She is said to have married M. Roland more as a theory than as a husband, for her ideas of marriage were such as to make pure, disinterested love impossible. Her husband was in many respects her intellectual superior, but she excelled him in versatility. Being her senior by twenty years, when he grew old and infirm he depended upon her for a great deal, all of which contributed to her restlessness and unhappiness. Then there developed in her that terrible struggle between loyalty to her husband and passion for Buzot, in which reason conquered. This devotion to duty was indeed rare in those days, when passion was supreme and pure love was almost unknown. Mr. Dobson says that this one trait by which she gave real expression of virtue is profoundly a product of her mental self. Her instinct would have led her to self-abandonment, so common in that day, but her "man by the head" self was stronger than her "woman by the heart" self. These two sides of her character, fostered by incessant reading, incited her fearful and unrelenting hatreds as well as her passion, "masculine enough to be mistrusted and feminine enough to be admired." These two qualities made her a power and an attraction. Her better side will continue to shine clearer as the horror of those days is revealed. Whatever may be the effects of her ambitious nature and of her unfortunate passion for Buzot, by the very virtue of her intellect and reasoning she will remain the one great woman of the Revolution who willingly and conscientiously sacrificed her life for her country. A type perhaps more universally known in her relation to the Revolution than is Mme. Roland, though no better understood, was Charlotte Corday. Possessed of a most intense patriotism and an unusual emotional nature, she represented better than any other woman of her age the peculiar French trait--namely, the emotional perfectly combined with the mathematical. She was unique; her compatriots practised the art of studying themselves, in order to be attractive, and thus accomplished their ends, while her ambition was not to please merely, but to be of some real, practical value to her troubled country. She stands out, however, as the product of the end of the eighteenth century, a natural result of the reading of philosophy and political pamphlets. Quite naturally, she entertained such philosophical sentiments as this: "No one will lose in losing me, and the country may be better off for the sacrifice. Death comes only once, and let us use it to the good of the country or the greatest number of people." Thus, her philosophy led her to a complete detachment from her individual self, and fostered the idea of dying for her country.