Two women find themselves confronted across the chessboard and about to move the pieces in a terrible game in which each stakes her head, and each is foredoomed to lose. One is the woman who represents the old régime--the daughter of the German Cæsars, the Queen of France and Navarre; the other stands for the new régime, the Parisian middle classes--the daughter of the engraver of the Quai des Orfèvres. They are nearly the same age. Madame Roland was born March 18, 1754; and Marie Antoinette, November 2, 1755. Both are beautiful, and both are conscious of their charm. Each exercises a sort of domination over all who approach her.
In 1792, when Roland enters the ministry, Marie Antoinette is no longer thinking of coquetry, luxury, or dress. The heroine of the Gallery of the Mirrors, the crowned shepherdess of the Trianon, the queen of elegance, pleasure, and fashion is not recognizable in her. The time for splendors is over, like the time for pastorals. No more festivals, no more distractions, no more theatres. Incessant anxieties and unremitting labor; writing throughout the day and reading, { 74} meditating, and praying throughout the night, are now the unfortunate sovereign's whole existence. She hardly sleeps. Her eyes are reddened by tears. A single night, that of the arrest on the journey to Varennes, had sufficed to whiten her hair. She wears mourning for her brother, the Emperor Leopold, and for her ally, the King of Sweden, Gustavus III., and one might say that she is also wearing it for the French monarchy. All trace of frivolity has disappeared. The severe and majestic countenance of the woman who suffers so cruelly as queen, spouse, and mother, is sanctified by the double poetry of religion and sorrow.
Madame Roland, on the other hand, is more coquettish than she has ever been. The actress who has at last found her theatre and is very proud to play her part, wishes to allure, desires to reign. She delights in presiding at these political dinners where all the guests are men, and of which her grace and eloquence constitute the charm. She has just completed her thirty-eighth year. Her husband is nearly fifty-eight; Buzot is only thirty-two. Possibly she is still more preoccupied with love than with ambition. To use one of her own expressions, "her heart swells with the desire to please," to please Buzot above all; she takes pains to celebrate her own beauty, which, in spite of showing symptoms of decline, has the brilliance of sunset. In her Memoirs she describes her "large and superbly modelled bust, her light, quick step, her frank and open glance, at once keen and { 75} soft, which sometimes amazes, but which caresses still more, and always quickens." She writes: "My mouth is rather large; there are a thousand prettier, but none that has a softer and more seductive smile." In prison, when she is nearly forty, she states that if she has lost some of her attractions, yet she needs no help from art to make her look five or six years younger. "Even those who see me every day," she adds, "require to be told my age, in order to believe me more than thirty-two or thirty-three." Madame Roland had at first written thirty-three or thirty-four. But after reflection, finding herself too modest, she made an erasure and retrenched another year. She adds that she made very little use of her charms; avowing at the same time, and with the most absolute frankness, that if she could reconcile her duty with her inclination to utilize them more fully, she would not be sorry.