Enough, enough this vision,
By thee built into story,
To crown thy life by Heaven's decision,
With monumental glory.
* * * * *
XXXV.
MADAME ROLAND
(BORN 1754--DIED 1793.)
THE MOST REMARKABLE WOMAN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION--THE IPHIGENIA OF
FRANCE.
Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, for this was her maiden name, was born in Paris in
the year 1754. Her father was an engraver. The daughter does not
delineate him in her memoirs with such completeness as she has sketched
her mother, but we can infer from the fleeting glimpses which she gives
of him that he was a man of very considerable intellectual and physical
force, but also of most irregular tendencies, which in his later years
debased him to serious immoralities. He was a superior workman,
discontented with his lot. He sought to better it by speculative
operations outside his vocation. As his daughter expresses it, "he went
in pursuit of riches, and met with ruin on his way." She also remarks of
him, "that he could not be said to be a good man, but he had a great
deal of what is called honor."
Her mother was evidently an angelic woman. Many passages in the memoirs
indicate that she possessed uncommon intellectual endowments; but so
exceeding were her virtues that, when her face rose to the daughter's
view in the night of after years, and gazed compassionately on her
through prison bars, the daughter, writing in the shadow of death,
presents her in the light only of purest, noblest womanhood.
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