On the whole, Madame Roland was very well off, and her life would undoubtedly have gone on thus to the end, broken after a while, perhaps, with the much desired pension; perhaps, by even the title of nobility; she then would have had the “paradise” she so much desired—“the pretty apartment in town and a bijou at Le Clos”; she might, on the other hand, have had her sad sentimental picture realized and Roland, blind, have made shoe-laces and she done needle-work, while they both shed delicious tears over Rousseau, had there not been something in the air which was about to take away all from him that had and to give it to him who had not; to make leaders of country lawyers, and doctors, and schoolmasters, and to send the diplomats and courtiers a-begging. The French Revolution was coming, and to trace briefly how it grew in the Lyonnais and how our friends in particular regarded it and were drawn to side with it, is our next affair. V HOW THE ROLANDS WELCOMED THE REVOLUTION Monsieur and Madame Roland had both, throughout their lives, been intelligent observers and critics of, as well as, to a degree, sufferers from, the financial and social causes of the French Revolution. They had both sympathized with the preliminary outbreaks of that revolution which, beginning early in the century, had recurred at intervals throughout their lives. They both had thoroughly imbibed the intellectual causes of the movement, those new ideas of Voltaire, Diderot, Helvétius, Abbé Raynal, Rousseau, which, coming _after_ the first agitation,—there had been many a riot in Paris, in Lyons, in Rouen; the King had been warned many a time that there were still Ravaillacs; the word _Révolution_ had been often spoken by the French of the eighteenth century before these men wrote,—had backed up the revolutionist with philosophy and logic. Roland was but ten years old, a boy in the Lyonnais, when the war with Austria caused so much misery, and when a new levy of men and the doubling of the taxes desolated and irritated the province. Lyons was obliged to contribute two million livres at that time to aid the King. He was seventeen when, in 1751, the misery again became so terrible that riots occurred throughout France, and D’Argenson wrote: “Nothing but a near revolution is talked of on account of the bad condition of the government.” These things could not but have affected him. Indeed, the bad outlook at Lyons was one reason that he left home with the idea of making his fortune in America. As a boy, then, Roland had felt the financial errors of the French government.