MADAME ADAM

1915

MADAME ADAM

(JULIETTE LAMBERT)

LA GRANDE FRANÇAISE

FROM LOUIS PHILIPPE UNTIL 1917

BY

WINIFRED STEPHENS

AUTHOR OF “FROM THE CRUSADES TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION,”
“FRENCH NOVELISTS OF TO-DAY,” “MARGARET OF FRANCE,”
ETC., ETC.

WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

Printed in Great Britain by
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E. 1,
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

PREFACE

La Grande Française [1]

Professor of Energy,” a term first applied to Napoléon I, is a title which has been bestowed on more than one living Frenchman. None has better claim to it than Mme. Adam, La Grande Française, as she has been happily called, the story of whose life, which is now running into its eighty-first year, is told in the following pages.

To write Mme. Adam’s biography is also to write one of the most momentous chapters of French history. For this remarkable woman has lived through the Revolution of 1848, the coup d’état of 1851, the agony of the siege of Paris, the civil war of the Commune, and two invasions of her beloved patrie.

As the mistress of a leading political salon, as the founder and editor for twenty years of an influential fortnightly magazine, La Nouvelle Revue, as for many years the intimate friend of Gambetta, of Thiers, of other French ministers, of the representatives of foreign powers and of such eminent French writers as George Sand, Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Alphonse Daudet, Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget and Maurice Barrès, she has not only kept her finger on the pulse of her great nation, but she has to some extent modulated its heart-beats.

The key to Mme. Adam’s temperament and to all the varied phases of her career is her passionate belief in self-government, in that cause of national independence for which the powers of L’Entente are now engaging in this world-embracing conflict. We may call it a belief, but originally in Mme. Adam’s case it was an instinct born in her and inherited from her father, one of the most ardent of revolutionaries. Mme. Adam is a revoltée to the core. Toujours hors des rangs, Gambetta said of her. In numerous incidents of her childhood her rebelliousness revealed itself. The growth of her reasoning powers, however, led her to submit to discipline, to embrace with fervour—she can never do anything by halves—the republican creed, and to become the irreconcilable adversary of the Second Empire. Then the national defeat of 1871, acting upon what she has described as her combativité rentrée (her suppressed combativeness), turned her passion for self-government into an ardent advocacy of the principle of nationality, into a vehement protest against everything which could in even the remotest manner be suspected of undermining that principle.

Consequently we shall find Mme. Adam loudly lifting up her voice, vigorously wielding her pen most frequently against Prussian aggressiveness, but also against imperialistic ideas, no matter in what shape or form, no matter in what part of the world she can detect them. We shall find her opposing alike the French tendency to colonial expansion and the Austrian Drang nach Osten, Mr. Gladstone’s later policy in Egypt and the Conservative coercion of Ireland, the Magyar domination over the Slav peoples and our war with the Boer Republic in South Africa. We shall find her also ever glorifying the army and navy as the most effective guarantee of national independence.

Nationalism is Mme. Adam’s creed, patriotism her religion. French Nationalists, like Léon Daudet, regard her as having been the strong tower of the French idea (la forteresse de l’idée française) throughout the forty-four years separating the war of 1914 from the war of 1870. If in later years Mme. Adam has renounced her father’s agnosticism and returned to the bosom of the Church, it is primarily because she considers that only by submitting to the Roman obedience can she best continue the traditions of her country.

I am very fortunate, for Mme. Adam has throughout taken a deep interest in this biography. We have discussed it together at length. Despite her multifarious war activities she has found time to write me some forty letters in response to my questions. She has also introduced me to her friend and collaborator in La Nouvelle Revue, Mme. Jeanne Krompholtz, who has kindly furnished me with valuable information.

For the greater part of Mme. Adam’s life, however, from her birth in 1836 down to 1880, my main authority has been her seven volumes of Souvenirs. These living documents, written, many of them, under the immediate impression of the events they record, I have carefully compared with contemporary and more recent writings, indicated by foot-notes throughout these pages. For the quarter of a century and more which has elapsed since the close of Mme. Adam’s Souvenirs I have consulted her numerous other autobiographical works, her contributions to La Nouvelle Revue and to other periodical literature, and also the frequent references to her personally, and to her books, which have appeared from time to time in the French press and elsewhere.

I have to thank Sir Sidney Colvin, who frequently visited Mme. Adam at her salon’s most brilliant moment, in the seventies, for generously bringing forth from the rich treasure-house of his remembrance and for permitting me to incorporate in this book valuable recollections which enhance, confirm and complement impressions derived from other sources.

Had he lived to see this work completed I should have gladly taken this opportunity to thank another of Mme. Adam’s acquaintances and admirers, M. Elie Mercadier, Director in London of L’Agence Havas. For to his lively talk about La Grande Française and her circle I am indebted for many a striking trait and useful suggestion.

Winifred Stephens.

London, 1917.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] “Celui qui l’a baptisée ‘la Grande Française’ a bien dit.”—Léon Daudet, L’Entre-Deux-Guerres, 231 (1915).

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ERRATA

• Page 9, note ¹, for Essay on the Spirit of Comedy read Essay on Comedy, and the uses of the Comic Spirit.
• Page 63, l. 25, for Memoirs read Mémoires.
• Page 99, l. 10, for Fagwet read Faguet.
• Page 194, l. 24, for parties read parts.
• Page 236, Chapter motto, for heureux on read heureux ou.
• Page 239, l. 8, for goutte read goûter.
• Page 240, l. 6 from bottom, for Ricard read Aicard.

MADAME ADAM

CHAPTER I

BIRTH, PARENTAGE AND INFANCY

1836-1839

“L’émotion, l’ébullition sont en permanence dans nos âmes.”—Mme. Adam, Souvenirs.

In the opening pages of her Recollections Mme. Adam has told, with more vivid detail than is unhappily here possible, the story of two generations of her ancestors. Her own career has not lacked romance; but many of its most thrilling incidents pale beside the experiences of her forbears. Tracing them back to the Napoleonic Wars, she presents us with a lively picture of domestic history, which is as far from being commonplace as it is possible to imagine. For it embraces moving scenes of rapturous love affairs, extraordinary marriages, a startling infidelity, quarrels about dowries, and the story of a son who had a rare precocious experience. At the age of nine, he found himself already disinherited and sent forth in the world, cast upon the mercy of the family milkman, with whom he took refuge. This juvenile outcast was Mme. Adam’s maternal grandfather, of whom, under the name of Dr. Seron, we shall hear much more anon. Only by unwavering persistence, and stern resolution did this unhappy boy escape from his benefactor’s vocation. Tramping to Paris, boots in hand, to save shoe-leather, he educated himself into the medical profession and ultimately married Mme. Adam’s grandmother, Pélagie Raincourt. Pélagie also was a highly romantic person, no less remarkable than her husband. For on her wedding morning, as the result of a family broil, by no means rare among Mme. Adam’s forbears, she escaped in a pet from her mother’s house, and was found sitting by the roadside, clad only in a nightcap and dressing-gown, by her bridegroom, who had pursued her on horseback. Swinging her into the saddle, in order to avoid further escapades, he carried her off to the church and there married her out of hand. Her sole bridal adornment was a white carnation, which a woman of the people pinned into her cap.

Juliette in later years was shown the cap and the carnation to illustrate the story, which she heard from the runaway’s own lips.

Mme. Seron continued all her life addicted to romance. When it became a question of marrying her daughter, Olympe, Mme. Adam’s mother, Mme. Seron, a catholic, chose a son-in-law who was an agnostic, because she was attracted by his appearance and his history. Jean Louis Lambert, Mme. Adam’s father, had for the sake of his opinions sacrificed brilliant ecclesiastical prospects, and from the prospective secretary of the Archbishop of Beauvais had become an usher in the boys’ school opposite Mme. Seron’s house. This heroic youth was taken by Mme. Adam’s grandmother, educated as a doctor, and married to the reluctantly quiescent Olympe, who from that time forward adopted that attitude of injured passivity which was expressed by her favourite phrase “where you have tethered the goat there it will graze.”

All this happened in Picardy, a province where people lived well and washed sparingly. The very name of Mme. Adam’s birthplace, Verberie, with its suggestion of oyster patties and sauterne, made Robert Louis Stevenson’s mouth water, as he paddled towards it in his canoe. Juliette remembers how on Fridays at ten in the morning the oyster cart from Boulogne would arrive, bringing twelve dozen oysters for her family, how they would all sit round the table, the oyster barrel in the centre, and how each with his or her knife would open his or her oysters. Juliette’s grandfather and father would consume four dozen each, her grandmother and mother two dozen each, while sometimes there would be a friend who would abstract as many as possible from his hosts’ respective shares. Wine flowed freely at these feasts. Dr. Seron was a twelve-bottle man. But fortunately his beverage was only light Macon; and this, happily for his patients, was not consumed until he had performed his operations at the hospital. Operations! One trembles at the very word when associated with Dr. Seron. For, according to his granddaughter, that country surgeon was a most diligent cultivator of microbes. Ablutions, as we have said, were rare in Picard households. A bath was unheard of. Dr. Seron held that the face should be washed as little as possible for fear of bringing out a rash. Soap was only used on Sundays. The windows, of course, were kept tightly shut. Physical exercise was carefully avoided. The women of Mme. Adam’s family, like old-fashioned Frenchwomen down to the present day, seldom went beyond their own house and garden, declining even the attractions of the provincial theatre, for they agreed with Mme. de Sévigné that une grande dame ne doit pas remuer les os (a true lady should not move about her bones).

Nevertheless, though their bodies were cribbed, cabined and confined, these Frenchwomen’s minds moved in the great world of romance, their fancies glowed with all the fervent imaginings of that effervescent age. Mme. Adam’s grandmother lived, moved and had her being in the “Human Comedy” of Balzac. Turning over the pages of his ninety-seven novels, or sitting over her embroidery frame, she lived the lives of his five thousand characters. Her unfortunate choice of a husband for her granddaughter, Juliette, was largely dictated by the suitor’s resemblance to one of her favourite novelist’s heroes.

Mme. Adam, as we have said, was born at the little Picard town of Verberie, a famous place in mediæval times, the residence of Frankish kings, whither in the ninth century had come Ethelbald, King of Wessex, to wed his thirteen-year-old bride, Charles the Bald’s daughter, Judith. Verberie in the last century was a favourite place of call for tourists, who in pre-motor-car days used to drive leisurely from Senlis to Compiègne. Our English poetess, Mary Robinson (Mme. Duclaux)[2], tells how from the steep brow of a down, known as “la Montagne de Verberie,” she saw through “the poplar screens of the precipitous hill-side, a lovely blue expanse of country with the Oise lying across it like a scimitar of silver”; how her carriage dashed down the hill “and clattered along the sleepy, pebbly ... street, past the inn, full of blouses and billiards.”

It was in that very inn, “Les Trois Monarques,” at Verberie that Mme. Adam was born, at half-past five on the 4th of October, 1836.

Was it a glimpse into their daughter’s future that made her parents name her “Juliette” after that most seductive of all the queens of French salons, Mme. Récamier?

No gold or even silver spoon was in our Juliette’s mouth when she made her first appearance on this world’s stage. At the time of her birth, her parents’ fortunes had reached a low ebb. Dr. Lambert had been in practice with his great-uncle in a village not far from Verberie, and thither to his uncle’s house he had brought home his girl wife. For the first years of their marriage everything had gone well with the young couple. Then had come a deluge of misfortunes. Their first baby, a boy, died in convulsions. Then the uncle died, and his estate was divided among numerous legatees. Finally, a fire broke out which nearly consumed the whole village, and, despite Mme. Lambert’s heroic efforts, burned her husband’s house to the ground.

Thus were Juliette’s parents driven to seek harbourage in the inn at Verberie, where Juliette was born.

Very shortly after this event, her father, one of the most unpractical but at the same time most attractive of scientists, was fascinated by the report of some marvellous scientific experiments, which were being made in the neighbouring town of Compiègne, by a well-known chemist, a Dr. Bernhardt. Leaving his wife and daughter to the tender mercies of mine host of “The Three Monarchs,” Dr. Lambert went off to join his confrère. This Dr. Bernhardt came to be regarded by Juliette’s family as a veritable German Mephistopheles; for the only result of his experiments was the consumption of Mme. Lambert’s dowry.

During her husband’s scientific adventures Mme. Lambert and her baby girl in the Verberie inn were suffering serious privations. And they might have come near starvation had it not been for the assistance they received from Mme. Lambert’s parents. But this timely aid could only be given surreptitiously; for Juliette had had the misfortune to be born, not into poverty merely, but into one of the numerous family feuds which were to chequer all her childhood. Between her parents and her grandparents at the time of the first baby’s death there had arisen a misunderstanding. For some time there had been no communication between the Lamberts at Verberie and the Serons, who lived not far away at Chauny, then a flourishing manufacturing town, now converted by German vandalism into a heap of ruins. It was only by the curtest of notes that Dr. Lambert had announced to Dr. and Mme. Seron their granddaughter’s advent. Had it not been for the report, brought by one of Dr. Seron’s patients, a friendly commercial traveller, Juliette’s grandmother would never have known of the sorry plight to which her son-in-law’s scientific vagaries had reduced his wife and child.

On hearing the commercial traveller’s news, Mme. Seron, with characteristic impetuousness, flew into a passion and declared that she would set off at once for Verberie to rescue her granddaughter from the parents who were obviously incapable of taking care of her. Dr. Seron, however, succeeded in convincing his wife that a family scene would be injurious for the infant, whom her mother was nursing. He reminded Mme. Seron that the first Lambert baby had died in convulsions; and finally he induced her to postpone her intervention until the child was nine months old and might leave her mother without danger.

Meanwhile the landlord of “The Three Monarchs” was secretly given to understand that Mme. and Mlle. Lambert must be made comfortable, and that Dr. Seron might be held responsible for the reckoning.

With great difficulty during those interminable nine months did the ardent grandmother possess her soul in patience. She occupied the time, however, in working out the details of the cleverly devised plot by which she ultimately succeeded in carrying off her grandchild.

Juliette in after years used to delight to hear her grandmother describe all the stages of that famous coup: how the landlord of the inn was made privy to the plot; how there stood ready a coach, nothing less than a berline, recalling another flight, more famous but less successful; how in the coach had been placed a warm shawl and a bottle of hot milk; how, while Mme. Lambert was haggling over the bill with the landlord, Mme. Seron, bearing a certain precious bundle, was stealthily stealing to the berline and then speeding away with baby Juliette to join the diligence outside the town; how ultimately the stolen jewel was deposited safely at Chauny, whither not long afterwards her mother followed her.

In vain did Dr. Lambert, penniless and disillusioned, plead for the return of his wife and daughter. “Not until you have proved yourself able to support them,” was Mme. Seron’s stern reply; and, she added relentlessly, “I adopt the child whom you abandoned, whom you left a prey to the direst poverty. She is mine, and shall be as long as I live.”

Thus ended the first of those kidnappings which were to recur at intervals through the first sixteen years of Juliette’s life, until her first marriage. They arose not merely from the rival claims of parents and grandparents to possess the child, but from the fact that each of these four persons held pronounced and divergent opinions as to the upbringing of their adored one. In the quarrels which ensued, Mme. Seron and Dr. Lambert were the protagonists; Dr. Seron and Mme. Lambert played the parts of supers, or supported one side or the other.

We are all, even the most obstinate and strong-minded, moulded, though often unconsciously, by various intellectual influences. To this rule Juliette, despite her indomitable will and personal idiosyncrasy, was no exception. And a study of her mental development shows her passing through three distinct phases: her childhood and youth, when her grandmother’s or her father’s influence dominated alternately: middle life, when broadly speaking she sympathised with her father’s opinions: her later years, after the war of 1870, when more or less she was returning to her grandmother’s point of view.

With these two formative forces, with these two remarkable persons, Mme. Seron and her son-in-law, Dr. Lambert, we must become intimately acquainted if we would understand Juliette’s character and career. We must also remember that the time of Juliette’s upbringing was the hey-day of the romantic period, a time when individualism ran rampant, when the most Utopian of dreamers believed they were about to realise their wildest hopes. It was true that after half a century of experiments in government France had practically settled down for a while into the jog-trot of Louis Philippe’s reign. But beneath the veil of the moderate and the commonplace which this compromise of constitutional monarchy had cast over the country, there bubbled and boiled a welter of effervescence which twelve years after Juliette’s birth exploded in the Revolution of 1848.

The national temperament of France during the first half of the last century partly accounts for the temperament of Juliette’s family, and for the atmosphere of intellectual and emotional feverishness in which she was brought up. Looking back from the vantage point of old age on the stormy scenes of her childhood, she asked: “Were we more sensitive then, more susceptible, more dramatic than to-day? I believe we were.”[3] It is not improbable also that Mme. Adam, regarding her childhood through the long vista of years, may have unconsciously exaggerated the violence of her sentiments and experiences. One of her charms is that feeling for the dramatic, with which Gambetta once reproached her, saying, “Vous dramatisez trop, madame!”

“My love for my grandmother and for my daughter,” said Mme. Adam to me shortly before her eightieth birthday, “have been the two great passions of my life.”

Of her grandmother, she announces in the beginning of her Souvenirs: “I shall write of her often, but shall I ever ... be able to make her live with that originality, that passion for the romantic which she infused into us all, lifting on to the plane of high romance the whole of our family life and each one of our daily actions?”

Though Mme. Seron hardly ever went outside her own domestic domain except to attend mass on Sunday, her granddaughter could say that never had she met a mind “more avid of adventure, more scornful of the every-day and the commonplace, more eager for the romantic in life and in literature.”

In no point, save in their passionate adoration of Juliette, did Mme. Seron and her son-in-law agree. Yet in temperament they were not altogether unlike; for they were both dreamers. But Juliette’s grandmother, if she did not possess it, at least respected that worldly wisdom which Dr. Lambert regarded with the utmost contempt. He was an idealist pure and simple. We have seen him sacrificing a brilliant ecclesiastical career to conscientious scruples. We have seen him risking the happiness of his wife and child in his pursuit of science. We shall see him again, more than once risking not only his family’s happiness but his own life in the cause of political reform.

“I am the daughter,” writes Mme. Adam, “of a sincere sectary ... of one who dreamed of absolute liberty, absolute equality.... Only for a moment, during the Commune, did he believe his dream realised.”

Jean Louis Lambert was one of those rare persons with tastes both scientific and literary. But it was only classical literature that appealed to him. He was a passionate Grecian and an ardent admirer of the French masterpieces of le grand siècle. In the remarkable literary works which his own day was producing, in the novels of Balzac and George Sand, which were his mother-in-law’s meat and drink, he took not the slightest interest. His Homer, on the other hand, he almost knew by heart; and he made his little daughter as familiar with tales from the Iliad as are most children with “Red Riding Hood” or “Cinderella.” Dr. Lambert himself wrote verses in the classic style, which he would recite to his mother-in-law; but there were others which were red republican, and which he would have kept from her hearing had not that enfant terrible of a Juliette caught them up and repeated them parrot-like to her grandparents. Dr. Seron, an old soldier of la grande armée, was infuriated by poems in which his son-in-law dared to attack his idol, the Emperor.

Indeed, the family tendency to wrangle was considerably accentuated by the fact that three of its members (Juliette’s mother took no interest in public affairs) held directly divergent political opinions. Mme. Seron was a liberal monarchist, Dr. Seron a Buonapartist, and Dr. Lambert a social democrat. None of these fervent partisans had the remotest idea of keeping their opinions to themselves. Consequently, whenever Dr. Lambert and his wife drove over from Blérancourt, a village nine miles from Chauny, where Juliette’s father had set up in practice, the voice of controversy rose high. These debates generally occurred at meal time. And baby Juliette, accustomed to have the attention of her doting elders fixed upon herself, strongly objected to these diversions. She tells how to restore herself to the limelight she would clamber into the middle of the table and begin to upset the plates and glasses. The device never failed. Discussion ceased; the three controversialists would be overcome with laughter, while the silent member of the group, Juliette’s mother, would suddenly become active. Snatching her daughter from the wreck on the table, she would be administering a sound smacking when three pairs of hands would be eagerly outstretched to rescue the culprit. Thus Juliette learnt two lessons: first, not to fear her mother’s severity, from which she might always count upon the indulgence of her other relatives to deliver her; second, to appreciate “that first born of common sense,” the comic spirit. In her earliest years it was her inestimable privilege to have “laughter for nurse, pure fun for friend.”

George Meredith, it will be remembered, divides humanity[4] into three classes: the non-laughers, the excessive laughers and those who stand where the comic spirit places them, “at middle distance between the inveterate opponents and the drum and fife supporters of comedy.”

In the table scene just described, each of these three classes is represented. Juliette’s mother was a non-laugher, a morbid person whose lack of fun, as is inevitable with women, degraded her to be a mere household drudge. Juliette’s grandfather, the jovial doctor, whose funny stories, nicknamed Seronnades, enlivened the countryside, was of the drum and fife order, an apostle of le gros rire. Juliette’s grandmother and father, though differing in so many respects, were alike endowed with the true comic spirit. Long years later, looking back on her turbulent childhood, Mme. Adam wrote: “I should probably have been intolerable, had not the gay and merry temperaments of my grandparents ... introduced into our relationship a jocular spirit which did not admit of solemnity, even in our grievances. Whenever I succeeded in reconciling them after one of their disputes, it was because I had made them laugh.”[5] “Certainly,” exclaimed a character in one of Pierre Mille’s stories, “he was no Latin, for he took everything seriously.”[6] Juliette Adam, Gallic by birth, Græco-Latin by education, as she likes to describe herself, has always been ready to see a joke, even when it was at her own expense. Thus she is proud to relate, how when at one of George Sand’s dinner-parties, Flaubert, in Dumas’ presence, pointed out that in one of her books she had made a man who had lost an arm take a box in both hands, she joined in the laugh, saying gaily, “Merci, Maître.”[7]

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Fields of France, 163.

[3] Souvenirs, I. 350.

[4] An Essay on the Spirit of Comedy, 62, 1903.

[5] Souvenirs, I. 127.

[6] Le Monarque, 169.

[7] Souvenirs, III. 163.

CHAPTER II

CHILDHOOD

1839-1848

“De l’amour et de l’indignation furent les aliments dont on nourrit notre jeune cœur.”—Juliette Adam, Preface to her Souvenirs, I. v.

Despite his intense desire to have his adored child in his own home, Dr. Lambert constrained himself to permit Juliette to remain with her grandparents until she was three. But on his daughter’s fourth anniversary her father put in his paternal claim.

Looking back over more than three score years and ten Mme. Adam still sees that day as the first which stands out clearly in her memory. She remembers it for several reasons—because of the new white frock she wore, embroidered by her grandmother; because the bonne Arthémise on that day called her “Mademoiselle” for the first time; because her grown-up friend Charles, professor at the boys’ school opposite, embraced her; because when her parents arrived late as usual from Blérancourt, on account of the bad roads, her father took her up in his arms, kissed her, and with tears in his eyes said, “Juliette, how you have grown, it is so long since I have seen you—three months.”

But above all that day stands engraved on Juliette’s recollection because in the midst of the birthday feast, there fell like a bombshell descending on the hitherto harmonious family party, her father’s words: “This time we shall take Juliette home with us.” Then there ensued one of those impassioned family scenes which were so frequent in Juliette’s childhood. Mme. Seron refused to give up her granddaughter, Dr. Lambert protested vehemently that he would have his child. The little girl, hardly out of babyhood, was herself appealed to: whom did she love most—her parents or her grandparents? Where would she like to live—at Chauny or at Blérancourt? But in the end Mme. Seron won the day, as she usually did, and probably for the excellent reason that it was she who held the family purse-strings.

There was, however, in this vehement, romantic, impulsive lady a strain of consistency and logic. Because during that dinner-table wrangle with her son-in-law she had based her claim to Juliette’s remaining with her on the fact that there were better educational facilities at Chauny than at Blérancourt, she felt compelled to act on that assertion. Consequently, she lost no time in sending Juliette, tiny as she was, to school.

But this important crisis in Juliette’s career could not pass without yet another drame de famille. To send so young a child to the pension, to “prison,” as they called it, seemed to the easygoing Dr. Seron and to the bonne Arthémise, who doted on her little charge, as nothing short of cruelty. Like a servant out of one of Molière’s comedies, Arthémise rated her mistress soundly, whereupon she received an entirely disregarded notice to pack up her baggage and be off.

Of this scene the little victim was herself a spectator. And it was as a captive, therefore, that she regarded herself, when her grandmother led her off and delivered her up to her schoolmistress, the grim, moustached Mme. Dufey, who, with what appeared to Juliette a veritable turnkey’s smile, received her with the announcement: “I had the mother, now I have the daughter.”

Then followed a hurricane of a day. Cries, sobs and physical protestations landed the new pupil in the school garret, wherefrom she was extricated in the afternoon by Arthémise, who had come to take her home. But home to her cruel grandmother this wilful child absolutely refused to go. No sooner was she outside the school gates than she set off running in the direction of the village where Arthémise lived. There Arthémise weakly followed her. And it was only late in the evening that the runaway, having been put to sleep in another and pleasanter garret, was driven back to Chauny by her grandfather in his gig.

Juliette felt that she had won a victory. Her grandmother had certainly learnt a lesson. She now realised that her granddaughter was the kind of child she herself had been—one of those who must be led and not driven. Henceforth Juliette was brought up on what we now call the Montessori system. And the time came when she herself elected to go with one of her playmates to that same school, which she now found quite amusing.

Indeed, considering the strongly pronounced and utterly divergent opinions held as to her upbringing by the four persons who desired to control her, the only possible course was for the child, as soon as she was able, to train herself as far as possible.

But there were certain questions which even this head-strong little girl found settled without her participation. There was notably the religious question. Dr. Lambert, as we have seen, was a bitter anti-clerical, an aggressive agnostic of the old-fashioned Voltairean stamp. Mme. Lambert, Dr. and Mme. Seron were all catholics. And there gnawed at Mme. Lambert’s heart the painful secret that Juliette was still a little heathen, for, as the result of her father’s anti-clericalism, she had never been baptized. To remedy this omission, without confessing it to her parents, Juliette’s mother devised a clever and effectual stratagem. Under the pretext of being present at the wedding of one of her mother’s friends, the little girl was brought over to Blérancourt by her grandfather. Then at the end of the wedding ceremony, she was hurried into one corner of the church and held over what seemed to her a yawning gulf of a basin, where, amidst her violent protestations, she was transformed, as her grandfather afterwards told her, from “a poor little unbaptized girl” into “a big, happy baptized girl.” But this blessed conversion she was carefully enjoined not to mention to her father, because he did not like churches.

Whether the youthful convert would have kept the secret is doubtful. But the opportunity of doing so was reft from her by one of her playmates, who during the wedding festivities called her, in her father’s presence, by her baptismal names of “Camille Ambrosine.” This led to inquiries and to a disclosure, followed, of course, by the inevitable drame de famille. Fortunately for the conspirators an accident to one of Dr. Lambert’s patients put an end to this extremely unpleasant situation. And while the Blérancourt doctor was at the injured man’s bedside his father-in-law seized the occasion to drive the “little bone of contention” back to Chauny.

Juliette, having been once captured by her catholic relatives, Dr. Lambert agreed to surrender her mind to their keeping until she had taken her first communion. And he must have been pleased that Mme. Seron, with her usual ambitious desire to force the pace in Juliette’s education, persuaded the Dean to admit her clever little granddaughter into the Church one year earlier than was customary, at ten instead of eleven.

“We must furnish the little brain,” was Mme. Seron’s favourite expression. She herself had never acquired much book learning. But, in order to educate her grandchild, she for a while put on one side her adored novels and studied French history, of which she was most eager that Juliette should take a correct view. That correct view was, of course, Mme. Seron’s own, and was the contradiction of her husband’s and son-in-law’s opinions. Juliette’s grandmother taught her to regard the French middle-class, the bourgeoisie, as the salt of the earth, and the government of Louis Philippe as the only possible government, infinitely superior to the Buonapartism which Dr. Seron and to the Jacobinism which Dr. Lambert would have liked to restore.

So Juliette, surrounded by piles of lesson-books, was kept hard at work till late in the evening, while her grandfather laughed at her for being a blue-stocking, and dubbed her “Mlle. Phénomène.”

But even the jocular Dr. Seron could sometimes be serious: and he gravely warned his wife that if she continued thus to press the little girl beyond her years misfortune would follow.

His warning being unheeded, the prognostication came true. Its fulfilment was hastened by three weeks at Blérancourt, where Dr. Lambert talked to his little daughter as if she were grown up, and by a tempestuous journey home with her mother, followed by an even stormier drame de famille on her arrival at Chauny.

Juliette fell seriously ill. On her recovery, Dr. Seron, who seems to have been the only member of the family endowed with common sense, insisted on his granddaughter being removed from the atmosphere of school-books and drames de famille to a serener and healthier air.

The child was sent to visit her grandmother’s three step-sisters, three maiden ladies who lived with their mother, in the heart of the country, at a village called Chivres, not far from Soissons.

“My aunts! Ah! you must love my aunts!” exclaimed Mme. Adam, as one day, in the salon at Gif, we talked of these delectable virgins. And indeed one could not help loving the charming, though eccentric ladies, les demoiselles Sophie, Constance and Anastasie Raincourt. They represent a type totally unknown in Great Britain, though I suspect it might not at that time have been altogether impossible to discover their counterparts in other French country districts, or perhaps in remote corners of New England.

The aunts were a bundle of contradictions and surprises. In their short gathered print skirts, aprons and kerchiefs, they looked like peasant women, and they worked like peasant women too, at hay-making, poultry-keeping and fruit-farming. But so distinguished was their bearing that in their humble attire they had the air of great ladies in disguise, while their discussion during hay-making of Sismondi’s Italian Republics showed them to be veritable femmes savantes. Though living in the heart of the country, these original spinsters took a deep interest in all the literary and political movements of the town. Though, with their step-sister, Mme. Seron, they were firmly convinced that a constitutional monarchy was the only ideal form of government, they did not altogether share Mme. Seron’s admiration for Louis Philippe. They criticised his policy and approved of the opposition led by M. Odillon Barot.

In almost every respect Juliette’s life at Chivres was a complete contrast to her life at Chauny or Blérancourt. Instead of, as at Chauny, sitting up late over her books and then going to bed in her grandmother’s stuffy chamber, with the windows tightly closed and the atmosphere infested by the midnight oil burnt to enable Mme. Seron to read her romances, Juliette at Chivres, after a day spent in healthy open-air exercise, lay down with the lamb and rose with the lark, having slept by herself in a large airy room with the windows wide open.

Whereas at Chauny no interest was taken in house arrangement, while picturesque old family heirlooms were regarded as lumber and relegated to the attic, and any artistic feeling found its only expression in personal adornment, at Chivres it was just the opposite: Juliette’s fine clothes were all folded away, and she was dressed like her aunts in peasant costume; but her natural love of the beautiful was gratified by the daintiness and artistry of all the household arrangements, by the handsome old chests and commodes, the embroidered draperies, the nosegays of fresh wild flowers, and the beautifully bound books ranged trimly on their shelves.

