XI.

After some years passed at Amiens, Roland was promoted to the same duties at Lyons, his native place.  In winter he dwelt in the town, and the rest of the year was passed in the country in his paternal home, where his mother still lived, a respectable old woman, but meddlesome and overbearing in her household.  Madame Roland, in all the flower of youth, beauty, and genius, thus found herself tormented and beset by a domineering mother-in-law, a rough brother-in-law, and an exacting husband.  The most passionate love could scarcely have been proof against so trying and painful a position.  To soothe her she had the consciousness of discharging her duties, her occupation, her philosophy, and her child.  It was sufficing, and eventually transformed this gloomy retreat into the abode of harmony and peace.  We love to follow her into that solitude, when her mind was becoming tempered for her struggle, as we go to seek at Charmettes the still fresh and sparkling source of the life and genius of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

XII.

At the foot of the mountains of Beaujolais, in the large basin of the Saone, in face of the Alps, there is a series of small hills scattered like the sea sands, which the patient vine-dresser has planted with vines, and which form amongst themselves, at their base, oblique valleys, narrow and sinuous ravines, interspersed with small verdant meads.  These meadows have each their thread of water, which filters down from the mountains:  willows, weeping birch, and poplars, show the course and conceal the bed of the streams.  The sides and tops of these hills only bear above the lowly vines a few wild peach trees, which do not shade the grapes and large walnut trees in the orchards near the houses.  On the declivity of one of these sandy protuberances was La Platiere, the paternal inheritance of M. Roland, a low farm-house, with regular windows, covered with a roof of red tiles nearly flat; the eaves of this roof project a little beyond the wall, in order to protect the windows from the rain of winter and the summer’s sun.  The walls, straight and wholly unornamented, were covered with a coating of white plaister, which time had soiled and cracked.  The vestibule was reached by ascending five stone steps, surmounted by a rustic balustrade of rusty iron.  A yard surrounded by outhouses, where the harvest was gathered in, presses for the vintage, cellars for the wine, and a dove-cote, abutted on the house.  Behind was levelled a small kitchen-garden, whose beds were bordered with box, pinks, and fruit trees, pruned close down to the ground.  An arbour was formed at the extremity of each walk.  A little further on was an orchard, where the trees inclining in a thousand attitudes, cast a degree of shade over an acre of cropped grass; then a large enclosure of low vines, cut in right lines by small green sward paths.  Such is this spot.  The