In all Madame Roland’s dramatic life there is no more attractive picture than that which the writing of her Memoirs brings up: this splendid, passionate woman, glorying in her love and her courage, sitting day after day before the little table in her prison cell, oblivious to the cries and oaths which rise about her, indifferent to discomfort, forgetful of everything but the souvenirs which her flying pen records, and which bring smiles and tears by turn to her mobile face. Here we have none of the stilted, prepared style of her early writings, none of the pose of the political memoirs. It is self-complacent, to be sure, and we feel that she is making herself out to have been a most extraordinary young girl, but one cannot help forgiving her, she makes herself out so charming. However, if one is interested in finding out the woman as she really was, he must not trust too fully to her interpretations. She was so interested in herself, idealized herself so thoroughly, was so serious in her self-confidence, so devoid of self-reproach, that she was oblivious to her own inconsistencies and inconsequentialities. Rousseau’s _Confessions_ were the model of her Memoirs. The result was that she related some experiences which good sense and taste, not to say delicacy, ought to have forbidden her to repeat to any one, above all, to the public. These passages in her Memoirs are due to her slavish following of Rousseau. She was incapable of exercising an independent judgment in a matter of taste, of opinion, of morals, where Rousseau was concerned, so completely had she adopted him. When she came to writing her life, she dragged to light unimportant and unpleasant details because Rousseau had had the bad taste to do the same before her. The naïveté, with which these things are told, will convince any one that cares to examine the Memoirs that they mean nothing but she had taken the foolish engagement to tell everything she could remember about her life. [Illustration: THE CONCIERGERIE IN 1793. Prison where Madame Roland passed the last eight days of her captivity, and from which she went to the guillotine. Pont au Change in the foreground. ]