The intellectual atmosphere of Chivres was likewise entirely different from that of Chauny and Blérancourt. Dr. Lambert’s heroes, Louis Blanc and Proudhon, were anathema to such worshippers of the established order as the aunts. In the light of her aunts’ wide interest in all manifestations of nature, her grandmother’s concentration on the merely human aspect of life suddenly appeared to Juliette as intensely narrow. It was at Chivres that Juliette first acquired that passionate love of nature which she was later to express so eloquently in her books. It was at Chivres that Juliette learnt to take an interest in birds and beasts and flowers, and also in inanimate things, to find—

“... tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones and good in everything.”

In her aunts’ company the simplest actions of rural life acquired for the little girl some deep significance: watering flowers in the garden she seemed to be quenching their thirst, gathering fruit in the orchard she was easing the burden of overladen trees, cutting clover in the paddock she was receiving a gift from bountiful earth.

For Aunt Sophie even stones and metals had a voice or resonance. She would place upon a crystal tray various substances differing in form, some round, some flat, and with a little hammer would play upon them curious melodies.

While Juliette’s father had brought her up on tales from the Iliad, Aunt Sophie, who was an accomplished Latin scholar, told her stories from the Æneid, which seemed to her strangely like an echo of her beloved Homer. While her grandmother’s favourite novelist had been Balzac, the aunts talked to her admiringly of George Sand’s peasant romances, and vaguely hinted at longer novels by the same author, which they did not altogether like, but which Juliette would read when she grew up.

But the greatest contrast of all was the atmosphere of calm which pervaded Chivres, the harmony in which the aunts and their mother lived, so different from the perpetual wrangling of Chauny and Blérancourt. No wonder that Juliette after two months of this serenity returned to her grandmother a new creature, in mens sana in corpore sano. No wonder that the perfect success of this first visit caused it to be repeated annually throughout Juliette’s childhood. Indeed, as time went on, as Juliette grew in years, as the feverish intellectuality of Chauny and Blérancourt intensified, the summer visit to Chivres became more and more necessary.

Having done his best to keep his word to his mother-in-law and to permit her to dominate Juliette’s mind until her first communion, once that event was consummated Dr. Lambert felt at liberty to educate his little girl in his own way, in his own ideas, and to make her, as he expressed it, “his daughter according to the spirit as well as according to the flesh.”

In his earlier talks with Juliette he had endeavoured to impose a certain reserve upon his expansive nature. Though finding it impossible to exclude his beliefs, his hopes and enthusiasms altogether from their conversation, he had but alluded to them vaguely, saying, “when you are older I will explain to you such and such, when you are older you will understand this or that.”

This seed, though sown in an almost infantile mind, had not fallen on barren ground. Not one of these remarks had been lost on Juliette’s precocious and naturally speculative intelligence. She was therefore well prepared to receive with enthusiasm those hopeful doctrines of liberty, fraternity and equality with which her father now set seriously to work to inculcate his eleven-year-old little daughter.

On Juliette’s return from Chivres in the autumn of 1847, she paid a visit to her parents at Blérancourt. And it was then that her father said to her: “Now that you have discharged your obligations to your grandmother’s religion, I can speak to you frankly of mine.”

The chief articles of Dr. Lambert’s creed were a belief in human solidarity and a conviction in the inherent goodness of nature. With the great Jean Jacques he held society, not nature, responsible for all the evils which have befallen mankind. His “great negation,” as his daughter was later to call it, consisted in the denial that the finite can ever be capable of comprehending the infinite. Nature, he held, was rich enough and vast enough to satisfy all man’s craving for knowledge, sociability and love. “If you must worship something,” he would say to Juliette, “then worship the sun which lightens and warms you, in whose rays all things germinate, breathe and blossom.” While for the Christian religion Dr. Lambert had little respect, its Founder he held in the greatest veneration. While Christ came to obliterate all distinctions of race and caste, Christianity seemed to Juliette’s father ever raising barriers between man and man. “Christ,” he used to say, “came to save what he called ‘souls,’ we [the social democrats] come to save society (la personne sociale) by establishing equality, fraternity, liberty.”

In days when trade unionism was beginning in Great Britain, and when Proudhon’s teaching was laying the foundations of future syndicalism in France, Dr. Lambert was a firm believer in the right of all men to work, and to insist on receiving for that work a just wage. “Juliette,” he would say, “I rejoice to see you talking to a working-man ... as if he were your brother. I want you to be an apostle of human happiness and universal good. I love the weak and helpless more than myself. To see struggle and suffering tortures me. To those who have nothing one must give oneself up entirely, keeping nothing back.”

At such words the little girl’s heart glowed within her. With all her passionate little soul she responded to her father’s pity for the unfortunate, with all the determination of her strong will she resolved to spend her life helping them.

Though in years to come some of her father’s notions were to appear to her quixotic, though even then she and her grandmother laughed at his affecting the workman’s blouse, for example, though as time went on his extravagance and lack of common sense were frequently to make her tremble for his safety, she never—not even when intellectually they had drifted apart—ceased to reverence the breadth of his knowledge, the range of his charity and his unfailing good nature. The words apostle and charity ever conjured up before her a vision of her father. In spite of their perpetual disagreement, even Juliette’s grandmother would say of her son-in-law: “He is a dreamer, but he is sincere, and he has a heart of gold.”

Dr. Lambert was indeed one of those intellectual enthusiasts who were largely responsible for the Revolution of 1848. For these men of 1848 Mme. Adam has always cherished the most profound respect. Though in after life she came to regard them as childishly ingenuous and heedless of the possibility of realising their dreams, she has ever venerated their “passionate altruism,” their “craving to sacrifice themselves in the people’s cause,” their revolt against that famous formula ascribed to M. Guizot, “enrich yourselves.” “The men of 1848,” writes Mme. Adam, “were apostles and saints. Never have there been more honesty, more virtue, a nobler simplicity. They were no mere politicians. They were souls in love with the ideal. All those whom I have known were as sincere as my father ... and to have associated with them is to honour and cherish their memory.”

CHAPTER III

HER FIRST REVOLUTION

1848

(From a Schoolgirl’s Point of View)

“Les hommes de 1848 étaient des apôtres, des saints.”—Mme. Adam, Souvenirs.

Mme. Adam has lived through four Revolutions. The first, that of 1848, occurred when she was eleven. In the previous year, when she paid her usual summer visit to Chivres, she found her aunts perturbed by the political situation. They were eagerly devouring the columns of the National. They were talking of politics from morn till night. Much to their mother’s disapproval, they brought their eleven-year-old niece into their discussions. “You are tiring the poor little thing to death!” remonstrated Juliette’s great-grandmother.

“No,” rejoined her daughters, “the child is quite old enough to listen and to understand.”

“Besides,” continued Aunt Constance, who was the ironist of the three, “it will not be unprofitable to you, mademoiselle, to learn, if not with your ears, at least with your mouth as you yawn, the views on public affairs held by such highly intelligent persons as your aunts.”

“But,” writes Juliette, “I did not yawn, for my mind was interested in all matters political and literary.”[8]

From her aunts’ point of view the child saw those surging political movements of the day at an angle quite different from that at which, under her father’s direction, she had been accustomed to regard them.

At Chivres her father’s heroes, Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin, Proudhon, were held in horror. As utterly subversive of all public order the aunts regarded Ledru-Rollin’s famous speech, when, pleading before the Court of Cassation, the republican barrister had challenged the Procureur Général, crying: “Procureur Général, who appointed you?” “The Ministry.” “I, being an elector, may dismiss ministries. In whose name do you speak?” “In the king’s name.” “I, being an elector—history proves it—can make and unmake kings. Procureur Général, on your knees, on your knees before my sovereignty.” While as for Proudhon’s famous maxim, “Property is theft,” the aunts exclaimed: “Why, it’s the end of the world.” Social reform had no place in these good ladies’ political programme. They were content with the existing order. They had no sympathy with Dr. Lambert’s doctrine of the right to work, nor with Ledru-Rollin when he declared: “The workers have been slaves; they have been serfs; to-day they are wage-earners; we must strive to make them partners.”[9] The reforms which the aunts advocated in their talks with their niece were merely administrative. What they desired above all was to see Paris dethroned from her seat as the one centre of influence in the kingdom. They wanted decentralisation, the revival of the old provincialism. “Remember,” said Aunt Sophie to Juliette, “a time will come, I am sure of it, when, after various Jacobin and Buonapartist experiments, after a series of revolutions, you will remember how wise, how essentially French, how truly national, were the opinions of your old aunts.”[10]

The last months of 1847 Juliette was permitted to spend with her parents. Blérancourt in those days was becoming, under Dr. Lambert’s influence, a centre of violent political agitation. The number of Dr. Lambert’s disciples was increasing daily, and his socialistic ideas were being promulgated in the neighbouring villages. Mme. Seron wrote constantly demanding her granddaughter’s return. She feared that from being a Republican, which was bad enough, Juliette would be made into a socialist, converted from a pagan naturiste, as she called it, into an atheist. Finally, such remonstrances passing unheeded, she threatened that if her granddaughter were not immediately restored she would disinherit her, and Juliette would be reduced to depend for her dowry on such savings as her father might accumulate. This practically meant that Juliette would have no dowry at all. For Dr. Lambert, far from saving, could never keep any money in his pocket. In face of poverty and distress he was a veritable St. Martin of Tours, and would give away the very clothes from his back. But to one whose mind was set so far above filthy lucre Mme. Seron’s threat was meaningless. And to his mother-in-law’s letter he replied that Juliette would not need a dowry as he had decided to marry her to a working-man. But such a destiny did not suit Mlle. Juliette at all. She had often dreamed of a cottage, of a farm, but always with a gentleman (un monsieur) for husband. And when her father told her of this letter, she exclaimed: “Of course you are joking.” “But no,” he replied; “that really is my idea.” “Then it is not mine,”[11] retorted this eleven-year-old socialist, to whom her father’s design seemed utterly preposterous and cruel to the last degree.

True, she loved the people more and more every day. True, it seemed to her in moments of exaltation that she was ready to sacrifice herself in their service; but that she, whom generations had raised above them, should become one of them, no. Father and daughter were equally violent. This, their first disagreement, was, to say the least of it, tempestuous. And it was well that Mme. Seron arrived the next day to take her granddaughter back to the less exalted atmosphere of Chauny.

Though Dr. Lambert continued to cherish his dream of a working-class marriage for Juliette, for the time being he ceased to urge its fulfilment; and for the time being Juliette found it not impossible to reconcile her socialism with filial devotion.

At Chauny she found that her grandmother’s political principles, like those of the aunts at Chivres, had undergone a change. Mme. Seron had lost her passion for the citizen king. She had come to realise the necessity for reform. Juliette was delighted, and she expected her father to be equally pleased by his mother-in-law’s partial conversion. But she did not then know human nature. It was not until much later that she understood how a partisan is far more distrustful of opinions differing slightly from his own than of those which are more remote. Dr. Lambert mistrusted a reform movement led by M. Odillon Barot as strongly as the aunts at Chivres mistrusted any reform advocated by that extreme liberal, M. Ledru-Rollin.

Juliette’s schooling had been interrupted by her three months at Chauny, and also by a visit to Boulogne, to which we shall refer later, paid in company with her father in the summer of 1847.

After Christmas she returned to the pensionnat. Many changes had taken place in the school during the five years which had elapsed since that eventful day when she made her début as a scholar. The ogress, Mme. Dufey, had been succeeded by two friends of Juliette’s mother, the Mlles. André. The school had expanded, and a new building had been erected on the site, alas! of Mme. Seron’s garden, in which Juliette had spent some of her most entrancing hours. On the occasion of the destruction of this her land of delight, her “temple of verdure,” as she called it, there had been a long and violent battle between this little devotee of nature and her grandmother. The excuse that the garden had been sold in order to provide Juliette with a dowry did not appeal to her in the least. Money had never loomed large in the child’s imagination. She loathed the mention of it; for it always seemed to her to lead to family quarrels. The only use she had for it personally was for the purchase of sugar-drops, which she distributed among her schoolfellows.

It was long before the little girl could be persuaded to enter the building which seemed to her the grave of her brightest dreams and her most cherished joys.

Now, in the early weeks of 1848, Juliette found her school seething with a political excitement, which she, with her violent views, was the last person to allay.

With an important air the young politicians of the Pensionnat André went about announcing “l’heure des réformes a sonné.” The playground echoed with cries of “Vive la Réforme!” “A bas Guizot!” The sympathies of the youthful reformers were entirely with the people, le grand peuple. They were transported into a veritable fury on the day when they heard that “the people” had been massacred, the inoffensive people, engaged in a manifestation strictly within the bounds of the law! Upon the heels of these tidings, however, followed quickly the news that “the people” were revenged. Louis Philippe, after having twice failed to form a ministry, the Duchess of Orléans, after a vain attempt to establish a regency, were in flight. “The people” had raised barricades, “the people” had proclaimed the Republic. “The people,” read Juliette and her schoolfellows in the columns of La Démocratie Pacifique, had behaved magnificently, they had shown themselves worthy of every kind of liberty. Not a theft, not a single violation of property, had been committed. “The people,” in rags (loqueteux) put up notices, “Death to Thieves,” in the corridors of the Tuileries. “The people,” themselves penniless, had protected the treasures in the Bank.

On the great day of the Revolution, the 26th of February, Dr. Lambert came over to Chauny. He was in the seventh heaven of delight. Even Mme. Seron did not seem alarmed at the monarchy’s collapse. Her husband, however, was less pleased. He had thought that the Revolution would be made on behalf of his hero, Louis Buonaparte. And this soldier of la grande armée vented his spleen on the first republican who came to his hand. This unhappy republican[12] chanced to be his son-in-law. “Your Republic,” he jeered, “your stupidly democratic Republic!”

“But,” writes Juliette, “father only laughed, grandmother smiled, and I said—

“‘Ah! my poor grandfather, your Buonaparte must be very sick at our Republic, however socialist he has pretended to be.’”

Juliette remembers that, towards the end of dinner on that fateful 26th of February, her grandfather, having, by way of consolation for his disappointment, drunk an extra bottle or so of his petit Macon, opening his eyes very wide, addressed his family, and said: “Well! I see the future as clear as day!... I see your Republic, do you hear me, Lambert? Do you hear me, Juliette? I see it trampled under foot by my Buonaparte. I tell you, I scream it at you: revolutions, don’t you know, always end in empires.”[13]

At school next day Juliette found all her friends in a state of great agitation. Half of the scholars had stayed away. Their parents had been afraid to let them leave home. The Revolution might spread into the provinces. There was a glass factory in the town, and all the workmen were in favour of the Republic. Might they not proclaim it at Chauny, and revolt and perhaps plunder?

Hardly had Juliette arrived at school than she was summoned to the study of the Mlles. André. There she was questioned as to what her father thought of the situation.

“‘Well, Juliette, your father must be highly pleased, he who has always been a republican. Have you seen him?’

“‘Yes, mesdemoiselles, he came yesterday, and he is delighted. He says that at last France will show herself worthy of her history, that she will govern herself, that all the European nations will admire us and perhaps follow our example, that it is the coming of the people, the real people, which is not corrupt like the middle-class, and which ...’

“‘That is enough,’ interrupted the eldest Mlle. André drily. ‘I hope, Juliette, that you will keep your father’s fine notions to yourself. I forbid you to speak of them here.’

“‘In the schoolroom, mademoiselle?’

“‘In the schoolroom and in the playground.’

“I looked Mlle. André in the face,” writes Juliette. I was almost as tall as she; and I replied—

“‘That, mademoiselle, I can’t promise you; for there are a great many of us republicans in the school, and no one can prevent our talking about the Republic and loving it.’

“‘But France has not accepted your Republic,’ replied the youngest Mlle. André, Mlle. Sophie.

“‘It will accept it, mademoiselle, because this time the people will vote.’”

The Mlles. André were perplexed. They hesitated between their desire to shut the mouth of their precocious and self-assertive pupil, and their reluctance to be hard on their friend’s daughter, and also to annoy the republican parents of the other scholars.

Finally they decided to bring the interview to a close by the following judicious remark: “When you see your father, Juliette, you may tell him from us that we hope his Republic will bring peace to France and not agitate it further.”

On coming forth from the mistresses’ presence, Juliette was, of course, the object of universal interest among the scholars. They were burning to know what had passed in the principals’ sanctum. But they could not satisfy their curiosity until school was over. The lessons that morning were not well known, and the general excuse was the Republic. “Mademoiselle, I have not had time to do my lessons because of the Republic.”

“Mademoiselle, I couldn’t work because of the Republic.”

“I fail to understand,” was the icy retort, “how the Republic can be any concern of yours.”

There was a deep silence, and then a voice—it was Juliette’s—made answer.

“But, mademoiselle, it interests us passionately.”

The end of morning school was a regular riot. The pupils rushed out into the playground, where they surrounded Juliette, in a crowd, clamouring to receive a full account of her famous interview. She, on her part, was only too eager to relate it in every detail, and to follow it by an appeal to her comrades to bear themselves like true and worthy republicans, not to be insolent towards their teachers, but to make them realise that, although younger than they, the Republic regarded them as their elders’ equals. Then followed a babel of conversation. Each schoolgirl had her own idea of what the Republic should do. But all were agreed that the first reform must be the establishment of universal suffrage. No mere tax-payers’ franchise would satisfy these ardent suffragettes. Every one must vote, men, women, and, of course, schoolgirls. Only thus could the Mlles. André’s pupils conceive of a really universal suffrage, and later they prided themselves on having invented it.

Nothing in the Revolution pleased Juliette’s father better than the opening of the National Workshops. An ardent believer in the right to work, he, with his idol, Louis Blanc, had always advocated them. And though Louis Blanc did not appear to be directly concerned with those that the Government was establishing, Dr. Lambert, like most people, believed that he was secretly connected with them. They had not been running more than a few weeks, however, when he began to suspect that he had been mistaken. As time went on he grew less and less satisfied with the Republic. There were too many reactionaries in the National Assembly. This Republic, from which he had hoped so much, was too pleasing to comfortable middle-class people like his mother-in-law.

“Jean Louis,” she would say, “I find that I agree very well with your Republic.” “Wait a little,” her son-in-law would reply at first. By and by he would answer: “You agree with it better than I do.” And finally there came a day when he exclaimed: “No wonder you approve of the Republic, for it is constituted for your advantage! The Orléans may come back and they will not need to alter anything as far as their bourgeois supporters are concerned.”[14]

Seeing his dream of a Christian, classical, social, scientific Republic vanish, Dr. Lambert resumed his old part of malcontent, and, of course, Juliette followed suit. She filled the house with her recriminations. She made herself excessively disagreeable to her grandparents. Her grandfather infuriated her by chuckling with delight and repeating: “All this augurs well for the Empire.”

That which most distressed Juliette and her father was the failure of the National Workshops. It had become obvious that, far from being organised by Louis Blanc, they had been initiated by his enemies. Émile Thomas, who directed them, was suspected of being Louis Napoléon’s agent. Far from constituting, as Dr. Lambert had fondly dreamed, a national benefit and a model for the whole civilised world, they proved useless and costly. They grew like an ulcer; as many as 119,000 men were on the pay-roll. They were a club of loafers, a reserve army of insurrection, a perpetual strike supported out of public money. No wonder there was talk of suppressing them. But Dr. Lambert, though bitterly disappointed with the way they were conducted, was horrified at the idea of suddenly depriving of occupation and turning adrift these thousands of workmen. It would mean, he thought, nothing short of a sanguinary revolution. Juliette, of course, shared her father’s horror. What had “the people,” “the people” who had behaved so admirably on the 26th of February, done to deserve such treacherous treatment? She could think of nothing else. Her rage and disappointment were such that she became absolutely insupportable. And when her grandmother remonstrated with her, she implored to be allowed to go to Blérancourt to her father, who shared her disappointment. But Mme. Seron was still living in dread of her son-in-law’s threat of a working-class marriage for his daughter. She had other ideas for Juliette. “Already,” she told her little granddaughter, “you have pleased young X——, who is seventeen; and his father, half in jest, half in earnest, because of your age, has suggested that in a few years’ time there might be an alliance between the families.” Moreover, Mme. Seron did not wish again to interrupt her daughter’s studies. So she proposed a compromise. Instead of going to Blérancourt, Juliette might become a boarder at the pension.[15]

This suggestion was a terrible blow to Juliette. That such a proposal should come from her grandmother, that she, who generally complained of the length of the school hours which deprived her of her idolised granddaughter’s company, should now of her own free will suggest a far longer separation, seemed incredible. The child was quick to see that her own behaviour had brought her grandmother to such a pass. By her ravings and recriminations she had made herself intolerable. Her grandmother was glad to get rid of her.

“I was thunderstruck,” she writes. “Nothing but wicked pride kept me from throwing myself on my grandmother’s neck and asking pardon for my folly; for I realised how wild and extravagant I had been. But what grandmother had told me about X——, a tall youth, whom I thought both handsome and clever, had so puffed me up that I could not see a young person like myself, close upon twelve, kneeling to ask forgiveness like a little girl. So, though my heart was in my mouth all the while, I merely said—

“‘Very well, grandmother, it is understood, I will be a boarder as soon as you like.’

“‘To-morrow,’ she replied.”

It will be seen from these reflections that her father’s and grandmother’s adoration had not, as it might well have done, completely warped their idolised Juliette’s disposition. They had made her absurdly vain, but they had not stifled a certain critical sense which even at that early age the little girl was beginning to turn upon herself. In this wholesome exercise she was encouraged by her mother’s severity. Whenever her father praised, her mother scolded.

“When father,” she writes, “spoke of my intelligence and my good looks, mother declared that I was as stupid as I was plain. It seemed to me that both of them exaggerated. And I began to judge myself, as I have done ever since, with a certain detachment. At heart I am really grateful to my mother for having preserved me from complete self-satisfaction.”[16]

Juliette’s career as a boarding-school miss, which resulted from her enthusiasm for and her disappointment with the scheme of National Workshops, was destined to be as short-lived as that great national experiment.

It was bad enough to be un enfant gâté removed from her fond relatives and subjected to all the rules of an institution. But her personal sorrows were intensified by the thought of hundreds of thousands of workpeople about to be threatened with starvation. By this apprehension Juliette’s schoolfellows were likewise depressed. An atmosphere of gloom pervaded the playground. Instead of playing games, the girls gathered together to discuss the fate of their unfortunate compatriots. “There was not one of us,” Juliette writes, “who did not deny herself goodies in order to save a few pence with which to help these poor people. We were always counting up our resources. We thought we might just be able to feed one of them. I decided that we would address an elegant epistle to the minister Trélat,[17] whom we abhorred. For him we held responsible for everything. We would propose to him to undertake the support of one of the workmen from the National Workshops. Certainly one out of a hundred thousand (sic)[18] was not much; but if every pension did the same, some would be saved in any case.”[19]

The composition of such a letter was not easy. In order to bring to bear upon it as much intelligence as possible, the republican scholars classified themselves in groups, eleven in all. Each group drew up a draft of the letter. These drafts were compared, the best passages selected from each, and finally the letter was dispatched to a friend of Juliette in Paris, that same Professor Charles who had embraced her on her fourth birthday. He was now a public functionary, and he was requested to deliver to the minister the all-important missive.

“Daily,” records Juliette, “we expected the arrival of our protégée, our atelier national, as we called him. He had been instructed by the famous letter to present himself at the Pensionnat André, and to announce himself as Juliette Lambert’s protégée. His benefactresses meanwhile were busily preparing for his arrival. Cakes and sweetmeats were tabooed. ”Nous économisions avec frénésie,“ writes Juliette. They also, under every imaginable pretext, begged from their friends and relatives.

One of them had been so fortunate as to obtain a suit of clothes belonging to her brother. Having cleaned and mended it with the greatest care, she kept it in readiness for the atelier national, who would doubtless arrive in rags.

Meanwhile the plot was kept a dead secret; for the conspirators were well aware that their sympathy for ces monstres des ateliers nationaux would meet with no encouragement at home.

While at Chauny the Mlles. André’s pupils were eagerly awaiting the arrival of their expected monstre, at Paris affairs were moving quickly. The men who had been paid forty cents a day for digging trenches in the Champs de Mars and filling them up again were sticking to their job in defiance of the Government’s orders to disband. The Socialists sympathised with them and organised street manifestations in their favour. Finally, on the 23rd of June, the capital broke out into open insurrection. It was at this juncture that Juliette received, not the eagerly expected atelier national, but a letter from Professor Charles which dashed all her hopes to the ground. He, to whom had been entrusted that elegant epistle to the minister, had basely deserted the young friends who had confided in him. Professor Charles had no sympathy with the State-employed workmen; he described them in his letter to Juliette as ces misérables qui t’intéressent. Charles was immediately banished from Juliette’s heart. Her ex-ami Charles, she called him, severely, when she announced to her comrades this terrible disappointment.

Then there followed much secret confabulation among the Republican groups of the pension. The pupils agreed that while blood was flowing in the streets of Paris, they at Chauny could not remain inactive. Already the revolution in the capital was finding an echo in the provincial town. Bands of rebels were marching down the streets. Why should not les demoiselles de la pension André join them? Juliette counted among her treasures a large handkerchief given her by her father and emblazoned with the words: Vive la République, Démocratique et Sociale. Attaching this emblem to a pole abstracted from the wood-shed, the girls, under Juliette’s leadership, organised themselves into a procession and marched round the playground, crying: “Long live the Democratic and Social Republic. Long live the rebels. We will not disband. We will not disband.”

This manifestation, the tumultuous scenes to which it led, the defiant words which she addressed to her governesses, resulted in Juliette’s expulsion from school. For the Mlles. André rightly regarded her as the leader of the revolution.

Mlle. Sophie conducted her back to her grandmother’s house. Mme. Seron was already regretting having sent her granddaughter away. She would, therefore, have been glad to see her back under almost any circumstances. But to find her distinguishing herself as the originator and ringleader of a rebellion gratified the pride and ambition of her own rebellious heart. So, after listening to Mlle. Sophie’s story, Mme. Seron said with dignity: “If you regard her behaviour as a defiance of your authority, then you are quite right to dismiss her.... But this episode shows me Juliette as I like to see her, displaying a determination and a courage such as are not given to every one. Since, without my seeking her, the child has been brought back to me, neither she nor I will be distressed. I have rather, mademoiselle, to thank you than to ask you to reconsider your decision.”

Thus after a few weeks terminated Juliette’s career as a boarder, and, indeed, her schooldays, for she never returned to the pension.

At Chivres, whither, on the 1st of July, Juliette went for a three months’ visit, she found herself promptly deposed from the pedestal on to which, as a reward for her defiance of authority, her grandmother and her father, too, had elevated her. The aunts had never heard of such nonsense; they scolded her roundly for her conduct. They had no sympathy whatever with the ateliers nationaux. And, during the violent suppression of the rising which followed, their sympathies were entirely with the bourgeoisie. Juliette was condemned to keep her opinions to herself, and even to read the newspaper by stealth. Instead of arguing about things she did not understand, she worked hard at her Latin. And in the serenity of her aunts’ presence, contrasting with their educated minds her own empty little head, she came to see herself as she really was: a pretentious young person, very ignorant, and fond of airing opinions she had borrowed from other people.

Consequently it was in a chastened frame of mind that Juliette returned in the autumn to Chauny. And her grandmother found her quite willing to fall in with the new scheme of life which she suggested. The storms of the past had strengthened Mme. Seron’s conviction that Juliette was a child to be led and not driven. In broaching the subject of her future studies, therefore, Mme. Seron began with this tactful observation—

“Now, my Juliette, you will do exactly as you like. You will learn what you wish, or you will, if you prefer it, learn nothing at all. But there is one thing in which I do ask you to take an interest: that is housekeeping. I will give you complete charge of our house for six months. You shall be its mistress to order and to spend. I shall merely advise you. As you are fond of the appointing, the arrangement, the decoration of a home, you will have full scope for the development of your taste. If you would like lessons in cooking and sewing, you have only to say so. I want to persuade you, too, that an art, and above all arts, music, embellishes life. The new organist is a remarkably good teacher. The piano bores you, but I wish you to cultivate your voice. And then I have another wish: I want you to try the violin. But, I repeat, you shall do as you like in everything.”[20]

To these diplomatic suggestions Juliette was graciously pleased to reply—

“Grandmother, I shall be delighted to keep house; it will be very interesting. I will certainly learn the violin. That will be quite out of the common: and I will cultivate my voice.”

How the Seron household fared during the régime of this young lady of twelve Juliette has not told us. But that her grandmother’s somewhat bold experiment was in the end eminently successful is attested by the fact that throughout her long life Mme. Adam has been renowned as a first-rate maîtresse de maison; and that this reputation is fully justified is the experience of all those who, like the present writer, have partaken of her lavish hospitality.

As for the rest of her studies, Mme. Seron had been well advised to leave it to her granddaughter to decide as to whether she would continue them. Juliette was far too ambitious to be content with her very meagre knowledge. And it was at her own suggestion that her father was asked to draw up a time-table for his daughter.

A professor from the boys’ school opposite was engaged to give her lessons; and Dr. Lambert himself, when he came to Chauny, superintended her studies. He read her Racine, and persuaded her to copy daily five pages from the pen of that great French classic. The doctor, as we have said, was himself a pure classicist. He used to say to his daughter, “Be a Grecian, Juliette, if you desire initiation into the worship of the eternally beautiful, into all that raises man above the age in which he lives.”[21]

In order to accustom his daughter to what he called the admirable sonority of notre langue initiatrice he read her passages from Homer in the Greek original. He dictated to her word by word translations of whole chapters of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In these lessons, in his own reading and in his talks with Juliette, Dr. Lambert found consolation for his bitter political disillusionment. “Books,” he would say, “are our greatest solace, when everything else is taken from us they remain.”[22]

He refused to talk of politics. The collapse of the June insurrection, its brutal suppression by General Cavaignac, and, finally, the election on the 10th of December, 1848, of his enemy, Louis Napoléon, as President of the Republic had disappointed all his hopes.

In the glorious days of the Republic’s dawn Dr. Lambert had consented to be Mayor of Blérancourt. His daughter describes how she and her grandmother came over from Chauny to see the Mayor, attired in a workman’s blue blouse and wearing the tricolour scarf tied with red, plant the Tree of Liberty, a young poplar, in the village square. In his delight at what seemed to promise the realisation of all his dreams, this agnostic had become reconciled even to the curé. The village priest was present to bless the Tree of Liberty. And in his speech this broad-minded cleric declared that the Republic, if it practised its doctrines of liberty, fraternity and equality, would realise the gospel ideal, but that it could only rise to such a height provided that all republicans in spirit, if not in form, were as Christian as the new Mayor. Then, much to his daughter’s astonishment, Dr. Lambert replied that the Republic, with its principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, had without doubt originated in Christianity; that Jesus Christ was the first Socialist and the first Republican; that republicans had much to learn from the Church, but that the Church on its side had to learn from republicans to adore nature and to follow science. “My dear Mayor,” said M. le Curé after the ceremony, “you would accept the Christian religion blindfold if only it would consent to become pagan.” “Yes,” replied the Mayor, laughing, “but I want you in return to accept my paganism, which is founded on a love of nature, on condition that it is inspired by Christian virtues.”

