It was in the same surroundings that he met Roland, an inspector of manufactures, and his young wife, then in all the flower of her robust beauty. The husband was forty-eight; the wife was twenty-six; Bosc was twenty; naturally he fell in love. Madame Roland gave him to understand that he had nothing to hope for from her; but she mockingly added that in eighteen years it would be allowable for him to make a like declaration to her daughter Eudora. Bosc resigned himself to the situation and consented to the friendship which was offered him; but he committed the folly, later, of taking seriously the raillery with which he had been dismissed. For ten years Bosc continued a correspondence with Madame Roland which was full of confidence and freedom. These letters no longer exist, and it is a pity; for this republican botanist seems to have possessed sensitiveness, tenderness and judgment. We do possess, however, most of the letters which were written to him by Madame Roland. [Illustration: 0093] Without these letters and various others of the same period, we would never have had any other means of knowing Madame Roland than the image drawn by herself in her Memoirs, her intolerable Memoirs. We would always have seen her behind the tragic mask, heroic, unapproachable and full of vanity, and we would have remained almost unconscious of the frightful tragedy of her death if she had not left us these intimate and familiar effusions, in which are revealed the heart and the mind of a woman who was truly feminine. We are very little moved by the celebrated letter which she wrote one day to Bancal, Bosc's friend, to spurn his love, although she confessed to "tumultuous sentiments" which agitated her, and to tears which obscured her vision. I know that Michelet cries: "The cuirass of the warrior opens, and it is a woman that we see, the wounded bosom of Clorinda." But we must doubt, after all, the severity of the wound which leaves Clorinda cool enough to call to witness "the absolute irreproachability" of her life. There is something theatrical in such half-avowals. On the contrary, her letters to Bosc are simple in diction and ofttimes charming. They are spontaneous: "Seated in the ingle nook, but at eleven o'clock in the morning, after a peaceful night and the different cares of the day's work, my friend (that is, Roland) at his desk, my little girl knitting, and myself talking to one, watching over the work of the other, savoring the happiness of existing warmly in the bosom of my dear little family, writing to a friend, while the snow falls upon so many poor devils loaded down with misery and grief, I grieve over their fate; I turn back with pleasure to my own..." And elsewhere: "Now, know that Eudora reads well; begins to know no other plaything than the needle; amuses herself by drawing geometrical figures; does not know what shackles clothes of any kind may be; has no idea of the price one has to pay for rags for adornment; believes