SOURCE: Walker, Lesley H. “Sweet and Consoling Virtue: The Memoirs of Madame Roland.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 3 (2001): 403-19.

[In this essay, Walker argues that Roland depicts herself in the character of a virtuous young woman familiar to readers of such eighteenth-century novels as Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie.]

Her great soul, superior to all events, turned inward and found the force to suppress not only the natural horror of death, but also to taste, if possible, the pleasure of this last sacrifice for her country.¹

Luc-Antoine Champagneux, Oeuvres de J. M. Ph. Roland

In June of 1793, as the French Revolution radicalized and the Jacobins consolidated their political power, Marie-Jeanne Roland, along with other Girondin sympathizers, was arrested and incarcerated. From prison, she wrote what we now know as the Mémoires de Madame Roland, edited and published by Louis-Augustin-Guillaume Bosc, after her death, in 1795. Rather than culling Madame Roland's autobiographical project for its informative, historical details, as the work of Gita May and Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret have so ably done, I will examine the cultural work performed by the Mémoires.² Madame Roland's text is divided into two parts. One half tells the disillusioned tale of a Revolution gone wrong, of innocent victims unjustly persecuted, and of virtue shamelessly defiled. The other recounts her girlhood, which she figures as an idyllic time of domestic tranquillity where the presence of her mother guaranteed her happiness. A narrative of feminine virtue, which is dependent on maternal sacrifice, unites the two halves. Read together, they produce a portrait of exemplary feminine virtue that, by means of sympathetic identification, sought to move and shape Madame Roland's posterity.

Madame Roland was, without question, one of the most influential female figures of the French Revolution.³ During the period when the views of the Girondin party dominated the Legislative Assembly and later the Convention, her husband, Jean-Marie Roland, was appointed Interior Minister in March and reappointed in September of 1792. Madame Roland's advice and counsel were sought by the leading figures of the Girondin party. Whether it was through her involvement in the selection of ministers for her husband's cabinet, her support and editorial guidance of La Sentinelle, a radical broadsheet, or through Roland's famous letter of resignation to the king, she wielded unusual power and influence during the months of her husband's ministries. In addition to Madame Roland's role in the Revolution and the memoirs that she would subsequently pen, she is likewise well known for her girlhood letters to Sophie Cannet. These letters, in two large volumes, supply a rich documentary account of eighteenth-century life as seen by an intelligent and astute young woman, and they also attest to their author's remarkable epistolary skills.

For different reasons, the concept of virtue has raised problems for both Madame Roland's early editors and her twentieth-century critics. In the aftermath of the Terror, which had unleashed extraordinary vitriol against those perceived as “public” women, the early editors of Madame Roland's memoirs worried about the consequences of exposing her writings to the public. In the 1795 preface to the first edition, Bosc justifies at length his decision to publish her text, and expresses great concern about sullying her virtue. The injustice of revolutionary events forced Madame Roland to take up her pen in order to defend herself, explains Bosc, and thus it was only out of a concern for her countrymen, a sense of patriotic duty, that she agreed to participate in the public forum. By contrast, for today's reader, it is Madame Roland's feminine virtue that risks obfuscating this otherwise noteworthy text. Because Madame Roland felt that women should be excluded from politics and expressed strong ambivalence about female authorship, it has proven difficult to enshrine her in the contemporary pantheon of eighteenth-century women writers. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie Rabine's omission of Madame Roland from their volume, Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (1992), is symptomatic of this difficulty.⁴ For many critics, Madame Roland was not enough of a rebel.

Excess—either too much writing or too much virtue—would seem to be at the root of the anxiety expressed about Madame Roland's Mémoires. The crux of the matter concerns the relationship of writing to feminine virtue. When one is pitted against the other, her text is inevitably viewed as somehow “compromised” or “lessened.” Mary Trouille, for example, suspects that psychological shortcomings may account for Madame Roland's refusal to identify herself as woman writer, declaring: “The importance Manon ascribed to female modesty and disinterestedness may also have been designed to hide a secret lack of self-confidence and fear of failure.”⁵ For Trouille, this “secret lack of self-confidence” surely diminishes the power and efficacy of Madame Roland's autobiographical project. By contrast, Brigitte Szymanek argues that “Roland's experience during the Revolution allowed her to live a version of the domestic role that was generally consistent with, if on the outer edge of, her understanding of an active domestic role for women.”⁶ She thus refuses to view Madame Roland's work as somehow hypocritical or insincere.⁷ Yet, despite this very sympathetic reading, Szymanek nevertheless finds little use for the political sections of the memoirs, as they are “focused exclusively on men.”⁸ Implicit in this statement is the reinscription of what critics view as an unproductive dualism in Madame Roland's work. Szymanek displaces this schism from the psychological realm to the structural composition of the Mémoires themselves: Madame Roland's stilted style of writing about politics is contrasted negatively to the touchingly evoked scenes of her girlhood spent among women. Underlying Szymanek's choice is a feminist imperative to valorize only work that explicitly engages in a critique of patriarchy. If a female writer does not express solidarity à la Olympe de Gouges with other women, her integrity and self-esteem are put into question.⁹

I propose a reading of the memoirs that avoids the biographical lure of diagnosing Madame Roland's attitude toward feminine virtue as a failing according to contemporary standards of “successful” womanhood. I hope to demonstrate that Madame Roland's self-representation as a virtuous daughter and mother depends on the enactment of a sacrificial drama of loss and reparation that can only be understood as masochistic. The female subject willingly sacrifices herself for the sake of virtue, but is offered the sweet and consoling pleasure of maternal beneficence for her pains. Seen in this light, Madame Roland's autobiography participates in a wider tradition: the enormous corpus of work on feminine virtue and motherhood that appeared and was read with avid interest by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers.¹⁰ Following the lead of critic Carol Blum, I hope to render Madame Roland's understanding of virtue less opaque, permitting it “to live again in its historical specificity.”¹¹

MASOCHISM AND MOTHERHOOD

Blum argues that three definitions of virtue exist in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: masculine virtue is understood as self-sufficient individuality; feminine virtue is depicted as a pleasurable loss of self-control; and, finally, there is the exemplary virtue of the innocent child.¹² Blum suggests that Rousseau created a repertoire of virtuous behaviors or embodiments available to his readers. While she concentrates specifically on how Robespierre and Saint-Just enacted this term, I will focus on the question of feminine virtue and its embodiment in Madame Roland's writings.

