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
