Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/87

Rh "By dint," says she in her Memoirs, "of occupying myself with the happiness of the man with whom I was associated, I felt that something was wanting to my own. I have never for a moment ceased to see in my husband one of most estimable persons that exist; but I often felt that similarity was wanting between us—that the ascendency of a domineering temper, united to that of twenty years more of age, made one of those superiorities too much."

They remained four years at Amiens, and it was there that Madame Roland's only child, Eudora, was born, in October 1781. Contrary to the universal French custom of sending children out to nurse, she had always considered that mothers should perform the duty of nursing their own offspring, and now, in spite of violent suffering, she persisted in doing so. During her stay at Amiens, her dear friend Sophie—whom Henriette, however, seems gradually to have eclipsed in Madame Roland's affection—married a certain Chevalier de Gomiecourt. Henriette, although of a warmer and more impulsive temperament, eventually united herself to a man of seventy-five, and in the last days of Madame Roland's life evinced a heroism of friendship which places her on a level with her famous friend.

In 1784 Madame Roland, it seems, went to Paris for the purpose of obtaining lettres d'anoblissement—the grant of permanent, indefeasible, and hereditary nobility—various members of Roland's family having held offices which made each of them personally a noble without the title being hereditary. She failed in this, for Roland's stiff-necked persistence and rigorousness of principle had made him very unpopular with his superiors; but it was afterwards