The concepts of virtue and self-sacrifice became intimately linked over the course of the eighteenth century as novels of sensibility grew in popularity. For instance, in his Eloge de Richardson (1761), Denis Diderot writes: “What is virtue? It is, from whatever aspect we consider it, a form of self-sacrifice.”¹³ In other words, through sympathetic identification, a novel such as Clarissa causes the reader to pity those who suffer, as Diderot explains: “In his [Richardson's] works, as in life, men are divided into two classes: those who live a life of pleasure and those who suffer. It is with the latter he makes me identify myself …”¹⁴ Reading such a novel not only establishes a form of sympathetic identification with fictional characters, but, more significantly, such identification is created by suffering. Virtue then involves self-inflicted suffering, if only through reading.

But is all suffering alike? If the point was to identify with those who suffered, why did the most popular novels of the century spend so much energy portraying the suffering of aristocratic women? Surely, in an age of war, famine, and sickness, it would have been possible to find greater subjects of suffering. Clearly, suffering was not the only point. Diderot writes of another feeling that overwhelms the reader of a touching story: “the pleasure of being touched and giving way to tears.”¹⁵ Can we not describe this type of reading as a masochistic pleasure?

Feminist critics have seized on the concept of masochism as an important tool in understanding the often ambiguous role cultures ask women to play.¹⁶ These critics locate female agency precisely in the ambivalence of suffering as somehow pleasurable and even beneficial. Accordingly, literary scholar Rey Chow offers a theory of maternally oriented masochism to explain the pleasure-in-pain nexus found so often in sentimental fiction. She begins by demonstrating that masochism should be understood as a reflexive structure whereby the subject incorporates or internalizes the suffering object. To make this point, she quotes Jean Laplanche's definition of the term: “To shift to the reflexive is … to reflect the action, internalize it, make it enter oneself as fantasy. To fantasize aggression is to turn it round upon oneself, to aggress oneself.”¹⁷ In other words, subjectivity emerges when the subject first directs its aggressive tendency toward itself—masochistically—because at that moment the self divides and the “other” or the suffering object takes up residence within the ego.

After offering the above explanation of masochism, Chow draws our attention to the role of the mother in psychoanalytic history, noting that central to the production of subjectivity is the mother's effacement or death.¹⁸ But the loss of the mother has dramatically different effects, depending on the child's gender. In essence, because the little boy will eventually identify with his father, he can jettison his mother with few psychic repercussions. By overcoming this loss, he gains his identity and independence. However, things are much more complicated for girls. While girls likewise “lose” their mothers, they must also learn to identify with them. How does this process of identification function? According to Chow, traditional Chinese culture assigns mothers the role of sacrificer, as the one who gives selflessly to her children. She demonstrates how this cultural script is passed on to the daughter by means of her masochistic incorporation of the mother's selfless sacrifice: “as the mother sacrifices for the daughter, the daughter reciprocates that sacrifice in the pain she feels, not for herself, but for her mother.”¹⁹ By internalizing the suffering other and becoming like her, the daughter sacrifices herself in order to repay the mother for her sacrifice, thereby creating a form of subjectivity dependent on mutuality and reciprocity. The concept of repayment also introduces the notion of debt and of compensation. By giving selflessly to her child, Chow explains, the mother expects to receive love in return. Thus, for Chow, mothers and daughters not only inhabit a world of reciprocal obligation, but they also experience the sweet pleasure of mutual love and consolation by identifying with each other's fate.

While Chow's analysis focuses on Chinese literature, her insights into the workings of maternal sacrifice strike me as applicable to the redefinition of motherhood which occurred in France during the eighteenth century. A brief consideration of Rousseau's Julie or the New Héloïse (1762) will allow us to see how feminine virtue was constructed in similar terms but in an eighteenth-century context. Feminist critics of Rousseau have recently concentrated on Julie's marriage and conversion at the altar, which occurs midway through the six-volume novel, as a sign of her submission, however reluctant, to the law of the father.²⁰ But an analysis of the relationship between Julie and her mother is of equal importance because it permits us to understand how this masochistic structure of identification functions to produce feminine virtue. Halfway through the novel and twenty pages before her fateful marriage, Julie mourns the untimely death of her mother: “Everything is over; the empire of love is dead. … I dedicate the rest of my days to mourning my most excellent mother; I shall sacrifice to her sentiments that have cost her her life. … Ah, if the immortal spirit reaches into the depths of my heart, it knows full well that the victim I am sacrificing to it is not utterly unworthy of her!”²¹ The trauma of the mother's death momentarily eclipses her passionate love for Saint-Preux. Grieved by her mother's suffering, Julie pledges to do likewise, to suffer, even to die, for having caused her mother such pain. The religious language of sacrifice and expiation reverberates in these lines and reinforces the feeling of an almost sacred obligation owed to the mother. As her mother sacrificed for her, Julie will do the same; she will expiate her sins by marrying and, in turn, becoming a mother herself. What matters here is Julie's acute sense of emotional and spiritual indebtedness toward her mother; this is a feeling that she does not share with her father or, indeed, with any man.

After marrying Wolmar, Julie describes for Saint-Preux her conversion at the altar. Significantly, the “eternal eye,” which reestablished order in her heart, does not cause her to love Wolmar and forsake Saint-Preux. Instead, she rediscovers a part of herself which was lost: “I seemed to feel myself being reborn; I seemed to be beginning another life. Sweet and consoling virtue, I begin it for thee; it is thou that wilst make me cherish it; it is to thee I want to dedicate it. Ah, I have learned too well what losing thee costs to abandon thee a second time!”²² At least part of the miracle of Julie's conversion has to do with her rediscovery of her connection to her mother. The metaphor of renascence is thus no accident. The above lines vivify the inanimate by imagining that virtue possesses the capacity to “give new life” like a mother. In promising to be forever virtuous, Julie interiorizes what could be called the dual mother function. This principle guarantees the daughter's continued sacrifice, while at the same time offering loving consolation for her pain. It is this fantasized maternal response that Julie experiences as sweet and consoling. Indeed, toward the end of the novel, Wolmar recalls a conversation with Julie in which she explained the effect of her mother's spectral presence: “A hundred times, she said, I have derived more pleasure in performing good works by imagining my mother present, reading what is in her daughter's heart and applauding. There is something so consoling about always living under the eyes of one we cherished. Thus for us, he [she!] dies only by half.”²³ Thus does the mother's ghost ensure the daughter's virtue. As figured in Julie, feminine virtue requires the daughter to sacrifice herself by giving up her mother's loving presence. But, this loss is compensated by the possibility of joining the sacrificial economy of maternal beneficence. By becoming a mother, Julie keeps her own mother magically alive to watch over and console her. In this manner, love and sacrifice are inextricably linked; a debt has occurred which the daughter must repay and, in the repayment, find pleasure.

