn—all this new world of beauty and grandeur burst on the pure soul of the child of the Seine with a rapture of delight. Her interest was divided between the natural beauties of Switzerland and its political constitution, which engrossed her even more. She got all the information she could concerning the working of republican institutions, the power vested in the Senate, and the character of the elections. After visiting many of the Cantons, she expatiated on the striking differences between the Roman Catholic and Protestant parts of the country, and on the much greater morality and cleanliness prevalent in the latter. The same contrast, only in a more marked degree, she also noticed between the inhabitants of the Swiss Republic and the German Empire, much to the disadvantage of the latter.
After the death of Madame la Platière, Madame Roland passed the greater part of her time at the Clos, her husband being frequently called to Lyons and other places by his official duties. Content apparently to spend the rest of her life in a remote country place, superintending her household, attending to the vintage, compiling articles for her husband, she was what may be called the highest type of the Frenchwoman—that is, of the Frenchwoman of the middle classes, who, so far from being the frail, fair, and frivolous coquette of the French novelist, is, on the contrary, the most active, practical, and sagacious specimen of her sex. Every traveller in France is doubtless struck by seeing women taking so very large a share in trade and commerce; the actual management of affairs is continually shifted from the husband on to the wife, although it may not be so to outward appearance. They are the exact opposite of the constitutional sovereign, of whom it is said that he reigns but does not govern; Frenchwomen govern but do not reign.
Up to this point of Manon Roland's life we cannot avoid the conviction of a great moral force frittered away on lilliputian tasks: the preparing of dainty dishes for her husband's delicate digestion, the mending of house-linen, the setting a child its lessons—excellent tasks all, but which affect one with something of the ludicrous disproportion of making use of the fires of Etna to fry one's eggs by! It seems, indeed, a curious irony of destiny, that this great woman should have spent many of her best years on things for which so much less ability was required, while so many small people in high places were bungling over the welfare of millions. But such are at present the satisfactory arrangements of society! And in the remote Clos de la Platière, her real strength unsuspected by the world and only half guessed at by herself, Madame Roland would have led her resigned and laborious existence, and died unknown, but for the echoes which, reaching the arid hill-country of Beaujolais, were reverberated from homestead to hamlet, from market town to seaport, from province to province, till France was shaken from end to end by the thunder of the storming of the Bastile.