Alas! only a few months later that roseate dawn of optimistic idealism had faded into the night of grim reaction. One by one the socialistic experiments of 1848 had failed. The socialist leader, Louis Blanc, had been discredited and driven into exile. The more moderate Ledru-Rollin, having, like most moderates, failed to please any party, had been excluded from the Government. And by the end of the year, after all her bright dreams of liberty, the one cry which went up from France was for a strong government. The cry was answered by Louis Napoléon’s election to the presidency. Old Dr. Seron’s prophecy had come true. Encouraged by the success of his divinations, Juliette’s grandfather continued to prognosticate. “Sure as my name is Seron,” he declared, “Louis Napoléon Buonaparte, from simple Prince Louis, from simple Buonaparte, will, before the expiration of his presidency, become Emperor Napoléon III.”[23]

“Alas! he is right,” said Dr. Lambert[24].... “All my beautiful fabric has fallen, stone by stone; and I am crushed beneath its ruins.... Juliette, I shall never again talk or write to you of politics.” But, though abstaining from political talk, Dr. Lambert could not withdraw from interest in political affairs. Though he had resigned his mayoralty, though he had severed all official connection with this sad travesty of a Republic, though the Tree of Liberty which he had planted had been dug up, he still clung to the vestige of his political dreams. And he continued to try to carve out a new destiny for France. If he could not work for her in the open, he would plot and plan in secret. Dr. Lambert, like many another disillusioned French republican, joined one of those secret societies which were being formed all over France. Juliette, when she next visited Blérancourt, found her parents’ home the centre of mysterious meetings, her father the recipient of mysterious correspondence which his wife urged him to destroy. One day, rummaging in the attic, Juliette chanced upon a hoard of papers, lists of names and letters, the import of which, enlightened by her parents’ conversation, she was quick to guess; and instantly there flashed on her vivid imagination the whole danger of the situation. With Juliette Adam action has never failed to follow swiftly upon the heels of thought. An hour or two after that discovery Juliette was busy making herself a big pocket, which she tied round her waist and wore beneath her frock. In a day or two that which she dreaded happened. Dr. Lambert’s house was visited by the Procureur de la République, accompanied by an escort of gendarmes. To the dismay of Juliette’s parents the Procureur produced a document entitling him to search the house. He began with the doctor’s desk in the room where the family was then sitting at lunch.

“What you are doing is not at all nice. It is even indiscreet,” said Juliette, much to the functionary’s amusement. It was a sultry midsummer day. Said Juliette to her terrified mother: “May I not go and tell Blatier” (the gardener, who, with a scared look, was peeping through the window) “to cool some cider for these gentlemen?” Mme. Lambert made a sign of assent. A minute before, when she had wished to go into another room, a gendarme had prevented her. But no objection was offered to her little girl’s departure. All the while, however, that she was telling Blatier to draw water from the well she felt a gendarme’s eyes fixed upon her through the window. While the gardener was drawing the water, she went down into the cellar, brought up some bottles, placed them in a pail. Intentionally prolonging the operation, she went down to fetch another pail, then, turning round, made as if she would return slowly to the room. But no sooner was she out of the gendarme’s sight than with one bound, having taken off her shoes, she flew upstairs to the attic, seized the papers, slipped them into her pocket, and in a trice had put on her shoes again, was back in the sitting-room, having apparently come straight from her cider-cooling in the courtyard. M. le Procureur was still busily searching. Having examined the living-rooms, he and his escort searched the stable, the coach-house, the cellar. Then, leaving one gendarme below, he went up into the attic.

“When father heard them go upstairs,” writes Juliette, “he rose, he looked very agitated, and I saw mother, saying to herself: ‘The papers must be there; we are lost.’

“Then, taking a glass of cider, I went up to father, whom the gendarme was closely observing. He put away the glass I offered him, but I, as if persuading him to drink, bent towards him and whispered: ‘Be calm. I have the papers.’ Father drank the glass of cider at one gulp. I embraced him. The gendarme was touched by our affection. Father clasped[25] me in his arms so tight that I thought I should have been stifled!...”

The Procureur de la République came downstairs. Before leaving he said to Juliette: “Mademoiselle, I am glad to tell you that we have found nothing to compromise your father. Had we discovered proofs of the matters of which he stands accused it would have been serious. For your father’s name figures on the list of those liable to arrest, imprisonment, or even deportation. He is reputed a dangerous revolutionary and propagandist to boot.”

“Thank you, sir,” replied Juliette. “As you are so fatherly to me, you, too, must have a daughter.” The Procureur smiled, but did not reply.

For the time, this child of thirteen had saved her father’s liberty, perhaps his life. But she had not placed him out of danger, because she had not cured him of plotting against the Government. Henceforth, indeed, until Dr. Lambert’s death, his daughter was to live in constant dread of her father’s so embroiling himself with the authorities as to be clapped into prison or even deported. The episode we have just related was only the first of many times when he narrowly escaped arrest. When, years later, Juliette was living with her father in Paris and he was late in returning to meals, she always expected to hear that he was in prison.

Not long after this domiciliary visit, in the spring of 1850, Dr. Lambert entertained the idea of giving up his practice at Blérancourt, and joining one of the phalansteries or socialistic communities then in vogue. However, he listened to the entreaties of his family and renounced this project.

“Juliette,” said Mme. Seron to her granddaughter, “how can you wish a country to be led by persons so wild as your father?” “And, for the moment,” writes Juliette, “I agreed with her.”

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Souvenirs, I. 247.

[9] Biographie Générale under “Ledru-Rollin.”

[10] See post, 243.

[11] Souvenirs, I. 272.

[12] Souvenirs, I. 280.

[13] Ibid., 281.

[14] Souvenirs, I. 295.

[15] Souvenirs, I. 300.

[16] Souvenirs, I. 348.

[17] Trélat, Minister of Education, so Dr. Lambert had told Juliette, had been one of the bitterest opponents of the National Workshops. But, seeing the danger of closing them suddenly, he had proposed to dismiss the workmen gradually, and he had appointed his son-in-law, Lalanne, to reorganise the whole movement. But it was too late.—Souvenirs, I. 298-9.

[18] Nineteen hundred thousand is the number given by Professor Guérard.—French Civilisation in the Nineteenth Century, 201.

[19] Souvenirs, I. 305.

[20] Souvenirs, I. 325.

[21] Souvenirs, I. 317.

[22] Ibid., 326.

[23] Souvenirs, I. 328.

[24] Ibid., 329.

[25] Souvenirs, I. 337.

CHAPTER IV

FIRST MARRIAGE AND PARIS

1849-1858

“Je vais devenir quelqu’un. J’irai à Paris.”—Mme. Adam, Roman de mon Enfance.

It will be seen from the events recorded in the last chapter that Juliette at thirteen was both mentally and morally much more developed than a young English girl of eighteen or even twenty. Children in France, largely because they associate constantly with their elders instead of being relegated to the nursery, grow up more quickly than in England. A little French girl often is quite a little woman. She will go with her mother to pay calls, and at home help her mother to entertain visitors. The system in vogue in Juliette’s childhood of marrying girls at fifteen or sixteen naturally favoured their early development. The early marriage was the outcome of the mariage de convenance, which was more general in Juliette’s youth than now. When marriages were arranged by the family it was unnecessary to wait until the young people, the bride at any rate, was old enough to choose wisely for herself. Though it would not have been admitted that girls were married against their will, though their consent to the marriage was generally asked, not by the aspirant, usually, but by the girls’ parents, it was a mere matter of form, everything having been settled beforehand. Moreover, the girl in question, when appealed to in this perfunctory manner, was not encouraged to consult her heart. Indeed, that very uncertain and awkward factor is not supposed to intervene in what is known as the real French marriage. It is essentially a business affair, a matter of social position and of pounds, shillings and pence. We shall find, for instance, that in arranging a marriage for her granddaughter, Mme. Seron’s chief concern was that Juliette should have an establishment in Paris. This, in the first place, would give her an opportunity of displaying to full advantage her many gifts, and, secondly, would enable her fond grandmother to shine in metropolitan circles, for Mme. Seron hoped to make some arrangement whereby she could for a considerable part of the year reside with her granddaughter.

Juliette was not married until she was sixteen. But, as we have seen, no sooner had she entered her teens than her grandmother and father began—in divergent directions, of course—to make plans for her alliance.

It was about this time, that the parents of young X——, a youth of seventeen, proposed to Mme. Seron that in a few years he should marry Juliette. The following year brought a renewal of this proposal and also a second offer of marriage from another quarter. Dr. Lambert refused to listen to either of these requests for his daughter’s hand. His persistence in his idea of a working-class marriage for his daughter drove his mother-in-law into a frenzy and produced another drame de famille. Mme. Seron threatened her son-in-law with the gendarmes if he attempted to carry out his nefarious scheme. Dr. Lambert threatened to take Juliette abroad out of her grandmother’s reach. But in the end Mme. Seron conquered, and Dr. Lambert went off in a towering rage. For several months he ceased to visit Chauny.

Juliette, who had now grown into a handsome girl, had already attracted considerable attention at Chauny. Those who are privileged to know her now, in her declining years, can see how lovely she must have been in her youth. “She has had that singular good fortune ...,” writes one of her friends to-day, “to have been adorably beautiful (adorablement belle).”[26] The delicately moulded features, the animated expression, the satirical glance, the dignified bearing, the vivacious manner, which at eighty never fail to charm, must have indeed been dazzling in her far-off girlhood. In a word, Juliette Lambert was as gifted physically as mentally. No wonder that when, wearing a pretty blonde cap with pink roses, and escorted by her grandfather and an old friend, Blondeau, who lived in the same house, she made her first appearance at the Chauny theatre, there was quite a sensation, although when she returned her grandmother had to scold her for having marred her beauty by weeping over the play.

The quarrel between Mme. Seron and her son-in-law having died down, Juliette was permitted to spend the Christmas of 1850, and to stay on into the New Year, at Blérancourt.

It was during this visit that she made the acquaintance of the man who was to be her first husband. She was told one day that her father expected a friend to lunch, that the guest was an advanced republican and a Comtist to boot. This was the first time that Juliette had heard that name of Comte, which she was to learn to know only too well later. The guest came. He was a barrister (avocat) at the Paris Court of Appeal. But he lived at Soissons, where he was conducting a series of law-suits on behalf of an aunt. His name was Lamessine. He was of the south Italian type, with dark eyes, olive skin and shining black hair, for his grandfather had been a Sicilian who had settled in France and been naturalised during the Revolution. Dr. Lambert’s visitor was reputed a man of talent. His brilliant conversation pleased Juliette; but she detested the scepticism which led him to maintain that good is merely the necessary balance to evil, and that society must grow increasingly corrupt until it produces a new “vegetation.” Against such doctrines Juliette could not refrain from protesting. There was an animated discussion between the Sicilian, who believed in nothing, and his host’s idealist daughter, who was ready to believe in everything that was good. The guest departed with the words, “And I hope you bear me no grudge, Mademoiselle la Batailleuse.” “I only pray,” she replied, “that Heaven may reveal to you some knowledge, however slight, of the good and the beautiful.”[27]

In the spring, while Juliette was visiting her aunts, M. Lamessine came to Chivres. There, though he found La Batailleuse more charming than ever in her peasant’s costume, which by clever contrivances and adaptations she had learnt to make extremely becoming, he met with a cold welcome from the aunts and was not encouraged to return. In June, however, while Juliette was at Blérancourt, he came to see her again. Political affairs were moving towards Napoléon’s December coup d’état and the empire which Dr. Seron had so persistently prophesied. There was a mysterious meeting at Dr. Lambert’s. And the next day Juliette’s father said to her, “The crisis is grave; but we have with us a man in whose veins flows the blood of the carbonari. He will do something.” That man was M. Lamessine.

In December the barrister came to plead at Chauny. He presented a letter of introduction to Dr. and Mme. Seron. They, unlike the aunts, received him most cordially. Having been invited to dinner, he told Juliette that, influenced by her arguments he had become less sceptical. She did not believe him. She was vaguely conscious of some ulterior motive in his words. She felt ill at ease and left the salon early. On the morrow her grandmother announced that M. Lamessine had asked for her hand in marriage, that his treatment of the important matter of settlements was satisfactory, and that he was willing for Mme. Seron to spend every winter with her granddaughter and her husband when they should go to live in Paris.

But Juliette was not the kind of young person thus to be married out of hand and merely to please her grandmother. She was thunderstruck at such an announcement. She would not dream, she protested, of marrying a man who was twice her age. In vain did Mme. Seron plead that M. Lamessine was très bien, that his coming was providential, that resembling feature for feature one of the heroes of her favourite novelist Balzac, he could not fail to be the most suitable of husbands. “You must admit that I am right, Juliette,” she said, and forthwith she took down the volume in question and read the description. But even this striking likeness failed to reconcile her recalcitrant granddaughter to the match. Juliette appealed to her grandfather and to her old friend Blondeau, to save her from so uncongenial a mating, but to no purpose, for Mme. Seron had already won them over to her side. There was, however, one member of the family who would be less easy to convince. And Juliette, as was her custom, called in Blérancourt to redress the balance at Chauny. Dr. Lambert, knowing more about the proposed bridegroom than his mother-in-law, was horrified at the idea of his marrying his daughter. A few days later when he and his wife came over to Chauny, he was aghast to find how far things had gone. He would, he declared, never give his consent to the marriage.

Throughout the succeeding months there followed a long-drawn-out war of words, enlivened by perpetual drames de famille. At one time Juliette was forcibly carried off by her father to Blérancourt, then brought back to Chauny by her mother, who desired the match and kept her at Chauny out of her father’s influence. He, unhappy man, worn out by domestic grief and political disappointment, fell ill, and during his illness once again narrowly escaped arrest. Finally, his wife and mother-in-law broke down his resistance. By their importunity they had rendered his life unbearable. In a moment of passion he seems to have said: “Very well, do what you will,” then to have given his formal consent, without which they could do nothing, and to have signed the fatal document which sealed Juliette’s unhappiness. Almost immediately Dr. Lambert repented; but it was too late, and all he could do was to signify his disapproval by absenting himself from the wedding.

The unhappy subject of so much dissension had been reduced almost to welcome marriage even with so uncongenial a mate as M. Lamessine as one way of escape from perpetual family quarrels.

But alas! experience proved that Dr. Lambert’s objections to the union had been only too well founded. “The man whom they have chosen for your husband,” her father had written to her, “is not one whom you can ever love or who will ever love you.”

With a delicate hand and in a few poignant phrases Mme. Adam in her Souvenirs passes lightly over her married misery. Until after her daughter was born, in September 1854, she kept her sufferings to herself, dreading the anguish which a revelation of them would inflict on her loved ones. It was during her confinement at Blérancourt that Dr. Lambert discovered her unhappiness. Some months later, while she was visiting her granddaughter, it was borne in on Mme. Seron that she had committed the gravest of blunders in marrying Juliette against her will. Now that the last instalment of his wife’s dowry had been paid, M. Lamessine shamelessly avowed that he had never intended to keep his promise of receiving his wife’s grandmother as an inmate of his home every winter.

“You imagine Juliette happy,” he said. “She is not. Our misunderstandings are perpetual. If we had you as a third, what would they be like?”

“Is it true, Juliette, that you are unhappy?”

“Yes,” she replied, “as unhappy as it is possible to be.”

Mme. Seron rose. She leant against a piece of furniture to avoid falling, for she shook like a tree which has been uprooted.

She reminded her son-in-law of his promises. “They were only necessary,” he remarked cynically, “as long as you had not completely fulfilled yours.”

Mme. Seron left the house abruptly. Juliette never saw her again. She went home to Chauny to die. In eleven months she was followed by her husband, Dr. Seron, for, as he said, he could not live without “his dear scold” (sa chère grondeuse).

During the first three years of their married life the Lamessines resided at Soissons. But during that time they paid a visit to Paris; and Juliette had her first unforgettable impression of that brilliant city which had figured so large in the dreams of herself and her grandmother.

When Lamessine first proposed to her that she should wean her baby, Alice, and come with him to Paris, she trembled. For in Paris, she felt, her lot would be cast. Paris held her destiny. Her grandmother’s spirit seemed to dominate hers as soon as Paris entered into her life.

“Bah,” said her father, when she told him of her hesitation. “Don’t be afraid of it. Set foot in it bravely. Look it in the face, this Paris. One of two things will happen: either you will make your name there, as your poor grandmother desired, and then the trials of your unhappy marriage will not have been in vain; or you will break your bonds and come back to your father. With us you will lead a life, if not happy, at least free from those marital responsibilities which fill me with fear for your future.”[28]

The Paris which Juliette visited in 1855 was Paris of the early Second Empire, “still in the freshness of its hopes and enthusiasm.” It was Paris of the first universal exhibition, which was visited by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Paris at the close of the Crimean War.

This Paris fully came up to Juliette’s expectations. Never had she been so impressed save when as a little girl she had caught her first glimpse of the sea at Boulogne.[29]

“It is impossible,” she writes, “to imagine the complete amazement of a young provincial beholding Paris for the first time, overwhelmed by myriads of sights never dreamed of.” From that moment Juliette adored Paris with all the enthusiasm of her passionate soul. At a closer acquaintance, during a residence in the heart of Paris extending through several decades, it has never loosened its hold on her vivid imagination. We shall find her friend, Gambetta, in future years, speaking to her of votre Paris.

After a fortnight spent with her husband in an hotel on the Place Louvois, she still found herself, “uninitiated into the hundredth part of what she wanted to know.”[30] Herein lies the secret of the overpowering impression which Paris made upon her: “What she wanted to know!” Paris was to her the master-key to all knowledge. In Paris lived the great leaders of thought, with whose ideas her father had made her familiar, the idealist politicians, whose Utopian dreams she had made her own. In the streets of Paris had ebbed and flowed the tide of that wonderful revolution which had found an echo in Chauny streets, and even in Mlle. André’s pension. In Paris might be seen those exquisite masterpieces of Greek art, the living symbols of her divine Homer.

Nevertheless a shadow fell even over the radiant exultation of those first weeks in Paris. From infancy to old age Juliette Adam has always been ambitious. It was no mere obscure existence in the great city that she had pictured in her youthful dreams. Hers was to be no diary of a nobody. Encouraged by her grandmother, she longed for fame. But alas! her hopes were dashed when she found herself lost in the vast crowds which thronged the boulevards, when she regarded the miles of well-filled shelves in the immense halls of the Imperial Library. It seemed as if the only homage Paris would ever render her would be the admiring glances of street arabs, who distinguished her as they had done another Juliette. The young Mme. Lamessine despaired of ever emerging from the mass, of ever carving for herself even the tiniest niche in the temple of literary renown. For it was to be a distinguished writer that she aspired. Already she had quite a hoard of youthful scribblings, infantile verses which her grandparents thought wonderful, romances over whose patriotic incidents the youthful authoress had wept bitter tears, a prize essay, written in competition with the pupils of the boys’ school opposite her Chauny home.

During her life at Soissons, it was in study and in literary composition that Juliette had sought distraction from domestic unhappiness. Some of her verses, a poem entitled Myosotis, had actually been published and set to music by the cathedral organist.

But it was after her return from Paris that she achieved a success which encouraged her to hope that, perhaps, after all she might not pass her life unnoticed.

The popular novelist, Alphonse Karr, was then contributing to the Siècle weekly articles on social subjects, entitled “Buzzings” (Bourdonnements). A girl friend of Juliette’s, Pauline Barbereux, used to bring her the Siècle and together they read Karr’s articles. One of these was on the crinoline, then at the height of its vogue. After having thoroughly enjoyed himself at the expense of all its absurdities, Karr declared that there was not a single young and pretty woman in France with sufficient independence of mind not to wear it. “There is I,” cried Juliette. “And what if I wrote and told him so?” For though affecting the full skirt, pretty Mme. Lamessine had always stopped short of the crinoline. Pauline was delighted with the idea. So together they set to work to concoct the letter, which should, of course, be anonymous. The writer, therefore, was able to enlarge on the charms of this independent young female who refused to answer to the beck and call of fashion.

“Yes, sir,” wrote Juliette, “there is a pretty woman of twenty who does not wear the crinoline, who has never worn it, there is one in France, in the provinces, and that one is I, Juliette.”[31]

Mme. Adam, throughout her long life, has ever been a fervent feminist, passionately interested in woman’s rôle and position in society. In her childhood’s desultory reading she had eagerly devoured a volume on the Fronde. It interested her because women played the principal part in it. And she was thinking of those frondeuses when she led her schoolfellows round the playground behind the banner of the social democratic handkerchief.

It was not unnatural, therefore, that Juliette should insinuate into this, her first contribution to the press, her own views on feminism, though they were expressed as far as possible in the style of Alphonse Karr. To the accompaniment of little Alice’s baby gurglings, she read the rough draft to Pauline, who, having declared it superb, dictated it solemnly while Juliette copied it on to magnificent paper. Then the wonderful document, “the article,” as Pauline christened it, was re-read, folded carefully, put into an imposing envelope, signed with a beautiful seal, which was engraved with the writer’s Christian name. Thereupon, writes Juliette, we repaired (no word less ceremonious could express such an act) with our precious packet to the post.

Oh, that week, how interminable it seemed! Could it be possible that Alphonse Karr would reply to the letter? On the night before the Siècle’s appearance Juliette dreamed of her poem, Myosotis. She interpreted that dream as a good sign. The 20th of February, 1856, dawned. Would Paris read that letter signed Juliette?... Pauline comes in breathless, pale with excitement. The Siècle flutters in her hand. “Juliette,” she cries, “it is all there.” “All.” “And then,” writes Juliette,[32] “we take two chairs and we draw them close to one another. We unfold the paper, and each holding one corner, we read. Yes, the whole of my letter is there. I read it. Pauline reads it. Not a word has been changed. I burst into tears. Pauline weeps too. Baby Alice, playing on the carpet, when she sees us crying, begins to howl. Her godmother, Pauline, soothes and consoles her. I think of my grandmother ... and I cry: ‘Grandmother, I shall be a writer.’

“I send father my article and tell him how I came to write it.”

This somewhat severe critic replied at length, and for the first time, it appeared, discerned in his daughter a promise of literary talent.

For the rest of her time at Soissons Juliette read voraciously, desiring to prepare herself for Paris. Whirled suddenly into the great vortex of metropolitan life, as she expected to be, she could not hope to have any time for study. She must, therefore, work hard to fill up the gaps in her desultory education and to equip herself for the brilliant career awaiting her.

Finally her hopes were realised. She found herself the mistress of a flat in Paris in the Rue de Rivoli, with a balcony looking on to the Louvre and close to the Museum of Antiquities, the temple of her gods. Her grandmother’s faith in her seemed to be justified.

But alas! as the weeks went on, Juliette herself suffered disappointment. The society in which she moved was utterly uncongenial. Her husband’s friends bored and revolted her; they talked of nothing but business; and her husband himself, when not discussing affairs, was for ever extolling the doctrines of Auguste Comte, whose positivism seemed to Juliette the negation of all her idealism. This disappointment, and the unhappiness of her home life, brought on an attack of neuralgia. She consulted the doctor of her quartier, a certain Dr. Bonnard, who had already corresponded with her father about a medical pamphlet, of which Dr. Lambert was the author. The doctor was quick to see that what Juliette needed was the physic of congenial society. He himself fortunately was in touch with literary people. He introduced her to two circles, one poetical, the other philosophical, where his young patient speedily felt herself at home. It was through Dr. Bonnard that the charming young Mme. Lamessine became a member of L’Union des Poètes. And it was a member of the Union, who, on a certain memorable day, took Juliette to see her first great Paris celebrity. This was the aged Béranger, a poet, whose name had been one of the household words of her childhood, whose songs exalting his adored Emperor her grandfather had known by heart.

Never had Juliette seen “a simpler, more charming, more paternal, more kindly satirical old man.”[33] The poet had read some of his young visitor’s compositions. And the verdict he passed on them was frank and somewhat brutal.

“My child,” he said, “you will never be a poet, but you may one day be a writer.”

Juliette’s reception of this crushing dictum, while showing her sensitiveness to criticism, proves that her reason had not been warped by all the extravagant adulation she had received in childhood. For she bore the veteran poet no grudge for his disappointment of her hopes. But, from that day, she ceased to write poetry and withdrew from the Poet’s Union.

As she was leaving, Béranger said to her, “Good-bye, my child. You will soon forgive me.”

“Good-bye?” said Juliette, “why not au revoir? Don’t you like me? Don’t you wish ever to see me again?”

Shrugging his shoulders and looking through the open windows, he said, “I think that I shall soon be going up there to see the Dieu des bonnes gens.” He died shortly afterwards at the age of seven-and-seventy, in July 1857.

Before her reluctant resignation from the Poet’s Union Juliette had begun to frequent a philosophical circle to which Dr. Bonnard introduced her. We have seen how from her tenderest childhood her father had made her acquainted with most of the numerous philosophical systems—the ideas of Cousin, Fourier, Comte, Proudhon, and others—which were at that time revolutionising human thought. With her natural quickness and keenness of intuition Juliette had comprehended their main principles. Consequently she was not the least confused by the learned discussions which took place in the salon of her new friends, M. and Mme. Fauvety.

M. Charles Fauvety was founder and editor of a well-known publication, La Revue Philosophique. Among the chief contributors to this erudite magazine was the philosopher, M. Charles Renouvier, the author of a learned work, Essais de Critique Générale, in four volumes, which he was then preparing, and which was not completed until 1864.

M. Renouvier possessed that inestimable gift of lucid exposition, which is so essentially French. Listening to, engaging in, and noting down his conversations with his editor, Juliette continued and carried to a point far advanced for one of her age and sex that philosophical education which her father had begun. It had long been her habit to keep a diary and to insert in it accounts of any discussion which interested her. And it is to this habit that we owe the reproduction in her Souvenirs of those entrancing conversations which give us so vivid a picture of the intellectual life of the period.

Throughout Juliette’s early womanhood and maturity there was no one who exercised a greater influence on French thought than Hippolyte Taine. His influence was at its zenith in the sixties; but already in this year, 1857, those who like Fauvety and Renouvier were gifted with prophetic insight could discern his coming greatness.

The publication of Taine’s Essais de Critique et d’Histoire was a great event in the circle of La Revue Philosophique.

“These young men[34] are admirable,” cried Renouvier.[35] “And seldom has it been given to forerunners, such as I, to take so great a delight in their disciples. For I, in a way, hatched Taine.”

“Taine,” said the editor of La Revue Philosophique, “will remain the hope or the anxiety of every philosophical system. He has taken a scourge in his hands. For the next half-century, he will enthrone himself on the judgment seat, and he will scathe every idea which wears out with use. I, as a philosopher, fear him and rely upon him alone.”

Mme. Lamessine was not the only woman member of that erudite circle. There was Mme. Fauvety, a clever woman, who had been an actress, and for a time the rival of Rachel. She mingled intelligently in the philosophical discussions of her husband and his friends. There was also a certain Mme. Jenny d’Héricourt, the only member of the circle whom Juliette disliked. She too contributed to La Revue Philosophique; and she was tainted with that narrow bigotry and dogmatism which were characteristic of the publication, but from which the broad-minded Renouvier was entirely free. A blue-stocking of the most objectionable type, une vertu farouche, as Juliette called her, la forte Jenny was conceited, censorious, pedantic and an inveterate scandalmonger. Such a person would naturally refuse to believe that any one so young and pretty as Juliette could have the slightest comprehension of philosophy. Nevertheless, on one subject at least the feminine Juliette and the Amazonian Jenny were agreed: they both detested Proudhon. Jenny had attacked his doctrines in an extremely able book, which Juliette had read and appreciated; for the materialistic and purely economic ideas of the father of modern syndicalism had never appealed to her, and she had fought many a battle of words on that subject with Dr. Lambert, who admired him. But, when Juliette ventured to discuss the economist with his female critic, Mme. d’Héricourt was furious. “Would you believe it,” she exclaimed to Fauvety, “that young lady actually dares to take upon herself to underline Proudhon!” It was bold, doubtless, in one so young and so charming. But Mme. Lamessine, nothing daunted by Jenny’s gibes, was to be bolder still, as we shall see in the next chapter.

We should convey a very wrong impression of Juliette’s early womanhood if we represented her as entirely absorbed in abstruse studies and frequenting only philosophers and blue-stockings. The lighter sides of life have always appealed to her. As a schoolgirl she excelled in games, and she has ever loved play as well as work. Now she was eagerly grasping the opportunities of amusement which Paris of the Empire knew so well how to offer, especially to one as attractive as Mme. Lamessine.

Mme. Fauvety took her to the theatre—not to first nights, this wise ex-actress preferred to wait until the players had perfected their parts, and it was not until the last performances were announced that she considered a play really worth seeing. Alexandre Dumas fils was then at the height of his popularity. La Dame aux Camélias, Diane de Lys, La Question d’Argent, were the talk of the town. Though Juliette had ceased to write poetry, she had not ceased to associate with poets. And it was a member of the Poet’s Union who took her to her first fancy-dress ball, where her escort appeared as Vercingetorix, and she herself was disguised as the Gallic Cassandra, Vellèda. She wore a long white robe, confined by a golden girdle from which hung a gilded scythe. Her arms were bare to the shoulder, and it was for the first time in her life, she writes, “for even at dances in those days we wore sleeves.” Her light brown hair with its gleam of gold hung over her shoulders, crowned with a wreath of mistletoe. Meyerbeer, the musical idol of the early Empire, happened to be present. Vellèda made a great impression on this queer little old man. “Why! she will make me forget my Selika!” (the composition on which he was then engaged), he is said to have exclaimed. “I am too old to fall in love with a new face,” and he left the ball-room abruptly. For months afterwards every morning Juliette received a bunch of violets with the words, Souvenir ému à Vellèda—and one day came a ticket for a box for the first night of the Pardon de Ploërmel. But she never saw her aged admirer again. Some years after his death, on the occasion of the first performance of his L’Africaine, Juliette received a ticket for a box in a little casket with a bunch of violets, tied with a ribbon on which was written le dernier. “She will come to the first night of L’Africaine wherever she is,” Meyerbeer had said.

Already the Lamessines were in the whirl of political life. On the 14th of January, 1858, the evening of Orsini’s attempted assassination of the Emperor, while they were shopping in the Palais Royal, a Sicilian friend, who was with them, was arrested. On the next morning their flat was searched. But this time there were no compromising documents for Juliette to conceal. M. Lamessine had no difficulty in proving his friend’s innocence and obtaining his speedy release.