While it is true that male readers, like Diderot, identified with female characters, and may have been spurred on to act more virtuously in real life, it is also true that the mother/daughter axis of identification and sacrifice proved especially appealing to certain women writers and their readers. Madame Roland deploys this particular strategy of affect in her Mémoires. She depicts the death of her own mother as the most significant emotional event of her youth. For Madame Roland, as for Julie before her, being a virtuous woman was inevitably tied to the masochistic cycle of suffering and consolation. As a grieving daughter, she dedicates her life to the practice of virtue; later, as a mother and revolutionary heroine, she seeks to pass on this tale of virtue to her posterity—that is, the reader.

MADAME ROLAND'S MEMOIRS

Before turning to my analysis of Madame Roland's writings, a few words on revolutionary virtue seem in order. Many critics have commented on the schism of masculine versus feminine virtue during the French Revolution, notably Dorinda Outram, who argues: “Virtue, far from being the linchpin of a monolithic ‘discourse of the Revolution,’ in fact bisected the apparently universalistic discourse of the general will into distinct political destinies, one male and the other female.”²⁴ Masculine virtue is defined as active and political, while feminine virtue comes to mean little more than chastity or domesticated sexuality. On the one hand, feminine virtue secured and anchored masculine virtue: chaste domesticity was necessary to the Republic. On the other, untrammeled female sexuality could threaten and even destroy masculine virtue. Thus, for the sake of the Republic, masculine virtue struck preemptively and sent threatening “public” women to the guillotine.

Outram reads Madame Roland's writings as a case study in feminine virtue. She contends that Madame Roland was trapped in a double bind by a concept of virtue that purchased respectability at the price of nonparticipation in the public sphere. She points to the passage in the memoirs where Madame Roland plays hostess to her husband's political friends and, yet, sits apart from their circle, exerting no influence. This dichotomy played itself out on Madame Roland's very body: her passive public person was mirrored by her efforts in private to manage her body in order to control her sexuality. Outram culls from the memoirs what she considers revealing examples of Madame Roland's ambivalence toward her body: the shame she felt at the hands of her father's apprentice, the disappointment of her wedding night, her unconsummated affair with Buzot. In prison, these contradictory impulses could be finally reconciled, but never adequately overcome. Outram concludes: Madame Roland “could not write in a trustworthy way because there was no means by which she could have achieved an undivided vision of herself, and hence of her surroundings. The self-confidence necessary to such a task was lost in her perpetual conflicts between chastity and desire, intellect and body …”²⁵ While Outram may be correct that Madame Roland never obtained an “undivided vision of self,” her assumption that this division spells failure depends on an understanding of the psychological self that strikes me as anachronistic. To her credit, Outram's concept of virtue is correct in as much as it captures Robespierre's understanding of how feminine virtue should work. But when she takes the Jacobin's view as the only one possible, she overlooks how this term might have been appropriated by women themselves. Implicit in Outram's critique of feminine virtue is a valorization of psychological wholeness that she links to a less restrictive sexuality. Judged by these criteria, feminine virtue becomes that which we in our “enlightened” era have overcome. Yet, what have we actually learned about its appeal and significance to women of the past?

Madame Roland's memoirs represent two separate projects that were written simultaneously. One half, entitled Notices historiques and Portraits et anecdotes, recounts her views of the political events in which her husband was implicated. The second part, Mémoires particuliers, describes her girlhood growing up in Paris in a family that prospered thanks to her father's skills as an engraver. Despite the apparent difference of subject matter—public versus personal—that divides them, a certain thematic unity can be discovered: sacrifice, death, and remembrance. The memoirs thematize suffering whose origin is traced back to her mother's death. Not only is the scene of her mother's death the most significant event of her girlhood, but it also links the Mémoires particuliers to the Notices historiques in a manner that allows the reader to understand the origin of her later heroic acts. By means of this initiatory trauma, her “true” (that is to say, discursively constructed) character is revealed.

When Bosc first published Madame Roland's memoirs in 1795, he underscored the fact that she was above all a wife and mother by inscribing on the title page: “Appeal to Impartial Posterity by the Citizen Roland, Wife of the Minister of Interior,” and informing the reader that any profit made from the book's sale would go directly to the Rolands' orphaned daughter Eudora. Moreover, the volume opens with an epigraph: “Let my last letter to my daughter fix her attention on what appears to be her essential duty, and let the memory of her mother attach her forever to virtue which consoles us for all things.”²⁶ There was nothing accidental about Bosc's choice to frame Madame Roland's memoirs in these terms. This epigraph serves to remind the reader that this seemingly political text is about death and sacrifice: a mother's legacy to her daughter.²⁷ Readers would later thrill to the tragic frisson wrought by these words.

From her girlhood letters, we learn that two crucial events shaped Madame Roland's early life. At the age of twenty-one, she both lost her mother and read Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse for the first time.²⁸ The shock that her mother's death caused was so unsettling that her family grew worried about her physical and mental health. She languished in a stupor for weeks. Finally, a family friend, Abbé Legrand, managed to bring her out of this state of aggravated mourning. To remedy her ills, he spoke continually of her mother and, as soon as he thought her strong enough to read, gave her Rousseau's novel. While some considered La Nouvelle Héloïse to be a scandalous tale about the illicit love between Julie and Saint Preux, Abbé Legrand clearly viewed it as a story about mothers and daughters; hence, the timing of the gift.

