reproduced the omissions and errors of the two first, for the original manuscripts remained in the keeping of Madame Roland's daughter, and could not be referred to. In 1835 a most valuable addition was made to the stock of information respecting Madame Roland, in the shape of a volume of letters addressed by her to Bancal des Issarts, a member of the Convention, and edited by his daughter with an introductory notice by M. Sainte-Beuve. These letters embrace a period (from 1790 to 1792) of which the Memoirs give but a scanty account, and are very valuable.

In 1841 two more volumes of letters addressed by Marie Phlipon, before her marriage with M. Roland, to Mademoiselles Cannet, the friends of her youth, were published by M. Breuil. This correspondence extends over a space of eight years (1772 to 1780). It was begun when Marie Phlipon was eighteen, and only terminated on the eve of her marriage. These youthful letters are not only interesting from the glimpses they give of bourgeois life in France before the Revolution, they are also curious from affording new proof of the difficulty which even the most truthful writer feels in recalling and setting down the impressions of the past without colouring them involuntarily with the hue of present feelings. The circumstances and sentiments which Madame Roland paints from memory in her-most certainly sincere-Memoirs, are related day by day and, so to speak, taken in the fact in her voluminous correspondence; and though we may not detect any important discrepancies, or wilful distortions, there is undoubtedly a notable difference between the aspect of the same things as they are shown in the two versions. Can the man of whom she disposes so cavalierly in a few lines of her Memoirs be the same hero about whom she poured out long pages of youthful rapture to Sophie Cannet-the only man that she could ever love? Can the engraver's shop which her father's carelessness and misconduct brought to ruin, can that home of which she paints so feelingly to her friend the vulgarities and narrow troubles, be the same of which she speaks so loftily in the opening sentence of her Memoirs as the abode of an artist, where in the bosom of the fine arts, and feeding on the charms of 'study, she passed her youth, recognising no other superiority than that of merit, no greatness save that of virtue? Alas! that Memory-the trusted depositary of past feelings-should so often prove faithless, and play such conjuror's tricks before the most vigilant eyes! Alas! that the testimony of man, given in his own cause, before the tribunal of his own conscience, should be so little worthy of reliance after a few brief years!

No writer, however, was more excusable than Madame Roland in falling into this common error, and the gloomy prison from which her Memoirs were dated might well create a mirage in favour of the past. We must be understood merely to say that without her letters Madame Roland would be imperfectly known, and that with their help, and that of her incomparable Memoirs, her whole character stands completely revealed She was, as we have said, an abundant letter-writer, and--what is more important to posterity-a sincere and confiding correspondent. La Rochefoucauld's rule of distrust never obtained with her, and she treated her friends, while friendship lasted, as though they never could become her foes. A good and generous rule! Madame Roland lived to see the dangers attendant on its indiscriminate application, but she never repented of it or ceased to practise it. Hence the great value of her correspondence, not only as regards her own life, but as a perpetual commentary on the passions and views of the political party to which she belonged.

One part of her history, however, had hitherto remained obscure. Contemporaries had asserted that among the brilliant and ardent Girondists who sought inspiration from her presence and counsel, there was one to whom she had given her love. In spite of the careful erasures of her editors, one or two passages of the Memoirs afforded strong confirmation of this tradition. She had spoken of the passions dont à peine, avec la vigueur d'un athlète, je sauve l'âge mûr.' Who was this lover? Some named the handsome Barbaroux, the Antinous of Marseilles, others suggested Buzot. It seemed probable that the mystery would never be cleared up. As a woman, a wife, and a mother, it was scarcely to be supposed that Madame Roland would have wished to raise the veil herself; yet, we have now proof that she intended to give a full account of the birth, the sorrows, and the struggles of the passion that filled her heart even on the steps of the scaffold, and to which almost her last thoughts were given. In an unpublished letter addressed to a friend a few days before her death she wrote, in allusion to her Memoirs:

'I know that I am lost; but for that belief, I would not take the trouble to confess. . . . I have weighed it all, and have made up my mind; I will tell everything,-absolutely everything. It is the only way of being useful.... I appreciate the feeling which prompts you to desire that my secret should never be divulged. But I may no longer remain silent. It is known... it has been misrepresented, I have been calumniated.'

Death left no time for writing these confessions, but Fate had

strangely ordained that her last wish should nevertheless be partly fulfilled. Seventy years after the strong impassioned heart had ceased to beat, four old letters rescued from the wreck of revolutions-letters which the most austere moralist cannot read without pity and, we dare add, without some admiration-have come to light, bearing witness to her love for Buzot, and also to the firm will which kept passion within bounds. Her's was a strange love with which patriotism and political sympathies were inseparably interwoven, a love befitting such a woman and such times. The letters given by M. Dauban are but the last fragmentary chapters of a drama of which the previous history can only be guessed, but they suffice to convey a vivid impression of the hidden griefs which were superadded to the well-known sorrows and trials of the last months of Madame Roland's life. Her love for Buzot seems like some strong gulf-stream of the heart which poured its heated waters into the wide ocean of revolutionary strife, and whose warm current can still be traced, even in the midst of the stormy waves with which it mingled.

manner.