Those were the days when the long conflict between sermentistes and abstentionistes, which later was to rage high in Juliette’s salon, was just beginning. The sermentistes were those who consented to take the oath of allegiance to the Empire, the abstentionistes those who held themselves completely aloof.

Juliette and her friends at Mme. Fauvety’s were all ardent abstentionistes. They were disgusted when, in June 1857, the first so-called republican, Émile Ollivier, took the oath, on his election to the Corps Legislatif. Ollivier’s betrayal of the republican cause, they regarded as all the more inexcusable because his father, one of the stalwarts of 1848, was then in exile through his loyalty to the principles his son had sacrificed. But Ollivier and many others, who speedily followed his example, had on their side no less a democrat than Proudhon. That unflinching advocate of the people’s cause maintained that to take the oath to the Emperor was merely to recognise the people’s sovereignty embodied in the chief of the State. Such an argument did not raise Proudhon in the esteem of so uncompromising a person as Juliette.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] Léon Daudet, L’Entre-Deux-Guerres, 235 (1915).

[27] Souvenirs, I. 353.

[28] Souvenirs, II. 13.

[29] Souvenirs, I. 214.

[30] Ibid., 16.

[31] Souvenirs, II. 25.

[32] Souvenirs, II. 26.

[33] Souvenirs, II. 30.

[34] Taine, born in 1828, was then twenty-nine.

[35] Souvenirs, II. 39.

CHAPTER V

HER FIRST BOOK

1858

“L’œuvre de Mme. Juliette Lambert n’est que l’hymne triomphante des sentiments humains les plus nobles et les plus joyeux.”—Jules Lemaître.

Born and bred in an atmosphere of controversy, inheriting from her grandmother and father an argumentative disposition, it is not surprising that in the field of polemics Juliette won her first literary laurels. Neither was it inconsistent with her ambitious nature that she should have chosen for adversary the most distinguished controversialist of the day. The socialist Proudhon was regarded not only as an eminent economist but as a master of dialectics.

Proudhon’s masterpiece appeared on the 22nd of April, 1858. It was a work in three volumes, entitled La Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Eglise. Announced in 1854, this book had been eagerly awaited by philosophic readers, among whom was Juliette’s father.

Dr. Lambert wrote to his daughter that she must buy La Justice at once, and that, as she finished each volume, she must send it down to him at Chauny. It was well that Juliette carried out her father’s recommendation, for in a few days the book was suppressed[36] and its author, who had fled to Belgium, condemned to three years’ imprisonment and a fine of 4000 francs.

Juliette, as she read these pages, was compelled to recognise the excellence of the writer’s style and the skill of his dialectics. But the so-called “justice” which Proudhon here metes out to women could not but infuriate so fervent a feminist. For even a cursory survey of this book will serve to reveal that the writer here carries the anti-feminist argument to its extreme verge. No self-respecting woman could possibly read these pages without being moved to indignation, unless she resolve to treat the matter as a huge joke; but unfortunately Proudhon, like most pure economists, had no sense of humour: he only stumbled into being funny. A breath of the blessed illuminating comic spirit would have saved him from many a ludicrous absurdity.

Juliette’s resentment of the philosopher’s sweeping indictment of her sex was aggravated by his singling out for special condemnation the two women whom among her contemporaries she admired most. “J’ai la folie d’admirer,” she has said of herself; and with all the ardour of her passionate soul she admired George Sand and Daniel Stern (la Comtesse d’Agoult). It was precisely against these two distinguished writers that Proudhon directed all the vitriol of his invective. In George Sand’s work he would see nothing but une orgueilleuse impuissance.[37] Daniel Stern,[38] because in her Esquisses Morales she had ventured to maintain that woman need not necessarily be inferior to man, he decried as une femme savante qui parle sans raison ni conscience.[39]

Writhing under these insults, Juliette went one evening to Mme. Fauvety’s. There she said to Jenny d’Héricourt, “You ought to defend the women who are thus insulted, you who know so well how to wield a pen against the terrible Proudhon. It would be disgraceful to leave unanswered such abominable charges.”

“George Sand and Daniel Stern,” replied this vertu farouche, “have only what they deserve. I insist upon virtue and I practise it. Proudhon has not dared to insult me, I am certain of it, though I have not yet read his book.”

“Very well,” said Juliette. “I am nobody, it is true, although I am as virtuous as you, and I will reply to Proudhon. Women, they must be defended by women.”

This esprit de corps, this loyalty not to her sex alone, but to any cause or party, political, social or religious with which she has chosen to identify herself, has ever characterised Mme. Adam, and the conflict of her sense of solidarity with her innate Celtic rebelliousness is one of the most interesting traits in her psychology.

Thus bravely did this young woman of twenty-two take up the glove thrown down by the most eminent and the most skilful dialectician of the day. For two months she was absorbed in the writing of this, her first book. Most of the work was done at night. She would shut herself up in her room, where she was alone with little Alice. Whenever she found time to go to the Fauvety’s, M. Fauvety and M. Renouvier inquired eagerly after the progress of the great work. Mme. d’Héricourt continued scornful.

“Well, and this defence of your famous friends, how is it getting on?” she would inquire derisively. “If you succeed in carrying it through, God send those great ladies be grateful to you, seeing all the pains you seem to be taking.”[40]

“Madame,” replied Juliette, “I am taking great pains. But then you must remember I am but a novice; and you can’t expect one of my age to have the experience of veterans.”

“Veterans! Veterans!” cried the irate lady. “You mean me, doubtless. Well, if you defend some of us you are very impertinent to others.”

Finally the book was finished, and entitled Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes. It was read to M. Fauvety, who approved and gave useful advice. But to Juliette’s dismay he expressed a doubt whether a reply to so powerful an adversary, so acrimonious a controversialist, so consummate a master of dialectics would ever find a publisher.

In her passionate enthusiasm for her task, such a horrid fear had never once entered Juliette’s mind.

“What!” she cried, “my poor book which has devoured my nights will never see day?”

“You have made a mot,” replied the editor of La Revue Philosophique, laughing. “But now you must captivate some great publisher. Don’t write, but offer your manuscript in person. Who knows? However, I doubt whether you will succeed when your book has been read.”

Such an opinion from so competent a critic would have discouraged most writers. But Juliette, with a buoyant hopefulness which has ever supported her throughout all the trials of her long career, was not deterred. She merely concluded that such difficulties in the way of publication would involve her having to defray the expenses of the book’s appearance. Consequently she went down to Chauny to demand her father’s fulfilment of a rash promise that should she ever give birth to a volume he would pay for its publication.

“I told him,” writes Juliette, “that I had written a book.” “What is it?” he asked, not unnaturally. But the subject of her book was the last thing Juliette meant to reveal to this disciple of Proudhon. It would seem a thing unheard of that Dr. Lambert should be asked to pay for the publication of a book when he was ignorant of its contents. But this was Juliette’s request; and she knew her father could refuse her nothing. She was encouraged, moreover, when she heard him express his annoyance with the philosopher for his gross attacks on such devoted republicans as George Sand and Daniel Stern. “You must have been sadly wounded, Juliette?” he inquired. “Yes, I was heart-broken,” she replied. Yet she did not enlighten him any further. Nevertheless she returned to Paris with the thousand francs, which her doting parent calculated would suffice for the publication of her literary first-born.

Then followed the search for a publisher. Always ambitious, Juliette applied to one of the greatest publishing houses in the world. She addressed herself to M. Michel Lévy,[41] the publisher of Victor Hugo, of Sainte-Beuve, of Alexandre Dumas, who had recently discovered Renan in his garret. That famous master used to declare that Michel Lévy had been ordained by a special decree of Providence to become his publisher. Such was not Juliette’s experience; for M. Lévy’s reception of her was, to put it mildly, not encouraging.[42]

“Here is a young lady,” said his clerk, and in what a tone! “who has come about a book she has written, which she wants the firm to publish.”

Smiling, M. Lévy looked at his visitor and asked: “The subject of the book?”

“A reply to the attacks made on George Sand and Daniel Stern in La Justice dans la Révolution.”

“And this reply is by you, mademoiselle?”

“Madame, sir.”

“And you think that a book like this will be published by the house of Michel Lévy?”

“Oh, sir, I quite realise that I must bear the expense of the publication of my first book. If you would be so kind as to read it.”

“Useless, madame.”

“What! Do you decide without having looked at it?”

“Oh! I can see perfectly what your ... work is like merely by looking at you. What do you think, my good Scholl?”[43] said he, addressing some one who had just come in.

“It would be a pity,” said Scholl, “for madame to become a commonplace blue-stocking. You are quite right to discourage her, my dear Lévy. She has something better to do.”

“Monsieur Aurélien Scholl,” replied Juliette proudly, “M. Huegel, near by, has published a poem[44] by me which may not be as good as your Denise, but my prose may quite well be equal to yours.”[45]

And with her heart in her mouth, her literary personality, as she puts it, thoroughly humiliated, she left Michel Lévy’s office. Scholl, with whom she was often to discuss that scene in after years, told her he had advised Lévy to call her back.

Though for the moment her hopes were all dashed to the ground, Juliette was unconquered. Her courage has ever been roused by opposition. And M. Lévy’s impertinence had provided her with a further incentive to succeed: she desired ardently to prove him in the wrong. So she continued her search for a publisher; and always it was the leaders of the publishing world whom she visited. No less than eight did she approach, not omitting even Proudhon’s own publisher. He was extremely polite, but he said: “You will understand, madame, that such things are not done.” At that time Hetzel, one of the most literary of Paris publishers, was in exile at Brussels. Juliette wrote to him. He replied:[46] “Either your book is very bad or you use a coloured handkerchief, and possibly you take snuff. I can’t believe a woman, who is probably ugly and certainly middle-aged, can have any right to defend against Proudhon the youth of George Sand and Daniel Stern or their position in the world. You would expose them to ridicule, and they would never forgive you. For doubtless Proudhon would reply to you.”

Here was a dilemma. What was Juliette to do? Evidently none of the recognised publishers would even read her MS., for they all either found her too pretty or suspected her of being plain.

On the ground floor of her house in the Rue de Rivoli was a bookseller, Taride by name, of whom Juliette was an excellent customer. She took him into her confidence. Would he publish her book if she stood all the expense? “Why not, madame?” he replied. “We neither of us run any risk, for we are both unknown, and if we fail, no one will hear of it.”

Consequently, Juliette put down eight hundred francs, and the book appeared, in defiance of the bookseller’s advice, in the summer, on the 15th of August, when, as the saying went, there was not “a cat in Paris.” But the impatient young authoress, whose hopes had been so long delayed, refused to wait until the autumn.

On the 19th of the month Juliette installed herself in the bookseller’s back shop, and inscribed on the fly-leaves of fifty copies suitable dedications to the most important figures in the world of journalism and letters: George Sand, Daniel Stern, Littré, Émile de Girardin, Prosper Mérimée, Edmond About, Octave Feuillet, Jules Grévy, Hippolyte Carnot and others. Then dispatching an errand-boy with the celebrities’ copies, she herself took a cab and delivered the books at the newspaper offices.

This done, her next concern was to go down to Chauny and put a volume into her father’s hands. What would he say to her impudence in attacking so great a philosopher, to her Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes? And, indeed, the title was a shock to him. He took the little volume in his hand, turned it round and round. “What if it’s bad?” he began. “But if it’s good?” interposed Juliette. “Ah, at your age, even if you have half a success, you are distinguished for life.”[47]

After dinner, finding her very agitated, he sent her to bed. “Va te coucher, Basile,” he said. “I will read your book to-night, and tell you what I think of it in the morning.”

“At three o’clock in the morning he came into his daughter’s room and awakened her with the words:[48] ”It is good, it is good. But it is mine. I sowed the seed in your mind of these Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes. My dear child, this means your success, your salvation,[49] influential friendships, your grandmother’s wishes realised. Why is she not here at this moment?“

The next morning at breakfast even the usually despondent Mme. Lambert was gay, although she could not help her customary gloom breaking out in the exclamation, “I tremble to think what a life of work and worry this will mean for you.”

Dr. Lambert was eager for his daughter to be off to Paris, there to receive the congratulations which he was convinced were awaiting her. And he was not mistaken. Every day brought some new proof of the attention this little volume had attracted. The book was widely noticed in the press. The review which pleased her most, even to the point, she confesses, of for the moment making her lose her head (cet article me monta un peu à la tête),[50] was by Eugène Pelletan, in La Presse. The writer came to see her the day after the article’s appearance: and from that moment he became one of her most faithful and devoted friends. The Siècle, the periodical which had published her first prose effort,[51] in the following terms noticed her volume only a few days after its publication—

“We received yesterday a book destined to produce a profound sensation. It is a reply to Proudhon and to the insulting attack upon George Sand and Daniel Stern contained in his last work. This book, despite its virility, is said to be by a very young woman. The title of the volume is Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes. It is signed ‘Juliette Lamessine.’”

Virility is, indeed, the dominating feature of this, Juliette’s first production, as it was to be of all her work. She writes as one having authority. Her style is crisp, terse, dramatic, vivid and, above all, forcible. It is essentially the style of a woman of action as well as of thought. In controversy she has always been at her best. And she could not possibly have found a subject better suited to her temperament and training than this answer to Proudhon’s attack on women. That in this year, 1858, three years before John Stuart Mill began to write his Subjection of Women, three years before our first woman doctor, Mrs. Garrett Anderson, began to study medicine, a young woman of twenty-two should have been able to present a bird’s-eye view of the whole field of feminist reform; that she should, in such forcible terms, have enunciated feminist principles and contended for those rights which it has required half a century of conflict to win, was a very remarkable achievement.

This little book of one hundred and ninety-six pages, polished off in two months, naturally makes no pretence at being an adequate answer to Proudhon’s great work, the result of years of laborious effort. It is, indeed, only with the last part of the book, that treating of women and of marriage, that the authoress of Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes is concerned. “Therein,” she writes, “are things which every woman who knows how to hold a pen has the right to regard as personal insults, and it is to these personalities that I intend to reply.”

Nevertheless, in her first chapter, entitled “Generalities,” she permits herself a few remarks on the main trend of her adversary’s book. She blames the narrow dogmatism which blinds him to the complexity of the social problem. A pure economist, this founder of the People’s Bank had attempted to solve the social problem in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. This Proudhon was the J. A. Hobson of that day. His absorption in the idea of justice caused him to forget what is equally important, passion, affection, solidarity and mercy. “There is no heart in your dialectics,” writes Juliette. “Now to understand life, you must be yourself alive. Had you the most powerful brain in the universe, you would never comprehend man and humanity.”

“Justice,” wrote Proudhon, “had been nothing, it must be everything.” But for this hide-bound economist justice could exist only between man and man, for all men should be equal; but between man and woman, who must ever be unequal, justice need not be considered, for man must ever dominate woman. And why? Because man regarded as a working member of the community is more productive than woman, who is physically, intellectually and morally man’s inferior. Such an argument gives us pause in these days of the Great War, when manufacturers are telling us that the average output of women in factories is twenty per cent. higher than that of men.

Woman, man’s inferior physically, maintains Proudhon, must necessarily be mentally his inferior also. For physical strength is no less necessary to the work of the mind than to the work of the body. Here the retort was obvious; and we may be sure Proudhon’s young opponent did not miss it. “What, M. Proudhon,” she rejoins; “then a porter will be a better thinker than a philosopher. M. Proudhon’s God is obviously the dynamometer.... Force, always force. In force lies the millennium. That was the opinion of the Prætorian Guard when they chose for emperor the great Maximin, because he was stronger than a horse.”

Instead of the subjection of woman to man, which Proudhon maintains to be inevitable, his young adversary contends that the progress of society requires that men and women shall work together as equals. “A mere glance at the history of mankind,” she argues, “will suffice to show that among nations civilisation is in proportion to the part played by woman, to her influence, to her moral worth; and, as civilisation increases, the greater will be the value set upon the position accorded to woman.” This is an argument which no profound observer of human nature could deny. Unless men and women laugh together you cannot have that true comedy which is the very salt of the intellectual life, was the opinion of George Meredith.[52] “Where the veil is over women’s faces,” he wrote, referring to the silence of comedy among Eastern peoples, “you cannot have society, without which the senses are barbarous, and the comic spirit is driven to the gutters of grossness to slake its thirst.” Nous avons débrutalisé la société française was the proudest boast of Juliette’s forerunner, La Marquise de Rambouillet, foundress of the first great French salon.

Mme. Lamessine was one of the earliest French women writers to divine that which this war is proving: woman’s capacity for work, for which her asserted inferiority to man had been held to unfit her.

Anticipating John Stuart Mill, Mme. Lamessine demanded that all the liberal professions should be thrown open to women, and that women should be admitted to a share, if not in the legislation at least in the administration, of their country. The rôle of mayoress she considered particularly appropriate to women. She demanded the admission of women to those conseils de prud’hommes which in France regulate disputes between employers and employed.

“O Nazaréen incorrigible!” she exclaims, when her adversary falls a prey to the ancient myth that woman is ever the source of evil and the mother of impurity. “Men who, like M. Proudhon,” she continues, “desire to restore the patriarchate by imprisoning women in the family are des abstractions de quintessence who are blind to all that is going on around them, who misjudge the collective life which is daily developing new needs, engendering new forces, and giving rise to social institutions responding to these needs and organising these forces. They mean well, doubtless, and they think they are serving the cause of progress, or at least of morality, which always comes to be that of progress. By compelling woman to shut herself up in her family, by limiting her to the rôle of wife and mother, they hope to put an end to her growing passion for luxury and dissipation.... But they are mistaken. It is not by limiting the scope of her activity that they will arrest this disorder, but rather by opening up new channels for the wholesome play of her energy. Women must be educated thoroughly, and, wherever it is possible, professionally. They must be made productive. Work alone has emancipated man. Work alone can emancipate woman. Let woman provide herself by honest work with clothes which will adorn and become her. Then, instead of dragging in the dust of the pavement her lace shawls and her silk skirts, she will walk free and proud in the modesty of clothes which will reveal her beauty, without tarnishing her virtue or selling her honour....

“But do not let me be accused of undervaluing woman’s rôle in the family: I, like Proudhon, believe that a woman’s first duty is to be wife and mother. But I maintain that family life need not absorb all woman’s activities, physical, moral and intellectual. The part of a broody hen is honourable without doubt, but it is not suited to every one, neither is it so absorbing as it is represented.”

In Juliette’s childhood her father had given her a catechism embodying the principles of democratic socialism. Now in the last pages of this book she expressed in another catechism her views of society and of women’s rôle in it.

The question of the parliamentary franchise Mme. Lamessine did not discuss in this volume. It is obvious that so ardent an advocate of sex equality must have believed in woman’s right to vote. Woman’s suffrage, we remember, was one of the reforms demanded by the Mlles. André’s pupils when, in 1848, Juliette marshalled them in the playground at Chauny beneath the banner of her father’s social democratic handkerchief. But the so-called universal, in reality manhood, suffrage of 1851 had led to the Empire, and Mme. Lamessine abhorred the Empire: henceforth therefore she placed no great faith in the people’s vote, not even if, as she believed, in all justice it should do, the people included women.

FOOTNOTES:

[36] The edition from which I quote is that of 1870 in four volumes. The suppressed edition of 1858, according to Mme. Adam’s Souvenirs, II. 66, was in three volumes. In a few years the condemnation was removed and permission given to Proudhon to return to France. He elected, however, to remain in Belgium.

[37] La Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Eglise (ed. 1870), vol. iv. 203.

[38] Her best-known works are a novel, Nélida, and her History of the Revolution of 1848.

[39] Proudhon, La Justice, vol. iv. 140.

[40] Souvenirs, II. 68.

[41] M. Michel Lévy on his death in 1875, was succeeded as head of the firm by M. Calmann Lévy, father of the M. Calmann Lévy, who to-day presides over the business at 3, rue Auber.

[42] Souvenirs, II. 74.

[43] A brilliant and fashionable journalist of the day, who was also a poet and critic. His best-known work is Le Nain Jaune. Later, Mme. Lamessine was to see him frequently.

[44] Myosotis.

[45] For the discussion of Denise at the Poet’s Union see Souvenirs, II. 49.

[46] Souvenirs, II. 75.

[47] Souvenirs, II. 79.

[48] Ibid., 80.

[49] Referring to the unhappiness of her married life.

[50] Souvenirs, II. 81.

[51] Her reply to Alphonse Karr’s article on the crinoline. See ante, 44.

[52] An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (1903), 57.

CHAPTER VI

SALON LIFE DURING THE SECOND EMPIRE

1858-1863

“Le Salon était alors ... l’ambition suprême de la Parisienne, la consolation de sa maturité, la gloire de sa vieillesse.”—Daniel Stern (la Comtesse d’Agoult).

Dr. Lambert was right. Juliette’s book brought her influential friendships and distinguished acquaintances. It flung her right into the whirl of Parisian literary and political society.

The two women writers, whom Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes had defended, both wrote to thank their young champion. Of George Sand’s letter and of the friendship which some years later ensued between her and Juliette we shall hear much in another chapter. La Comtesse d’Agoult (Daniel Stern), after having read Juliette’s book, wrote to her—

“It is surprising, sir, that you should have assumed a woman’s name, while we women write under masculine pseudonyms.”[53]

“I replied to her,” writes Juliette, “that I was a woman, and very much a woman.”

Then there followed an invitation to one of the great lady’s evenings. This was a high honour. For Mme. d’Agoult’s salon in the Rue Presbourg was not only the centre of the Republican opposition to the Empire, it was a brilliant and cosmopolitan assembly, a meeting-place for many of the most distinguished men of the day. Renan, Littré and Émile de Girardin, here foregathered with Emerson, Heine and Kossuth. The life of Mme. d’Agoult herself had been as eventful as that of any of her guests. Born at Frankfort in 1805, she was the daughter of a German banker’s daughter and the Comte de Flavigny, a French emigré, who had been page to Marie Antoinette. When the Revolution had subsided, the Comte de Flavigny brought his wife and his daughter, Marie, back to France. Marie soon grew into an intelligent and beautiful girl of Germanic type—tall, golden-haired and blue-eyed. Having set her heart upon a man who married some one else, she refused offer after offer until well on in what was then regarded as spinsterhood. At the age of twenty-two she submitted to a mariage de convenance with the Comte d’Agoult. In a loveless life she found consolation in that joy of every clever Parisienne’s heart, the creation of a salon. She delighted to gather the élite of the aristocracy round her in her town house on the Quai Malaquais, facing the Louvre, or in her country château of Croissy, fifteen miles out of Paris. Soon this “Corinne of the Quai Malaquais,” as she was called, became one of the most attractive of Parisian hostesses. She aspired even to emulate the seductive Mme. Récamier, whose salon at L’Abbaye-aux-Bois was then at the height of its glory. But the Comtesse realised that without le grand homme, in other words, without a literary lion, a salon is nothing. Mme. Récamier had her Chateaubriand. Mme. d’Agoult selected for her “great man” the poet, Alfred de Vigny. So, while Chateaubriand was entrancing Mme. Récamier’s guests by the reading of his Mémoires d’Outre Tombe, the Countess invited her friend, Alfred de Vigny, to read his new poem, La Frégate, to an assembly of ambassadresses, duchesses, and countesses at Croissy. But alas! de Vigny, though a gifted poet, was no reader. And the chilling silence at the end of the reading was broken by the freezing question: “Is your friend an amateur, madame?” “Decidedly,” said de Vigny to his hostess, “my frigate has been shipwrecked in your salon.”

But a worse shipwreck than that of La Frégate was to attend the fair châtelaine of Croissy. Some one had described this statuesque beauty in terms she herself found not inaccurate as “six inches of snow on twenty feet of lava.” And the lava was soon to melt the snow. Mme. d’Agoult’s apparent coldness vanished before the noontide heat of an irresistible attraction, that of the most fatal Don Juan of Europe, none other than the musician, Franz Liszt, who had already melted many a distinguished feminine heart.

Casting to the winds her social reputation, her marriage vows, and her maternal affection (she had borne the Comte d’Agoult two children), she suffered herself to be carried off from a ball, and spent the next years of her life wandering over Europe with her lover.

Then, having quarrelled with Liszt, she returned to Paris in 1846, and settled down, in the Rue Presbourg, to write under the pseudonym of “Daniel Stern.”

Of course all the doors of her aristocratic friends in the Faubourg St. Germain were closed against her. But even before her flight she had made some friends in the bourgeoisie; and among them were M. and Mme. Émile de Girardin. Mme. de Girardin, the Countess had known when, as the clever and beautiful Delphine Gay, she was the poetess laureate of the Restoration. Now, married to Émile de Girardin, the Lord Northcliffe of that day, Delphine was one of the most successful of Parisian hostesses. While her mysterious husband, that Napoléon of the Press, that homme fatal, of whose origin no one was sure, muffled himself in a shawl and slumbered in a corner of the salon until such time as he should go to his newspaper,[54] the vivacious Mme. de Girardin gathered round her all the great literary celebrities of the hour, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Théophile Gautier and Eugène Sue. And in this brilliant circle, the Countess, ostracised elsewhere, was made warmly welcome. Here she formed her Republican opinions, here she came into contact with the leading figures of that Revolution of 1848, of which she was to become the historian.[55] Here, in Mme. de Girardin’s salon in the Rue Lafitte, the Countess replenished her emptied visiting-list and gathered material for her second salon.

With most of this story Juliette had become acquainted through the gossip of Mme. Fauvety’s drawing-room. And what she did not already know was told her by Mme. d’Agoult’s friend, de Ronchaud, whom the Countess had sent to escort the young Mme. Lamessine to the Rue Presbourg. Mme. d’Agoult could not have assigned Juliette a more congenial cavalier. De Ronchaud was a fervent classicist, one of the founders of that new Hellenic school which was just then coming into prominence. His delightful talk about Greek art in the book-shop of Père France on the Quai Voltaire had seduced young Anatole into playing truant from the Collège Stanislas in order to spend a whole day wandering through the Galerie des Antiques in the Louvre. Juliette found de Ronchaud’s conversation equally entrancing. “Our first talk,” she writes, “was one long hymn to Greece.” De Ronchaud promised to introduce his young friend to other Hellenists, and he foretold that together they would bring about a second Renaissance.

What an all-important event was Juliette’s first evening in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon may easily be imagined. She found the Countess, like many other distinguished Frenchwomen, anticipating her age, for although she was only fifty-three, she wore over her silver hair a light black lace mantilla. At the first glance she gave Juliette the impression of strength, almost virile, and yet of femininity. “J’ai atteint l’âge d’homme,” she used to say, echoing Catherine of Russia’s sentiment when she welcomed Diderot with the words: “As man to man we can discuss anything.” Tall and superbly graceful, it seemed to Juliette that she had never seen a more complete great lady. When Mme. d’Agoult described herself as a Democrat, it was difficult to suppress a smile, so anomalous on her lips sounded such a word. Her bearing, the pose of her head, her features, the lines of her face which betrayed no trace of the tempestuous passion that had swept over her in youth; everything about Mme. d’Agoult was aristocratic.

In the general conversation of her salon the Countess took little part, but, seated on the right of the fireplace, she would carry on a tête-à-tête with some single person. Unlike many another salon lady, Mme. du Deffand or Mme. de Staël or Juliette herself, she was no maker of mots; nor was she ready with repartee. She herself could never understand how she came by her reputation of a wit;[56] for she knew that she never appeared at her best in conversation. She was too reserved, too self-conscious to be a vivacious talker, and she could only be eloquent when intense feeling took her out of herself.[57]

Grave and a trifle solemn, her salon was frequented by serious students, such as Littré, who rarely went anywhere else, as well as by more sociable philosophers like Renan. The subjects discussed were politics, philosophy, art (music especially), serious literature, but seldom plays or novels. The guests were too addicted to monologue; and too often some weighty personage, leaning against the mantel-piece would discourse at such length that his talk became a veritable lecture. Sometimes Mme. d’Agoult would read a letter from some foreign correspondent, a famous revolutionary like Mazzini or Kossuth; for she had relations with the whole of Europe, including those illustrious Frenchmen whom Louis Napoléon’s coup d’état of December 1851 had driven into exile.

Though all Mme. d’Agoult’s friends were republicans and therefore opposed to the Empire, they were not all agreed as to the best way of conducting the opposition. About this year, 1858, two distinct parties were beginning to define themselves: the extreme republicans who, like Juliette and her father, believed in keeping entirely aloof from imperial politics, and who regarded as traitors to Republicanism any who should, no matter for what purpose, consent to swear allegiance to the Emperor. These uncompromising anti-imperialists went by the name of abstentionistes. But there was also coming into existence a more moderate party led by Mme. d’Agoult’s son-in-law, Émile Ollivier.[58] They held that opposition to the Empire could be most effectively carried out by entering the Corps Legislatif, for which it was necessary to take the oath of allegiance. This party, known as sermentistes, was to grow in strength until it succeeded in forcing its so-called Liberalism on the Emperor, and establishing what is known as L’Empire Libéral.

Juliette’s uncompromising nature, as we have seen, made it impossible for her to approve of the Sermentistes. And she loses no opportunity of ridiculing les petits Olliviers, as Ollivier’s followers were called, when they appeared in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon. Indeed, the Countess herself opposed her son-in-law’s policy; and, after her daughter’s death, there was an open breach between them.

From the very first the pretty, vivacious Mme. Lamessine made a highly favourable impression on Mme. d’Agoult. “She took the trouble,” writes Juliette, “to convert a little provincial into a society lady.[59] She encouraged me to talk of my work. When you are perplexed, come and tell me,” she would say. “I shall be delighted to give you the benefit of my observation of mankind and of all I have learnt in the hard school of experience.”

Soon Juliette’s invitation to the Countess’s evenings was extended to those smaller intimate parties, which met around the luncheon or the dinner-table. On these occasions the Hellenist, Louis de Ronchaud, was almost invariably her fellow-guest.

Mme. d’Agoult laughed at Juliette’s passion for antiquity. “My dear child,” she would say, “you must be of your time. At your age you ought not to be so antique.... I shall take you to the Opéra Bouffes” (the Italian theatre). “That will modernise you a little.”

“For the love of Greece, remain Greek,” pleaded de Ronchaud. But, indeed, there was no fear of the Opéra Bouffes perverting Juliette from Hellenism; for Offenbach’s caricaturing of her Homeric deities in Orphée aux Enfers so outraged her Grecian sympathies that Mme. d’Agoult was constrained to make amends by inviting her to a neo-Grecian dinner. “It will be a pagan party,” the Countess said. “De Ronchaud has arranged it.” The other guests were two brilliant Hellenists, Ménard and Saint Victor. They began by discussing the now much-disputed importance of a classical education. These neo-Grecians were firmly persuaded that the classics alone can inculcate those superior ideas of justice and heroism, which are all the more salutary because for ages they have permeated the race. Naturally they lamented over what seemed to them the decadence of French society under the Empire. Ménard maintained that periods of intellectual decadence are invariably periods of mechanical progress and of political despotism.