Marie-Jeanne (Manon) Phlipon's response to La Nouvelle Héloïse emerges in her 1776 letter to her friend and confidant, Sophie Cannet, where she relates a scene from her mother's memorial service. She recounts how she called on her deceased mother to bless a union that she had secretly formed with Pahin de la Blancherie.²⁹ At first glance, Manon's letter seems to be a reversal of Julie's situation in the novel because, instead of giving up her beloved after the death of her mother, Manon asks her mother to approve of the relationship: “See your daughter renewing her vows to take you always as a model! … I present myself before you with my beloved [La Blancherie], I open my soul to you: read, recognize your work, approve and bless us. Finally, behold how each homage I pay to virtue honors your memory and celebrates my pain!”³⁰ The apostrophic address (“see,” “read,” “recognize,” “approve and bless”) functions to make her departed mother present to witness her daughter's sacrifice. As Julie vowed before her, Manon begins by pledging to imitate her mother in order to pay back the debt that she owes. Her deeds thus become so many acts of “homage”—a form of ancient payment—to her mother's memory. However, while the maternal demand of virtue can be severe, the daughter nonetheless expects (or fantasizes) a loving response, a blessing from her deceased mother.

But virtue demands sacrifice. While Manon asks her mother to approve of her relationship with La Blancherie, she also readily concedes that it might be necessary to give him up. A few sentences later, she writes: “If reason, duty, or necessity oblige me later to marry someone other than D. L. B., that someone would have to resemble him.”³¹ While the setting in a church, along with the emotionally charged language of witnessing and vows, implies a kind of marriage, Manon's solemn vow is in fact pledged to neither man nor God, but to her mother. In imitation of Julie, who must give up her lover in order to be reborn to virtue, Manon willingly sacrifices La Blancherie to remain virtuous.

Virtue demands the sacrifice of the living, but promises a kind of afterlife in the form of remembrance. If we return to the language of psychoanalysis, specifically the theory of masochistic incorporation, we can say that Manon Phlipon has internalized the dual mother function: the demand for sacrifice and the expectation of consolation for her inevitable pain. In this manner, the absent mother is kept alive through memory (or fantasy) to function as a regulatory force that guarantees the daughter's virtue while, at the same time, her ghost-like presence offers loving consolation for the daughter's pain. The virtuous female subject is therefore always divided by the fantasized pleasure of imagining the mother as present: a fantasy that necessarily depends on her absence. As Julie wed herself to la douce et consolante vertu, so does Madame Roland.

In her Mémoires, written almost twenty years later, Madame Roland will again dramatize the death of her mother. However, in this rendition, there is no romantic triangulation. This death signals the end of an epoch, the fundamental and necessary loss that will constitute our heroine as a virtuous subject.

The early pages of the Mémoires particuliers are filled with loving accounts of her life spent with her mother, family, friends, and the good sisters at the Congrégation de Notre Dame. They describe with an ironic eye Manon's many suitors. As the only daughter of a relatively prosperous engraver, shopkeepers, a doctor, and an impoverished young man from provincial nobility vied unsuccessfully for her hand. The memoirs also recount outings in the countryside, a visit to an aristocratic household, and evenings of amateur music concerts. The mood is lighthearted and frequently mocking as Madame Roland portrays the customs and manners of the middling bourgeoisie (and the occasional aristocrat) of her girlhood. However, the tone changes dramatically when she begins to recount the final few days of her mother's life. Signs, omens, and predictions precede her mother's death while excessive bereavement follows it. She begins this account with a dream: “We were returning by stormy waters to Paris, and as we were leaving the boat, a corpse being dragged in, blocked my passage; this spectacle froze me with horror, I looked to see who this sad corpse was … At that moment, my mother, … calling me with her sweet voice, made the dream vanish.”³² Despite an apparent improvement in her mother's ill health, she fears leaving her side. She assures the reader that, while not superstitious, she was nevertheless haunted by a vague premonition. Whatever the cause of her anxieties, this dream also has a literary precedent in La Nouvelle Héloïse. Late in the novel, Saint-Preux has a premonitory dream in which he witnesses the deathbed scene (described to him earlier by Claire) between Julie and her mother. In the dream, he sees Julie sobbing over the ailing body of her mother and imagines that he hears her last words of comfort to her daughter: “My child … you must accomplish your fate … God is just … you will be a mother too.”³³ Then, much to Saint-Preux's horror, the dead woman in the dream becomes Julie. In the novel, the dream functions to reiterate Julie's imbrication in the maternal economy of sacrifice and to foreshadow her imminent demise. I suggest that Madame Roland's dream plays a similar role. The premonition of her mother's death attests to the profound, even supernatural, character of their attachment, and it also presages her own death.

Madame Roland then describes the bedside scene in which the daughter, her younger self, is confronted by her mother's real corpse. The narrative moves into a tragic register as Manon Phlipon opens and closes her dead mother's eyes: “I tried to suck death out of her, I hoped to win her back with my breath. I wanted to die that instant.”³⁴ She spends the next week in intense mourning, hovering between “life and death.” Finally, a letter from Sophie Cannet arrives that causes tears to flow, saving her life. This depiction of the excessively aggrieved daughter functions in the narrative to illustrate the true nature of Madame Roland's heart or soul. The family friend Abbé Legrand once commented about her: “It is good to have a heart [de l'âme], it is unfortunate to have so much of one.”³⁵ Crucial to Madame Roland's self-portrayal is the pain and suffering caused by this traumatic loss. As we have seen, however, she manages to overcome this life-threatening grief by pledging to take her virtuous mother “as a model always.”³⁶ Thus, the trauma of her mother's loss allows the daughter to emerge as a virtuous subject who, in turn, keeps the memory of her mother alive by enacting virtuous deeds.

Madame Roland ends the account of her mother's demise with a touching simile. She compares the years spent under her watchful and affectionate gaze to the beauty and promise of spring days: “Here ends the sweet and brilliant period of those tranquil years … like beautiful spring days … giving happiness by promising it.”³⁷ These last few lines infuse the memory of her mother with extraordinary nostalgia. For what could be more moving or sadder than this tale of a mother's premature death? And yet, while Eden may have been lost, the bittersweet pleasure of remembering and retelling lives on. These are the pleasures that Madame Roland enjoys in prison while writing her Mémoires, and these are the pleasures that she offers to her reader.

