“I have seen in your strong, energetic, enlightened, practical soul, the stuff for a friend of first rank. I have been delighted to regard you as such, and to all the seriousness of friendship I wanted to add all the fervor of which a tender soul is capable. But you have awakened in my heart a feeling against which I believed myself armed. I have not concealed it. I showed it unreservedly and I expected you to give me the generous support which I needed. But far from sparing my weakness, you became each day rasher, and you have dared ask me the cause of my pensiveness, my silence, my pain. Sir, I may be the victim of my sentiments, but I will never be the plaything of any man.... I cannot make an amusement of love. For me it is a terrible passion which would submerge my whole being and which would influence all my life. Give me back friendship or fear—to force me to see you no more.

“O my friend, why disturb the beautiful relation between us? My heart is rich enough to repay you in tenderness for all the privations it imposes upon you.... Spare me the greatest good that I know, the only one which makes life tolerable to me,—a friend sincere and faithful. I have not enough of your philosophy or I have too much of another which does not resemble yours in this point only, to give myself up inconsiderately to a passion which for me would be transport and delirium.

“My friend, come back more moderate, more reserved, let us cherish zealously, joyfully, and confidently the tastes which can strengthen the sweet tie which unites us....”

This letter threw Roland into confusion. He had taken her at her word when she suggested an intimate friendship. He had taken her at her word when she told him her affection was becoming love. He had been, perhaps, too fervent, but how was one to regulate so delicate a situation? He wrote her a piteous and helpless sort of letter in which he declared he was unhappy. Manon replied in a way which did not help him particularly in his quandary:

“In the midst of the different objects which surround and oppress me, I see, I feel but you. I hear always, ‘I am unhappy.’ O God! how, why, since when, are you unhappy? Is it because I exist or because I love you? The destruction of the first of these causes is in my power and would cost me nothing. It would take away with it the other, over which I have no longer any control.”

Even after this Roland was so obtuse that he was uncertain of her feeling for him, but finally he asked her squarely if it could be that all this meant that she loved him. Very promptly she replied: “If I thought that question was unsettled for you to-day, I should fear it would always be.” Will she marry him then, oui ou non? He asked the question despairingly, in the tone of a man who expected a scene to follow, but could see nothing else for him to do honorably. In a letter of passionate abandon Manon promised to be his wife. Roland was the happiest of men.

“You are mine,” he wrote. “You have taken the oath. It is irrevocable. O my friend, my tender, faithful friend, I had need of that yes.”

Manon’s joy was unbounded and she told it in true eighteenth-century style. “I weep, I struggle to express myself, I stifle, I throw myself upon your bosom, there I remain, entirely thine.” Immediately they entered upon a correspondence, voluminous, extravagant, passionate. Manon explained to Roland the beginning and the development of her affection for him, and labored to harmonize two seemingly incongruous experiences,—her interest in Roland during the time he was in Italy and the marriage she had contemplated with M. de Sévelinges. The harmony seems incomplete to the modern reader, but probably Roland was not exacting since he was sure of his possession.

In every way she tried to please him, even keeping their betrothal a secret from Sophie—this at Roland’s request. They planned, confided, rejoiced, and made each other miserable in true lover-like style. For some time the worst of their misunderstandings were caused by delays in letters, but, unfortunately, there were to be annoyances, in the course of their love, more serious than those of the postman. There was M. Phlipon; there was Roland’s family; there were all the vexatious formalities which precede marriage in France. M. Phlipon was the most serious obstacle to their happiness. Since his wife’s death he had been constantly growing more dissipated and common. Roland regarded him with the cold and irritating disapproval of a man convinced of his own infallibility, and M. Phlipon, conscious of his own shortcomings, disliked Roland heartily. For some time Roland refused to ask M. Phlipon for his daughter, but he counselled her to insist upon having the remnant of her dowry turned over.

She began to talk to her father of this, and he, incensed at the suspicion this demand implied, became surly and defiant. He talked to the neighbors of his desire to live alone and accused Manon of ingratitude and coldness. She held to her rights, however, and succeeded finally in having her estate settled. She found at the end that she had an income of just five hundred and thirty francs a year.

