Brissot brought Petion, his fellow-student and friend.  Petion, already member of the Constituent Assembly, and whose harangues in two or three cases had excited interest.  Brissot was reputed to have inspired these orations.  Buzot and Robespierre, both members of the same Assembly, were introduced there.  Buzot, whose pensive beauty, intrepidity, and eloquence were destined hereafter to agitate the heart and soften the imagination of Madame Roland; and Robespierre, whose disquiet mind and fanatic hatred cast him henceforward into all meetings where conspiracies were formed in the name of the people.  Some others, too, came, whose names will subsequently appear in the annals of this period.  Brissot, Petion, Buzot, Robespierre, agreed to meet four evenings in each week in the salon of Madame Roland.

XVI.

The motive of these meetings was to confer secretly as to the weakness of the Constituent Assembly, on the plots laid by the aristocracy to fetter the Revolution, and on the impulse necessary to impress on the lukewarm opinions, in order to consolidate the triumph.  They chose the house of Madame Roland, because this house was situated in a quarter equi-distant from the homes of all the members who were to assemble there.  As in the conspiracy of Harmodius, it was a woman who held the torch to light the conspirators.

Madame Roland thus found herself cast, from the first, in the midst of the movement party.  Her invisible hand touched the first threads of the still entangled plot which was to disclose such great events.  This part, the only one that could be assigned to her sex, equally flattered her woman’s pride and passion for politics.  She went through it with that modesty which would have been in her a chef d’oeuvre of skill if it had not been a natural endowment.  Seated out of the circle near a work table, she worked or wrote letters, listening all the time with apparent indifference to the discussions of her friends.  Frequently tempted to take a share in the conversation, she bit her lips in order to check her desire.  Her soul of energy and action was inspired with secret contempt for the tedious and verbose debates which led to nothing.  Action was expended in words, and the hour passed away taking with it the opportunity which never returns.

The conquests of the National Assembly soon enervated the conquerors.  The leaders of this Assembly retreated from their own handiwork, and covenanted with the aristocracy and the throne to grant the king the revision of the constitution in a more monarchical spirit.  The deputies who met at Madame Roland’s lost heart and dispersed, until, at length, there only remained that small knot of unshaken men who attach themselves to principles regardless of their success, and who are attached to desperate causes with the more fervour in proportion as fortune seems to forsake them.  Of this number were Buzot, Petion, and Robespierre.