Page:Heroines of freethought (IA cu31924031228699).pdf/39

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MADAME ROLAND.
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lic position and duties obliged her to receive. By the adoption of this course, she found time for her studies, and to remodel and enliven, if she did not originate, many of the State papers which appeared over Roland’s signature.

In regard to this phase of her life, Carlyle writes of her thus: “Envious men insinuate that the wife of Roland is Minister, not the husband. It is, happily, the worst they have to charge her with. For the rest, let whose head soever be getting giddy, it is not this brave woman's. Serene and queenly here, as she was of old in her own hired garret of the Ursuline Convent.”

Although on her marriage with M. Roland she had confessed that she esteemed more than she loved him, yet never was wife more devoted to husband than she; never was husband happier in a wife than he. In her memoirs she thus bears testimony to the mutual confidence and sympathy subsisting between them:

“During twelve years I shared in my