The disagreement with her father made her unhappy. She wrote Roland letters full of complaints and sighs. She saw everything black. She declared that they were farther apart than ever, that her heart was breaking. After a few weeks of melancholy she came to an understanding with her father and wrote joyously again. This occurred several times until at last Roland grew seriously out of patience with her. He told her that it was her lack of firmness that was at the bottom of her father’s conduct; that she was “always irresolute, always uncertain, reasoned always by contraries.” His letters became brief, dry, impatient. Finally, however, he wrote M. Phlipon, asking for Manon.

The difficulty that Roland had foreseen with his prospective father-in-law was at once realized. The old gentleman, incensed that his daughter would not give him Roland’s letters to examine before he replied, answered in a way which came very near ending negotiations on the spot. Since his daughter had taken her property into her own hands and since she refused to let him see the correspondence which had passed between her and Roland, she could enjoy still further the privileges her majority gave her and marry without his consent.

Roland wrote to Manon, on receiving this curt response, that the soul of M. Phlipon horrified him; that he loved her as much as ever, but—“your father, my friend, your father,” and delicately hinted that it would be impossible for him to present such a man to his own family. This was in September. For two months they lived in a state of miserable uncertainty. Roland accused Manon of irresolution, of inconsistency, and inconsequence; she accused him of fearing the prejudices of society, of caring less for her than for his family’s good-will. With M. Phlipon Manon alternately quarrelled and made up. Wretched as the lovers were, their letters nearly always ended in protestations of affection and appeals for confidence.

The first of November Mademoiselle Phlipon brought matters to a crisis by leaving her father for good and retiring to the Convent of the Congregation. She wrote Sophie, who, of course, had known nothing of her affair with Roland, but to whom she had often written freely of her trouble with her father, that she had taken this resolution in order to save her family, if possible, from further disgrace.

In going into the convent she had broken with Roland. They were to remain friends, but dismiss all projects of marriage; but they continued to write heart-broken letters to each other. She told him, “I love you. I feel nothing but that. I repeat it as if it were something new. Your agonized letters inflame me. I devour them and they kill me. I cover them with kisses and with tears.”

Roland was quite as unhappy. He had taken Manon at her word again when she declared that their engagement was at an end, and that they would remain friends; but he could not support her unhappiness; he was too wretched himself. The worst of it was that he could not make out what she wanted: “You continually reproach me,” he wrote her in November, “of not understanding you. Is it my fault? Do you not go by contraries?”—“You complain always of what I say, and you always tell me to tell you all.... You protest friendship and confidence at the moment you give me proofs of the contrary. All your letters are a tissue of contradictions, of bitterness, of reproaches, of wrangling.”

This unhappy state continued until January, when Roland went to Paris and saw Manon. Her sadness and her tears overcame him, and again he begged her to marry him. This time the affair was happier, and in February Manon Phlipon became Madame Roland.

Twelve years later, in her Memoirs, Madame Roland gave an account of this courtship and marriage, which is a curious contrast to that one finds in the letters written at the time. If these letters show anything, it is that she was, or at least imagined herself, desperately in love; that after having outlined a Platonic relation she had broken it by telling Roland she loved him too well to endure the restrictions of mere friendship; that she had been extravagantly happy in her betrothal, and correspondingly miserable in her liberation; and that when the marriage was finally effected she was thoroughly satisfied.

But in her Memoirs she says of Roland’s first proposal: “I was not insensible to it because I esteemed him more than any one whom I had known up to that time,” but—“I counselled M. Roland not to think of me, as a stranger might have done. He insisted: I was touched and I consented that he speak to my father.” She gives the impression that as far as she was concerned her heart was not in the affair, that she merely was moved by Roland’s devotion, and that she saw in him an intelligent companion. Of his coming to her at the convent, she says that it was he alone who was inflamed by the interview, and she gives the impression that his renewed proposal awakened in her nothing but sober and wise reflections: “I pondered deeply what I ought to do. I did not conceal from myself that a man under forty-five would have hardly waited several months to make me change my mind, and I confess that I had no illusions.... If marriage was, as I thought it, a serious tie, an association where the woman is for the most part charged with the happiness of two persons, was it not better to exercise my faculties, my courage, in that honorable task, than in the isolation in which I lived?”

But at the time that Madame Roland wrote her Memoirs she was under the influence of a new and absorbing passion. The love, which twelve years before had so engulfed all other considerations and affections that she could for it break up her home, desert her father, take up a solitary and wretched existence, even contemplate suicide, had become an indifferent affair of which she could talk philosophically and at which she could smile disinterestedly.