Madame Roland had never accepted, other than theoretically, the idea which at the end of the eighteenth century made hosts of advocates,—that love is its own justification; that any civil or religious tie which prevents one following the dictates of his heart is unnatural and wrong. Nor did she accept for herself the practice then common in France, as it is still, and as it must be so long as marriage remains a matter of business, of keeping marriage ties for the sake of society, but of finding satisfaction for the affections in _liaisons_ of which nobody complains so long as they are _discreet_, to use the French characterization. Her notions of duty, of devotion, of loyalty, were those of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_ and allowed only marriage based on affection and preserved with fidelity to the end. Her theory of life and human relations would not allow her to be false to Roland. With such opinions she could not allow Buzot to declare the affection he felt. Had she been an inexperienced woman, such a declaration might have come naturally enough without any reproach for her; she would have been unprepared for it. Madame Roland was not inexperienced. She knew all the probability there was of Buzot loving her and she was too skilled in the human heart to believe herself incapable of a new love. Already she had been absorbed by passions whose realization at the moment had seemed necessary to her life. Her Platonic affection for Sophie Cannet was of an intensity rarely equalled by the most ardent love. For La Blancherie she had been ready to say that if she could not marry him she would marry no one. Roland, before their marriage, she had overwhelmed by her passion, and since she had followed him incessantly with protestations of affection. Certainly she knew by this time that impassioned love may grow cool and that the heart may recover its fire and vehemence. Nor had all her experience been before her marriage. She had not the excuse of those married women who suppose, in the simplicity of their innocence and purity, that once married there is no deviation of affection or loyalty possible, and who, when circumstances throw them into relations where a new passion is awakened, are overpowered by shame and surprise.