Madame Roland was on very good terms with the _chanoine_ in all the early years in Beaujolais, caring for him when sick, making visits with him, talking with him over the fire winter evenings when Roland was away from home. No doubt he found her a welcome addition in a house which up to that time had been under the more or less tyrannical rule of his mother, a woman “of the age of the century,” and “terrible in her temper.” Madame Roland found him a welcome relief from the care of her mother-in-law, whom she seems to have regarded rather as an object for patience and philosophy than for affection. The old lady was trying. She had the child’s vice of gormandizing, and after each _petite débauche_, as her daughter-in-law called it, was an invalid for a few days. Then she invited recklessly, a habit that made much work and expense, and was particularly obnoxious to Madame Roland because the company passed all their time at cards. To see the house filled every evening with people who had not intellect and resources to entertain each other intelligently was exasperating. All these annoyances Madame Roland repeated to her husband in the long letters she sent him almost every day. More questionable than her habit of writing these petty vexations to him was her retailing of them to Bosc, with whom she was in constant correspondence. In spite of the drawbacks there was much brightness in the new home, much of that close intimacy which is the charm of the French interior. Madame Roland realized this and frequently painted pleasant pictures to Bosc as contrasts to the disagreeable ones she gave him. Although Madame Roland was greeted cordially at Villefranche by the leading people, as became the wife and sister-in-law of two prominent men, she never came any nearer to what was really good and enjoyable in the place than she had in Amiens. The town displeased her, as it naturally would, since she insisted on comparing it with Paris. She amused herself in studying the _soul_ of the place, and she found it frequently small, false, and distorted. Now an analysis of one’s surroundings is certainly amusing and instructive, but if one is to be a good neighbor and agreeable member of the society he dissects, he must keep his observations to himself; must place humanity and courtesy higher than analysis. Madame Roland did not do this; she showed often what she thought and felt, and became unpopular in return. Roland, too, made himself disliked in the Academy of Villefranche by his domineering ways.