The ardent and pure mind of a female was worthy of becoming the focus to which converged all the rays of the new truth, in order to become prolific in the warmth of the heart, and to light the pile of old institutions.  Men have the spirit of truth, women only its passion.  There must be love in the essence of all creations; it would seem as though truth, like nature, has two sexes.  There is invariably a woman at the beginning of all great undertakings; one was requisite to the principle of the French Revolution.[12] We may say that philosophy found this woman in Madame Roland.

The historian, led away by the movement of the events which he retraces, should pause in the presence of this serious and touching figure, as passengers stopped to contemplate her sublime features and white dress on the tumbril which conveyed thousands of victims to death.  To understand her we must trace her career from the atelier of her father to the scaffold.  It is in a woman’s heart that the germ of virtue lies; it is almost always in private life that the secret of public life is reposed.

II.

Young, lovely, radiant with genius, recently married to a man of serious mind, who was touching on old age, and but recently mother of her first child, Madame Roland was born in that intermediary condition in which families scarcely emancipated from manual labour are, it may be said, amphibious between the labourer and the tradesman, and retain in their manners the virtues and simplicity of the people, whilst they already participate in the lights of society.  The period in which aristocracies fall is that in which nations regenerate.  The sap of the people is there.  In this was born Jean Jacques Rousseau, the virile type of Madame Roland.  A portrait of her when a child represents a young girl in her father’s workshop, holding in one hand a book, and in the other an engraving tool.  This picture is the symbolic definition of the social condition in which Madame Roland was born, and the precise moment between the labour of her hands and her mind.

Her father, Gratien Phlippon, was an engraver and painter in enamel.  He joined to these two professions that of a trade in diamonds and jewels.  He was a man always aspiring higher than his abilities allowed, and a restless speculator, who incessantly destroyed his modest fortune in his efforts to extend it in proportion to his ambitious yearnings.  He adored his daughter, and could not, for her sake, content himself with the perspective of the workshop.  He gave her an education of the highest degree, and nature had conferred upon her a heart for the most elevated destinies.  We need not say what dreams, misery, and misfortunes men with such characters invariably bring upon their honest families.

The young girl grew up in this atmosphere of luxuriant imagination and actual wretchedness.  Endowed with a premature judgment, she early detected these domestic miseries, and took refuge in the good sense of her mother from the illusions of her father and her own presentiments of the future.