Then the worshippers of ancient Hellas fell with equal zest and vivacity to discussing the antiquity of the Orphic mysteries.

How intensely alive for Juliette was this Hellenic past she has proved over and over again in her literary work, and most notably in three novels she was to produce some years later, Laide (1878), Grecque (1879), and Païenne (1883).[60]

That great wave of philosophic speculation which was sweeping through France could not fail to affect so intellectual a salon as Mme. d’Agoult’s. An earlier dinner-party, Juliette’s first at the Rue Presbourg, had been a veritable symposium of philosophers. The great Littré,[61] the eloquent exponent of Comte’s philosophy, was the lion of the evening. His famous Etymological Dictionary of the French Language was then going through the Press.

“Littré,” writes Juliette, “inspired me with a sentiment which was almost worship.” When they had met before they had talked of Greece. The editor of Hippocrates and Pliny, though laughing at his young friend’s fervent passion for ancient Hellas, had been able to reveal to her things in the Iliad which neither she nor her father had dreamed of.

Among the other guests were De Ronchaud, of course; Hippolyte Carnot, son of the “Organiser of Victory,” and editor of one of the leading magazines of the day, La Revue Encyclopédique;[62] Dupont-White, the friend of John Stuart Mill, a bold thinker and an ardent apologist of centralisation in government. In the presence of such an august philosophic trio Juliette for the first part of the dinner was content to listen; and we may be sure that, like her illustrious namesake, Mme. Récamier, she listened “with seduction.” But towards the end of the evening we find her warmed to take part in the discussion. Although she admired, almost worshipped Littré, she could not tolerate his positivism. Positivism suggested Comte, and Comte suggested the husband whose conduct was rendering her domestic life unbearable. But Littré seemed to her to out-Comte even Comte; for Littré would stifle the slightest breath of idealism. While Comte admitted that there are as many arguments for as against the existence of an unknowable, Littré seemed to Juliette absolutely to deny it. This may have been so at that time; but surely Littré must later have become less dogmatic. For we remember Paul Bourget’s description of “Old Littré” as a saint who spoke eloquently of that ocean of mystery washing our very shores, but over the waters of which we have no barque to carry us.[63]

When Littré maintained that as “light cannot exist without a luminous body, neither can life without organs nor spirit without matter,” Juliette protested that vehicles are not essences. “The Homeric past,” she added, “presents us with a poetic conception of things which encourages the belief that the future has something better in store than your immutable law and its brutality.”

“Yes, I agree,” replied Littré, “the immutable law is brutal in its partial manifestations, but its general action, based on the unvarying conditions of proportion and order, inspires us with the idea of absolute justice.”

Against such determinism Juliette revolted with all the fervour of her rebellious and romantic soul.

“I protest,” she said. “If I feel myself a mere atom of dust swept about by the wind and not an intelligence dominating matter, why should I make any effort?”

“Because action is the law of humanity.”

“Ah! but for me belief in man led by the spirit and nature by the divine is a necessity.” Here, in these words indicating so plainly the wish to believe, lies the key to Juliette’s whole mental and spiritual evolution. It was a key which her philosopher friends were quick to grasp.

“We shall see this pagan turning Christian,” said Littré.

“And I should not be at all sorry,” remarked Mme. d’Agoult, “if it were only for the pleasure of exasperating that Hellenising Ronchaud.”

Juliette and her hostess would appear to have been the only women at these dinner-parties. There may have been others, whom Juliette does not mention. But Mme. d’Agoult was essentially a man’s woman. The wives of her guests, with very few exceptions, did not interest her. There were, however, a few clever and distinguished women who frequented her salon. There was the masculine Mme. Royer, who was as much of a blue-stocking as her friend Jenny d’Héricourt, and whom Juliette equally detested; there was the heroic Mme. Hippolyte Carnot, the Cornelia of French republicans, who, when her husband was resisting Louis Napoléon in December 1851, said, “If you die you will bequeath to your sons the example you inherited from your father.” Then there was that queen of raconteuses, the witty but rather Rabelaisian Comtesse de Pierreclos, the poet Lamartine’s niece. This tall and powerfully-built lady, with large prominent features, was one of the most striking figures in salon society. She was pleased to joke about her own appearance. Being asked what part she would take in a play, she replied, “I think mine should be the part of the bust of Louis Philippe.” But if other people attempted to make fun of her she resented it strongly. Thus when she said she had met a certain person face to face, which in French is “nose to nose,” and some one ejaculated, “Then it must have been yours that conquered,” she was on the point of bursting into tears.[64] But Mme. de Pierreclos passed as quick as lightning from tears to laughter. She and Juliette were equally exuberant and impulsive. Perhaps it was this that made them sworn friends. They corresponded regularly, and during Juliette’s frequent absences from Paris she depended on her friend to keep her au courant with all the doings of the metropolis, with the latest mot, the last scandal, the newest play and the best music.

For Juliette’s interests were far from being concentrated on philosophy or even on neo-Hellenism. Plays, picture-shows, fancy-dress balls and the opera crowded her days, leaving her, one might have thought, no time for literary work. Nevertheless, she had contrived before 1863 to produce a novel, Le Mandarin, three volumes of short stories, Mon Village, Récits d’une Paysanne, Voyage autour du Grand Pin, besides pamphlets on public questions and newspaper articles.

JULIETTE LAMBER
From a portrait by Léopold Flameng, 1860

Among all these various pleasures and duties one wonders what became of Juliette’s little daughter Alice. The child was now old enough to notice the strained relations between her parents, and in order to remove her from the unedifying disputes between her mother and father, Alice had been sent to her grandparents at Chauny.

As far as her literary and social life was concerned Juliette’s most ambitious dreams were about to be realised. She was on the way to become a queen of society. True, she had enemies, chiefly pedants like Mme. d’Héricourt and Mlle. Royer, or the friends of Proudhon. No one so convinced, so outspoken as Juliette could avoid arousing opposition. But, with the exception of that little coterie, all hearts were hers, won by her good nature, her charm, her genius for friendship, her vivacity, her intelligence and her loveliness.

A leading French journalist, now no longer living, who followed Mme. Adam’s career with interest and admiration, told me that in her youth she was entrancingly beautiful. Referring to the salon she was shortly to establish, to the princes, ambassadors, writers and artists who crowded round the brilliant young hostess, that journalist said: “We were all in love with her.”

Moreover Juliette, though an advocate of the rights of woman in days when feminists tended to affect masculine attire, discarded none of her femininity. It has always been her opinion that Pour une femme, c’est une infériorité que se deféminiser. She who had been independent enough to abstain from the crinoline, knew how to dress. One of her gowns, velvet gorge de tourterelle, with large steel buttons, worn at Alphonse Daudet’s dinner-party, made such an impression on Edmond de Goncourt that he described it in detail, in the pages of that Journal which has now become a classic.[65]

It is not surprising that more than one distinguished artist—Flameng, Charpentier, for example—painted Mme. Lamessine’s portrait. Charpentier’s picture was exhibited in the salon. Mme. d’Agoult’s friend, the famous sculptor, Adam Salomon, photographed her in a Charlotte Corday costume, which she had worn at a fancy-dress ball, and wished to model her bust. The photograph was a success, not so the bust. After having made many attempts in clay, the sculptor gave it up. Some time later, however, when Mme. Lamessine was in his studio, he persuaded her to let him take a caste of her face. “It was horrible,” she writes.[66] “I thought I should have been suffocated; and I felt as if my eyebrows and eyelashes were being torn off. The agony of those few seconds when Adam Salomon was piercing holes for my nostrils and making slits for my lips, when I could hardly breath, pursued me for months.” “I quite understand,” she adds, “that a cast of the head and face is not usually taken until after death.”

It was at the Adam Salomons’ that Juliette met Lamartine. He came there every day: and it saddened her to see this great poet worried by financial embarrassments and attempting to retrieve his fallen fortunes by soliciting subscriptions to his Cours Familier de Littérature. Ce pauvre Lamartine, wrote the witty Mme. Mohl, ce n’est plus une lyre, c’est une tire-lire (a sealed earthen pot with a slit into which a peasant puts his money). The poet’s fine, handsome countenance still lit up when he spoke of art, letters or politics, but that unhappily was but seldom.[67]

There are those for whom socially the Second Empire signifies little more than hollow splendour, ostentatious display and vulgar luxury. No doubt these tendencies were strongly marked; but at the same time there flourished a rich and original development of art, music and literature. When Juliette was making her début in Paris drawing-rooms, Alexandre Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias and his Fils Naturel were being played at Le Théâtre Français, Millet and Puvis de Chavannes were exhibiting their first pictures in the Salon, Renan was writing his Vie de Jésus, Erckmann and Chatrian their Napoleonic romances, and Victor Hugo, in exile, his Légende des Siècles. Those were the days when two of the greatest composers of the modern world, Berlioz and Wagner, were rivalling one another on the Parisian operatic stage.

Juliette first met Berlioz at the representation of Orpheo at the Théâtre Lyrique. Mme. Viardot’s sublime rendering of the part of Orpheo avenged Juliette and her neo-Grecian friends, Ménard and de Ronchaud, who accompanied her, for the insults Offenbach had offered to their Greek gods. During the song “I have lost my Eurydice,” Juliette, overcome by emotion, paid the singer the superb compliment of momentarily losing consciousness. When Berlioz himself came round to their box at the end of the act, Ménard did not neglect to tell him of the beautiful Mme. Lamessine’s little swoon. Highly flattered the composer took her hand in his and kept it there.[68]

“Yes,” he said, “it is quite beautiful.... Orpheo is near enough to the real Orpheo for the expression of grief rendered as we have just heard it to overwhelm the senses.”

Juliette appreciated Wagner’s art, though she was far too much of a Latin to prefer this Teuton to Berlioz. “Berlioz,” she wrote, “is the initiator, he stands above all others. He can well afford to let the Wagnerian fanatics assert that Wagner’s is the music of the future.”

Juliette first met Wagner and heard him play at the Comtesse de Charnacé’s. The Comtesse was Mme. d’Agoult’s daughter by her husband, the Comte d’Agoult, and, strangely enough it may seem to us, she was in the habit of receiving her half-sister, daughter of Liszt and Mme. d’Agoult, and wife of the celebrated pianist, Hans von Bülow. Von Bülow was Wagner’s shadow; and it was Von Bülow who brought Wagner to the Rue Vaugirard. About twenty-five people were present. Juliette thought Wagner’s enormous head not lacking in character, at least the upper part of it. His forehead was broad and high. His questioning eyes were now tender, now hard; but his ugly mouth, with its sarcastic expression, seemed to press back his cheeks and like nut-crackers to bring together an authoritative chin and an arrogant nose. She found him caustic and witty as he talked of everything and seemed to know everything. Then suddenly he would become vulgar, personal, conceited.

He played the Prelude to Lohengrin. “Never has anything been written to equal it,” exclaimed Von Bülow.

“I alone,” said Wagner ..., “can do these things. No one else in the world would dare to attempt them.”

Then laughing, and, with a strong Germanic accent, he added: “People can never tell whether I am hydrocephalous or a man of genius.”

“Something of the first,” whispered Juliette to Mme. d’Agoult.

“A great deal of the second,” rejoined the Countess, rather severely.

Wagner, who was extremely quick of hearing, had caught this whispered conversation.

“He gave to each of us,” writes Juliette, “the ‘thank you’ we deserved.” Then he talked well of Parisians and their mocking spirit. He said how it grieved him not to be understood in France, and to have for a rival any one so eminent as Berlioz.

“It is impossible for you ever to understand one another,” said Mme. d’Agoult.

Despite the personal antipathy with which Wagner inspired her, Juliette made enormous efforts to sell tickets for the three concerts he was to give at Paris. And she disposed of so many that the musician actually sent de Ronchaud to her with a message of thanks from “the Hydrocephalous.”

The first two concerts at least were a distinct success. At the second even Berlioz applauded.

Mme. d’Agoult, unlike most aristocratic Frenchwomen of her day, was a brave pedestrian. That was what kept her such a good figure, said Juliette; and her young friend often accompanied her on her walks. In May 1859, after having visited the Salon, they walked through the Bois. Juliette seldom refers to her own toilettes. But on that day, she tells us, she was wearing a specially becoming costume, a frock of black taffetas with no trimming, but wide sleeves of white lace, a fichu of black chantilly and a Leghorn hat with a cluster of cornflowers and strings of black velvet. It was a glorious May day. All Paris seemed to be out enjoying itself. As the Countess and Juliette walked past the Arc de Triomphe, Mme. d’Agoult said—

“The war is imminent. Perhaps it will be declared to-morrow. God send we may see France victorious and Italy delivered.”[69]

For months Mme. d’Agoult and her friends had been eagerly following Italy’s struggle for liberty. With the whole of France they ardently desired their Latin sister’s liberation from the Austrian yoke. The Countess herself had Italian connections. She was related to a well-known Florentine family, the Peruzzi.

Juliette, before she came to Paris, had known little of foreign politics. Save for a vague prejudice against England, the legacy of the Napoleonic Wars, a mistrust of Prussia and a liking for the Russians because Russian soldiers, billeted in the house of Chauny, had been kind to her grandmother, Juliette had no very decided sympathies or antipathies towards countries not her own. But in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon such indifference speedily vanished. On the very first evening in the Rue Presbourg she met the Alsatian, Nefftzer, who had been editor of La Presse and was later to direct Le Temps. “By him,” she writes, “for the first time in my life I heard foreign politics lucidly discussed, and it was then that I began to take an interest in them.”[70]

Among the European nations outside France, Italy was Juliette’s first love and Garibaldi her greatest hero. Next to Italy, as one might expect from so ardent a Hellenist, came Greece. She and her Grecian friends were highly delighted when the Ionian Isles were reunited to Greece. She was in the South of France at the time, but de Ronchaud wrote announcing the good news and exclaiming “Vive l’indépendence.”

But that was in 1862. To return to 1859 and to the cause of Italian unity as it appealed to Mme. d’Agoult’s salon. Napoléon’s declaration of war against Austria so delighted Juliette and her friends that for a moment they almost forgot their opposition to the Empire. The news of the victories which followed increased their rejoicing, but their joy was short-lived; for in a few weeks came a bitter disillusionment. In July the Peace of Villafranca was signed. Instead of fulfilling Napoléon’s proud boast and freeing Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic, it delivered her tied hand and foot into the power of Austria. Francis Joseph remained master of Italy, the most powerful member of the Italian Confederation, over which the Pope, Pio-Nono, presided.

“Ah! we felt that Napoléon’s promises had been too good to be true,” exclaimed Juliette and her Republican friends. And, with more reason, “I told you so,” exclaimed M. Thiers. For the ex-Minister had advised the Emperor not to engage in war against Austria. Italian unity, he foretold, would be followed by Prussian unity. And now he pointed out that France had not only made an enemy of Austria, but she had offended Italy, who saw that she had been duped. Italy was still further offended when Napoléon in direct violation of the Treaty of Villafranca insisted on annexing Savoy and Nice. Then, not content with ranging against him Italy and Austria, the Emperor proceeded to alienate the Pope, whom he was pledged to support.

Out of that mind which, as Lord Palmerston said, “was as full of schemes as a warren of rabbits,” Napoléon III produced at this juncture one of his numerous pamphlets. In this one he attacked nothing more nor less than the Pope’s temporal power, urging him to acquiesce in the independence of Romagna. This dangerous policy of playing first with one party then with another made Juliette and her friends tremble for France, despite their anti-clericalism.

They were kept closely in touch with Italian affairs by a friend of Mme. d’Agoult’s, a man equally remarkable in the three fields of science, literature, and politics, Alessandro Bixio, the founder with Buloz of the Revue des deux Mondes. Born in 1808, Bixio was a Genoese by birth, but had been educated in France. A moderate Republican, during the terrible insurrection of July 1848, in an attempt to keep order in Paris streets, he had been severely wounded. Having lost consciousness he was taken for dead, and left lying near one of the barricades. Not having been heard of afterwards, his death was announced, a memorial service was arranged, mourning was ordered, when suddenly his friend Hetzel, the publisher, received a letter from him. A concierge had found the wounded man lying in the street, had taken him into the house, and there, after some days of coma, he had returned to consciousness. He wrote to Hetzel entreating him to announce his resurrection as delicately as possible.

Earlier in the year, Bixio had been French Ambassador at Turin, later, during Prince Louis Napoléon’s presidency, he was French Minister of Agriculture. After the coup d’état he had retired into private life. But he remained in close touch with Turin, which he visited every fortnight, never failing on his return to bring to the Rue Presbourg the latest news from the Piedmontese capital. On one occasion, when Mme. d’Agoult was going to Turin to see the performance of one of her plays, Bixio was her escort. The Countess’s story on her return of her reception by Victor Emmanuel and of her having seen Cavour, fanned into yet greater ardour her guests’ passion for Italian unity.

Alessandro’s brother, Nino Bixio, played a prominent part in Garibaldi’s Sicilian expedition, having commanded one of the two ships which sailed from Genoa. This adventure he related in detail to Juliette some time later. Nino Bixio was one of the most fearless of men; he was said to have plucked a bullet out of his own flesh, saying to his men, “See, such things are quite harmless.” When Juliette in conversation with his brother, referred to Nino’s intrepidity, “Yes, by my faith,” exclaimed Alessandro. “Did I not bring him up not to know fear? Did I not, when he was a boy, hold him by one foot and let him dangle from the balcony over the street?”

Juliette eagerly and sympathetically followed Garibaldi’s adventures. She collected all the details she could glean about her hero, and, in 1859, published a pamphlet[71] which caused her to be regarded as an authority on the Italian liberator.

Her admiration for Garibaldi did not prevent her from appreciating the services rendered to Italian liberty by the more judicious Cavour. The tidings of Cavour’s illness, broken to Mme. d’Agoult in a letter from Turin, cast a gloom over the salon of the Rue Presbourg. “Cavour,” wrote the Countess’s correspondent, “is in extremis, the Italian doctors are killing him. They are butchers. They have bled him fourteen times.”[72] “Alas,” adds Juliette, “they bled him once more, and he died on the 6th of June” (1861).

Almost as fruitless as the Italian War was Napoléon III’s expedition to Syria on behalf of the Christians of Mt. Lebanon, threatened with extermination by a neighbouring Mussulman tribe, the Druses. This expedition, which was much discussed in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon, had ended in the French, as the result largely of Lord Palmerston’s intervention, evacuating Syria and leaving the cause of the persecuted Christians to the Sultan’s somewhat uncertain championship. Renan, appointed to an archæological mission in Syria by the French Government, had chanced to sail with the expedition. As soon as he came back, and returned to the Rue Presbourg, he was eagerly questioned by Juliette and her friends as to his opinion of the settlement.

“What do you think of it?” inquired Dupont-White, referring to the Sultan’s protectorate and the French evacuation of Syria.

“I think well of it,” replied Renan. “It will put an end to the massacres.”

“ What,” exclaimed Dupont-White, “then do I understand that you were sent there to stir up religious fanaticism? I knew you received your mission through Prince Napoléon, so I thought your object would be rather to come to an understanding with the infidels. For I regard your prince and you as being two of the finest specimens of infidelity in the world.”

“But Prince Napoléon is a deist,” said Renan.

“Very well. And you?”

“I have no objection to saying Mon Dieu,” replied Renan. “But ...”

“I don’t see Renan going to preach a crusade in Syria or anywhere else,” said Littré, who had seemed to be dreaming.[73]

Two years later, on the 23rd of June, 1863, after Juliette had separated from her first husband and was living with her parents at Chauny, appeared Renan’s Vie de Jésus. From the point of view of its influence on free thought Dr. Lambert considered the publication of this book the most significant event of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Juliette received twenty letters from her friends, some extolling, others attacking the book. Mme. de Pierreclos thought it abominable and pernicious, all the more because of the perfection of its style. Ronchaud wrote admiring its poetry. “Even those,” he added, “who disbelieve in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth must henceforth worship him.”

“Renan,” said Dr. Lambert, “was like myself, a simple-minded, sincere and pious student of theology. But when he found the sacred text distorted by those to whom it had been entrusted, he lost faith as I did.”

Dr. Lambert on hearing that Renan had been deprived of his chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France, exclaimed, “You see, imperialism, by treating Renan as an enemy, is pointing him out to us as our friend.”[74]

FOOTNOTES:

[53] Souvenirs, II. 83. Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes was signed “Juliette Lamessine.”

[54] See Daniel Stern, Mes Souvenirs, 311.

[55] Daniel Stern, Histoire de la Révolution de 1848, 2 vols., Paris, Charpentier, 1862.

[56] Daniel Stern, Mes Souvenirs, 346.

[57] Ibid., 349.

[58] He had married Blandine, daughter of Mme. d’Agoult and Liszt.

[59] Mme. Adam, Souvenirs, I. 108-9, “Elle prenait la peine de faire d’une petite provinciale une dame.”

[60] See post, 209.

[61] Born in 1801, Littré had studied and qualified as a doctor of medicine, though he never practised his profession. He, like most of Mme. d’Agoult’s friends, was a “man of 1848.” Immediately after the Revolution he served for a few months as unpaid municipal councillor of Paris. But, disillusioned after the violent suppression of the July rising, he had retired from office and since then had lived in retirement.

[62] Hippolyte Carnot, born in 1801, had accompanied his father into exile. After the elder Carnot’s death, Hippolyte returned to France. There he became one of the leaders of the Saint-Simonian group of philosophers, see post, 86-90. During the Revolution of 1848 Carnot was Minister of Education. Like Littré, disillusioned by the reactionary movement which followed the July insurrection, he resigned. After the coup d’état of December 1851, he went into voluntary exile. During his absence he was elected member of the Corps Legislatif. But although he returned to France, he refused to take the oath to the Empire, thus forfeiting his seat. Since then he too had lived in retirement.

[63] Le Disciple, Preface.

[64] Mémoires de la Comtesse Diane, 146-7.

[65] Journal des Goncourt, VI. 184.

[66] Souvenirs, II. 155.

[67] Ibid., 147.

[68] Souvenirs, II. 214.

[69] Souvenirs, II. 166.

[70] Souvenirs, II. 85.

[71] Garibaldi: Sa vie d’après Documents Inédits, avec un portrait, Paris, 1859.

[72] Souvenirs, II. 315.

[73] Souvenirs, II. 317.

[74] Souvenirs, II. 421.

CHAPTER VII

AMONG THE UTOPIANS

1858-1864

“Often in the years that are darkening around me, I remember our beautiful scheme of a noble and unselfish life and how fair in that first summer appeared the prospect that it might endure for generations.”—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.

“Moi qui ait vécu une partie de ma jeunesse avec des cabétiens, des phalansteriens, des saint-simonians.”—Mme. Adam, Souvenirs.

Juliette’s energy was crowding her life with a variety of interests and occupations: literary work, plays, parties, picture shows and two distinct sets of acquaintances: Mme. d’Agoult’s rather aristocratic and elegant republican friends, and a much less fashionable circle. While Mme. d’Agoult and her associates concentrated on political reform, coming more and more into prominence in Parisian society was another group of reformers, the collectivists, who were followers of Fourier and Saint-Simon. They, placing little faith in politics, were working for a social revolution. With the latter’s schemes for humanity’s regeneration, her father’s enthusiasm had already made Juliette familiar. But we, too, if we would enter into her life at this time, must take note of these somewhat Bohemian reformers and of their Utopian aspirations, which, stimulating many of Juliette’s most intimate friends, could not fail to affect her own mind and character.

After extreme individualism had permeated the thought of the first half of the nineteenth century, a tendency towards solidarity began to declare itself among certain bold thinkers. A feeling for association was in the air. Association of whom and with whom was perhaps not quite clear. But, however defined, association, or, as we should to-day describe it, human solidarity, seemed in many enlightened circles to offer the only possible remedy for the ills of society. Even such an ardent idealist as George Sand had been converted to this comparatively new point of view. “Are there not misfortunes that call more urgently for relief than the boredom of this or the whims of that individual?” she writes.[75] Louis Napoléon himself, before he became Emperor, had shown in certain of those pamphlets, for which he was famous, that he was not unaffected by this new current of opinion. The feeling of solidarity had declared itself definitely in the early months of the 1848 Revolution. But its germs must be sought much earlier. We must go back fifty years to the time when the French Revolution was shaking society to its foundations. Then there appeared a man, who, standing apart, aloof from the great scuffle of parties, entertained the daring thought of reconciling them all and making them all pull together in a new system. That man was François Marie Charles Fourier. Born at Besançon in 1772, the son of a tradesman from whom he inherited a small fortune, Fourier became a commercial traveller in the grocery line. Then he served for a while in Napoléon’s campaigns. But, returning to his original occupation, he found employment in a wholesale house at Marseilles. There his employers instructed him secretly to throw into the sea a whole cargo of rice which that firm, in order to send up the price, had stored until it had become useless.[76] This commission opened Fourier’s eyes to the iniquitous waste proceeding in modern industry. Henceforth one of the most wildly imaginative minds that has ever existed outside a lunatic asylum was concentrated on social problems. To the ideas that resulted Fourier gave expression in a whole library of voluminous works, of which the best known is his Théorie des Quatre Mouvements. In this welter of elaborate theorising, wild schemes and absurd prophecies, such as that the ocean may one day be replaced by a sea of lemonade, and that humanity may once more develop a tail, it is possible to discover certain sane and essentially practical suggestions for social reform.

It seems incredible that this commercial traveller, who on one side of his brain was so completely unreasonable, should have produced a scheme which has in many respects now come to be regarded as fundamentally right. Fourierism, divested of its absurd extravagance, contains the germ of much modern socialism. For Fourier was one of the first to realise “that social organisation should rest on a comprehensive conception of human nature.” The first task of a reformer, he held, is to analyse human passions and to study their combinations. But Fourier’s psychology, as one might expect, is extremely fanciful. He discovered twelve major passions which can be combined into eight hundred and ten characteristic types. No one of these types can be fully himself, nor reap the greatest benefit from his labour in a state of isolation or in the state of permanent warfare, which we call competition. In our present inorganic condition, legitimate desires clash and may often be called vices. In the free and communistic régime of the future they will all be harmonised. Production will be increased a thousandfold by the association of efforts. Labour will be no longer a curse, for it will become attractive through the free choice and constant change of occupation.

The part of Fourier’s scheme which most appealed to his contemporaries was his ideal community, in which he hoped to embody his ideas in concrete form. This community he called the Phalanstery.

Juliette well remembered how, when she was a child, a fervent Fourierist had visited her father at Blérancourt. He had talked in such glowing terms of this ideal community that she forthwith resolved that on her return to Chauny she and her schoolfellows would lose no time in establishing a phalanstery. She was, however, reluctantly compelled to admit the justice of her father’s remark that at the age of nine and a half she was rather young to launch out on so complicated an experiment. For, indeed, simplicity was no part of the root idea of the phalanstery. This may be seen from the following enunciation of his principle by the master himself.

“Since there are only eight hundred and ten characters,” argued Fourier, “a phalanx of that number (or rather one thousand eight hundred with old men over one hundred and twenty and children under four) will be sufficient to realise Harmony on about a square league of ground. This phalanx would live in a handsome and comfortable building—farm, workshop and palace combined—called the Phalanstery. In this association capital and talent as well as labour would have their proper reward.”

Few of the various attempts to establish phalansteries met with any success. Fourier himself, aided by one of his most eminent disciples, Victor Considérant, and financed by a French Député, endeavoured in vain to apply his theories at Condé sur Vesgres.[77] After Fourier’s death in 1837, another vain attempt at a phalanstery was made at Citeaux.

But it was on the virgin soil of America, in the light of the New World’s sanguine hopefulness and fervent enthusiasm for social progress that the phalansterians were most confident of success. In America Fourierism had aroused intense interest. There it had met with its most ardent advocates and its bitterest opponents.[78] Victor Considérant, who after Fourier’s death became the chief apostle of Fourierism, had founded a newspaper La Démocratie Pacifique for the advocacy of his doctrines. In the columns of this paper in the year 1853, he sketched the outline of an ideal community, La Réunion, to be founded in Texas on the banks of the Red River. Subscriptions to the experiment flowed in from all parts of the world. The chief subscriber was a rich American, Albert Brisbane. He had sat at Fourier’s feet in Paris. Fascinated by this new gospel, he was spending his life translating the reformer’s colossal and for the most part incoherent works, vainly endeavouring to introduce into them something like order.

But, despite its brilliant prospects, La Réunion too was a failure. Victor Considérant, though a clever organiser, possessed neither legislative nor administrative gifts. He was an apostle, nothing more. And when adherents from all parts of the world flocked to the Red River, they found this anticipated ideal community, not, as they had fondly hoped, the embodiment of perfect harmony, but a chaos of hopeless confusion.

Warned by Brisbane’s experience and much to his disappointment, George Ripley, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others, when they were organising the comparatively successful socialist community of Brook Farm, at West Roxbury (Mass.), carefully kept off phalansterian lines.[79]

Thus by the time Juliette came to live in Paris the Phalansterian Movement had been tried and found wanting. Nevertheless it was not dead. Its spirit still breathed in the numerous co-operative experiments, which were being tried on every hand; and one of these, the famous foundry at Guise, run on something approaching phalansterian lines, met with considerable success, owing to the organising genius of the founder, the Fourierist Godin. It endured until shortly before the Great War.

Fourier’s disciples, when in 1858 Juliette first came into personal contact with them, had grouped themselves into what was called l’École Sociétaire, which numbered some four thousand adherents. The school had its headquarters in the Rue de Beaune, in a shop for the sale of Fourierist literature, kept by a certain Mlle. Aimé Beuque.

It was to this shop that Juliette, soon after the publication of Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes, was taken by her good friend Dr. Bonnard. She found Mlle. Beuque an odd creature. A quaint birth-marked, shrivelled-up little old maid, wearing a rough black serge gown, a big black poke bonnet tied with broad strings, she had invariably hanging over her arm, a capacious bag, half satchel, half basket. Aimé Beuque had known Fourier when he was a grocer at Lyons. Sitting at his feet she had imbibed his doctrine and become one of its most convincing advocates, winning for the new philosophy many a distinguished adherent. For in that poor little wizened unattractive body there burned a great soul passionately convinced that perfect harmony would one day evolve out of all our apparently hopeless social chaos.

This little woman so charmed Juliette that she came away from the Fourier shop feeling that in la chère petite vieille Beuque, she had made a life-long friend. And for many a year whenever she was downhearted, depressed by the domestic trials which were now thickening around her, Juliette’s due feet would not fail to cross the bridge to Mlle. Beuque’s shop, in search of that encouragement and consolation which the “adorable” little spinster never failed to give her.

One of the most delightful features of Paris literary society has ever been the habit of writers and readers to foregather for leisurely afternoon talk in some well-known book-shop—at Anatole France’s father’s, for example, on the Quai Voltaire; at his successor’s, Honoré Champion’s, on the Quai Malaquais, or at Charles Péguy’s at the office of “Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine,” in the Rue de la Sorbonne.