These letters to Buzot, which form the principal interest of M. Dauban's volume, were discovered in a most unexpected Had a novelist invented such a mode of accounting for the possession of a manuscript, he would be set down as a very clumsy contriver of fiction. About twelvemonths ago a young man entered the shop of a bookseller on the Quai Voltaire, and offered for sale a bundle of old papers which he had found, he said, at the bottom of a trunk, where his father, an amateur of old books and autographs, had left them. After some hesitation on the part of the bookseller, the whole lot was purchased for fifty francs. Within a month after the bargain was concluded, a sale of autographs was announced in which the documents thus mysteriously sold formed the most conspicuous items. They consisted of the letters above mentioned, a last letter from Buzot to his friend Jérome Le Tellier, some unpublished memoirs of Louvet and of Pétion, a tragedy by Salles the Girondist, various notes and remarks in the handwriting of Barbaroux, and other papers, all having some connexion with the members of the Girondist party.* No clue has

Salles' tragedy, entitled 'Charlotte Corday,' has been recently printed. It is written in the declamatory, pompous style of the old tragic muse of France. There can be no more striking instance of the theatrical temper of those times than the fact that a proscribed fugitive, hiding for life, and with all the blood-hounds of terrorism in hot pursuit, should have thought of writing a tragedy in verse in honour of the heroine bloody deed and death, when he wrote, were, so to speak. terday.

been obtained as to the manner in which this collection came into the same hands. With the exception of Louvet, all those whose literary remains have thus been discovered died a violent death on the scaffold or by their own hand, and their papers most probably fell into the possession of their enemies, who were not likely, when better days came, to boast of their illgotten treasures. Be that as it may, the authenticity of Madame Roland's letters, with which alone we are dealing, is undoubted. If the fac-simile of her well-known handwriting which M. Dauban gives were not convincing proof, there is abundant internal evidence in the documents themselves.

A few months before the discovery of these papers, chance had thrown in the way of an indefatigable investigator in the field of French revolutionary history, a relic which corroborates the tale of passion told by the letters to Buzot. M. Vatel, to whom the public is indebted for an interesting work entitled Docu'ments historiques sur Charlotte Corday,' noticed one day in a poor shop in one of the suburban markets of Paris, a small, much damaged oval picture which lay on the floor in the midst of a heap of vegetables. It proved to be the portrait of Buzot. The glass which had protected the painting was gone, and between the picture and the piece of cardboard to which it had been affixed, lay hidden two small sheets of paper. They were closely covered on both sides with writing, which was soon recognised as being that of Madame Roland. They contained a short biography and an eulogium of Buzot, and concluded with a prediction that posterity would one day treasure his portrait among those of the generous friends of Liberty who believed in virtue, dared to inoculate it as the sole basis of ‹ a Republic, and had the strength to practise it themselves.' There can be no doubt that this portrait was the same that Madame Roland had with her in her prison up to the day of her death, and from which she had intended to part at the last moment in order that it might not be profaned by the hands of the executioner. It would seem as though that last tribute of esteem and admiration, secretly inscribed on the loved image, had by some mysterious spell preserved it from destruction.

M. Dauban, in the volume he has entitled'Étude sur Madame Roland,' has given, besides the newly-found letters and an engraving of Buzot's portrait, a sketch of Madame Roland's life and times, the materials of which are for the most part derived from the various sources we have enumerated. His work is not planned with sufficient method, his style is too discursive, and the narrative is at times disconnected and confused; nevertheless, the matter he has to deal with is so

interesting, and he has been at so much pains to gather information from all quarters, that he has produced a very readable volume in which nothing is omitted that can throw light on the life of his heroine.

Towns

In some of M. Dauban's conclusions we cannot concur. There is a very numerous class of French historians who, either from motives of mistaken patriotism or from a vain desire of conciliation, seek to envelop in one common halo all the actors of the French Revolution, from Lafayette and Mirabeau down to Saint-Just and Billaud-Varennes. M. Dauban does not go so far, but he considers that contemporary Frenchmen who live in the peaceful enjoyment of civil liberties which no ⚫ revolution can henceforward assail,' and which have been purchased by so much bloodshed, cannot without ingratitude curse the memory of any of the combatants in the great revolutionary battle. We cannot admit such reasoning. Bad acts have often been the indirect means of bringing about very good results, but they can claim no absolution on that account. have been destroyed by fire and been rebuilt on a better plan, and, in consequence, health and cleanliness have been established where filth and periodical pestilence reigned before; yet who would think, on that account, of glorifying an incendiary? But even this plea does not hold good in respect of the worst actors in the French Revolution. The civil liberties with which modern France is fain to rest content were secured long before the differences which even now divide the partisans of a liberal democracy and the fanatics of democratic absolutism became apparent; whereas the political liberties for which the descendants of Girondists and Montagnards are alike vainly striving at the present day were forfeited--it would be difficult to say for how many generations-by the very men whose bloody dictatorship it is the fashion of modern historians to absolve.

Almost all those who figured prominently in the great French Revolution died in turn on the scaffold, and it should be added that almost all met death with firmness, but they were sacrificed -to use a trivial expression-in batches, and the date of their immolation may, almost without exception, serve to class them in the respect of posterity. Some, like the Girondists, died because they would not kill, because they protested against the execution of the king, the prison massacres, and the direct rule of an imbecile and infuriated mob, whereas the victims of the latter days, the vanquished Montagnards, fell in a desperate struggle for hideous pre-eminence, after having sacrificed to the desire of preserving life and power whole hecatombs, not only of their adversaries, but of their friends and accomplices. To