After this whenever Bosc became too ardent in his letters, or inclined to jealousy, she treated him in this half-playful, half-matronly style. Her principle with him remained from the first to the last that there could be between them no ignorance of the question of their duty.
The experience with Bosc had taught her the strong probability that a man admitted to such intimate relations would, at some period in the friendship, fall more or less in love; and it had shown her, too, that it is possible for a woman to control this delicate relation and insure a healthy and inspiring relation. In short, Madame Roland had reason to congratulate herself, as she did with her usual self-complacency, on her wisdom and her tact in handling _l’ami_ Bosc. Whether she would not have been less wise if she had been less in love with her husband, or Bosc had been of a different nature, a little less dry and choleric, it is not necessary to speculate here.
She was quite as happy in directing her relations with Dr. Lanthenas, whom it will be remembered Roland had picked up in Italy before their marriage, who had come back with him, who had visited them often at Amiens, and who had lived with them at Le Clos, where an apartment on the first floor is still called Lanthenas’ room. He was associated in all their planning, and in 1790, when Roland, disgusted with the turn politics had taken, sighed for Pennsylvania, Lanthenas suggested that the Rolands, and one of his friends at Paris, Bancal des Issarts, and he himself should buy a piece of national property—the State had just confiscated some millions’ worth of clerical estates and was selling them cheap—and should establish together a community where they could not fail to lead an existence ideal in its peace, its enthusiasm, its growth.
This Utopia was discussed at length in their letters, and several pieces of property near Lyons and Clermont, where Bancal lived, were visited. Roland was thoroughly taken with the idea, but Madame Roland, while she saw all the advantages, discovered a possible danger. If she had been able to resist the siege to her heart by Bosc and Lanthenas, even to win them over as allies, her relation with Bancal des Issarts had taken almost immediately a turn more serious for her. She was herself touched and interested, and her policy when she felt her heart moved was most questionable. Instead of concealing her feelings and mastering them, she poured them out to Bancal himself in a way to excite his sympathy and to inflame his passion. Indeed, the turn their correspondence took in a few months reminds one forcibly of the letters of Manon Phlipon to M. Roland in the days when, feeling herself moved by his attentions, she drew a declaration out of him by portraying a state of heart which no man who was as decidedly interested as Roland was, could resist.