Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/69

Rh one time, in order to procure a holiday for a hard-worked cousin, she offered to serve behind the counter of the husband's shop in her absence. Behold, then, the woman who was to play so momentous a part in one of the most momentous periods of history, trudging backwards and forwards between her house and the Rue Montmartre, in the dusty August weather, diligently selling spectacles and watch-glasses, with a head stuffed full of Socrates and Plato.

Her position was no doubt a unique one; for, while sometimes relegated to the servants' hall when she went visiting with her relatives, she was at others the friend and correspondent of men of high rank and abilities. She took it all very philosophically, and attached herself to right action, she says, "with the zeal and desperation of a man who, in a ship-wreck, clings with all his might to the only plank that is left him." But what wrung a cry from that strong soul was neither unkindness, nor loneliness, nor impending destitution; it was the sense of a great force wasted, of potential powers doomed to perish unused. Once only she bursts forth with, "In truth I am not a little annoyed at being a woman. I ought either to have had another sex, another soul, or another country. I ought to have been a Spartan or a Roman woman, or at least a Frenchman. As the latter I should have chosen the Republic of Letters for my country, or one of those States where one may dare be a man and obey the law only. My displeasure looks very insane; but I feel as if riveted to a manner of existence not properly my own. I am like those animals transplanted to our menageries from the torrid soil of Africa, who intended to develop in a tropical climate, are shut up in a narrow cage hardly able to contain