Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/218

208 Roland no more believed in the indissolubility of the, conjugal tie than did her contemporaries, and the bond which claimed to keep together two people made incompatible by differences of age, temperament, or sentiments, appeared to her both anomalous and cruel; but she never considered the possibility of applying this reasoning to her own situation. Her theories never served her as stepping-stones to licence. The more old foot-holds of custom seemed giving way beneath her, the more frantically she clung to her ideal of Duty, that rock which had hitherto upheld her. When it came to a question of gaining her own happiness or of spoiling the last years of Roland's fretted existence, she never hesitated at the sacrifice. And does not the highest moral worth consist in overcoming temptation rather than in never having been led into it?

The perfect candour of Madame Roland's nature had not suffered her to live in confidential intercourse with another while hiding her thoughts from him. It would have seemed like treason. She had confessed everything, laying her heart bare before Roland. "The knowledge that I am making a sacrifice for him," she says, "has upset his happiness. He suffers in accepting what yet he cannot do without." Roland, if exacting in daily life, could rise to great occasions. He entered magnanimously into his wife's trouble, and there goes a tradition that he had formed a resolution of voluntarily leaving her, should she not succeed in stifling her love; but she would never have consented to this, knowing as she did how closely the fibres of his life were bound up in hers: having so completely fulfilled her maxim—that a woman must make the man's happiness in marriage—that he could not live