Wire-pulling, favor-seeking, letter-writing, theatre-going and Mesmer-studying were over at last, and the end of May she started home, and glad to go. The separation had been severe for them both. There is scarcely a letter in the two collections not marked by tenderness; many of them are passionate in their warmth and longing. It is evident that at this time Madame Roland had no life apart from her husband. Madame Roland reached Amiens early in June. The first day of July she and her husband left for a trip in England which they had long planned. She counted much on it; for many years she had been an enthusiastic admirer of the English Constitution and its effects on the nation. Roland had been there before and was somewhat known, and naturally she saw what he thought best to show her. The journey lasted three weeks and she wrote full notes of what she saw for her daughter. These notes were published in Champagneux’s edition of her works. They are in no respect remarkable for originality of observation, or for wit. But they are always intelligent and practical, a result, no doubt, of Roland’s companionship. They touch a wide range of subjects and they are entertaining as a look at what an eighteenth-century traveller saw. It is easy to see that Madame Roland, as most travellers do, sought to confirm her preconceived ideas. England, for her, was the country of freedom, and she saw that which was in harmony with her ideas. IV COUNTRY LIFE It was in September of 1784 that the Rolands arrived in Beaujolais. Although Roland’s new position kept him the greater part of the time at Lyons, they settled for the winter some twenty-eight kilometres north, in Villefranche-sur-Saône. It was mainly for economical reasons that they did not go to Lyons. Roland’s mother had a home at Villefranche and they could live with her through the winter. The summers and autumns they meant to spend at Le Clos de la Platière, the family estate about eleven miles from Villefranche, which had recently come under their control. With such an arrangement it was necessary to take only a small apartment at Lyons. As M. Roland could come often to Villefranche and Le Clos, Madame planned to spend only about two months of the year at Lyons. Villefranche, their first home in the Beaujolais, is to-day a manufacturing town of perhaps twelve thousand inhabitants. There is a wearisome commonplace about its rows of flat-faced houses, a dusty, stupid, factory atmosphere about it as a whole. It seems to be utterly destitute of those _genre_ pictures which give the flavor to so many French towns, utterly lacking in those picturesque corners which make their charm.