glittering personages among whom she had been condemned to play the part of a humble spectator, that 'she knew not what to do with the hatred in her heart.' In 1780 she took as her husband M. Roland, a small Government official. He styled himself M. Roland de la Platiere, from the name of a small estate which belonged not to him but to his elder brother, an excellent priest and canon of Villefranche (who, by the way, was guillotined at Lyons in 1793), and in 1781 his young wife made him take her to Paris, where they spent some time in vain efforts to secure letters patent of nobility! The efforts failing, they went back to live at Lyons, where M. Roland was an inspector of manufactories, and from Lyons, in July, 1789, Madame Roland, now become at last a most classical Republican, wrote to her friend M. Bosc (who afterwards published her Memoirs), a letter denouncing the timidity of their political friends. 'Your enthusiasm,' she exclaims, 'is only a fire of straw! _If the National Assembly does not regularly bring to trial two illustrious heads, or if some generous imitators of Decius do not strike them down, you will all go to the devil._' I soften and tone down the final phrase of this extraordinary outburst, for though in the original it is but an indecorum as compared with that famous passage in the 'Memoirs of Madame Roland' which M. de Sainte-Beuve gracefully describes as 'an immortal act of indecency,' it is yet an indecorum of a sort more tolerable in the French than in the English tongue. If the style is the man, the style is also the woman. In 1771 Marie Phlipon 'knew not what to do with the hatred in her heart.' In 1789 Marie Roland, then on the eve of her appearance upon the public stage of the Revolution, had found 'what to do with the hatred in her heart.' In this letter to Bosc we have the 'soul of the Gironde' _tout entiere a sa proie attachee_. She clung to her regicide purpose with the tenacity of a tigress. Everything which furthered it she approved, everything which retarded it she denounced. When the king and queen were brought back captives from Varennes to Paris in June 1791 she wrote, in an ecstasy of delight, to Bancal des Issarts, that 'thirty or forty thousand National Guards surrounded our great brigands'; and her desire was that 'the royal mannikin should be shut up, and his wife brought to trial.' She was then inclined to favour the scheme of a regency, of which her ally Petion should be the chief. We know from his own nauseating account of his conduct while journeying back from Varennes to Paris with the unfortunate royal family, how unbridled were Petion's dreams of his own probable share in this regency; and by a very curious coincidence a passage in the diary of Gouverneur Morris confirms, on the authority of Vicq d'Azyr, the Queen's physician, Petion's odious revelations of his own vanity and vulgarity.