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84 of Rousseau. But now had come more austere days; literature had to be laid aside, music and Italian were becoming rusty, yet in the fulfilment of all its duties this fine nature always found the highest satisfaction.

She had consolations, moreover, in the close and ever closer sympathy which grew between her husband and herself, and in the ever fresh interest which she felt in her daughter Eudora—who hardly ever left her mother's side—described as being "a pretty little prattler, as full of mischief as a monkey," and who seems to have taken after her father's family in character and temperament. She showed none of her mother's precocious passion for books, but was an incorrigible romp, whose childish doings, sayings, and ailments are as minutely retailed to the friendly Bosc as if he, too, had been a young mother painfully interested in an infant's growth.

Every autumn M. and Madame Roland left the depressing atmosphere of Villefranche to spend some time at the Clos de la Platière, that remnant of ancestral estates. It resembled a farm more than a manor-house, with a low red-tiled roof and projecting eaves, and from its terrace one saw the white outline of the Alps, Mont Blanc, called "The Cat's Mountain" by the peasant folk, towering above them all. The country, dotted about with innumerable hillocks, was planted with vines, and such value as the Clos possessed was due to its vineyard. To the house itself were attached a kitchen garden, an orchard richly stocked with fruit trees, a yard and outhouses, barns and granaries for the harvest and vintage, &c. Here, if anywhere, Madame Roland felt at home in a wide-reaching activity, for as early as 1778 she had written