Her mother's death also marks the beginning of her odyssey from virtuous daughter to revolutionary heroine. After describing the suffering caused by her mother's premature demise, the Mémoires switch abruptly to the present. At this pivotal juncture in the narrative, Madame Roland explicitly links her ability to endure that first death to her present willingness to make great sacrifices: “Well beforehand, I was possessed of the necessary talents that would allow me to make great sacrifices and endure great misfortunes. For me, death will put an end to them. … I await it …”³⁸ In this manner, the death of her mother becomes uncannily enmeshed in the fate that awaits her. As does Julie in Saint-Preux's dream, Madame Roland prepares to take her mother's place, but not without leaving behind memories of her own: “I like to publish truths which interest not only me; I won't silence any of them because their linkage serves to demonstrate their veracity.”³⁹

THE PUBLIC STAGE

Immediately after her incarceration in June of 1793, Madame Roland began to write an account of revolutionary events in which she described the dramatic days before her arrest and then related the significant details of Roland's two ministries. She entitled these pages Notices historiques. However, due to unfortunate circumstances, she was told that these early pages … were destroyed in a fire. Although saddened by the loss of her Notices, she started over while working on her Mémoires particuliers and called the new pages Portraits et anecdotes. Thus, when reading her political writings, it is important to bear in mind that they are in fact fragments or lambeaux, as she called them.⁴⁰

Despite their fragmentary quality, Madame Roland's intention to become a revolutionary exemplar unites these pages, making them more than the sum of their parts. For instance, she relates going to the Convention with the intention of making an appeal on her husband's behalf: “I fear nothing in the world, and if I do not save Roland, I will express vigorously truths useful to the Republic; tell your distinguished colleagues that a display of courage can produce a great effect and as the very least will serve as a great example.”⁴¹ As important as saving Roland was setting an example, giving a lesson, instructing her fellow citizens in the ways of virtue. To do this, she depicted herself as Innocence personified, her friends as largely ineffectual, and her enemies as the vilest of hypocrites. She hoped to publicize these truths in front of a revolutionary court. But, as time passed, it became clear that her final “élan de courage” would not be made in front of any tribunal but instead, her last words would be spoken at the foot of the scaffold. Her political writings are thus haunted by an ever-increasing awareness of her impending demise.

The movement from guarded optimism to despair is easy to trace. After learning of the loss of her Notices historiques, she penned the Portraits et anecdotes in the belief that these quick jottings would serve to refresh her memory and supplement later work. However, less than a hundred pages later, she recognizes that someone, other than herself, will have to make use of her fragmented writings: “Perhaps one day, these reunited fragments will offer to a friendly hand new elements to be added to the picture of truth.”⁴² As political events worsened and her disillusionment became complete, she began to write with the knowledge that her execution was drawing near: “Perhaps, I will exist no longer, but I will leave this world confident that the memory of my detractors will be lost in their own bile, while my memory will sometimes be recalled with tenderness.”⁴³ She thus turned her attention to last words and final gestures in an effort to leave behind an extraordinary example of feminine courage and virtue.

Exemplarity would require a spectacular death. While Madame Roland may not have had the opportunity to speak publicly in front of the revolutionary tribunal, she would have the chance to offer one last, brilliant lesson to her countrymen. From her prison cell, she managed to assemble a group of friends to bear witness to her execution. In her Souvenirs, Sophie Grandchamps relates Madame Roland's last request: “Would you be brave enough to witness my final moments in order to provide authentic testimony of what they were?”⁴⁴ Indeed, in a manner reminiscent of Julie, she choreographed the last hours of her life, aware that her every action would be observed and eventually retold.⁴⁵ From the gentle scolding of La Marche, a fellow prisoner who had attempted to enter the executioner's wagon before her, to her final words at the foot of the guillotine, Madame Roland stage-managed the closing events of her life with extraordinary theatrical aplomb. As witnessed by Grandchamps, she was still offering lessons of courage to the other condemned prisoners in the tumbrel en route to the scaffold. In the preface to his 1840 edition of the Mémoires de Roland, Jules Ravenel recounts her mythic final scene: “At the foot of the scaffold, she turned toward the statue of liberty erected in the middle of the square and cried: ‘O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!’ Then she begged to be given pen and paper to write down the sensations she had just experienced; but this last wish was unfeelingly refused …”⁴⁶ With these words, faithfully transcribed by friends, she became a martyr, passing into history and legend as a great heroine.⁴⁷ In addition to having uttered those famous last words, Madame Roland also left behind an indelible image of herself as writer. While her final sensations may not have been recorded, her sacrifice was. By sacrificing her own life in order to become an illustrious example, Madame Roland would make a powerful claim on posterity.

Madame Roland understood the extraordinary effect that the blade of the guillotine would lend to her story. Indeed, the amazing rhetorical force that this final gesture, her self-immolation, brings to the memoirs cannot be overestimated. In his preface to them, Ravenel emphasizes precisely this point. He assures the reader that he will be moved by this tale, especially if he bears in mind the fate of its heroine: “These are truly Memoirs from beyond the Grave that Madame Roland wrote. She knew it and her serenity was never altered. … It is thus not without emotion that we tell this story that would have been worthy of the pen of Plutarch.”⁴⁸ While inviting a comparison of Chateaubriand's memoirs to Madame Roland's, Ravenel underscores the truly heroic quality of her work. She wrote and acted with the knowledge that her death was imminent. And yet she remained perfectly self-possessed. For Ravenel, this ability to stare death in the face and not lose heart recalled heroes of antiquity who, too, had faced death with the same unnerving equanimity.

