tears of youth only—­her record is voluble and all complete.  For the dignity of her style, of her force, and of her balanced character, Madame Roland would doubtless have effaced the two imperfections which, to us who would be glad to admire in silence her heroic figure, if that heroic figure would but cease to talk, are finer and more noble than her well-placed language and the high successes of her decision and her endurance.  More than this, the two failures of this unfailing woman are two little doors opened suddenly into those wider spaces and into that dominion of solitude which, after all, do doubtless exist even in the most garrulous soul.  By these two outlets Manon Roland also reaches the region of Marie Antoinette.  But they befell her at the close of her life, and they shall be named at the end of this brief study.

Madame Roland may seem the more heroic to those whose suffrages she seeks in all times and nations because of the fact that she manifestly suppresses in her self-descriptions any signs of a natural gaiety.  Her memoirs give evidence of no such thing; it is only in her letters, not intended for the world, that we are aware of the inadvertence of moments.  We may overhear a laugh at times, but not in those consciously sprightly hours that she spent with her convent-school friend gathering fruit and counting eggs at the farm.  She pursued these country tasks not without offering herself the cultivated congratulation of one whom cities had failed to allure, and who bore in mind the examples of Antiquity.  She did not forget the death of Socrates.  Or, rather, she finds an occasion to reproach herself with having once forgotten it, and with having omitted what another might have considered the tedious recollection of the condemnation of Phocion.  She never wearied of these examples.  But it is her inexhaustible freshness in these things that has helped other writers of her time to weary us.

In her manner of telling her story there is an absence of all exaggeration, which gives the reader a constant sense of security.  That virtue of style and thought was one she proposed to herself and attained with exact consciousness of success.  It would be almost enough (in the perfection of her practice) to make a great writer; even a measure of it goes far to make a fair one.  Her moderation of statement is never shaken; and if she now and then glances aside from her direct narrative road to hazard a conjecture, the error she may make is on the generous side of hope and faith.  For instance, she is too sure that her Friends (so she always calls the Girondins, using no nicknames) are safe, whereas they were then all doomed; a young man who had carried a harmless message for her—­a mere notification to her family of her arrest—­receives her cheerful commendation for his good feeling; from a note we learn that for this action he suffered on the scaffold and that his father soon thereafter died of grief.  But Madame Roland never matched such a delirious event as this by any delirium of her own imagination.  The delirium was in things and in the acts of men; her mind was never hurried from its sane self-possession, when the facts raved.