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