Mlle. Beuque, too, had her afternoons; le Jour des amis de notre vieille Beuque was an institution highly valued by Juliette and her Fourierist friends.

The great and shining light, le grand homme of Tante Beuque’s shop parlour, was the eminent writer on natural history, Alphonse Toussenel.

His name had been a household word for Juliette in her childhood. Out of Toussenel’s book L’Esprit des Bêtes, Dr. Lambert had told his little girl many a thrilling tale about the habits of insects. And when, in their walks, they came to an ant-hill, father and daughter would both lie down flat while the red republican parent showed the ants at their work, designating the fighters, the layers of eggs and so forth, and declaiming loudly against the laziness of the queen ant as against that of all other royalties.

Now that Juliette made the acquaintance of Toussenel in the flesh she found him no less delightful than in his books. Though in certain respects wildly extravagant and greatly given to paradox, in others he appeared abundantly gifted with common sense. Some of his theories were almost as curious as those of his master, Fourier. In his manner of life he was as eccentric as his devoted comrade, Mlle. Beuque. In appearance, however, he presented a striking contrast to his meagre little companion. For Toussenel was a fine figure of a man, an athlete, whose face was tanned by life in the open air, a sportsman in spite of his love for animals, and also a bitter anti-semite[80] in spite of his aspirations after social harmony. Toussenel’s attractive personality and eloquent talk brought into the Rue de Beaune book-shop an atmosphere of the most brilliant salon.

Toussenel was an enthusiastic feminist; so, of course, he had read and appreciated Idées Anti-Prudhoniennes; and for its charming author he speedily developed a rapturous adoration. One of his eccentricities was to illustrate human intelligence by that of animals. He likened Juliette to the falcon, because in that species of birds apparently the intelligence of the female is superior to that of the male bird. To his “falcon,” or gerfaut, he wrote ecstatic love-letters. Though she laughed at her elderly amoureux, she kept his letters; and one of them, she quotes in her Souvenirs.[81] It closes pathetically with this sentence—

“It is not your fault if you hold a larger place in my life than I in yours. I do not write to complain, but to tell you that, whenever any happiness comes to you, you may know that one of my wishes has been fulfilled.

“Yours in heart, mind and soul,

”Toussenel.“

As well as in the shop in the Rue de Beaune, Fourierists used to gather in the salon of Mme. Charles Reybaud. She was a novelist of distinction, whom Juliette thought the only contemporary woman of letters worthy to be compared with George Sand.

At Mme. Reybaud’s Juliette met many prominent socialists, belonging to various groups. Some were Saint-Simonians, the followers of that extraordinary person Claude Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). This philosopher, realising, like Fourier, the disastrously chaotic condition of society, had propounded various comprehensive schemes for its reformation. Saint-Simon’s life had been one long series of romantic experiences, wild adventures and hair-breadth escapes. Born of a noble family, priding himself on being descended from Charlemagne, at sixteen he was a volunteer under Washington. Returning to Europe, he grew rich on land speculations and stock jobbing under the Revolution, but was imprisoned at the time of the Terror. In prison his ancestor Charlemagne, appearing in a vision, revealed to his descendant that he was destined to be a second Messiah. On his release, to prepare for the accomplishment of this high mission, Saint-Simon entered on a course of scientific study and European travel. He had married; but he divorced his wife in order to marry Mme. de Stäel, who had recently become a widow. Journeying to Geneva, he asked the author of Corinne to unite her life to his, for he pleaded: “You are, madame, the most extraordinary woman in the world. I am the most extraordinary man. Our offspring ought therefore to be still more extraordinary.” To such an argument, however, unfortunately for the human race, this otherwise public-spirited lady turned a deaf ear.

Having wasted his substance in wild schemes and extravagant living, Saint-Simon was reduced to poverty. At one time he attempted to blow out his brains, but only succeeded in disfiguring himself for life and in blinding one eye. He died in 1825, leaving behind him the reputation of a crack-brained Bohemian.

Saint-Simon had been fortunate, however, in meeting with clever collaborators, Augustin Thierry and Auguste Comte. These two eminent writers helped him to formulate his somewhat incoherent notions, and to express them in a series of works[82] which exercised no little influence. Some of Saint-Simon’s ideas discussed in these works, notably the piercing by a canal of the Isthmus of Panama, have already been carried out; others, like the institution of a parliament of nations for the regulation of international affairs, are still in the air.

The dominant aim of all Saint-Simon’s schemes was the moral and physical well-being of the least favoured and most numerous class of humanity. His doctrines had at once a practical and a mystical tendency. This dreamer, at a time when French industry was still in its infancy, “had a prophetic vision of modern production, with its scientific management and its unlimited capacity. He communicated his enthusiasm to his disciples, most of whom never saw him in the flesh.”

For it was not until after the apostle’s death that the Saint-Simonian school of philosophy was formed. Its rapid success, its acceptance by “all the superior and even all the exceptional young men of the day,” was largely due to the proselytising vigour and organising faculty of Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, a man whom Lord Morley describes as “the most wonderful and impressive figure of modern enthusiasm.”[83]

Father Enfantin, as he was called, had only been introduced to Saint-Simon as he lay on his death-bed.

Barely initiated (à peine catéchisé), writes Mme. Adam, this Elisha of Saint-Simonianism went forth to preach throughout the towns and villages of France the golden age of the future. Signal success attended his crusade. There was much in the Saint-Simonian doctrine which accorded with the romantic humanitarianism of the age. “Its key-note was love—love and pity for the oppressed, for the poor, for the fallen woman, for the sinner, for Satan himself.” The service of mankind was the essence of this religion. For Saint-Simonianism was a religion. As such, its founder and many of its disciples regarded it. Le Nouveau Christianisme is the title of Saint-Simon’s last book, published in the year of his death.

But, as we have said, this new philosophy had also its extremely practical side. Its adherents preached “the gospel of great public works, railroads, maritime canals, free trade.” Here again they were responding to one of the great needs of the age.

A striking characteristic of society under the Empire was the intensity of its material activity. Industry on a large scale had begun to develop under Louis Philippe. It had received a powerful impetus from railroad construction.

One of the most wonderful experiences of Juliette’s childhood was her first railway journey. When she was ten and a half, her father took her by train from Amiens to Boulogne. This line, the first in France, had recently been opened. Juliette was horribly frightened. Everything terrified her: the snorting of the engine, the diabolical air of the engine-driver and fireman, the piercing shriek of the whistle, and, above all, the darkness of the tunnel, in which, she was told, a poor lady, who had put her head out of the window, had only that morning been guillotined by a passing train. When Juliette returned to Chauny, quite a heroine, because she had been in a train, this story told to her schoolfellows had a brilliant success. That unhappy passenger’s tragic fate remained for many a long day an object of intense interest to the Mlles. André’s pupils, to whose inquisitiveness it suggested all manner of questions.

“Why did she lean out of window?” asked the elder girls. “People who go on journeys ought to take care.”

“Had she any children?” asked the juniors, “and, if so, were they present?”

And when Juliette replied that they were, the horror was indescribable.

Juliette’s fame as a train traveller, however, soon faded, for so rapid was the spread of railway construction throughout France that train journeys soon became every-day occurrences. Chauny was before long united by a railway line to Paris, which Haussman was rapidly rendering almost unrecognisable. And in all this mechanical activity the Saint-Simonians were playing a prominent part. With them originated many industrial enterprises: the Saint-Simonian Pereires founded the Magasin du Louvre and the General Transatlantic Company. Father Enfantin himself, a capable railroad administrator, was the first to conceive the project of the Suez Canal.

Mme. Adam inclines to the opinion that as employers the Saint-Simonians were inferior to the Fourierists; for the latter practised division of profits among employers and employed, whereas the Saint-Simonians showed a tendency to exploit their workers. They encouraged trusts. Their system Benjamin Constant described as le papisme industriel.

By the time that Juliette came to Paris the Saint-Simonians had split up into two sects. The scission had first declared itself during the Revolution of 1830, when Enfantin insisted on standing aloof from politics, while his colleagues, Bazard and Rodrigues, declared that the Master’s teaching rendered it incumbent upon them to take an active part in political affairs. Further contention occurred over the relations of the sexes. Enfantin declared himself the apostle of free love, Bazard and Rodrigues upheld marriage; and it was on this point that the Saint-Simonians finally separated into a school which was entirely political and philosophical—that of Bazard and Rodrigues—and the so-called church of Enfantin, which represented the mystic and individualist side of the Saint-Simonian doctrine.

Enfantin and such followers as remained to him, only forty in number, left the Rue Taitbout, which had been the Saint-Simonian headquarters, and went off to the suburb Menilmontant, where they established a settlement. Singing songs especially composed for them, and attired in tam-o’shanters and light blue dalmaticas, the brethren, most of whom were university students, cultivated the ground under the supervision of Father Enfantin, who wore a scarlet robe with a violet girdle and a large metal necklace, each link of which represented one of his disciples.

Father Enfantin and his followers lived in the hope of the coming of a feminine Messiah, who, in conjunction with the Father, was to redeem the world. But their labours were interrupted and their hopes dashed to the ground by the intervention of justice. In the columns of the Saint-Simonian newspaper, Le Globe, the Father had enunciated his views of marriage and sexual morality, with the result that he found his settlement at Menilmontant broken up, and himself (in 1832) condemned to a year’s imprisonment. It was on his release that he went to Egypt and studied the feasibility of cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Suez.

When Juliette published her Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes Father Enfantin was back again in Paris acting as director of the Paris-Lyons Mediterranée Railway. Struck by the cleverness of Juliette’s first book, he sent two of his followers to invite the young authoress to a Saint-Simonian banquet. But she thought it prudent to refuse the invitation, having heard that the Father regarded her in the same light as his Master had regarded Mme. de Staël, viz. as a possible feminine Messiah, who with the Father should make all things new. “Enfantin,” remarks Juliette, “at the age of sixty-two, was somewhat late in discovering his fellow-saviour,” though for her at twenty-two the discovery was premature, for she did not feel herself ripe for so exalted a mission. “Just think what I was expected to bring to the world!” she exclaims. “Nothing less than the golden age!”

Though Juliette had refused the invitation to the banquet, she permitted her friend Arlès Dufour to take her to one of Enfantin’s evening receptions, where she found him assisted by a stout and comely lady. Arlès Dufour had been one of those who had brought her the invitation to the Father’s banquet. From the first he had taken a fatherly interest in the young Mme. Lamessine; and she felt drawn to him by a sentiment of filial devotion which never left her. He must indeed have been an attractive character. An ardent Saint-Simonian, a pacifist, an advocate of women’s rights and an Anglophil, he was the friend of John Stuart Mill and Richard Cobden. “It is charming to see him, at sixty-five, with his heart still running off with his head,” writes Cobden in 1860.[84] “He would not allow the word ‘obey’ to be used by women in the marriage ceremony, and has other very rebellious notions.”

Though in practice a staid citizen of Lyons, a devoted husband and father of a family, theoretically Dufour, like his master, Enfantin, believed in free love. This was the only point on which he and his young friend Juliette disagreed. “Woman needs a certain dignity,” she argued, “which can never be hers if she violates convention and neglects her duty to society.”

Arlès Dufour, a convinced free trader, was deeply interested in his friend Cobden’s mission to Paris, for the purpose of arranging a commercial treaty between France and England. During these negotiations, Arlès, who was regarded as an authority on free trade, was more than once consulted by the Emperor, and at a restaurant dinner in the autumn of 1860 he entertained Juliette, Mme. Reybaud, Girardin and some Saint-Simonian friends with the story of his imperial audiences. Unlike most of Juliette’s acquaintances, Dufour was an Imperialist. But he had spoken rather freely to Napoléon on the subject of his Saint-Simonian faith and his dreams for the future. Thereupon the Emperor had remarked, “Don’t you think, M. Arlès, that people may not be far wrong when they call you a crank?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Arlès Dufour, “I am a crank, but your Majesty knows it is only the cranks who succeed.”

The Emperor laughed loudly; then he rose and said: “Go, you bold man, and don’t return until to-morrow at two o’clock.”

At the same restaurant dinner the talk fell on the Suez Canal, which had been begun two years earlier. The Saint-Simonians were aggrieved by Ferdinand de Lesseps’ appropriation of an idea which they regarded as the property of their sect. Girardin argued that de Lesseps had conceived the idea independently; that it was he who had communicated it to Saïd Pasha, who had received it with enthusiasm, and that de Lesseps alone could carry the project through, particularly in the face of England’s opposition. Lord Palmerston, always suspicious of Napoléon’s designs, was, as Girardin remarked, conducting a veritable campaign against the making of the canal.

“Come, Arlès,” said Girardin. “You know how malicious Palmerston can be when it is a question of any French enterprise. Your friend Cobden has suffered enough from that. Palmerston’s campaign against the canal ought to make you support de Lesseps instead of attacking him.... When de Lesseps comes to Paris I will take you to him, and you are too much of a Frenchman not to say, ‘Succeed, and you will have deserved well of the Saint-Simonian School in France.’”

Thus did this wily journalist of a Girardin win Arlès Dufour to his side. But with the other Saint-Simonians present he was not so successful; and one of them, who had a prophetic soul, was heard to mutter: “We shall see. But if the canal is a failure it will remain French; if it succeeds the English will buy it, as they buy everything that is worth buying.”

It was in this year, 1860, that Mme. Lamessine published her second volume, Mon Village,[85] a series of charming rural sketches, stories, dialogues, quaint old country ballads put into the mouth of a village weaver. From the beginning to the end of this little book, one breathes the atmosphere of the Picard countryside, when it was still remote, before railways and motor-cars had brought it within reach of the capital. Juliette had written the book at the suggestion of George Sand, who, replying to a letter in which Juliette had said that the days spent at her village of Blérancourt were the happiest of her life, enjoined her to write her memories while they were fresh. “Your title is found,” she added, “Mon Village.” The publishers were, by a curious irony of fate, Hetzel and Lévy, the very two who had most emphatically refused her first book. M. Lamessine, having taken advantage of the power given him by the Code Napoléon, had appropriated the profits of her earlier publications. Juliette now, at Hetzel’s suggestion, by dropping the last letter of her maiden name, made use of the pseudonym “Juliette Lamber.” “It is a clever trick,” said her husband. “But I will make you pay for it.”

Juliette’s domestic life was growing steadily more and more unhappy. Arlès Dufour, her bon père, as she called him, advised her to separate from her husband. But to such a course Dr. Lambert was strongly opposed. However, the two fathers—the adopted and the natural one—met at Chauny. There Arlès, “the white-haired old gentleman,” whom little Alice described as un bon génie, arranged everything, and for a time Juliette gave up her life in Paris and returned to her parents’ home.

Mme. d’Agoult approved of the course her young friend had taken. And Juliette for some months devoted herself entirely to her literary work. She was writing her third volume, a study of a Chinaman, who visits Europe and somewhat in the manner of the travellers in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters compares Eastern with Western civilisation. Under the title of Un Mandarin this book appeared in the same series as Mon Village, before the end of the year 1860.

Juliette at Chauny, now that the railway line had been opened, was not altogether isolated from her beloved Paris. Her friends were able to come and visit her on Sundays. Hetzel on his way to Brussels made a point of calling at Chauny; and Juliette herself sometimes went to town.

On one occasion she went to Paris to visit her friend Eugène Pelletan,[86] who was in Sainte Pélagie prison. The Imperial Government always kept a watchful eye on the press; and Pelletan had been sentenced to three months imprisonment for an article attacking the Government, entitled La Liberté comme en Autriche, which had appeared in the Courier du Dimanche.

This was the first time that Juliette had been in a prison. The visit left an impression of horror on her mind, which obsessed her for many weeks. Pelletan took her to see one of his fellow-prisoners, that famous “monomaniac of conspiracy, Blanqui, who spent half his political life in the prisons of four different régimes.” Juliette respected and pitied Blanqui as a martyr to Republicanism and the only kind of martyr with whom she could ever sympathise, the kind that returns blow for blow. Passive resistance never appealed to Juliette’s rebellious spirit. Not even now, when she has become a Christian, does she believe in the doctrine of turning the other cheek. In Blanqui she found all the bitterness and disillusionment of the defeated rebel. When she offered him Daniel Stern’s History of that Revolution of 1848, in the first months of which he had played a prominent part, he seemed to regard it as an insult and refused even to touch the volume.

Juliette returned to Chauny depressed and ill. She had contracted a severe cold, which speedily developed into hæmorrhage of the lungs. She concealed this alarming symptom from her parents, however, and made an excuse to return to Paris, where she saw her doctor, not Dr. Bonnard, but a throat specialist, a Dr. Cabarrus, whom she had lately been in the habit of consulting. He thought so seriously of her case that he hurried her off to the South of France at once. From Paris to Cannes in those days was a long journey. The train took a day and night to reach Toulon, which was the terminus. Then before Cannes was reached there were two days of driving.

The much-vaunted Riviera seemed to this young Picarde at first extremely dull. In her Voyage autour du Grand Pin, a book published in 1863, she writes: “I loathe travelling. I love the things I know, old books, old friends, familiar landscapes, familiar melodies, familiar enthusiasms.... I feel much worse at Cannes than I did at Paris, and I can’t forgive the people who are for ever praising Provence.... What has happened to the sun? I have been asking. I am told that it will soon come out. I wait. If you have heard any news of Phœbus do be kind enough to send me a telegram. I fear that some accident may have befallen him. Perhaps a seal may have devoured him over there at the back of the sea, where he is said to set in this country.”

But it was as she had been told, she had not long to wait, Phœbus Apollo soon rose radiant from the sea; and with the glorious sun of Provence returned Juliette’s health and spirits.

Introductions from the north speedily surrounded her with interesting acquaintances: her physician, Dr. Maure, the friend of Thiers; Dr. Maure’s friends, Prosper Mérimée and Victor Cousin; Jean Reynaud, an eminent Saint-Simonian, but not of Enfantin’s group. At Jean Reynaud’s villa, la Bocca, she met Lord Brougham. Mme. Reynaud, one of Chopin’s most accomplished pupils, entranced Juliette by her rendering of Beethoven. Jean Reynaud took her long rambles. In one of these he related how he had come to leave Enfantin, having found his views on sexual morality quite impossible.

Next winter, when Juliette returned to Cannes, her little Alice, now seven and a half, came with her and joined in these rambles at her mother’s side. Jean Reynaud was amused by Juliette’s respect for her daughter’s personality. For Mme. Lamessine, mindful of the suffering endured in her own childhood through the proselytising ardour of her grandmother and father, was careful not to impose on Alice any of her own ideas. With regard to fundamental things Juliette would say to the child: “Grandfather thinks so and so, my view is such and such. You must form your own opinion.”

The first time Jean Reynaud heard this kind of conversation he burst out laughing, and was about to repeat the phrase in jest, when Juliette stopped him with a look, and sending her little girl away to pick some flowers, said: “Joke with me as much as you like, but not before her. Remember she has only me to respect.”

So charmed was the young author with her life at Cannes, so beneficial for her own health and her daughter’s did she find the climate of Provence, that, before the end of her second winter there, she had persuaded her father to buy a building site on the Golfe Juan; and before her return to the north in the spring of 1862, the walls of her villa of Bruyères were already rising.

Dr. and Mme. Lambert were thinking of selling their house at Chauny, in order to spend the summer months with their daughter in a Paris flat and their winters on the shore of the Mediterranean.

The winter of 1862-3 found Juliette and Alice installed in their villa of Bruyères. Mme. de Pierreclos was their first visitor. Dr. Maure called frequently, always bringing with him his last letter from his friend Thiers, which he was proud to read to his friends at Bruyères. But, alas! he by whose advice Juliette had settled on the Golfe Juan, Jean Reynaud, her “third father,” as she called him, was no more. He had died in Paris, during the summer, after a surgical operation. His loss left his adopted daughter disconsolate. Her book Mon Voyage autour du Grand Pin she dedicated to his memory; for every one of its pages, she writes, had been inspired by their walks and talks at Cannes.

Dr. Lambert, when he came to Bruyères, was as charmed as his daughter and granddaughter with the villa and its surroundings. He was delighted with the garden which Juliette had planned. But, above all, he was enraptured by the Mediterranean, which he saw for the first time, and by the view of the island of Corsica in the distance.

Gazing upon this lovely prospect, the fervent classicist cried: “Ah! this is Greece. And to think that I could ever have imagined that I understood Homer and all he described! Why, I must read him again, in the light of this new experience. And I will begin this very day. Juliette, have you our old Homer here? If not, I must go and buy a copy at Cannes, at Nice, or even in Corsica, if need be.”

Henceforth Dr. Lambert had no hesitation as to leaving Chauny. He wrote to his wife that the house must be sold. Juliette, as soon as the winter months were past, returned to Paris to look for a flat.

Dr. Lambert, le vieil étudiant, as his daughter called him, would have liked to settle in the Latin quarter, but Alice was bent on the Rue de Rivoli, opposite the Tuileries Gardens, where she loved to play. And it was Alice who had her way. Besides, as Juliette explained to her father, all Revolutions began in the Rue de Rivoli, and a flat in that street would be like a place in the stalls at the theatre.

FOOTNOTES:

[75] Lettres à Marcie, III. (1837).

[76] Biographie Générale under “F. M. C. Fourier.”

[77] With regard to this phalanstery there is a slight discrepancy in Mme. Adam’s Souvenirs. According to vol. i. p. 342, Condé was the phalanstery which her father, during her childhood, wished to join, whereas according to vol. ii. p. 136, that phalanstery was Guise. Probably Guise is correct. For the Condé movement had been abandoned before Juliette was born.

[78] Among the latter was Donald McLaren, author of a virulent diatribe against Fourierism, published at Caledonia, Livingstone County, in 1844, entitled The Boa Constrictor, in which Fourier’s gospel is denounced “for the licentiousness of its principles, its hypocrisy and sinister aims.” In this connection it should be noticed that, as a concession to the prejudices of the times, Fourier never attempted to give practical application to his theories as to the relations between the sexes, to that “Phanerogamy” which is but another name for promiscuity.

[79] Founded in 1841, the Brook Farm Community broke up in 1847. In his delightful story, The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne describes this settlement.

[80] Author of Les Juifs, Rois de l’Epoque, 1844.

[81] Souvenirs, II. 216.

[82] La Réorganisation de la Société Européenne, l’Industrie ou Discussions politiques, morales et philosophiques and others.

[83] Morley, Life of Cobden, 1910 ed., 760.

[84] Morley, Life of Cobden, ed. 1910, 830.

[85] Mon Village, Collection Hetzel, Michel Lévy Frères, Paris; Méline, Cans et Cie, Brussels.

[86] See ante, 57.

CHAPTER VIII

HER PRE-WAR SALON

1864-1870

Le Petit Salon de la Rue de Rivoli.
Le Grand Salon de la Maison Sallandrouze.

Sociability has ever been one of Mme. Adam’s gifts. It declared itself in her childhood. At school she was always the centre of a band, grouping, organising her schoolfellows. When she came to live in Paris, to create a salon became her dominating ambition. And it was no less a personage than that most distinguished and aristocratic of salonnières, Mme. d’Agoult, who first suggested to her young friend the possibility of realising her aspiration.

“Mine will remain the great salon of the winter,” said Mme. d’Agoult, who frequently left Paris during the summer months, “and yours shall be the little summer salon.” For Juliette, as we have seen, had begun to spend her winters in the south.

Then the Countess proceeded to draw up a code of rules for Juliette’s guidance in the execution of her great social enterprise. “Mme. d’Agoult,” writes Juliette, “sent me la très belle page suivante.[87]

“‘Happiness depends on renunciation and wisdom. If you would gather around you a number of men and a few intelligent women you must appear serene or happy.

“‘Your life, though in reality it may be agitated, must appear to others to be without complications and not lacking in unity.

“‘Friendships can only be retained in an atmosphere which is impersonal and restful.

“‘In order that the founders of your salon may regard themselves as such you must consult them before you introduce any new-comers.

“‘You should avoid exchanging confidences; for they create too close an intimacy; and they may lead you to give advice with which some day you may be reproached.

“‘Be modest, but not self-effacing. Be simple, but distinguished. Express your opinions with a certain confidence. Appear firm, but also tolerant.

“‘If you would preserve your salon your first duty should be to stimulate the intellectual curiosity of those whom you have gathered round you.

“‘Be careful to make them feel that you are more occupied with them than with yourself.

“‘Twenty men friends and five women will suffice to found a salon. You have them already.’”

Juliette had not only the requisite number of friends, but now, in the spring of 1864, she had also a home in the very heart of Paris, where she could receive them. And the dinner-party which, by way of house-warming, she gave in the flat in the Rue de Rivoli may be regarded as inaugurating her salon, that salon minuscule, as she called it, which was to be the summer ante-chamber to Mme. d’Agoult’s grand salon d’Hiver.

Seven out of her twenty men friends were invited to dinner. They all accepted, and hence may be regarded as the pious founders of Juliette’s first salon. They were Edmond Adam, a wealthy financier, an ardent republican, one of the men of 1848, of whom we shall hear much later; Edmond Texier, a distinguished writer and a brilliant wit; the amorous Toussenel, of course; Peyrat, the most bigoted of anti-clericals; Nefftzer, now editor of the Temps; that polished Jacobin, Challemel-Lacour; and the ever-faithful Ronchaud.

Following Mme. d’Agoult’s instructions, and preserving, roughly, the feminine proportion of one quarter which she had indicated, Juliette had invited two women guests—Mme. d’Agoult herself and Mme. de Pierreclos. But neither was able to come. The Countess, who seldom went out anywhere, considered herself excused from accepting her young friend’s invitation by the recent death of her daughter, Mme. Ollivier. Mme. de Pierreclos was away at Macon, staying with her uncle, Alphonse de Lamartine.

The conversation that evening gave the tone for the conversations in all Juliette’s salons: of the little salon in the Rue de Rivoli, of the greater salon in the Boulevard Poissonnière, of the pre-war and the post-war salon, of that extension of her salons which was La Nouvelle Revue, and likewise of those latter-day assemblies which, since her retirement from La Nouvelle Revue, seventeen years ago, Mme. Adam has gathered round her on the terrace or in the spacious drawing-room of her beautiful country home in the Abbey of Gif.

Whether the late M. Émile Faguet ever visited either of these salons, I do not know. But if he did, he must have been ill at ease, for he was one of those who found the political salon “uninhabitable.”[88] And at Mme. Adam’s, though literature, art, philosophy, and other subjects were by no means excluded, politics held the first place. Throughout the Empire Juliette’s salon, first in the Rue de Rivoli, later on the Boulevard Poissonnière, was a centre of energetic republican opposition to the Empire. The hostess’s chief desire was to reconcile the diverse currents of republican sentiment, to blend in the broad stream of freedom the various and too often conflicting strands of progress.

Already on that initial evening we find three shades of republican opposition represented in the Rue de Rivoli salon. There was Peyrat, the most rabid of reformers, who cared not what the Government might be so long as it was a Republic. “Qu’elle soit d’abord la République! on verra après,” he exclaimed.[89] There was the more moderate Edmond Adam, who feared what he called a pseudo-Republic; and there was the nationalist Nefftzer, the Alsatian, who steadily refused to avert his gaze from the peril lowering across the north-eastern frontier. Nefftzer, though calling himself a republican, would have supported the Emperor had he shown himself capable of inaugurating a vigorous foreign policy. The editor of the Temps was one of the few who in those days perceived Bismarck’s true aims and character. “Il est plus que dangereux, il est effrayant,” exclaimed Nefftzer that evening. But the editor’s lugubrious prognostications were jeered at by most of his fellow-guests. “Here comes to life again the illustrious Jeremiah,” said Peyrat. Only Juliette and her amoureux Toussenel experienced any consternation at Nefftzer’s warnings. “I have long felt,” said Toussenel, “that some one was undermining our race, our character, our heroism.... You, Nefftzer, declare this some one to be Prussia. You have not wasted your time here this evening. You have warned a patriot, and one who is not stoney-hearted. Thank you.”[90]

In Juliette’s salon at this time everything was an open question; for in these years, though she was swayed by strong preferences, she had no exclusions. Different shades of religious as well as of political opinion were represented. Anti-clericalism, though it dominated, did not have everything its own way.

When Juliette’s physician, Dr. Clavel, announced that the Masonic Lodges were intending to drive Catholicism from France, Peyrat applauded, but Saint-Victor put in a plea for liberty.[91]

“Whether one believes or disbelieves,” said Saint-Victor, “freedom is essential.”

Eugène Pelletan agreed with him; not so Peyrat, who uttered his usual cry: “The Republic before everything. And then....”

“And then what?” inquired Duclerc,[92] who was one of the 1848 revolutionists.

“After we have extirpated all error, then...”

“But who shall decide what is error?”

“We shall.”

“Then you consider yourselves infallible?”

“Is it or is it not a question of overthrowing the adversary?”

“Yes; but I should like to know in favour of whom and of what the adversary is to be overthrown.”

“In favour of the principles of the Great Revolution.”

“The principles of ’92 or ’93?”

“Oh!” said Peyrat; “not the Revolution as understood by Quinet, the Revolution emasculated of all that was most powerful in it. Michelet ... has accepted the Revolution, including the Terror.”[93]

“What!” exclaimed Duclerc, “the French Revolution may not be considered apart from its ferocity?”

“Ferocity which was necessary.”

“And which may again become necessary.”

“That may be.”

“When Peyrat and Duclerc were discussing,” comments their hostess, “arguments flew so rapidly from side to side that we listened without interrupting. Moreover, there was not the slightest chance of getting in a phrase or even a word edgeways.”

Though politics held the first place in Juliette’s salon, as we have said, literature and art were by no means neglected.

The hostess herself, an ardent romanticist and idealist, if ever there were one, had no sympathy with the realism which in the middle sixties was beginning to invade French art and literature. Manet’s “Olympia,” when it was exhibited in the Salon, filled her with loathing. When she first saw it, she knew not whether to laugh or to cry.

“Quelle horreur et aussi quels rires,” she exclaims. “Voici l’Olympia de Manet. Nue, étendue, accoudée sur un drap blanc. Derrière elle une negresse tient un bouquet. Sur le drap blanc un chat noir déteint et laisse la trace de ses pattes sales. Germinie Lacerteux en littérature, le chat noir aux pattes sales en peinture, c’est complet! O idéal, idéal! Je vais revoir Picardia.”

The de Goncourts’ novel, Germinie Lacerteux, on its recent appearance, had been vehemently discussed in the Rue de Rivoli. “It is Lucrèce Borgia graillonnante,” exclaimed Lamartine’s niece, Mme. de Pierreclos. And most of her fellow-guests as well as her hostess were up in arms at once when some one described the de Goncourts and Flaubert as the leaders of the realistic school. Flaubert, they contended, would never have condescended to wallow in the mud which seemed as much the de Goncourts’ natural element as it was to be that of their disciple Zola. For the author of La Terre and for all his tribe Juliette has ever manifested an extreme aversion.

