EOLAND DE LA PLATIERE
EOLLESTON
inspector of factories, and he became an
inspector himself at Amiens. He made
a careful study of economics, and went to
Germany and England in search of expe
rience. In 1784 he was appointed inspector
general of factories for the Lyons area.
In his leisure he still studied assiduously,
and he read papers to the Academies of
Lyons and Villefranche, to which he
belonged. He was elected to the Con
stituent Assembly in 1790, and rose to
prominence. As Minister of the Interior,
in 1792-93, he pleaded for moderation,
and, when excesses could not be checked,
he resigned his position. His arrest was
ordered, and he fled to Lyons, where he
was hidden for some months. When he
heard that the vindictive extremists had
put to death his beautiful and devoted
wife, he took his own life. Eoland had
published a number of economic and
commercial works. D. Nov. 10, 1793.
ROLAND DE LA PLATIERE, Marie Jeanne, French patriot, wife of preceding. B. Mar. 17, 1754. Marie Jeanne Phlipon, as she was named before marriage, was a very precocious child. She could read at the age of four, and, as she grew up, she devoured books. The works of Bossuet had the effect of disturbing her faith, and she went on to read the works of the great Eationalists of the time, and abandoned Catholicism. As virtuous as she was beautiful and accomplished, she took the Stoic morality for her inspiration. In 1780 she married Eoland, a Eationalist like herself, and they worked and studied in close co-operation. She accepted the sober principles of the Eevolution, and before long " Mme. Eoland" was one of the most familiar names at Paris. She helped to found Le Eepublicain. But their moderation made many enemies, and at the fall of the Girondins her husband had to fly. Mme. Eoland was thrust into a prostitutes jail, and there for five months she helped her unfortunate fellow prisoners and wrote her Memoirs. Still a Deist, at the most, she tried to end her life, but the
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extremists succeeded in bringing her to the
guillotine. Thei e was a statue of Liberty
near the scaffold, and she uttered the
famous words : " Libert6, que de crimes
on commet en ton nom ! " Carlyle, who
found little good in the Eevolution, is
dithyrambic in his praise of this wonderful
woman (French Revolution, III, bk. v, ch. ii),
though he has to admit that her " clear
perennial womanhood " was nourished
only on " Logics, Encydopedies, and the
Gospel according to Jean-Jacques." D.
Nov. 8, 1793.
ROLLAND, Professor Remain, D. es L.,
French writer. B. Jan. 29, 1866. Ed. College de Clamecy, Ecole Normale Supe- rieure, and Ecole Fran^aise de Eome. In 1892-93 Eolland discharged a mission in Italy, and he was professor of the history of art at the Ecole Normale Superieure from 1895 to 1904. In the latter year he was appointed professor at the Sorbonne. Eolland has written finely on many sub jects biography, music, politics, history, drama, and literature and in 1915 he obtained the Nobel Prize for literature. His finest work, and the one in which his ideas are best formulated, is the unique ten- volume novel, Jean Christophe, in which he surveys all contemporary life. He uses Theistic language, but he explains that his God is " undefinable," and is only vaguely expressed by such metaphors as Life and Love. There is a long analysis of the work, with letters of Eolland s in support, in P. Seippel s Eomain Bolland (1913).
ROLLESTON, Thomas William, writer.
B. 1857. Ed. St. Columba s College, Eathfarnham, and Trinity College, Dublin. From 1879 to 1883 Eolleston lived in Germany. He then edited the Dublin University Beview for a time (1885-86). In 1892 he was appointed Taylorian Lec turer at Oxford and first secretary of the Irish Literary Society of London ; and in 1893 he became assistant editor of the New Irish Library. Since then he has been mainly occupied in writing, lecturing,
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