There was, indeed, a long list of suitors for the hand of the impulsive maiden; but owing to her views as to a husband and her restless, unsettled state of mind, she could not decide upon any one of them.  To her mother, when urged to accept one, she said:  “I should not like a husband to order me about, for he would teach me only to resist him; but neither do I wish to rule my husband.  Either I am much mistaken, or those creatures, six feet high, with beard on their chins, seldom fail to make us feel that they are stronger; now, if the good man should suddenly bethink himself to remind me of his strength he would provoke me, and if he submitted to me he would make me feel ashamed of my power.”  For such a woman marriage was certainly a difficult problem.  Finally, Roland de la Platieres came within her circle; and although somewhat adverse to him at first, after a number of his visits she wrote:  “I have been much charmed by the solidity of his judgment and his cultured and interesting conversation.”  Just such a man appealed to her nature and was in harmony with her views.  After months of monotonous life in the convent to which she had retired, she at last consented to become the wife of Roland, not from expectations of any fortune, but purely from a sense of devoting herself to the happiness of an honorable man, to making his life sweeter.

Roland, scrupulously conscientious, painstaking, and observing, had won the position of inspector of manufactures, which took him away on foreign travels part of the time.  He had acquired a thorough knowledge of manufacturing and the principles of political economy.  The first years of their life were spent in each other’s society exclusively, as he was insanely jealous of her; she rarely left his side, and they studied the same works, copied and revised his manuscripts, and corrected his proofs.  In this she was indispensable to him.  But her activity did not stop with literary work; she managed her husband’s household, and for miles around her home the peasants soon learned to know her through her charitable deeds.  She was the village doctor, often going for miles to attend the poor in distress.  With her own hands she prepared dainty dishes with which to tempt her husband’s appetite.  Thus, her best years were spent upon things for which much less ability would have sufficed.  She watched with breathless interest the installation of Necker and the dismissal of Turgot, the convocation of the notables, the struggles for financial recovery, and, finally, the calling of a States-General, which had not been in session since 1614.  During the first stormy years, 1789-1790, she wrote burning missives to her friend Bosc, at Paris, which appeared anonymously in the Patriote Francais, edited by Brissot, the future Girondist leader.  Soon came the commission of Roland as the first citizen of the city of Lyons, which had a debt of forty million francs, to acquaint the National Assembly with its affairs.