Revolutions are ideas, and it is this communion which creates parties.
The ardent and pure mind of a female was worthy of becoming the focus to which converged all the rays of the new truth, in order to become prolific in the warmth of the heart, and to light the pile of old institutions.

Men have the spirit of truth, women only its passion.
There must be love in the essence of all creations; it would seem as though truth, like nature, has two sexes.

There is invariably a woman at the beginning of all great undertakings; one was requisite to the principle of the French Revolution.[12] We may say that philosophy found this woman in Madame Roland.
The historian, led away by the movement of the events which he retraces, should pause in the presence of this serious and touching figure, as passengers stopped to contemplate her sublime features and white dress on the tumbril which conveyed thousands of victims to death.

To understand her we must trace her career from the _atelier_ of her father to the scaffold.

It is in a woman's heart that the germ of virtue lies; it is almost always in private life that the secret of public life is reposed.
II.
Young, lovely, radiant with genius, recently married to a man of serious mind, who was touching on old age, and but recently mother of her first child, Madame Roland was born in that intermediary condition in which families scarcely emancipated from manual labour are, it may be said, amphibious between the labourer and the tradesman, and retain in their manners the virtues and simplicity of the people, whilst they already participate in the lights of society.