But her stoic death comprises only part of Ravenel's fascination. He was also impressed by her talents as an author. He found equally moving her ability to have expressed herself with such charm in the face of her impending death: “The Memoirs of Madame Roland possess for the enlightened reader an inexpressible charm, ingenuity, grace, force, intelligence, glory. All that one can imagine of the beautiful, the good, the noble can be found among these pages drawn by the calmest hand, by a woman who, a few days later, would lose her head to the guillotine's blade.”⁴⁹ It is clear that Ravenel enjoyed reading Madame Roland's Mémoires particuliers and was touched by her charming descriptions of middle-class Parisian life. Indeed, he seems particularly moved by the juxtaposition of the two contrasting images of Madame Roland: the young woman portrayed as serious, intelligent, and not lacking in humor, compared to the revolutionary martyr. For Ravenel, the memoirs' power to captivate depends on a reading of both halves; the story of her exemplary death is intimately tied to the tale of her virtuous early life.

While the tone of Madame Roland's political writings, with the constant echoing of classical themes, is admittedly different than that of the Mémoires particuliers, we are still within the confines of a sacrificial economy preoccupied with reproducing virtue. The depiction of the virtuous young woman in the Mémoires renders her as appealing as any heroine of sentimental fiction, while her political writings figure her enemies as villains or rakes who repeatedly assault her virtue. Like Clarissa, Madame Roland endures their incessant assaults but remains untainted. The two halves of her autobiography thus work in tandem to produce a narrative of Innocence cruelly defiled and mercilessly killed. The injustice of this death demands an emotional response on the part of the reader; it seeks to incite indignation, sympathy and tears. Madame Roland's memoirs want to move the reader who, by identifying and suffering with wronged virtue, will be spurred on to correct real-life injustice. To quote Diderot in another context: “Sacrifice performed in the imagination creates a predisposition to sacrifice ourselves in reality.”⁵⁰ Marshalling her considerable skills as a writer, Madame Roland hoped to touch her reader and inspire a desire to right the wrongs of the Revolution.

Given the prominence of classical stories of virtue, the explicitly political stories of Lucretia or Cato might seem to be the model on which Madame Roland's sacrifice was based. However, her first editor Bosc chose to place the memoirs under the aegis of maternal virtue. In following his lead, I have argued that two deaths shape Madame Roland's autobiographical project. Madame Phlipon's premature death lead the young Phlipon to dedicate her life to sweet and consoling virtue that, in turn, allowed her to keep the memory of her mother alive. Following a similar logic, Madame Roland imagines that the reader of her Mémoires will identify with her fate as a daughter: “perhaps one day my little stories will enchant, for a few moments, the life of an unfortunate prisoner allowing her to forget her fate in sympathizing with mine; perhaps the philosophers, who look for the human heart in the plot of a novel and in the action of a drama, will find it by studying my story.”⁵¹ Writing about her early years lived under the watchful and affectionate gaze of her mother brought comfort and solace to Madame Roland in prison. Her autobiography is meant to perform the same function for the unfortunate prisoner: in the face of extreme difficulty, it extends loving consolation to the daughter-like figure. This movement from one sacrificing subject (Madame Roland) to another (the captive) creates feelings of pleasurable reciprocity—the gift of maternal virtue. By means of this sympathetic identification, the memoirs also intend to move the reader to embrace a life of virtue, which might eventually produce heroics acts.

This is not to say, however, that men and sons were not or could not be equally moved by Madame Roland's memoirs. Indeed, as Diderot's Eloge de Richardson makes clear, the act of identifying with a suffering other reveals very little about one's gender. In the above citation, Madame Roland explicitly appeals to philosophers of the “human heart” and thus makes a more generalized claim on her readership, a claim that is not dependent on gender identification. Nevertheless, with the explosion during the eighteenth century of interest in motherhood, the rhetorical power of laying explicit claim to that position should not be underestimated. In order for the reader to experience the full effect of maternal loss, he should identify as a daughter. When Bosc placed Madame Roland's last words to her daughter on the title page of the Mémoires, he invited the reader to put himself or herself in the place of Eudora. This framing of the title page urged the reader to become the daughter by buying—both literally and metaphorically—the story told herein.

And buy they did. Her heroic death quite literally called forth witnesses, editors, and readers to finish and then to reproduce her text. At least nine different editions of Madame Roland's memoirs were published from 1795 to 1885. As Paul de Roux notes in his introduction to the memoirs: “the nineteenth century opened the doors of its literary pantheon for her.”⁵² She was admired by Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Goethe, Lamartine, Michelet, and Carlyle to name but the most famous. The actress and poet Louise Colet penned a play entitled Charlotte Corday et Madame Roland, and she remarked in her preface that “the life of Madame Roland is too well known, we believe, to necessitate here the writing of a historical biography.”⁵³

Today, when we assume that Madame Roland was the “victim” of a misguided, Rousseauvian agenda, we forget that her Mémoires once possessed the rhetorical energy to stir the emotions and sympathies of generations of readers. I have argued that the concept of feminine virtue linked to maternal sacrifice accounts for much of their persuasive force. Instead of interpreting the two portions of her Mémoires as fundamentally at odds with each other—private versus public—I have shown that it is necessary to read them as a whole, because together they depict feminine virtue as a complex structure of both psychic and textual negotiation. The virtuous self and the virtuous text are constituted by an originary loss, that of the mother, which is overcome when the daughter or reader incorporates through sympathetic identification the suffering of the lost loved one. This teary-eyed masochism is then ennobled by the imperative to strive for virtue. If Madame Roland's Mémoires are viewed in these terms, the specter of an unproductive or, worse yet, hypocritical dualism can be put to rest. We do not have to agree with Madame Roland's understanding of women's role in society in order to admire her talents as a writer and a heroine. Given that too few women have had the opportunity or the courage to seize such an important moment in history, it seems wrong for feminist critics to overlook these achievements. By concentrating on the cultural specificity of the term “feminine virtue,” I hope to have offered one way of expanding our understanding of the historical contribution of women.

Notes

1. Oeuvres de J. M. Ph. Roland, ed. Luc-Antoine Champagneux (Paris: Bidault, An VIII), lxviij. “Sa grande âme, supérieure à tous les événements, lui fit trouver en elle-même des secours, nonseulement pour anéantir l'horreur naturelle du supplice, mais pour lui faire goûter, s'il est possible, du plaisir dans ce dernier sacrifice à sa patrie” (my translation).

2. For biographies of Madame Roland, see Gita May, Madame Roland and the Age of Revolution (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971) and Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, Madame Roland: Une femme en Révolution (Paris: Seuil, 1985).

