IN intellect, Madame Roland was one of the most remarkable women of the eighteenth century, and in the romantic interest of her life, she is second among the heroines of the French Revolution only to Charlotte Corday. Her “Philosophical and Literary Essays,” published soon after her death and republished in London in 1800, fully sustain the historical and traditional theory of her ability. It was the remarkable power of her intellect which energized her husband and enabled the Girondist party to keep a foothold in the stormy politics of the Revolution at a time when to be accused of moderation was almost equivalent to a conviction of capital crime. Gratien Phlipon, Madame Roland’s father, was an engraver by profession and it is from him that she seems to have received the speculative impulses which enabled her to break away from the political conventionality of her time and become a leader in revolution. Her earliest reading was of the great classical writers from whom she imbibed the republican principles which animated her work for the overthrow of the royalty in France. In M. Roland, whom she married in 1781, she found a kindred spirit. He was nearly twenty-two years her senior and no doubt greatly her superior in thoroughness, but he lacked her quickness of intellect and was always ready to rely rather upon the intuitions of her genius than on his own common sense. When they appeared together at Paris in 1791, they soon became one of the potent influences against royalty. Roland became a member of the Jacobin Club and acted with them until their radicalism resulted in the formation of a more conservative party,—the Girondists,—which in the crisis of 1792 made him Minister of the Interior. He used this position to force issues with the king. A letter written by Madame Roland, and addressed by her husband to the king, led to a Cabinet crisis and to the dismissal of Roland. This was the prelude to the overthrow of royalty, but instead of being the Aspasia of a great and world-reforming republic as she had hoped, Madame Roland found herself at first the sport and then the victim of forces too violent to be checked or directed by any power of intellect or of combination. After the death of the king and the September massacres, the Girondists fearlessly devoted themselves to inevitable destruction. Hated alike by Royalists and Jacobins, they had no refuge except in honorable death; and this, with Vergniaud and Roland at their head, they challenged by impeaching Robespierre when he was at the height of his power. On June 1st, 1793, Madame Roland was arrested, and on November 8th, 1793, was carried to the guillotine in the Place de la Revolution, where the scaffold was overlooked by a statue of Liberty, which she addressed in her celebrated apostrophe, “O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!” On hearing of her death, her husband, then at Rouen, pinned on his breast a paper declaring his unwillingness to survive her, and killed himself by falling on the point of the stiletto he carried in his walking cane.