In 1784 they removed to the family estate of Roland at Villefranche, near Lyons.  She had, in the course of her studies, acquired considerable knowledge of medicine.  There was no physician in that little community, and she became the village doctor.  Some of her experiences were quite whimsical.  A country-woman came several leagues, and offered her a horse if she would save the life of her husband, whom a physician had given up to die.  She visited the sick man, and he recovered, but she had great difficulty in resisting the importunities of his wife that she should take the horse.

In 1784 they went to England, and in 1787 they made the tour of Switzerland.  Roland was elected member of the constitutional assembly from Lyons, and they went to Paris.

I am compelled now to pass from the uneventful first ten years of her married life with the single remark that, through them all, she was the devoted wife and mother, the kind neighbor, and the most assiduous student.  But her mind bore, as on a mirror, prophetic, shadowy, and pictured glimpses of those awful events which were marching out of futurity toward France.  Her letters written during this period show that she gazed upon them with a prescient eye, and heard with keenest ear the alarum of the legions which were gathering for attack.  The young men of Lyons, where she and her husband spent the Winters, gathered in her parlors, and heard from the lips of this impassioned seeress of liberty words which, in such formative periods of a nation’s life, hasten events with a power that seems like absolute physical force.

Her husband was chosen a member of the national assembly, and she went with him again to Paris in 1791.

Here ends the peaceful period of her life.  Here close upon her forever the doors of home; and here open to her the doors of history, which too often admits its guests only to immolate them in splendid chambers, as it immolated her.  From this time we miss the pure womanliness of her character, in which she is so lovely, and see her imperial beauty and her regal intellect in all their autocratic power, until that time when her husband, home, child, power, and hope were all forever gone, and her womanhood again shone out, like a mellow and beauteous sunset, when life’s day drew near its close.

Nothing had become more certain than that the monarchy would undergo radical constitutional changes.  Of this every one was conscious except the king and the nobility.  They were struck with that blindness which foreruns ruin.  They constituted one party, and this party was the common object of attack by two political and revolutionary divisions, the Girondists and the Jacobins.  The Gironde wished reform, a constitution, a monarchy, but one limited and constitutional, equality in taxes.  They did not wish to destroy utterly, but they were willing to dislocate and then readjust, the machinery of state.  The Jacobins at first said much, but proposed little.  They