From the de Goncourts’ realism our passionate idealist turned with relief to the classicism of her Grecian friends, Ronchaud, Saint-Victor, Ménard, and to those poets of the new Parnassian school who shared her enthusiasm for the gods and ideals of antiquity.[94]

Juliette’s Salon Minuscule, as she modestly called it, had now become a regular institution in Parisian intellectual society. Possibly it had been a greater success than its originator, Mme. d’Agoult, had ever anticipated. Possibly this may have accounted for the clouds which now began to appear on the horizon of Juliette’s friendship with that great lady, clouds which threatened to repeat in the nineteenth century that earlier story of the jealous Mme. du Deffand and her gifted young protégée, Mlle. de Lespinasse. Certain of Mme. d’Agoult’s friends were thought to be too often in the Rue de Rivoli. Consequently, Juliette began to be coldly received in the Rue Presbourg. Mischief-makers were not lacking: they told the Countess that in the Rue de Rivoli her works were somewhat severely criticised. While Juliette was at Bruyères in the winter of 1866-67 she received a letter from Mme. de Pierreclos[95] warning her that somehow she was not in the Countess’s good books.

“Attention, petite Juliette!” wrote Lamartine’s niece. “Vous n’êtes pas en faveur. Je ne jurerais qu’à votre retour vous ne subissiez une bourrasque qui vous écarte à tout jamais de la Rue de Presbourg.”

In the crisis now approaching, one of the most momentous of Juliette’s life, Mme. d’Agoult vouchsafed her young friend no sympathy whatever.

For some years, as we have seen, Juliette had been living apart from her husband. M. Lamessine had used to the full the powers, which until a few years ago the French law gave a husband, of appropriating his wife’s earnings. Little Alice lived in terror that one day her father might even claim that house and garden on the Golfe Juan, the beloved Bruyères, where she and her mother spent happy winter months. “You must make haste and grow up,” Dr. Lambert used to say to his granddaughter, “and then you will marry and Bruyères shall be your dowry.”

It was in the summer of 1867 that Juliette received from her lawyer, M. Matthieu, a letter asking her to come and see him on a certain evening about a communication he had received from her husband.[96] M. Lamessine, in return for 15,000 francs, consented to relinquish his claim to the royalties on his wife’s books published before their separation. Distressed by the exorbitance of this demand, Juliette and Alice, who had accompanied her, on leaving the lawyer, tried to divert themselves by watching the crowds of merry-makers in the Champs Elysées. All Paris seemed en fête, for it was the summer of the Great Exhibition. But these gay sights afforded Juliette no solace. Tired and sad, she and Alice returned home. On the table lay a letter marked urgent. “Never mind,” said Juliette to herself, “I have enough worries for one evening. I will not open the letter till morning.” It was late. Her father and mother had gone to bed. She wished her daughter a sad good-night and followed her parents’ example. But she could not sleep, neither could she forget that letter marked urgent. The writing seemed familiar. She rose and read it. The letter was from her lawyer.

“Dear Madam,” it ran, “among the papers which I had set aside to finish examining to-night is a letter from Algeria, which tells me that your husband, M. Lamessine, died six weeks ago.... Thus the question of your royalties is decided.[97]—Yours, etc....”

Juliette has never been one of those who feign sentiments they do not feel. About her first husband’s death she is in her Souvenirs perfectly frank: she makes no attempt to conceal the feeling of intense relief which the news brought to her. Dr. Lambert, when he heard it, exclaimed: “I know some one who will be glad to have me for a father-in-law.”

That “some one” was Edmond Adam. One of the pious founders of Juliette’s salon, he had also been a member of Mme. d’Agoult’s circle. Originally a journalist on the staff of the famous National, he had made a considerable fortune and had become one of the mainstays of the Comptoir d’Escompte, a republican bank founded by his friend Alessandro Bixio and others. But that which had above all things attracted Juliette to the man who was to be her second husband—for he was considerably Juliette’s senior—was his uncompromising republicanism, dating back to the Revolution of 1848, in which he had played a prominent part. Edmond Adam united to high principles and fervent idealism a distinguished appearance and ingratiating manners. Among his friends he passed for a pleasant fellow. “A fine old Senator” he appeared some years later to a foreigner who visited Mine. Adam’s salon. “The chivalrous Adam,” she herself used to call him.

She noticed him first at a Wagner concert, standing opposite to her by a mirror in which their eyes met. “Who is that tall gentleman?” she inquired of Mme. d’Agoult, who sat next to her.

“Edmond Adam,” replied the Countess. “We are great friends. You don’t see him at my receptions because of Girardin, whom he is always wishing to fight. He will fight for anything or nothing. After Carrel’s death,[98] when Adam was editor of an Angers newspaper, Armand Marrast invited him to join the staff of the National. His friends are Duclerc,[99] Grévy,[100] Carnot,[101] all abstentionistes, and so is Adam, though he is essentially a man of action.... On the 2nd of December[102] he was a Councillor of State. But he refused to serve the Empire.... I don’t know any man who is more highly esteemed, and I like him very much.... He is fidelity and devotion itself.”

During the insurrection of June 1848, Adam with his friend Bixio,[103] both of them unarmed, had gone up on to the Paris barricades to endeavour to restore order. Afterwards, when the National Assembly wished to decorate the hero with the Cross of the Legion of Honour, Adam refused it on the ground that he could not wear a decoration won in a civil war, and, moreover, that he had merely done his duty. “Ronchaud,” added the Countess, “has just told me that he [Adam] has read your book,[104] and that he would like me to introduce him to you.”

But Juliette, moved by a sentiment not uncommon in women of deep feelings, a kind of subconscious fear of a man who has profoundly impressed them, refused that evening to make her new admirer’s acquaintance. Later, on the publication of her book Mon Village, he wrote his congratulations. She replied somewhat curtly. But her correspondent was not discouraged. Some time afterwards, when she was at the theatre with her friend, Mme. Fauvety,[105] whom he knew, he joined their party. Mme. Fauvety admired him no less than Mme. d’Agoult. Dr. Lambert, too, had a high opinion of his daughter’s new acquaintance. “He is pure gold,” said Juliette’s father, “and when you see him next you can tell him your father would like to shake hands with him; for he is one of those—and they are few—of whom an old republican may be proud.”[106]

Juliette’s betrothal to Edmond Adam took place on the day after she received her lawyer’s letter. Congratulations poured in from all her friends, with the one exception of Mme. d’Agoult. Yet she was aware of her young friend’s happiness. Ronchaud had told her. Since Mme. de Pierreclos’ warning letter,[107] Juliette and her old friend had not met. Now, with some misgiving, Juliette determined to go and see her. She received her kindly. But in a few minutes the discordant note was struck.[108] “The misfortune of being a widow,” said the Countess, “is that one is seized by a foolish desire to remarry. But I don’t think you capable of such folly. An intelligent woman should remain free and mistress of her own thoughts.”

“I have greater need of happiness than of freedom,” replied Juliette.

Then followed a distressing scene. Mme. d’Agoult completely lost her temper. She told Juliette she hoped never to see her again. They parted; and the Countess’s wish was fulfilled. But when, some time later, Juliette heard that her former friend had entered as a patient the house of the famous nerve specialist, Dr. Blanche, she felt that Mme. d’Agoult’s lack of self-control on that sorrowful day was accounted for.

In the spring of the following year Juliette Lamber and Edmond Adam were married. The intervening winter had been spent on the Golfe Juan, where Adam, like other friends of Juliette, the Texiers, for example, had built himself a villa, Le Grand Pin. There had been a somewhat heated discussion as to whether after marriage the Adams should spend their winters at Le Grand Pin or at Bruyères. Juliette could not tolerate the idea of leaving the house which she had built and the garden she had planned. Though, as she had told Mme. d’Agoult, she longed more for happiness than for freedom, she was determined to hold her own in her new life. Already she had consented to abandon her flat in the Rue de Rivoli for one in a famous house, la Maison Sallandrouze,[109] on the Boulevard Poissonnière, opposite Adam’s favourite restaurant, the Café Brébant. She was making no small sacrifice by consenting to leave what seemed to her the hub of the universe, that Rue de Rivoli with its delightful proximity to the Louvre, to the Corps Legislatif, the doings of which this ardent young politician followed feverishly, and to those Tuileries Gardens, where, while Alice was at play, her mother, in conversation with members of Parliament on their way from the Assembly, could glean all the latest political news. Not unnaturally, therefore, Juliette’s keen sense of justice was outraged when Adam asked her to make the further sacrifice and give up her beloved Bruyères in favour of Le Grand Pin, although this villa was much more spacious and imposing than her own dear home.

“I entreat you,” pleaded Adam,[110] “do consent to live at Le Grand Pin for at least two or three years after our marriage. I really cannot run the risk of being called M. Lambert in a district where you are so well known.”

“Oh, you need not fear; I can assure you I shall be called Mme. Adam.”

“No, I don’t think so,” persisted Adam.... “And however I may love your name when borne by you, it would humiliate me.”

“Very well then, I will keep it,” retorted Juliette.

They parted, and did not meet for several days. They were both miserable. Then that kind physician, the good Dr. Maure, Thiers’ friend, effected a reconciliation.

“Oh, you fools,” he cried, “at your age to lay down conditions and to be obstinate. When happiness runs to meet you, you turn away. Be reconciled at once.”

Adam holds out his arms. Juliette hesitates. Dr. Maure makes a grimace. “He will live at Bruyères. Embrace him. But it costs him dear. It is the greatest sacrifice he can make.”

The quarrel was at an end. Juliette threw herself into her lover’s arms. He asked her pardon.

“I ought to have understood, Juliette,” he said. “I was mad. I ought to have realised that your beloved Bruyères, which you had made with your own hands, you could not leave for another house so close. It was with money only that I created Le Grand Pin. To-morrow I will summon the builders. I will enlarge Bruyères, and next year, when we return, we shall be at home in your own house.”

The year 1868, the year of her second marriage, opened well for Juliette. “Tellement riante,” she writes, “que j’y vois tout en beau. Je suis heureuse autant qu’on peut imaginer....”[111] As she awoke on New Year’s Day, Alice whispered, “Dear mother, I wish you what you already possess.”

Her father, who had not come to Bruyères that year, wrote that he, too, was the happiest of men. For cet étudiant rive gauche, ce fanatique de science, as Juliette called him, was now at liberty to quit cette rue impériale, as he called the Rue de Rivoli, infestée par les allées et venues de l’empereur et de l’impératrice, and to inhabit the quarter of his dreams, to take a flat in the Rue S. Jacques close to the lecture-rooms and laboratories of those eminent scientists, Paul Bert and Claude Bernard.

In every respect it was well that the two families should separate. The discordant temperaments of Juliette and her mother rendered it impossible for them to agree long together. Neither their summers in Paris nor their winters on the Riviera had been very happy. And as for Juliette, the bliss of life with a husband who adored her and shared all her interests soon compensated her for the loss of her favourite street. “Nous sommes heureux à rendre jaloux,” she wrote soon after her marriage.[112] “But, on the contrary, our friends enjoy our happiness. Their assiduity in visiting us grows. They love our home, and they cannot pass along the Boulevard Poissonnière without coming up to see us, especially in the evening.”

Thus the minuscule salon of the Rue de Rivoli was transformed into the Great Salon of the Boulevard Poissonnière.

In the two troubled years which were to elapse before the outbreak of war, the Adams’ salon was to serve, as we have said, as a meeting-place for representatives of all parties in opposition: for abstentionistes and for sermentistes, for the elder republicans who followed M. Thiers, and for les Jeunes who followed Gambetta.

“Bientôt,” writes Juliette, “notre salon réunit toutes les opinions, depuis les orléanistes jusqu’aux irréconciliables.”[113]

Mme. Adam’s own attitude remained irreconcilably abstentioniste. She had no sympathy whatever with those who, like her husband’s friend, Jules Grévy, took the oath to the Empire in order to upset it. “Prêter un serment qu’on est résolu à ne pas tenir,” she writes, “c’est être déloyal et coupable.”[114] Imagine her horror, therefore, when she found her own husband wavering—first inclined to listen to the arguments of his friend Thiers, and then, on the eve of the 1869 election, announcing that he is going to his native Normandy, there to stand as candidate for the village of Brionne.[115]

“And you will take the oath—you?”

“Yes; I have thought it well over. Whatever objection you may have to offer has been considered and rejected.”

“It seemed,” writes Juliette, “as if a gulf had opened between us. What I could not say to him when he started, I wrote to him.” With her letter she enclosed others from friends who had written expressing their astonishment at his decision. One was from Louis Blanc.

“That the young who never witnessed the crime of December should swear allegiance to the murderer I can understand,” he wrote. “But how can one who saw the blood flow, who heard the oath broken, forget, if his heart be kind and loyal?”

One morning, shortly after this packet had been dispatched, Mme. Adam received a telegram from Brionne containing one word: “Come.” She and Alice obeyed. They arrived at Brionne on the very day when Adam was to take the oath. “I could not take it,” he said, “without being sure that you approve and that you realise its significance. Have you become any less narrow, any less bigoted, Juliette?”[116]

But no, Mme. Adam was as resolute as ever. And her husband, yielding to her arguments, or unwilling to create between himself and his wife an impassable breach, told his electors that he found himself incapable of taking the oath. “The candidate who replaced him,” adds Juliette, “did so well that the electors bore him no grudge. As for me, I am prouder than ever to bear his name.”

Léon Gambetta was now, as the acknowledged leader of that wing of the republican party known as les Jeunes, attracting considerable attention. He was a complete meridional, for his parents were a Provençal mother and a father of Genoese origin. He was born in 1837 at Cahors, where his father kept a small grocer’s shop. Léon and one sister were their only children. It having been prophesied to Mme. Gambetta, before her son’s birth, that he would one day be a great man, she denied herself in every way in order to give him the best of educations. He entered the legal profession and went to Paris. There, among the students of the Latin quarter, he rapidly made his mark. No students’ manifestation was complete without him, neither was any fête. He showed a marvellous capacity for repeating verses and drinking beer. He hated the Empire with exuberance, but not with fanaticism. He was well read. Montaigne and Rabelais were his favourite authors, and he was seldom seen without a tattered copy of the latter protruding from his slovenly coat pocket. Passionately interested in public affairs, he hardly missed a sitting of the Corps Legislatif. He was equally assiduous at the Café Voltaire and the Café Procope. There, no matter what subject was under discussion—books, plays, women, or politics—he never failed to monopolise the conversation.

Gambetta first appears in Mme. Adam’s Souvenirs when Eugène Pelletan describes him to her as one of the riff-raff of the party (les voyous du parti).[117] Later Girardin in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon had praised his exuberance tempered by common sense.

“Vous n’imaginez pas la vitalité de ce gaillard-là,” said Girardin.[118] “If only he were better put on, I would introduce him to you. But it is impossible. Nevertheless, he is a man of letters.”

But soon Juliette began to feel that without ce gaillard-là, ce jeune monstre, ce dompteur des foules, as Gambetta was beginning to be called, her Grand Salon was incomplete. Adam was meeting Gambetta constantly at Laurent Pichat’s, and was ever quoting to his wife this rising young demagogue’s astute sayings.

“We must introduce him into our circle; you must bring him to me,” said Juliette.[119]

“But,” objected Adam, “he is very unfledged. Neither in manner nor in words does he know any restraint. His accent is impossible. He is insolent in discussion. Moreover, I do not wish you to hear him talk of the men of 1848.”

For the idealists of 1848, for their lack of worldly wisdom, for their failure to take advantage of the situation they had created, Gambetta did not scruple to express his profound contempt.

“But,” interjected Juliette, “is he really out of the common? Is he worth knowing? Yes or no?”

“Yes, he is out of the common. He is worth knowing. But he is Bohemian, vulgar, brutal. His manner of life is extraordinary. He is a typical man of the masses, as Danton, plus retors. He has an air of authority and dominates the conversation, no matter where he is.”

“We will invite him,” said Juliette. Nevertheless, before making the final plunge, she took the precaution of consulting her old friend, Hetzel, the publisher, who knew about Gambetta through a mutual friend, Alphonse Daudet, another brilliant young Provençal, who was at that time making his mark in Paris.

Hetzel pronounced the jeune monstre to be quite impossible. “You should hear Alphonse Daudet describe Gambetta’s southern clan, the clan of the bas-midi, composed of howling Gascons, of blatant windbags of Provençals. He himself a kind of political commercial traveller ... provincial to the marrow of his bones, a provincial grocer withal, one-eyed and chemisé et cravaté et pantalonné en dégringolade.”

Such a picture gave Mme. Adam pause. But her husband pronounced it a caricature. Alphonse Daudet had only seen Gambetta at restaurants. In Laurent Pichat’s salon he was better. Certainly he was too vehement, but he was not a windbag. So he was invited to one of the Adams’ famous Friday dinner-parties to meet a number of distinguished guests, with most of whom he was previously acquainted: his friend Laurent Pichat, Eugène Pelletan, Jules Ferry,[120] Hetzel, who came to form his own opinion of le monstre, those two faithful friends Challemel-Lacour and de Ronchaud, d’Artigues, Duclerc, the Orleanist de Reims. L’hôte exceptionnel,[121] as Mme. Adam puts it, was another Orleanist, no less a personage than the grandson of General La Fayette, the Marquis Jules de Lasteyrie. He had fought in Portugal for Don Pedro in 1832; he had sat on the left centre in the Chambre des Députés under Louis Philippe; he had been exiled in 1852, but had returned after the amnesty. Now, backed by Thiers, he was endeavouring, as candidate for Seine et Marne, to re-enter political life.

Adam had told the Marquis that he was to meet Gambetta, and full of curiosity, congratulating his hostess on her boldness, Lasteyrie arrived early. “I shall tell Thiers about this party,” he said, “for he is deeply interested in le jeune monstre.”

Gambetta, imagining that he was going to dine with a blue-stocking, dressed anyhow. He arrived wearing a nondescript kind of coat, with a suggestion of a flannel shirt appearing between his high-buttoned waistcoat and collar.[122] He looked thunderstruck when he saw every one else in evening dress. Eugène Pelletan, who knew him well, presented him to his hostess. Adam was talking in another salon. Gambetta begged Mme. Adam to excuse his not having dressed.

“If I had known,” he said.

“You would not have come,” she replied, laughing. “That is not nice of you.”

M. de Lasteyrie, who was generally most tolerant, whispered in her ear.... “If he had come in a workman’s blouse, I might have passed him ... but ... that!”

Jules Lasteyrie was to have taken Mme. Adam in to dinner.

“The only way to rehabilitate him, my dear friend,” she said, “is to give him the first place. I deprive you of it. But I am sure you will agree with me.”

The Marquis assumed his fine lordly air and replied: “You are right, the servants might neglect him. Besides, we shall see whether he understands le grand.”

The hostess took Gambetta’s arm. He was overwhelmed at being placed on her right. Lasteyrie sat on her left. Adam could not believe his eyes.

Hardly had they sat down at table when Gambetta, leaning towards Mme. Adam whispered—

“Madame, I shall never forget the lesson you have taught me.” Evidently he understood le grand.

Many another lesson was Juliette to teach her illustrious friend. In matters sartorial and social she was to find him an apt pupil. As Mme. d’Agoult had transformed the provincial young person into une grande dame, so Juliette was to turn the Provençal grocer, the political commercial traveller, into a man of the world.

When some ten years later she saw him at the opera faultlessly attired, with light gloves, a hat slightly tipped over one ear, a gardenia in his buttonhole, she felt proud of her handiwork.

While Gambetta was ready enough to employ Adam’s tailor, he was not ready to adopt all his or his wife’s political opinions. At that first dinner-party Mme. Adam and her guest, as Adam had foreseen, disagreed on the question of the oath of allegiance to the Empire and on their estimate of the republicans of 1848.

Despite these differences, however, for the next seven years, at least, bonds of mutual admiration united Mme. Adam and Gambetta. During the national disasters now approaching her esteem for him steadily increased;[123] she admired not his patriotism only, but his wisdom, his moderation; she came to regard him as the one hope of la patrie, the cariatide of her beloved France.[124]

It was by his speech at the famous trial of Delescluze that Gambetta first established his fame as an orator. The days that proceeded that trial, writes the historian Pierre de la Gorce,[125] in his vivid account of these incidents, were les derniers de sa vie obscure. That trial and the incidents leading up to it thrilled with excitement Mme. Adam’s salon. They originated in a manifestation which had taken place on the 2nd of November, 1868, round the grave of the republican leader Baudin. After Louis Napoléon’s coup d’état of December 1851, Baudin, an ardent republican deputy, had endeavoured to incite the Parisian populace to resist. They taunted him with caring chiefly to secure the daily sum of twenty-five francs, which he received as a Member of Parliament. “Why should we be killed for your twenty-five francs?” they cried. “You will see how one can die for twenty-five francs,” cried Baudin, and he climbed on to the barricade, expecting the crowd to follow him. But troops were coming up the street. Baudin was seen to wave a flag, and then to fall dead after having called to the people to come on. The republicans, who gathered round Baudin’s grave in the Montmartre Cemetery, did not lose this opportunity of expressing their opinions of the Imperial Government and of prophesying its speedy dissolution. They took themselves very seriously, and rather expected their little group of some sixty persons to be dispersed by the authorities. But what they thought to be the roll of the guns of approaching troops turned out to be nothing more than an announcement that it was time to close the cemetery. Afterwards, however, it occurred to certain Republican journalists, first to Delescluze of Le Reveil, later to Peyrat of L’Avenir National and to Challemel-Lacour of La Revue Politique to open a subscription for a monument to be erected to Baudin. The Imperial Government, ever with its eye on the press, determined to nip in the bud this project of honouring one of its arch enemies. Delescluze, Peyrat and Challemel, with certain of the manifestants, were summoned before the Sixth Chamber Correctionelle. It was Edmond Adam who had urged Peyrat to bring L’Avenir National into the movement. His friend Thiers had rated him soundly for so doing. “Cette affaire est insensée,” said le grand petit homme,[126] always the soul of moderation. “C’est de la faction! Ces choses-là conduisent aux émeutes et aux révolutions.”

“You are mistaken,” replied Adam calmly. “We are placing an instrument in the hands of the opposition. You will soon recognise it. The Empire’s enemies figure in the subscribers’ lists, and those lists will one day furnish a basis for a coalition, which you will find useful.”

A few days later M. Thiers admitted that Adam was right. This eventful year was now drawing to a close. The late autumn had come, and it was time for the Adams to shut up their salon and go to Bruyères for the winter. “But how,” writes Juliette, “could we discontinue our evenings in the midst of so much agitation, when our friends passing along the boulevard like to come up and talk in our salon?”

There was considerable discussion as to the advocate to defend Delescluze, who was regarded as the most important among the accused. Finally the choice fell on Gambetta.

The trial took place on the 13th of November. “La surexcitation est extrême parmi nos amis. Les plus calmes s’emportent,” wrote Juliette.[127]

The speeches for the defence were numerous and eloquent. But one alone has survived. Needless to say it was Gambetta’s. With consummate skill he converted his defence of his client into an attack upon the Empire. Posing that difficult question which has of late so often presented itself in French political life, Gambetta asked, “Can there ever be a moment, when for the sake of the public weal it is right to violate the law, to overthrow the constitution, to treat as criminal those who defend the right at the risk of their lives? Louis Napoléon, when in December 1851 he effected his coup d’état, considered that such a moment had arrived. But surely,” exclaimed this fearless republican, “this is not the time to justify such an act, for here we are in the prætorium of the judge, here the voice of the law alone should make itself heard.”

These words, as it may well be imagined, created an enormous effect in the court. There was absolute silence. The audience seemed to hold its breath. The parts were transposed: the defender had become the accuser. Several times the President endeavoured to interrupt. But such remonstrances as “Really, Maître Gambetta, you ought to reserve that for your peroration,” as well as the objections of the opposing counsel, passed unobserved amidst the thunder of that tremendous voice. Gambetta merely redoubled his vehemence. He walked up and down, he struck with his hand on the bar in front of him. His attitude no longer was one of defence, but rather of rebellion. His disordered hair, his floating gown, his collar thrown open, his crumpled cap, which he was constantly putting on and taking off—everything betrayed the intensity of an avenging wrath indifferent to everything save the one matter which kindled it.

“On the 2nd of December,” cried Gambetta, “they tried to deceive Paris with the provinces, the provinces with Paris. Steam and telegraphy were instruments in the hands of the new régime. Throughout the departments ran the announcement, Paris submits. Paris submits? Why, Paris was assassinated, shot down, cannonaded.”

Then like a defiance resounded the concluding ironical appeal to the Empire—

“Listen; for seventeen years you have been absolute masters, you have held France in your power.... Yet you have never dared to place among the national festivals that 2nd of December!... Well, we claim it, that anniversary of the 2nd of December. We claim it for ourselves. We shall never cease to celebrate it. Every year it will be the anniversary of our dead, until the day when the country, once more having become the master, shall exact from you the great expiation in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity.”[128]

After a long deliberation the court pronounced sentence, and all the accused were condemned. But few thought of them. Gambetta, though he had failed to obtain his client’s acquittal, was the hero of the hour, for he had brought a more serious indictment against a far greater criminal. Fêted and congratulated on every hand, he was conducted to the famous Restaurant Magny. No false modesty was his. He knew he had dealt faithfully with the tyrants, and he was not ashamed to own it. “Comme je leur ai dit leur quatre vérités,” he exclaimed.

In Juliette’s salon that night there was wild enthusiasm. Adam and his friends had heard the speech. They repeated passages of it. “You must read it,” Adam said to his wife. “But it will not be the same as having heard it.”

“The 13th of November,” writes Juliette, “was a fatal day for the Empire.[129] ... The imperial tree had been sapped by the little Cahors lawyer. It was not that Gambetta’s oratory was so very exceptional. His power lay in making his ardent soul vibrate to the emotion of the crowd.”

The Adams had found it well worth their while to postpone their departure for Bruyères in order to be in Paris at such a time.

Juliette, on her arrival at her villa, was overwhelmed by the transformation which Adam had worked in it. “Mon Bruyères,” she writes, “est embelli, transformé joliment à l’intérieur, sans avoir perdu quoi que ce soit de sa gracieuse et modeste physionomie.”[130]

Now that in her glorified Bruyères Juliette had three guest-chambers instead of one, she could receive numerous friends from Paris. During this winter Garnier-Pagès, one of her husband’s old friends, a man of “1848,” one of the founders of the Comptoir d’Escompte, came with his family, and Juliette’s publisher Hetzel. On the Golfe Juan, as at Paris, Mme. Adam gathered her friends round her; and Bruyères became a veritable salon, with Prosper Mérimée for its grand homme. Of this illustrious writer, in the evening of his days, Mme. Adam in her Souvenirs[131] paints a striking picture. She draws to the life his elegant figure, always well put on. He affected grey trousers, white waistcoats, large soft blue cravats tied in an artistic bow. She describes his eyeglasses, well posed on un nez qu’on ne voyait qu’à lui tant la forme en était particulière, his wrinkled, careworn forehead, his thick eyebrows, which gave him a cold, haughty and somewhat severe air. There was something English about his appearance. His mother was an Englishwoman, and he loved England. It was an admirable country, he used to say, where reforms proposed by liberals are executed by conservatives. This statement, which like most generalisations is more striking than accurate, was natural to an observer of British politics so soon after the Reform Bill of 1867.

THE VILLA BRUYÈRES, ON THE GOLFE JUAN, MADAME ADAM’S RIVIERA HOME

Each winter Mérimée and Juliette Adam became better friends. He paid her one of the compliments she appreciated most when he told Dr. Maure that she had made him understand fraternity.[132]

She enjoyed his conversation immensely. “A talk with Mérimée,” she writes, “is always full of surprises,[133] so wide is his knowledge and of a quality so superior.” His eclecticism delighted her. He belonged to no school, but was ready to appreciate anything that appealed to him, modern or ancient, idealist or realist, romantic or classical. His bête noir was exaggeration. He was artistic to the finger-tips. He detested the photographic method of treating life and nature. “Every artist at the beginning of his life,” he would say, “must, I admit, be carried away by passion, by rapture, but before long he must deny himself any ecstasy which might cloud his imagination and dim his vision of reality; he must retain of his passion only so much as is necessary for its description.”

Mérimée, like Juliette’s friend Flaubert, was a heroic worker. He would not hesitate to rewrite a page ten times. A term erased seemed to him but “a jumping-off place from which to reach le mot juste.” Mme. Adam highly prized the lessons he gave her on style.

In general conversation he was not at his best. However interesting the subject might be, he was ill at ease if the speaker did not appeal to him. He would assume a frigid manner. On the other hand, if the speaker pleased him, he would hasten to pour forth all the treasures of his accumulated reflections.

The events of the summer of 1868, and the troubles of L’Avenir National, an opposition newspaper founded in 1865, edited by Peyrat, and in which Adam had a large financial interest, had prevented Juliette and her husband from taking any honeymoon immediately after their marriage. Now, in the spring of 1869, accompanied by Alice, they took their postponed wedding-tour to Italy. They visited Florence, then the capital of the Italian kingdom, Milan, Turin and Genoa. Furnished with useful introductions by Thiers and other friends, they met many interesting people, Cairoli, the Marquis Alfieri, Nino Bixio, the Garibaldian soldier, whose brother Alessandro had been so intimate a friend of Adam. At Florence they rejoiced to meet again the Italian exiles whom they had known in Paris. Mme. Adam, while admiring the intense patriotism of the Italians, was grieved to perceive how Napoléon’s papal policy had alienated them from France. At the meetings of the Italian Chamber, the opposition’s violent attacks on France cut her to the heart.

“C’est pour Adam et moi une grande tristesse,” she writes. “Quoi! tout le sang versé, nos sacrifices, notre amitié, notre dévouement, notre enthousiasme, à nous, républicains, qui nous à fait accepter un armistice dans notre lutte contre l’Empire, n’ont servi qu’à nous faire une ennemi violente de l’Italie.”[134]

Juliette was glad to see her last novel, L’Education de Laure, displayed in the book-shops of Milan. Driving home, along the Corniche Road, in company with Nino Bixio, they had a memorable journey, to which we shall refer later.

Arriving in Paris in April, they found the capital in the throes of preparing for the general election, fixed for the 23rd and 24th of May—the third election held since the establishment of the Empire, the two previous had been in 1857 and 1863. But this, remarks Mme. Adam, was the first election which had been held since the granting of liberty of public meetings and of the Press, two reforms which had resulted from Ollivier’s establishment of what is known as l’Empire Libérale.

