Book Around the Corner

Childhood, by Madame Roland.

As a child, under the quiet roof of my father, I was happy with flowers and books: in the narrow walls of a prison, being in the chains imposed by the most revolting tyranny, I forget the injustice of men, their stupidity and my pain with books and flowers.

Madame Roland – maiden name Manon Phlipon – was born in 1754 in a family from the Parisian bourgeoisie. She married Jean-Marie Roland in 1780 and was living in Lyon when the French Revolution started. Her husband and her promoted republican ideas and M. Roland was appointed as Ministre de l’Intérieur (1) in 1790. Manon Roland was involved in politics and wrote her husband’s speeches. She was arrested on June 1st 1793, imprisoned in Paris and took advantage of this period to write her memoirs. She was put to death on November 8th 1793.
Her memoirs were written within a few months, on notebooks she secretly gave to reliable friends.
Childhood corresponds to the four first notebooks and as a consequence of the circumstances, is not divided in chapters but in parts that matched to the notebooks. It is moving because it reminds the reader where she was when writing this.

Childhood tells Manon’s life from infancy to adolescence. She describes the life of an intelligent child raised by loving parents and whose education mainly consisted in reading anything she could. She explains in a vivid tone her first religious commitment and how reading and thinking led her to reject religion as an impossible thing to reconcile with scientific and philosophical reasoning. She had a brilliant mind and spent most of her free time studying, reminding me of Emilie du Châteley. Like most of the intellectuals of her time, she studied philosophy, history, maths and science. Her memoirs are a testimony of the inner mind of a little girl and then an adolescent: her astonishment at social rules, her discovery of sex, her thoughts on religion. We see how she learned to think by herself.
She tells incidents which are relevant to explain how her own opinions were created. We understand that she felt that a social system judging the worth of a person according to its social class was a defaulted one and that she could not become anything else than a republican.
Her style is precise and lively, she can paint a character in a few words. She was really gifted, she had no time to work this out and yet it is well written. I could picture her in her cell, bent over a small table, frantically writing on candle light as many pages as possible, as she did not know how much time she had left before her inevitable trial and execution.
I ended this book with a mixed feeling of tenderness and of regret for this woman of another time. She had a brilliant mind and was born at a time when she could not take advantage of it.

Let her conclude herself:

I hate gallants as much as I despise slaves and I am good at showing flatterers to the door. Above all, I claim for regard and benevolence; one may admire me after that, but I need to be singled out and cherished; this rarely fails me when someone of sense and heart meets me on a regular basis.

I wish I had had the opportunity to meet you, Madame Roland and I wish you could see what has become of us.

PS : This book belongs to a collection of  “2€” books published by Folio. It consists in small texts from well-known or forgotten authors. I like it because it’s a way to test/taste new authors in an evening read. If the tone and style suit me, I’ll read another one, if not, I won’t have wasted much time.

(1) Home Office / Department of the Interior