Nowhere else, whether in her candid history of herself, or in her wise
history of her country, or in her judicial history of her contemporaries,
whose spirit she discerned, whose powers she appraised, whose errors she
foresaw; hardly in her thought, and never in her word, is a break to be
perceived; she is not silent and she hardly stammers; and when she tells
us of her tears--the tears of youth only--her record is voluble and all
complete. For the dignity of her style, of her force, and of her
balanced character, Madame Roland would doubtless have effaced the two
imperfections which, to us who would be glad to admire in silence her
heroic figure, if that heroic figure would but cease to talk, are finer
and more noble than her well-placed language and the high successes of
her decision and her endurance. More than this, the two failures of this
unfailing woman are two little doors opened suddenly into those wider
spaces and into that dominion of solitude which, after all, do doubtless
exist even in the most garrulous soul. By these two outlets Manon Roland
also reaches the region of Marie Antoinette. But they befell her at the
close of her life, and they shall be named at the end of this brief
study.

Madame Roland may seem the more heroic to those whose suffrages she seeks
in all times and nations because of the fact that she manifestly
suppresses in her self-descriptions any signs of a natural gaiety. Her
memoirs give evidence of no such thing; it is only in her letters, not
intended for the world, that we are aware of the inadvertence of moments.
We may overhear a laugh at times, but not in those consciously sprightly
hours that she spent with her convent-school friend gathering fruit and
counting eggs at the farm. She pursued these country tasks not without
offering herself the cultivated congratulation of one whom cities had
failed to allure, and who bore in mind the examples of Antiquity. She
did not forget the death of Socrates. Or, rather, she finds an occasion