3. For a brief discussion of her historical significance to the Girondin party, see Jeremy D. Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998), 63-5.

4. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie Rabine, Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992).

5. Mary Trouille, Sexual Politics and the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 170.

6. Brigitte Szymanek, “French Women's Revolutionary Writings: Madame Roland or the Pleasure of the Mask.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 15 (1996): 109.

7. Szymanek, “French Women's Revolutionary Writings,” 101. Szymanek writes: “By reading Roland's pledges of allegiance to the prevailing feminine view, and her lack of support for women activists, as inconsistent with Roland's own political activities, the critics (whether hostile or sympathetic) have essentially viewed Roland as a hypocrite.”

8. Szymanek, “French Women's Revolutionary Writings,” 118.

9. Gita May's groundbreaking work on Madame Roland and the revolutionary generation remains essential reading for those interested in the field. However, she also explains Madame Roland's involvement with revolutionary politics as a violation of her self-assigned domestic role. Additionally, she asserts that Madame Roland's reluctance to declare herself a woman writer stems from an overweening sense of pride: “Undoubtedly, she also believed … that nothing was more ridiculous than a woman with literary pretensions. … Her pride, ever vigilant, feared nothing as much as ridicule.” De Jean-Jacques Rousseau à Madame Roland: essai sur la sensibilité préromantique et révolutionnaire (Geneva: Droz, 1964), 89 (my translation).

10. Beginning with the post-Tridentine reforms to re-christianize France in the seventeenth century and reaching a summit in the works of Rousseau, initiatives to transform the French nation often targeted mothers and daughters. Early-modern science and literature colluded to produce a new woman whose primary aim in life would be the biological and moral reproduction of the species. Historians of education, the family and private life have offered ample testimony to this shift. The nascent companionate marriage requires a new type of wife and mother who happily tends to her children and watches over the home, concerned primarily with the domestic economy. For the Catholic reformation, see Martine Sonnet, L'Education des filles au temps des Lumières (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1989). For historical accounts of women and families, see Yvonne Knibiehler and Catherine Fouquet, Histoire des mères du moyen-âge à nos jours (Paris: Editions Montalba, 1980), 149-61; A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier (Cambridge: Belknap, 1989), 399-529; Histoire des femmes en Occident, vol. 3, eds. Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge (Paris: Plon, 1991). For a discussion of women and science, see Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex: Women and the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

11. Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: the Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), 19.

12. For Blum's discussion of Rousseau's tripartite understanding of virtue, see chapter two, “The Magnetism of Virtue,” in Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue, 37-56.

13. Denis Diderot, Selected Writings, ed. Lester G. Crocker and trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Macmillian, 1966), 110. Jay Caplan's Framed Narratives: Diderot's Genealogy of the Beholder (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) offers many points of comparison with my essay. He is also interested in the dynamic relationship between text and reader which is dependent on a “sacrificial economy.” Our analyses differ in that I give an account of how gender relations, the mother/daughter axis in particular, can affect this economy. In addition, I employ an understanding of subjectivity and reading developed by psychoanalytically informed feminist critics such as Rey Chow.

14. Diderot, Selected Writings, 111.

15. Diderot, “On Dramatic Poetry, “in European Theories of Drama, ed. Barret H. Clark (New York: Crown Press, 1965), 238. Quoted in Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between East and West (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1991), 122.

16. Along with Rey Chow, other post-Lacanian feminist critics, such as Kaja Silverman in film studies (The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1988]), Judith Butler in philosophy (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge, 1991] and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex [New York: Routledge, 1993]), and Carolyn Dever in English literature (Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998]) seek to problematize the triumphal narrative of male subject formation (inherited from Freud and rewritten by Lacan) by theorizing a form of feminine or maternal agency.

17. Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 124.

18. In Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud, Carolyn Dever demonstrates that mothers are almost entirely absent from Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis. But this absence is nonetheless essential to the narrative because it offers that mythic point of origin to both theory and fiction.

19. Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 160.

20. Political scientists and literary critics have long been concerned with the issue of virtue and feminine subjectivity in Rousseau's work. See, for instance, Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), 99-194; Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau's Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), 134-46; Peggy Kamuf, Discourses of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1982), 97-122; and recently, Christine Roulston, Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson, Rousseau and Laclos (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1998), 104-13. These critics tend to emphasize the necessary sacrifice of Julie's feminine desire to the law of the father. I am suggesting that another relational axis, which is usually overlooked or underappreciated, figures significantly in the novel: Julie's relationship to her mother. Interestingly enough, Peggy Kamuf comments on the Princesse de Clèves's relationship to her mother in much the same terms as I use to discuss Julie's. However, the mother drops out of Kamuf's discussion when she turns to Rousseau's novel.

21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie or the New Héloïse, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover: Univ. of New England Press, 1997), 258-9.

22. Rousseau, Julie or the New Héloïse, 292.

23. Rousseau, Julie or the New Héloïse, 598.

24. Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 127.

25. Outram, The Body and the French Revolution, 151.

26. Roland, Appel à l'Impartiale Postérité, Par la Citoyenne Roland, Femme du Ministre de l'Intérieur, ed. Louis-Augustin-Guillaume Bosc (Paris: Louvet, 1795). “Que ma dernière lettre à ma Fille fixe son attention sur l'objet qui paraît être son devoir essentiel, et que le souvenir de sa mère l'attache à jamais aux vertus qui consolent de tout.” All further references to Madame Roland's memoirs (hereafter M) are taken from Paul de Roux's edition entitled Mémoires de Madame Roland (Paris: Mercure de France, 1966). All translations of her writings are mine.

27. It should be noted that Madame Roland found real-life motherhood to be an enormous disappointment. Early in the Notices historiques she says about her daughter Eudora: “elle ne connaîtra ni mes vives affections, ni mes peines, ni mes plaisirs” (“she will never know either my lively emotions, or my pains, or my pleasures”) Roland, M, 42 (my translation). My essay is thus about the discursive construction or idealization of motherhood which, admittedly, might not correspond to the lived experience of mother/daughter relations.

