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MADAME ROLAND

́N THE year 1754 there was living in an obscure workshop in Paris, an engraver by the name of Gratien Phlippon. He had married a very beautiful woman, whose placid temperament and cheerful content contrasted strikingly with the restlessness of her husband. The comfortable yet humble apartments of the engraver were over the shop where he plied his daily toil. He was much dissatisfied with his lowly condition in life, and that his family, in the enjoyment of frugal competence alone, were debarred from those luxuries which were profusely showered upon others. Bitterly and unceasingly he murmured that his lot had been cast in the ranks of obscurity and of unsparing labour, while others, by a more fortunate, although no better merited destiny, were born to ease and affluence, and honour and luxury. Phlippon was a philosopher. Submission was a virtue he had never learned, and never wished to learn.

Madame Phlippon was just the reverse of her husband. She was a woman in whom faith, and trust, and submission predominated. She surrendered her will, without questioning, to all the teachings of the Church. She was placid, contented and cheerful, and undoubtedly sincere in her piety. In every event of life she recognised the overruling hand of Providence, and feeling that the comparatively humble lot assigned

her was in accordance with the will of God, she indulged in no repinings.

Of eight children born to these parents, one only, Jeanne Manon, or Jane Mary, survived the hour of birth. Her father first received her to his arms in 1754, and she became the object of his painful and most passionate adoration. Both parents lived in her and for her. She was their earthly all. Even in her infantile years she gave indication of a most brilliant intellect--and her father repined that she should be doomed to a life of obscurity and toil, while the garden of the Tuileries and the Elysian Fields were thronged with children, neither so beautiful nor so intelligent, who were reveling in boundless wealth, and living in a world of luxury and splendour which, to Phlippon's imagination, seemed more alluring than any idea he could form of heaven.

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By nature Jane was endowed with a soul of unusual delicacy. From early childhood, all that is beautiful or sublime in nature, in literature, in character, had charms to rivet her entranced attention. She loved to sit alone at her chamber window in the evening of a summer's day, to gaze upon the gorgeous hues of sunset. Books of poetry and descriptions of heroic charand achievements were her especial delight. "Plutarch's Lives," that book which, more than any other, appears to be the incentive of early genius, was hid beneath her pillow, and read and re-read. Those illustrious heroes of antiquity became the companions of her solitude and of her hourly thoughts. She adored them and loved them as her own most intimate personal friends. Her character became insensibly moulded to their forms, and she was inspired with restless enthu

siasm to imitate their deeds. When but twelve years of age her father found her, one day, weeping that she was not born a Roman maiden.

It was, perhaps, the absence of playmates, and the habitual converse with mature minds which, at so early an age, inspired Jane with that insatiate thirst for knowledge which she ever manifested. Books were her only resource in every unoccupied hour. From her walks with her father, and her domestic employments with her mother, she turned to her little library and to her chamber window, and lost herself in the limitless realms of thought.

In a bright summer's afternoon she might be seen sauntering along the boulevards, led by her father's hand, gazing upon that scene of gaiety with which the eye is never wearied. A gilded coach, drawn by the most beautiful horses in the richest trappings, sweeps along the streets a gorgeous vision. Phlippon takes his little daughter in his arms to show her the sight, and, as she gazes in infantile wonder and delight, the discontented father says:

"Look at that lord and lady, and child, lolling so voluptuously in their coach. They have no right there. Why must I and my child walk on this hot pavement, while they repose on velvet cushions and revel in all luxury? A time will come when the people will awake to the consciousness of their wrongs, and their tyrants will tremble before them."

He continues his walk in moody silence, brooding over his sense of injustice. They return to their home. Jane wishes that her father kept a carriage, and liveried servants and outriders. She thinks of politics, and of the tyranny of kings and nobles, and of the unjust

inequalities of man. She retires to the solitude of her loved chamber window, and reads of Aristides the Just, of Themistocles with his Spartan virtues, of Brutus, and of the mother of the Gracchi. Greece and Rome rise before her in all their ancient renown. She despises the frivolity of Paris and her youthful bosom throbs with the desire of being noble in spirit and of achieving great exploits. Thus, when other children of her age were playing with their dolls, she was dreaming of the pros. tration of nobles and of the overthrow of thrones.

The education of young ladies, at that time in France, was conducted almost exclusively by nuns in convents. The idea of the silence and solitude of the cloister inspired the highly imaginative girl. Her mother's spirit of religion was exerting a powerful influence over her, and one evening she fell at her mother's feet and, bursting into tears, besought that she might be sent to a convent to prepare to receive her first Christian communion in a suitable frame of mind.

The convent of the sisterhood of the Congregation in Paris was selected for Jane. She subsequently wrote:

While pressing my dear mother in my arms, at the moment of parting with her for the first time in my life, I thought my heart would break; but I was acting in obedience to the voice of God, and I passed the threshold of the cloister, tearfully offering up to him the greatest sacrifice I was capable of making. This was on the 7th of May, 1765, when I was eleven years and two months old. The first night I spent in the convent was a night of agitation. I was no longer under the paternal roof. I was at a distance from that kind mother, who was doubtless thinking of me with affectionate emotion. A dim light diffused through the room in which I had been put to bed with four children of my own age. I stole softly from my couch and drew near the window, the light of the moon enabling me to distinguish the garden, which it overlooked. The deepest silence prevailed around, and

I listened to it, if I may use the expression, with a sort of respect. Lofty trees cast their gigantic shadows along the ground, and promised a secure asylum to meditation. I lifted up my eyes to the heavens; they were unclouded and serene. I imagined that I felt the presence of the Deity smiling upon my sacrifice, and already offering me a reward in the hope of a celestial abode. Tears of delight flowed down my cheeks. I repeated my vows with holy ecstasy, and went to bed again to taste the slumber of God's chosen children.

Two years after this she was taken to pass a week at the luxurious abodes of Maria Antoinette. Versailles was in itself a city of palaces and of courtiers, where all that could dazzle the eye in regal pomp and voluptuousness was concentred. Most girls of her age would have been enchanted and bewildered by this display. Jane was permitted to witness, and partially to share, all the pomp of luxuriously spread tables and presentations, and court balls, and illuminations and the gilded equipages of ambassadors and princes, but this maiden, just emerging from the period of childhood and the seclusion of the cloister, undazzled by all this brilliance, looked sadly on the scene. The servility of the courtiers excited her contempt. She contrasted the boundless profusion and extravagance which filled these palaces with the absence of comfort in the dwellings of the over-taxed poor, and pondered deeply the value of that despotism which starved the millions to pander to the dissolute indulgence of the few. Her personal pride was also severely stung by perceiving that her own attractions, mental and physical, were entirely overlooked by the crowds which were bowing before power. Disgusted with the frivolity of the living, she sought solace in companionship with the illustrious dead. She chose the gardens for her resort, and, lin