For the majority of women, still beautiful, who mingle in public affairs, love is the principal thing; politics but the accessory, the pretext. They imagine they are attaching themselves to ideas, and it is to men. In this respect the heroines of the Revolution resemble those of the Fronde. The stateswoman in {65} Madame Roland plays second to the lover of Buzot. In her mind the Republic and the handsome republican blend into one. Believing herself a patriot when she is above all a woman in love, she carries the emotions, the infatuations, the ardors and exaggerations of her private life into her public one. With her, angers and enthusiasms rise to paroxysm. She is extreme in all things. She detests Louis XVI. as much as she loves Buzot. After the flight to Varennes, she wrote: "To replace the King on the throne is a folly, an absurdity, if it is not a horror; to declare him demented is to make obligatory the appointment of a regent. To impeach Louis XVI. would be, beyond all contradiction, the greatest and most righteous step, but you are incapable of taking it. Well then, put him not exactly under interdict, but suspend him." Here begins the influence of Madame Roland. The suspension of the royal authority is one of her ideas. "So long as peace lasted," she says, "I adhered to the peaceful rôle and to that kind of influence which I thought fitting to my sex; when war was declared by the King's departure, it appeared to me that every one should devote himself unreservedly. I joined the fraternal societies, being persuaded that zeal and good intentions might be very useful in critical moments. I was unable to stay at home any longer, and I went to the houses of worthy people of my acquaintance that we might excite each other to great measures." One knows what the {66} Revolution meant by that expression: great measures. Madame Roland became furious. She wanted a freedom of the press without check or limit. She was angry because Marat's newspapers were destroyed by the satellites of Lafayette. "It is a cruel thing to think of," she exclaims, "but it becomes every day more evident that peace means retrogression, and that we can only be regenerated by blood."