Her judgments on men are not always just. Indeed, they cannot be called judgments, they are simply her feelings towards those persons at the moment she wrote. Her indignation against the wrongs done her and her party is so intense that often her tone is irritated, contemptuous, impatient. The arrangement is not systematic, as, indeed, it was impossible to be, under the circumstances, and her pen bounds from one character to another,—from hero to agitator, from apostrophe to anecdote,—in a sort of reckless, impassioned hurry. The whole gallery of the Gironde and its opponents, from 1791 to 1793 pass before us, every one stamped with a positive, definite character. That she poses throughout the narrative is unquestionable. It is to posterity she speaks, and she wished to appear in the eyes of the future as she believed herself to be,—the apostle of the ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the incarnation of patriotism, the most perfect disinterestedness, and the highest fortitude. It was Madame Roland’s plan, in writing her personal Memoirs, to cover her whole life, and to follow Jean Jacques Rousseau’s _Confessions_. Although the work was never completed, we have the first twenty-five years. The charm of the narrative is irresistible. Never, even in the gayest and most natural of her letters to Bosc and Roland, was Madame Roland’s pen so happy as in these Memoirs of her youth. They sparkle with mirth and with tenderness. Never did any one appreciate better his own youth, nor idealize it more lovingly. To her these souvenirs are radiant pictures, and she sketches them one after another, with a full appreciation of all their attractiveness. Her early masters, her suitors, her youthful enthusiasm, Sophie, the Convent des Dames de la Congrégation, Meudon, Vincennes, La Blancherie, her mother, the Salon, river, Luxembourg, her toilettes, duties, sorrows, joys, the whole flows in a steady, sparkling stream, vivid with color, pulsating with life. She relives it all, and without reflection or hesitation pours out everything which comes into her mind. So full and natural are these Memoirs that they are really the most attractive material we have of the life of her class in the eighteenth century.