Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/121

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THE RIGHTS OF MAN.
111

unfortunately he also had his vulnerable point, the Delilah who shore him of his strength being the Queen by whom he was bribed.

Under such guidance, while many startling yet salutary changes, impossible to enumerate here, were taking place in France; while the pusillanimous nobles fled pell-mell across the frontiers; while the vacillating King, professing adhesion to the Constitution, was secretly conspiring with foreign potentates, Madame Roland was writing to Bosc letters palpitating with hope, fear, and enthusiasm. "Who is the traitor," she cries, "who at this moment minds any business but that of the nation!"

"I believe," she says, in August 1789, "that the honest Englishman is in the right, and that we must have a small touch of civil war before we are good for anything. All those little quarrels and insurrections of the people seem to me inevitable; nor do I think it possible to rise to liberty from the midst of corruption without strong convulsions. They are the salutary crises of a serious disease. We are in want of a terrible political fever to carry off our foul humours. Go on and prosper then: let our rights be declared; let them be submitted to our consideration; and let the Constitution come afterwards."

And again, on the 4th of September, "Your kind letter brought us very bad news; we roared on hearing it, and on reading the public papers, They are going to patch us up a bad Constitution, in like manner as they garbled our faulty and incomplete Declaration of Rights. Shall I never, then, see a petition demanding the revision of the whole? Every day we see addresses of adhesion, and other things of that sort, which bespeak our infancy, and