ration 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 in-
