Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/125

Rh suffer heads to escape which are about to conjure up new horrors. You are nothing but children; your enthusiasm is a momentary blaze; and if the National Assembly do not bring two illustrious heads to a formal trial, or if some generous Decrees do not strike them off, you will all go to the Devil together."

If there is a fierce ring in these words, she, on another occasion, says: "I weep over the blood that has been spilt; one cannot be too chary of that of human beings. " But, terrified at the dangers which menace the new-born freedom of her country, she adds the warning: "The philosopher shuts his eyes to the errors or weaknesses of private men; but even to his father he should show no mercy where the public weal is at stake."

The burning missives addressed by Madame Roland to Bosc and other political friends were widely circulated; the greater portion of them, without the author's name, found their way into the public press. They chiefly appeared in the Patriote Français, edited by Brissot, then one of the leading members of the Commune of Paris. As yet personally unacquainted with the Rolands, he had, attracted by the articles in the New Encyclopædia, been for some time in correspondence with them.

Brissot de Warville—afterwards the leader of the Girondins—was born at Chartres in 1754. A disciple of Plutarch and Rousseau, he had gravitated to Paris, and, by a strange coincidence, had been fellow clerk with Robespierre in a notary's office. A rapid and discursive writer, who could dash off a political treatise as others would a letter, he was preoccupied from the beginning of his career with questions of public interest, to the detriment of his own.