“Do as you think best,” she wrote; “at any rate I shall not have the false delicacy to conceal from you that I am going to Paris, and shall even push my frankness to confessing that this circumstance adds much to my scruples in writing you to return. There is, in this situation, an infinite number of things which one feels but cannot explain, but that which is very clear, and which I say frankly to you, is that I wish never to see you bend to light considerations or to half affections. Remember that if I need the happiness of my friends this happiness is attached, for those who feel like us, to an absolute _irreproachability_.” [Illustration: Inscription written by Madame Roland on the back of the portrait of Buzot which she carried while in prison. ] It was by this constant return to the subject that she kept the relation between herself and Bancal “interesting.” It was by holding up her duty—the necessity of “virtue”—that she provoked him. It was the “coquetry of virtue” which Dumouriez found in her. But when Madame Roland went up to Paris she found other interests, new friends. Bancal received less attention, and he, occupied in making new friends, gave less attention; gradually the personal tone dropped from their letters, and by the fall of 1792 the correspondence had become purely patriotic. The friendship became of still less moment to Madame Roland when Bancal revealed to her his love for Miss Williams, a young English girl who had been attracted to Paris by the Revolution, and there had become associated with the Girondins. The affair with Bancal des Issarts proves Madame Roland to have had no more discretion than an ordinary woman when her heart was engaged, and drives one to the reluctant conclusion that in her case, as in the majority of cases, she was saved from folly by circumstances. By experience and by reflection, then, she was armed. Indeed, on whatever side we regard the revelation of her love to Buzot, she was blamable save one—and that of importance. In the general dissolution of old ideas, in the return, in theory, to the state of nature, which intellectual France had made, every law of social life, as every law of government, had been traced to its origin, and its reasonableness and justice questioned in the light of pure theory. Marriage had come under the general dissection. Love is a divine law, a higher wisdom. It is unjust, unreasonable, unnatural, to separate those who love because of any previous tie. It is the natural right of man to be happy. This opinion in the air had affected Madame Roland. She found it “bizarre and cruel” that two people should be chained together whom differences of age, of sentiment, of character, have rendered incompatible; and although she would not consent to take advantage of this theory and leave Roland, it justified her in loving Buzot and in telling him so.