ROLAND 



ROLLEP 



767 



Petion, and at first even Kobespierre and Danton. 

 Her noble beauty, dark expressive eyes, sweet 

 voice, and eloquent words added a charm to 

 patriotism that was irresistible. In March 1792 

 Roland became minister of the Interior, and his 

 stiff manners, round hat, and unbuckled shoes 

 struck dismay into the court. Three months later 

 *ie was dismissed for his disloyal remonstrance to 

 the king, who had refused to sanction the decree 

 for the banishment of the priests. It was Madame 

 Roland's vigorous pen that wrote this letter, as 

 indeed she wrote most of the papers that her 

 husband signed. He was recalled after the king's 

 removal to the Temple, made himself hateful to 

 the Jacobins by his protests against the September 

 massjicres, and took his part in the last ineffectual 

 struggle of the Girondists to form a moderate party. 

 It was in the last days of the Gironde that the 

 reciprocal affection between Madame Roland and 

 Hu/.nt crossed the indefinite bounds that separate 

 friendship from love. It was the one touch of soft- 

 ness that her nature needed, says Sainte-Beuve, to 

 make it wholly feminine and French. But her 

 Spartan soul sacrificed its passion to duty, and 

 strong in the purity of her heart she made a 

 confidant of her husband, partly perhaps because 

 she sought in this a strange safeguard against her- 

 self, but doubtless still more because the ideal love 

 to that exalted virginal heart was a love nourished 

 upon sacrifices, that encircles its object with an 

 aureole of respect, and dreads to find in possession 

 the end of its enchantment. The struggle brought 

 on six days of physical exhaustion, and on the 

 seventh the sound of the tocsin announced the 

 proscription of the Twenty-two (31st May). 

 Rolaml had l>een arrested, but escaped and fled to 

 Rouen ; Buzot and some of the others fled to Caen to 

 organise insurrection, but in vain ; next day she 

 herself was seized and carried to the Abbaye. Set 

 at liberty two days later, she was arrested anew 

 and taken to Saiiite-Pelagie. She had five more 

 months of prison before death closed her tragedy 

 of life, and during this time she wrote her un- 

 finished Mimoires, furtively, with a swiftly flowing 

 pen, on sheets of coarse gray paper given her by 

 a kindly turnkey, often blotted by the falling 

 tears. The stern joy with which she had hailed 

 the dawn of revolution, her hatred of the throne, 

 the high hope and heroic disinterestedness of her 

 dreams all her sincere illusions were now dissi- 

 pated, and at length she saw into the heart of 

 that declamatory tragedy called the Revolution. 

 Her character, made perfect through suffering, took 

 on a new refinement ; she carried with her into 

 deatli something of the sanctity of the martyr, and 

 still, in Carlyle's phrase, like a white Grecian 

 .statue, serenely complete, she shines in that black 

 wrcrk i>f things. She bore herself in prison with 

 a gracious and queenly dignity, buried in her 

 Thomson, Sliaftesbury, Plutarch, and Tacitus. The 

 approach of deatli unsealed her lips, and (22d June 

 to 7th July) in four letters to Buzot, strangely 

 discovered in 1863, she spoke out a love that could 

 never now come into conflict with duty. On the 

 1st November, the morning of the execution of the 

 Twenty-two, she was transferred to the Con- 

 ciergerie, and there lay for eight days. She went 

 to the Tribunal dressed all in white, her long 

 black hair hanging down to the girdle, and in the 

 dusk of the 8th November 1793 she was carried 

 to the guillotine along with a trembling printer of 

 ossignats, whom she asked Sanson to take first to 

 nave him the horror of seeing her head fall. 'You 

 cannot," said she, 'refuse the last request of a 

 woman.' It is usually told how, on the point of 

 entering the awful shadows of eternity, she asked 

 for pen and paper to write down the strange 

 thoughts that were rising within her, but Sainte- 



Beuve thinks it impossible, puerile, untrue to the 

 nature of the heroine, as well as unauthenticated 

 by good contemporary evidence. As she looked 

 up at the statue of Liberty, she exclaimed, 'O 

 Liberte, comme on t'a jou6e !' or as it is still more 

 commonly given, ' O Liberte, que de crimes on 

 com met en ton nom ! ' She had often said her 

 husband would not long survive her ; a week later 

 he ran himself through with his sword-stick near 

 Rouen, November 15, 1793. 



Madame Roland's JHemoirtt reflects little of the 

 horrors amid which it was written, but is a serene and 

 delightful revelation of her youth in a series of charming 

 glimpses. But in writing she is best and most natural in 

 her letters, as in the series to Bosc, those to Bancal des 

 Issarts, the four to Bu2ot, and the exquisitely simple 

 letters to her two school friends, Henriette and Sophie 

 Cannet. The best editions of the Mimoires, for the first 

 time printed in their entirety, are those of Dauban ( 1864 ) 

 and Faugere ( 1804 ). Her Letters were collected by 

 Dauban (2 vols. 1867). See the studies by Dauban 

 (1864), Mathilde Blind (1886), and Ida M. Tarbell 

 ( 1890 ) ; Lamy, Deux Femmes Celebres ( 1884 ) ; and 

 Austin Dobson, four Frenr-hicomen ( 1890 ) ; Sainte- 

 Beuve, in Nooiveaux Lundis, and in Portraits de Femmes; 

 Scherer, in his Etudes. 



Rolf. See NORTHMEN, NORMANDY. 



Rolle, RICHARD. See HAMPOLE. 



Roller (Coraciidce), a family of Picarian birds 

 characteristic of the Ethiopian and Oriental regions, 

 although the common Roller is extensively distrib- 

 uted in the Palfearctic region and a few species 

 enter the Australian region. None are found 

 in the New World. Madagascar possesses three 

 species peculiar to itself, and so different from one 

 another that they are regarded as types of different 

 genera, and so different from other rollers that 

 they are grouped into a separate sub-family, 

 Brachypteracianae : they are named ground-rollers, 

 and are nocturnal in habit. An Indian species, 

 Eurystomns orientalis, is also nocturnal. The 

 Common Roller ( Corai-.ias garrula ) is an autumn 

 or more rarely a spring visitor to the British 

 Isles ; and about one hundred have been recorded 

 since the first one was noticed by Sir Thomas 

 Browne in 1644. Some have visited the Orkneys 



The Common Roller ( Coraciai garrula). 



and Shetlands, one has been found as far went as 

 St Kilda, and about half a dozen have been 

 recorded from Ireland. It is a straggler to northern 

 Europe; in central Europe it is common; in 

 countries bordering on the Mediterranean it is 

 very abundant. It ranges through Asia to Omsk 

 in Siberia and to North-west India. In winter it 

 extends its migrations to Natal and Cape Colony. 

 In size it is about a foot long. The general colour 

 is light bluish green ; the mantle is chestnut- 

 brown ; the wings and rump are adorned with 

 beautiful azure blue. The female resembles the 

 male in plumage. Nesting takes place in the 