28. Madame Roland's mother died 7 June 1775, apparently of a brain hemorrhage.

29. Pahin de la Blancherie was among Madame Roland's many suitors. However, unlike most of them, he was young, handsome, and a philosophe. He was also poor and, consequently, was refused when he asked for Phlipon's hand.

30. Roland, Lettres de Madame Roland, nouvelle série (1767-76), ed. Claude Perroud (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1900-2), 395. “vois ta fille renouveler le serment de te prendre toujours pour modèle! … Je me présente avec cet objet [La Blancherie] devant toi, je t'ouvre mon âme: lis, reconnais ton ouvrage, approuve et bénis. Vois enfin chaque hommage que je fais à la vertu servir d'éloge à ta mémoire, de tribut à ma douleur.”

31. Roland, Lettres de Madame Roland, 395. “Si la raison, le devoir, la nécessité, me forçaient dans la suite à m'attacher à un autre qu'à D. L. B., il faudrait que ce fût quelqu'un qui lui ressemblât.”

32. Roland, M, 296. “nous revenions à Paris par eau, battus de l'orage, et … au sortir de la galiote où nous étions un cadavre que l'on en tirait s'opposait à mon passage; ce spectacle me glaçait d'effroi, je cherchais ce qu'était ce triste cadavre … Au même instant, ma mère, … m'appelant de sa voix douce, fit évanouir mon songe …”

33. Rousseau, Julie or the New Héloïse, 616.

34. Roland, M, 298. “je cherche à aspirer la mort, j'espère la gagner avec mon souffle et pouvoir expirer sur l'heure.”

35. Roland, M, 301. “Il est beau d'avoir de l'âme, il est malheureux d'en avoir autant …”

36. Roland, Lettres, 395.

37. Roland, M, 300. “Ici finit l'époque douce et brillante de ces années tranquilles, … semblables à de belles matinées du printemps … donnant le bonheur en le promettant.”

38. Roland, M, 302. “j'apportai de longue main tout ce qui devait me rendre capable de grands sacrifices et m'exposer à de grands malheurs. La mort ne sera plus pour moi que le terme des uns et des autres. Je l'attends …”

39. Roland, M, 302. “J'aime à publier des vérités qui ne m'intéressent pas seule, et je n'en veux taire aucune, pour que leur enchaînement serve à leur démonstration.”

40. Béatrice Didier also discusses the fragmentary character of Madame Roland's memoirs. It is important to remember that they were published posthumously and that there is a good deal of “paratext,” rendering the simple division between historical memoirs and autobiographical text more problematic. However, the bulk of the manuscript does in fact divide fairly neatly along these lines—particularly if we insist on the temporal division between recent past and childhood. Didier, “Madame Roland: History, Memoirs, and Autobiography,” in Women Writers in Pre-Revolutionary France: Strategies of Emancipation, eds. Colette H. Winn and Donna Kuizenga (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 363-72.

41. Roland, M, 38. “je ne crains rien au monde, et si je ne sauve pas Roland, j'exprimerai avec force des vérités qui ne seront pas inutiles à la République; prévenez vos dignes collègues, un élan de courage peut faire un grand effet et sera du moins d'un grand exemple.”

42. Roland, M, 174. “un jour peut-être la réunion de ces lambeaux offrira à quelque main amie de quoi ajouter de nouveaux traits au tableau de la vérité.”

43. Roland, M, 169. “je n'y serai peut-être plus, mais je sortirai de ce monde avec la confiance que la mémoire des calomniateurs se perdra dans la malédiction, tandis que mon souvenir sera quelquefois rappelé avec attendrissement.”

44. Sophie Grandchamps, Souvenirs, in La Révolution française, ed. Claude Perroud (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1899), 164 (my translation). Grandchamps's Souvenirs were first published in 1806. “Auriez-vous le courage d'assister à mes derniers moments, afin de rendre témoignage authentique de ce qu'ils seront?”

45. Outram notes that this stage-managing of death was a typical revolutionary gesture. See chapter six, “Heroic Suicide, Suffering and the Middle Class in the French Revolution,” in The Body and the French Revolution, 90-150.

46. Roland, Mémoires de Madame Roland, ed. Jules Ravenel (Paris: Auguste Durand, 1840), ix (my translation). “Arrivée au pied de l'échafaud, elle se tourna vers la statue de la liberté élevée au milieu de la place et s'écria ‘O liberté que de crimes on commet en ton nom!’ Puis elle supplia qu'on lui donnât une plume et du papier, afin d'écrire les sensations qu'elle venait d'éprouver; mais cette dernière satisfaction lui fut impitoyablement refusée.”

47. Ravenel no doubt culled these details about her death from the “Discours préliminaire” written by Madame Roland's close friend and second editor, L. A. Champagneux. For instance, Champagneux writes in his edition of her memoirs: “I learned that she had one dying regret: she was unable to transcribe the new and extraordinary feelings that she experienced en route from the Conciergerie to the Place de la Révolution. She asked for paper and pen and was refused …” Roland, Œuvres de J. M. Ph. Roland, ed. L. A. Champagneux (Paris: Bidault, An Viii [1800]), lxviij (my translation).

48. Roland, Mémoires de Madame Roland, ed. J. Ravenel, i. “C'était des Mémoires d'outre-tombe qu'écrivait madame Roland; elle le savait et sa sérénité n'en était pas altérée. … Aussi n'est-ce pas sans émotions que nous essayons d'esquisser cette histoire que la plume de Plutarque n'eût point dédaignée” (my translation).

49. Roland, Mémoires de Madame Roland, ed. J. Ravenel, i.

50. Diderot, Selected Writings, 110.

51. Roland, M, 238. “peut-être un jour mes récits ingénus charmeront les instants de quelque infortunée captive, qui oubliera son sort en s'attendrissant sur le mien, peut-être les philosophes qui veulent reconnaitre le coeur humain dans la suite d'un roman et l'action d'un drame trouveront-ils à l'étudier dans mon histoire.”

52. Roland, M, 29. “Le XIXe siècle ouvrit à Madame Roland les portes du panthéon littéraire.”

53. Louise Colet, Charlotte Corday et Madame Roland (Paris: Berquet et Pétion, 1842), 325. “La vie de Madame Roland est trop connue pour que nous croyions nécessaire de donner ici sa notice historique” (my translation).