Whilst the king, isolated at the summit of the constitution, sought support, sometimes by hazardous negotiations with foreigners, sometimes by rash attempts at corruption in the capital, a body, some Girondists and other Jacobins, but as yet confounded under the common denomination of patriots, began to unite and form the nucleus of a great republican idea: they were Petion, Robespierre, Brissot, Buzot, Vergniaud, Guadet, Gensonne, Carra, Louvet, Ducos, Fonfrede, Duperret, Sillery-Genlis, and many others, whose names have scarcely emerged from obscurity. The home of a young woman, daughter of an engraver of the Quai des Orfevres, was the meeting place of this union. It was there that the two great parties of the _Gironde_ and the _Montagne_ assembled, united, separated, and after having acquired power, and overturned the monarchy in company, tore the bosom of their country with their dissensions, and destroyed liberty whilst they destroyed each other. It was neither ambition, nor fortune, nor celebrity which had successively attracted these men to this woman's residence, then without credit, name, or comforts: it was conformity of opinion; it was that devoted worship which chosen spirits like to render in secret as in public to a new truth which promises happiness to mankind; it was the invisible attraction of a common faith, that communion of the first neophytes in the religion of philosophy, where the necessity for souls to unite before they associate by deeds, is felt. So long as the thoughts common to political men have not reached that point where they become fruitful, and are organised by contact, nothing is accomplished. Revolutions are ideas, and it is this communion which creates parties. The ardent and pure mind of a female was worthy of becoming the focus to which converged all the rays of the new truth, in order to become prolific in the warmth of the heart, and to light the pile of old institutions. Men have the spirit of truth, women only its passion. There must be love in the essence of all creations; it would seem as though truth, like nature, has two sexes. There is invariably a woman at the beginning of all great undertakings; one was requisite to the principle of the French Revolution.[12] We may say that philosophy found this woman in Madame Roland. The historian, led away by the movement of the events which he retraces, should pause in the presence of this serious and touching figure, as passengers stopped to contemplate her sublime features and white dress on the tumbril which conveyed thousands of victims to death. To understand her we must trace her career from the _atelier_ of her father to the scaffold. It is in a woman's heart that the germ of virtue lies; it is almost always in private life that the secret of public life is reposed. II.