This spirit, this restless energy, never left her, though she was buried at Le Clos almost all the first eighteen months of the Revolution. She kept herself aflame by correspondence with her friends and by her propagandism among her neighbors, most of them decidedly recalcitrant. Especially did she incite herself by her reading. Writing to Bancal once she told him: “I have left all the Italian poets for the _Tacitus_ of Davanzati. It is not permitted in a time of revolution to turn to pleasant studies, or objects remote from the public interest. If I can give a little time this winter to English, I shall read Macaulay’s history. I shall leave the historian only for the novel of Rousseau, which is perfectly suited to civism.” She saw no danger in her doctrines. They moved to noble sentiments, to great aspirations. What greater good? That they incited to crimes, too, she did not admit. She was recklessly indifferent to what is; she looked only at what might be. Her eyes were turned to America, to Greece, to Rome, and not to the facts of the struggles of these countries, only to the fine actions of their heroes, the rounded phrases of their orators. The reasonable girl who welcomed Louis XVI. to the throne, the politic woman who for years had been seeking a title and its advantages, and who had been willing to devote all her splendid power to reforming the old régime, had become suddenly inexorable in her demands, unyielding in her suspicions, fierce in her thought. She believed that one must “watch and preach to the last sigh or else not mingle with the Revolution.” It was the revolt of the idealist against compromises made in the past; resentment for wrongs suffered; the “strike back” for the title not granted, and for Roland’s talent and services unrecognized; the hope of realizing dreams of an ideal society. Nor was it a momentary enthusiasm. Her conviction never wavered. Others as firmly founded in the doctrines as she, and as eloquent in their defence of them, hesitated sometimes, drew back with apprehension at the torrents of passion and of demagogy they were loosening on France. But she never admitted that anything but “complete regeneration” could come of their teachings. It was the woman’s nature which, stirred to its depths by enthusiasm or passion, becomes narrow, stern, unbending,—which can do but one thing, can see but one way; that inexplicable feminine conviction which is superior to experience, and indifferent to logic. VI FIRST POLITICAL SALON