Juliette in her salon on the Boulevard Poissonnière found herself quite as much in the movement as she would have been in the Rue de Rivoli. From her windows she saw, or imagined she saw, all manner of wonderful happenings: strange meetings and consultations after midnight between policemen and les blouses blanches, those socialists, the mistrusted tail of the radical party, whom Gambetta, in his famous Belleville speech, was accused of humouring. His more moderate friends thought he had promised too much: tariff and tax reform, election of all Government functionaries, suppression of standing armies. “You must cut off this tail of yours,” remonstrated his anti-socialist supporters. “Cut off my tail,” said Gambetta gaily, “not as long as I live. I will tie a white sash round it and lead it into society.”[135]

Gambetta, at the head of les Jeunes was opposing at Belleville Hippolyte Carnot, that vieille barbe as the heroes of 1848 were called. Baucel, another of les Jeunes in another Paris constituency, was successfully opposing Ollivier himself; and the founder of l’Empire Libérale was driven to a provincial constituency in the Department of Var. So unpopular was the minister in the capital that his public meeting at Le Châtelet became a riot, during which the famous beer-house Dréher was sacked before the police could effectually intervene.

The election cries of the opposition were “Away with personal government,” “Away with a standing army and substitute a national militia.” With the latter neither Juliette nor her husband were in agreement. Jules Simon in their salon represented this party. And when Adam argued against him, upholding a standing army, maintaining that without it a nation is lost, Nefftzer intervened saying, “You are right both of you. We must have a standing army and a national militia to defend the country against the German invasion which is approaching.”[136]

Though many of her friends were standing as candidates, Madame Adam’s salon continued to be well frequented all through the election. The guests, however, came later and went away earlier. Occasionally some one would disappoint her. Jules Ferry, for instance, in one of the most adroit of notes excused himself at the last moment.

“Madame,” he wrote,[137] “je n’appartiens plus ni à mes amis, ni à moi-même, ni aux choses gracieuses de la vie.... Or voici qu’une réunion d’électeurs apparaît à l’horizon, un peu plus farouche que votre salon. L’électeur est un maître, vous le savez, et nous ne sommes pas sur un lit de roses; vous m’excuserez donc et vous me permettrez si ce mercredi soir m’est enlevé, de vous porter mes excuses un matin.”

At the request of their friends the Adams, as will be seen, had changed their day from Friday to Wednesday. Throughout the election Juliette had been full of hope. And the result did not disappoint her. For, although the Government maintained a majority in the House, the opposition had won a striking moral victory. The forces of the opposition now led by Gambetta in the Chamber, had shown their growing power. Many of its candidates, Rochefort, for example, though defeated, had obtained a large number of votes. The Empire was visibly tottering. Napoléon, ill and irresolute, was driven to grant the reformers concession after concession.

[87] Souvenirs, II. 462-3.

[88] Propos Littéraires, 5ième série, 285.

[89] Souvenirs, II. 450.

[90] Souvenirs, II. 453.

[91] Ibid., III. 29.

[92] He had held office in the Provisional Government, had attempted to stem the tide of insurrection in the summer of 1848, and, having failed, had retired into private life, occupying himself with the writing of books and articles on political and economic subjects. After the war he returned to politics, and was Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1883.

[93] Quinet and Michelet had both recently published histories of the Revolution. The appearance of these volumes ended that close friendship which until then had united them. For each regarded himself as having said the last word on the subject; and according to Mme. Adam, who disliked Michelet, the latter could not forgive his sometime friend for not having mentioned him in his book (see Souvenirs, III. 314). Michelet was astonished, he wrote to Quinet, “at this amazing neglect of one qui seul avait frayé, les voies.”

FOOTNOTES:

[94] See post, 209.

[95] Souvenirs, III. 123.

[96] Souvenirs, III. 131.

[97] Ibid., 133.

[98] Armand Carrel, editor of the National, killed in a duel by Girardin.

[99] See ante, 100.

[100] Afterwards President of the French Republic.

[101] Hippolyte, see ante, 68.

[102] 1851, at the time of Louis Napoléon’s coup d’état.

[103] See ante, 76.

[104] Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes.

[105] See ante, 48.

[106] Souvenirs, II. 236.

[107] See ante, 102.

[108] Souvenirs, III. 136.

[109] It was said to have been bombarded during the coup d’état of December 2, 1851.

[110] Souvenirs, III. 249.

[111] Souvenirs, III. 193.

[112] Souvenirs, III. 251.

[113] Ibid., 307.

[114] Ibid., 261.

[115] Ibid., 363.

[116] Souvenirs, III. 364.

[117] Souvenirs, II. 373.

[118] Ibid., 416.

[119] Ibid., III. 309.

[120] Later Prime Minister of France.

[121] Souvenirs, III. 311.

[122] Ibid., 312.

[123] Souvenirs, V. 143, 154, 156, 161.

[124] Souvenirs, IV. 309.

[125] Histoire du Second Empire, chap. v. p. 412.

[126] Souvenirs, III. 315.

[127] Ibid., 317.

[128] Pierre de la Gorce, op. cit., 418, and the speeches of Gambetta, published by Joseph Reinach, I. 5-17.

[129] Souvenirs, III. 318-19.

[130] Ibid., 409-13 et passim.

[131] Ibid., 412.

[132] Souvenirs, III. 412.

[133] Ibid., 410.

[134] Souvenirs, III. 345.

[135] Pierre de la Gorce, op. cit., V. 483.

[136] Souvenirs, III. 358.

[137] Ibid., 361.

CHAPTER IX

HER FRIENDSHIP WITH GEORGE SAND

1858-1870

“Ma grande amie maternelle a été mon guide.”—Mme. Adam, Souvenirs.

To have been intimately associated with George Sand during the last fifteen years of that distinguished woman’s life, Mme. Adam regards as one of her greatest privileges.

Each of Mme. Adam’s seven volumes of Souvenirs has its hero and heroine: her grandmother, Mme. Seron, dominates the first, Mme. d’Agoult the second, Gambetta the four last. George Sand, while intervening in several volumes, figures most prominently in the third, Mes Sentiments et Nos Idées avant 1870. Here we find a striking portrait of that celebrated novelist whom her English critic, W. H. Myers, considers “the most noteworthy woman, with perhaps one exception, who has appeared since Sappho.”[138] Mme. Adam knew George Sand in the evening of her days, when she had lived down her enemies, partisanships, scandals, loves. They had passed away and left her “in grand old age sitting beneath the roof that sheltered her earliest years, and writing for her grandchildren stories in which her own childhood lives anew.”

It is not surprising that Juliette Adam and George Sand should have been attracted to one another; for they had many natural affinities. They were both passionately romantic and idealist. “Je suis restée troubadour,” writes Mme. Sand in January 1867,[139] “c’est à dire croyant à l’amour, à l’art, à l’idéal.” They were both incurable optimists, ardent adorers of nature, lovers of humble folk, and of peasants especially; delighting in simple things, in the joys of friendship, in the pleasures of family life, though both had known marital miseries. Their upbringing had not been unlike, penetrated in each case with a strong strain of paganism. Neither was a rationalist, for surging up from the subconsciousness of them both was a keen sense of the unseen and a lively curiosity in the occult.

Their creeds differed: George Sand was a deist, Juliette in those days a pantheist. But Mme. Sand was not mistaken when she prophesied that one day her young friend’s faith would approximate more nearly to her own. “Essayez donc de vous convertir à mon Dieu unique,” she said. “Il y’a en votre âme un grand vide de spiritualité dont vous ne vous apercevez pas a cette heure, parce que vous avez la vie la plus pleine que se puisse imaginer, mais un beau jour vous sentirez l’insufficence que vous apporte votre croyance en l’incroyance.”[140]

It was in 1858, on the publication of her first book, Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes, written as we have seen partly in defence of George Sand, that Juliette first came into personal relationship with the writer whom she had long admired. “George Sand me remercia par une fort belle lettre pleine de gratitude,” she writes.[141] Later the young authoress received a visit from one of Mme. Sand’s friends, a certain Captain d’Arpentigny, who explained to her that, as she was the friend of the Comtesse d’Agoult, with whom Mme. Sand had quarrelled,[142] the latter deemed it prudent that she and her young champion should not meet. If some day Juliette should break off her relations with Mme. d’Agoult, then she might come to see George Sand.

Such a condition was neither petty nor vindictive, though such at first it might seem. Considering the temperaments of these two distinguished women—one endowed with the passionate vehemence and frankness of the Celt, the other not lacking in a certain Teutonic vindictiveness—for Juliette to have been a loyal friend to them both at the same time would have been impossible.[143]

There was no reason, however, why Juliette and George Sand should not correspond. Mme. Sand never failed to take an interest in her correspondent’s literary career.

She read all her books and gave the young author the invaluable benefit of her criticism. Though her book Mon Village was dedicated to Mme. d’Agoult, it was, as we have seen, written at the suggestion of George Sand.

For nine years Juliette and her unknown friend, her amie éloignée, as Mme. Sand called herself, continued to correspond. And it was not until Juliette’s final breach with Mme. d’Agoult, in 1867, that the former considered herself at liberty to see in the flesh her whose spirit and whose writings she had admired so long.

Mme. Adam’s graphic description of the memorable meeting in the third volume of her Souvenirs[144] has become almost a classic.

With her whole being throbbing with emotion, Juliette went by appointment to Mme. Sand’s flat, No. 97, Rue des Feuillantines. In a large arm-chair, which made her appear quite a little woman, Mme. Sand sat with both arms on a table in front of her, rolling a cigarette.

“I approached,” writes Juliette; “she did not rise, but she pointed to a seat, which I was to take, quite near the table. Her large kind eyes enveloped, attracted me. My pulse beat violently.

“I made a great effort to greet her with a word. I found nothing to say. My heart came into my mouth.

“She lit her cigarette and began to smoke. She also seemed searching for a word to address to me; but she no more than I could find anything to say.

“Later I knew how reserved she felt in the presence of any one whom she saw for the first time.

“Then, realising that I must appear idiotic, my feelings overcame me, and I burst into tears.

“George Sand threw away her cigarette and held out her arms to me. I threw myself into them, possessed by that filial tenderness which I had longed to experience, and which has remained with me to this hour.”

Naturally they could not avoid talking of that disagreement with Mme. d’Agoult which had rendered the meeting possible.

Then they discussed a theme constantly recurring in the conversation of serious persons in that day: the frivolity and corruption of Parisian society under the Empire, and the reign of opportunism.

They rejoiced at the boldness of the manager of the Théâtre français, who had dared to represent a play by Victor Hugo, then a political exile, and they delighted to think of the consolation it must bring to the author in his banishment.

“I left Mme. Sand,” writes Juliette, “after two hours of confidences, confirmed in my adoration of her and in our friendship.

“Would that I could tell and tell again all her delicacy of feeling, her nobility of heart, her moral elevation, her wide comprehension of life, her serenity learnt in so hard a school, won at the price of such cruel experiences.”

That Juliette on her part had favourably impressed her new acquaintance may be seen by the terms in which Mme. Sand refers to her in her correspondence. Writing to Flaubert in September 1867, she calls Juliette une charmante jeune femme de lettres,[145] and again to the same correspondent she exclaims later, Mme. Juliette Lamber est vraiment charmante. George Sand took a deep interest in all the members of her young friend’s family. At her invitation Juliette’s betrothed, Edmond Adam, went to see her. They talked of 1848. Speaking of Juliette, Mme. Sand said to Adam, “I have waited long for cette fille adoptive”; of Adam to his bride, “He has a loyal hand:[146] you must be proud to give him yours.”[147] Henceforth nothing would satisfy Juliette and her affianced but that Mme. Sand should visit them on the Golfe Juan. Juliette described her Bruyères as modest but gay, Adam’s villa, Le Grand Pin, as fine and equipped with every possible comfort and convenience. George decided for Bruyères.

“Et me voilà,” writes Juliette, “aussi joyeuse qu’Edmond Adam va devenir jaloux.”[148] Mme. Sand, who adored children and was never tired of talking of her own little granddaughter Aurora, insisted on seeing Alice. With Juliette’s daughter it was a case of love at first sight. For Mme. Sand, who had a nickname for every one she loved, Alice was henceforth Topaz, because of the dark olive complexion she had inherited from her Sicilian father, Lamessine.

Henceforth Juliette lived in the hope of that promised winter visit to Bruyères. But before her southern flight in November, she was to see a great deal of her friend in Paris. In September they went together to Rouen and Jumièges.[149] They dined together in town. Once at Mme. Sand’s favourite restaurant, the famous Magny’s, on the left bank,[150] Juliette met for the first time an illustrious quartette of whom she was to see much later: Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Gustave Flaubert and Dumas fils. The friendship between Juliette and Flaubert, which dates from that evening, endured until the novelist’s death. With Flaubert’s family Mme. Adam has continued intimate, and the opening weeks of this year (1917) she spent with Flaubert’s niece at her country house in the department of Var. The talk, chez Magny, that evening[151] was lively and frank, to say the least of it. The youth, the beauty, the charm of Mme. Sand’s new friend, provoked Dumas to scoff at the idea of her becoming a writer and a bas bleu. He, like Michel Lévy of old,[152] believed, as he put it, that she had something better to do. “Il faut aimer, aimer, aimer,” he cried. And Flaubert and the de Goncourts repeated, “Il faut aimer.” “To learn that, gentlemen, I have not waited for your words of wisdom,” replied Juliette. “I love to love whom I love, and he, whom I love, loves to see me write.”

“The fool,” cried Dumas.

“What an extraordinary idea,” exclaimed Mme. Sand, “to attempt to prove in my presence that a woman who is a writer cannot love.”

“There is truth in it all the same,” said Edmond de Goncourt.

“Never,” protested George Sand. “The reproach which may be brought against women writers is precisely that they have loved too much. Et la preuve, dedans moi-même, je la treuve,” she added, relapsing into patois.

“You,” cried Dumas, “why you have never loved anything but the prefigurings of the heroes of your future novels, something like the marionettes,[153] whom you have rigged out to repeat your play. Can that be called loving?”

“Come,” said Flaubert. “Now, we four are writers of some standing. Can we be called great lovers?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” replied Mme. Sand. “But, to confine oneself to recent examples, it is absurd to maintain that Mme. de Staël, Mme. d’Agoult, Mme. de Girardin and I have not been passionate lovers. Indeed, on the contrary, what remains to be proved is the possibility of a pretty woman writer, who is really gifted, continuing a simple, loving, faithful wife like any other woman.”

“Yes, that is an interesting problem,” said Jules de Goncourt.

That evening Mme. Sand talked more than usual. Generally she preferred to listen, delighting to emphasise some witty remark, which she relished more than any one by a frank outburst of laughter or a brief exclamation.

In conversation Mme. Sand was best in tête-à-tête. Some of the most memorable of her confidential talks with her friend, Mme. Adam has reproduced in her Souvenirs.

One evening in Paris, when they were to have gone to the Odéon together, the play having been suddenly changed through an actor’s illness, “Let us stay at home and talk, dear Juliette,” said George.

That conversation marked the beginning of George Sand’s ascendancy over her young friend’s mind. “A partir de cette heure,” writes Juliette, “ma grande amie maternelle a été mon guide”.[154]

At the end of a long silence, during which she had been smoking cigarettes, throwing them into a bowl of water after a few whiffs, George said, as if resuming the thoughts that had been occupying her—

“I want my life to be useful to another, to the daughter whom I choose to adopt, to you, my child. As we learn to know one another better, as we talk more and more to one another, I will tell you by what paths, always roughest when I most sought to find them smooth, I have climbed the hill of existence.”

Through all that she has written of George Sand, we find Juliette ever attempting to excuse, or at least to account for, the irregularities, the ebullience, the wild passions of her friend’s exuberant and turbulent youth. She attributes them to the extravagance and effervescence of that romantic movement, in the hey-day of which Mme. Sand lived the first half of her life. For this view of her friend’s career Juliette had the authority of George herself.

“In my young days,” said Mme. Sand on this memorable evening, “I moved in a purely artificial world, in which we were all resolved to feel, to experience, to love, to think, differently from the vulgar herd. Determined to avoid the bank, to swim out into the open, we were constantly losing our foothold and floundering in unfathomable depths. Remote from the crowd, remote from the shore, always more and more remote. How many of us have not perished body and soul!

“And those who would not be drowned, who struggled, who were thrown back on to the bank, they recovered their footing, they became like other people, through contact with the earth, and especially with the common sense of humble folk. How often have I not become myself again in the midst of peasants! How often has not Nohant cured me of and saved me from Paris!”

For George Sand, as for Joan of Arc four centuries ago, as for Anatole France to-day, the most adorable, the most salutary, the most indispensable of all human sentiments is pity. Looking back from the vantage point of old age on the mad, passionate adventures of her youth, Mme. Sand saw herself ever swayed from the bottom of her heart by une grand pitié. It was often that pity which caused her to quarrel with her lovers. She loved them as a mother loves her child. But they demanded from her the love of a mistress.

“Quand je m’examine,” she said to Juliette, “je vois que les deux seules passions de ma vie ont été la maternité et l’amitié.”[155]

After numerous delays and postponements Mme. Sand, accompanied by her son Maurice and her friend Planet, at length, in February 1868, arrived at Bruyères. The date of the visit had been so frequently changed that Juliette and Alice had begun to fear that it might never take place at all. “Cold outside, comfort within, and especially the happiness of living surrounded by one’s family,” writes Mme. Sand to a friend in Paris,[156] “have delayed my journey.” But on the 22nd of February she was able to write to a friend at Toulon from “Golfe Juan, Villa Bruyères.” “We are very comfortably installed, very much spoilt, very energetic, very happy. The day after to-morrow we are going to Nice, Monaco and Mentone. We shall be away three or four days. Consequently you must try not to let your business bring you here before the end of the week. Friday, for example, we are always at home. For on that day Mme. Lambert receives. But if you come on another day you must let us know; for we generally spend the whole day out of doors, and sometimes go a considerable distance.”[157]

In picnics, in visits to Monte Carlo and other scenes of gaiety, in sailing in La Petite Fadette, the yacht which had been Edmond Adam’s New Year’s gift to his affianced bride, the time passed very pleasantly. George Sand was a fervent geologist and botanist. “Give me a piece of stone,” she would say, “and I will tell you the kind of flora it will produce.” By such means and without visiting the country she is said to have given a background to some of her novels. On one of their picnics Mme. Sand suggested that they should found a new Abbey of Thelema, in which Juliette was to be housekeeper and caterer. And she could not have made a better choice, as will testify all who have tasted of Mme. Adam’s hospitality.

The fortnight which Mme. Sand passed on the Golfe Juan was for Juliette one of the happiest in that happy year, 1868, the year of her marriage with Edmond Adam. Bruyères was a home of delight to those who enjoyed its charming hospitality and had the good fortune to stay there. La Villa du Bon Repos some of them christened it, and later it was known as “the Adam’s earthly Paradise.” During the February of 1868 it was the gayest house on the Riviera.

Mme. Sand was a delightful person to entertain, so simple, so contented, so entirely occupied with other people, never permitting her hosts to perceive in her the slightest suggestion of care, anxiety, or fatigue. Perfectly regular and orderly in her manner of life, every day she made her first appearance at the twelve-o’clock lunch, and from that hour until ten her friends had her to themselves. At ten in the evening she bade them good-night and retired to her room to work, frequently until the small hours of the morning. Juliette, whose room was beneath Mme. Sand’s and who also went to bed late, used to hear her moving about. Her cigarettes and a glass of water were all she required for her long vigils.

Maurice Sand, her son, himself a gifted writer, one of the wittiest and gayest of companions, the inventor and manager of the celebrated marionette theatre at Nohant, entertained the company with his jokes—no one could long be serious in his presence.

Mme. Sand’s friend Planet had been brought up to laugh at Nohant (élevé à rire), for Mme. Sand believed in mirth as the most effectual of sanitives. La gaieté est la meilleure hygiène de l’esprit. “Consequently,” writes Juliette, “I assure you we are not sad.”[158]

George Sand used to say that she was never sure of her friends until she had stayed with them and lived some days of their life. Her visit to Bruyères drew more closely the cords of her intimacy with Juliette, and sealed their friendship.

On their return to Paris, and after their marriage, which took place in the spring, the Adams were constantly being urged by Mme. Sand to visit her at Nohant. “Chers enfants,” wrote George, “quand vous verra t’on? On vous attend maintenant tout l’été, sans aucun projet que le bonheur de vous embrasser tous trois”[159] (Edmond Adam, Juliette and Alice). Adam had a horror of country visits. But in this case he was willing to set aside his prejudice, and to accept the great George’s invitation. The Adams only waited until Juliette’s father, Dr. Lambert, had recovered from an operation for stone. Finally, on the 4th of July, in time for their hostess’s sixty-fifth birthday, jour de bouquets et d’embrassades, they arrived at Mme. Sand’s picturesque home at Nohant, in the heart of that beloved Berry, which readers of her novels know so well.

The birthday of the mistress of Nohant was a fête for the neighbourhood. Maurice had spent the previous night decorating the hall and reception-rooms with garlands woven by the peasants. In the art of decoration, the creator of the Marionette Theatre was a past master; and the whole house appeared a bower of flowers and verdure.[160]

The firing of a gun announced the luncheon hour. Marshalled by Maurice, the entire household, guests, servants and even the tiny granddaughter Aurora, holding Alice’s hand, assembled in grande toilette. Alice and her mother had been early out in the fields gathering wild flowers for the birthday nosegays, which they were to present to their hostess. Then she appeared. The servants cried: “Vive la bonne dame.” Maurice read an address which he had prepared for the occasion. “Ce que tu es adorablement stupide,” cried his mother, embracing him. Then all the guests in turn expressed their good wishes. Luncheon passed gaily, the afternoon was spent out of doors. But the great event of the day was the evening performance in the marionette theatre.

To the description of this highly ingenious, perfectly artistic and most entrancing of entertainments Mme. Adam devotes six pages of her Souvenirs. The spectators were encouraged to express their opinions audibly as the play went on. Each had his favourite actor or actress. Mme. Adam, having declared her preference for a certain Coq-en-Bois, he from the stage invited her to dine with him in a cabinet particulier at the Café Brébant. “Ah! no, I protest!” cried Adam; and led by the queen of the festival, the whole audience was convulsed with laughter.

In theory, and in practice during her early days, always a rebel against order and discipline, in her home George Sand had ever been the personification of orderliness. Perfect tidiness reigned in her simply furnished study. In her desk and her large cupboards, every drawer and shelf was furnished with a label indicating the contents. Equally precise was the arrangement of her bedroom, opening out of the study, with its fine old furniture and its hangings of blue—the colour of the Golfe Juan, as she said to Juliette. In her gardens, where she had acclimatised an immense variety of plants, collected during her travels, Mme. Sand took great delight. But no one was allowed to cut the flowers. Those used for house decoration were all gathered in the woods and fields.

Serious conversation, profound discussions, Mme. Sand reserved for her tête-à-têtes. The general talk at Nohant was of the mirth-provoking order, that intelligent nonsense which clears the brain and sharpens the wits. If any one was inclined to be too serious, he was immediately prodded into liveliness by one of those practical jokes in which the mistress of Nohant revelled. The unhappy Edmond Adam had all his worst prejudices against country-house parties confirmed when he was roused from his slumbers by the crowing of a cock, which Maurice had hidden in the wood-chest of his bedroom. The wretched victim’s vociferations, mingling with the voice of chanticleer, as in night attire this much-tried guest searched for his tormentor, afforded intense amusement to the household assembled in the passage, as well as to Juliette, who, being in the secret, was cowering beneath the sheets, trying to suppress her laughter, and to Alice in the adjoining room.

Several days of the Nohant visit were occupied in excursions to places of interest in the neighbourhood, to the Druidical monuments of Crevant and to La Mare au Diable.

After they had left Nohant the Adams continued to see a great deal of George Sand. In the autumn of 1868 they accompanied her on a tour to the Meuse Valley, which she intended to make the scene of her next novel, Malgré Tout. The great George was a valiant traveller. None of the discomforts of country tours in days when inns were close and filthy disturbed her. With what she called the poltronnerie of Juliette and Alice, who complained of sleepless nights spent in hunting vermin, their friend had no sympathy. She only jeered at them for not following her example and keeping the pests away by smoking cigars and cigarettes.

Mme. Sand returned with her friends to Paris. There she established herself in a flat in the Rue Gay-Lussac, from the windows of which she could see her beloved Luxembourg. Her chambermaid, who had not the remotest idea of her mistress’s distinction, always addressed her as “Madame de Cendre,” and George forbade any one to enlighten her.

Mme. Sand had come to Paris to assist at the rehearsals at the Porte-Saint-Martin of her play Cadio. This indefatigable old lady of threescore years and more, went every evening to the theatre, where she stayed from six till two. In her company Juliette for the first time penetrated “behind.” She was also present on the first night. But the play was a failure. According to the author, this was chiefly because the principal actor, one Roger, persisted in wearing a hat with a white feather instead of a battered and weather-stained cap. As the curtain was about to rise Mme. Sand tore out the feather and broke it. But swift as lightning Mme. Roger, an ex-milliner, sewed it together again. The actor entered beplumed. “La pièce est perdu!” cried the authoress.

The next year the Adams were staying at Pierrefonds. There George Sand joined them, and they spent together a delightful fortnight there. In all that concerned her young friend, in Juliette’s spiritual, professional, domestic and physical welfare, Mme. Sand took the deepest interest. She marvelled at the numerous activities Juliette continued to crowd into her life.

“J’admire q’étant ‘mondaine’ et toujours par monts et par vaux,” she writes, “et très occupée de la famille et du ménage, vous ayez le temps d’écrire et de penser. Au reste, cette activité est bonne à l’esprit, mais n’usez pas trop le corps.”[161]

Sometimes George Sand feared for her friend the consequences of her excitable temperament and her untiring energy. She would have liked to have seen in her something of the serenity which the great George had herself acquired. But she realised that with Juliette, as with herself, this calm, this aloofness from life’s petty worries, would come with old age. “We must not ask youth to anticipate age,” she wrote. “And youth’s charm is in its impressionability.”[162] Nevertheless, she adjures her friend to cultivate moderation in all things, not to strive after violent sensations. “You are passionate and exalted,” she wrote to Juliette; “that is good and beautiful, and we love you for it.” “But,” she adds, “do not, in your craving for emotion, afflict yourself unnecessarily. Spend yourself, but do not waste yourself.... Your sleeplessness is not natural to youth.” It indicated, thought Mme. Sand, that something was wrong in Juliette’s ordering of her life. She advised her not to work at night, but to go to bed at eleven, to rise at six and to write then, before the time came for her daughter’s morning lessons. The writer of this letter did not herself follow these precepts. But she had long passed out of Juliette’s condition of nervous excitability. “Work,” she added, “is an act of lucidity. Now, perfect lucidity is impossible without preliminary rest.”

Alas! the course of international affairs was rapidly rendering impossible that calm restfulness to which George Sand was so wisely exhorting Juliette.

In the summer of 1870 the Adams repeated their visit to Nohant. On the 15th of July diplomatic relations between France and Prussia were severed. On the 25th, M. Émile Ollivier read before the Corps Legislatif the French Government’s declaration of war.

The house-party at Nohant immediately broke up, and the Adams returned to Paris.

FOOTNOTES:

[138] W. H. Myers, Modern Essays (1883).

[139] George Sand, Correspondance, V. 164.

[140] Souvenirs, III. 282-3.

[141] Ibid., II. 83.

[142] That Liszt was the cause of their quarrel was well known. Mme. Sand had written of it in her novel Horace, Mme. d’Agoult in Nélida.

[143] For the bitterness of Mme. d’Agoult’s resentment, see Souvenirs, II. 201-4.

[144] pp. 145-7.

[145] Correspondance, V. 220.

[146] The great George, apparently like Juliette herself, was a believer in palmistry. See Souvenirs, II. 97.

[147] Souvenirs, III. 161, 239.

[148] Ibid.

[149] See George Sand’s letter to Flaubert, Correspondance, V. 220.

[150] It was at this restaurant that Sainte-Beuve gave that Good Friday dinner which clerical circles regarded as a shocking blasphemy.

[151] Souvenirs, III. 165-8.

[152] See ante, 55.

[153] Dumas was thinking of George Sand’s famous marionette theatre at Nohant. See post, 129.

[154] Souvenirs, III. 172.

[155] Souvenirs, III. 170.

[156] George Sand, Correspondance, V. 243.

[157] Ibid., 245.

[158] Souvenirs, III. 205.

[159] Ibid., 259, and George Sand’s Correspondance, V. 258-9.

[160] Souvenirs, III. 268.

[161] George Sand, Correspondance, V. 317.

[162] Ibid., 250.

CHAPTER X

THE WAR AND PREPARATION FOR THE SIEGE OF PARIS

1870

“Nous serons vaincus. Il n’y a qu’à voir le désordre, l’impossibilité des armements.”—George Sand to Mme. Adam, August 18, 1870.

For years a few clear-sighted Frenchmen had seen the German Peril approaching. Now it was at the gates of France. George Sand and Edmond Adam had been more afraid of the “Anglo-Saxon Contagion.” They had been inclined to scoff at Nefftzer’s jeremiads;[163] but now, alas! they proved to be only too well founded.

The Adams in the anguish of their souls recalled their memorable drive,[164] in the spring of 1869, along the Corniche Road, in the company of Nino Bixio, the Garibaldian hero, who was then Commander-in-Chief of the Italian army. Bixio had just returned from Germany, whither he had gone at Victor Emmanuel’s command in order to ascertain the precise condition of the Prussian army. Bixio had come back firmly convinced that Bismarck was preparing war against France.

“And you are not ready,” he had said to the Adams; “you will be thoroughly beaten.”[165]

Then Adam, ghastly pale and half rising from his seat, had cried: “Silence, Nino, or I will throw you into the sea. France, beaten by the Prussians! Never, do you hear? Never.”

“And do you think it would give me pleasure?” the Italian had retorted. “But understand, if you don’t wish to be beaten ... then make an end of your opposition’s foolish, wicked, criminal campaign against militarism. It is militarism which, entering into the very marrow of Prussian bones, has for half a century been preparing her to take her revenge for Jena. Ah! my poor Adam! How blind is France.... Your Napoléon III is a provoker of invasion, and you republicans, you will be ready to eat your hearts out for having been party men before Frenchmen. When you refuse him soldiers, you are idiotic.”

Then Bixio had spoken of the negotiations for a triple alliance between France, Italy and Austria against Germany. According to the Italian General, it was Napoléon’s support of the papacy, in which he was encouraged by his ultramontane Empress, that had rendered these negotiations fruitless.

In order to pass on to their political friends Bixio’s warnings, the Adams had hastened their return to Paris. But they might have spared themselves the trouble. For, with the exceptions of Thiers and Nefftzer, no one had paid any heed whatever to the Italian General’s prognostications. French politicians were then absorbed in domestic affairs. But in a few weeks international matters forced themselves upon their attention. For a new cloud appeared on the horizon. This was General Prim’s offer of the Spanish crown to a prince of the House of Hohenzollern. With feverish eagerness Juliette and her friends had followed these negotiations. Instead of the usual weekly dinner-party, followed by a reception, in Mme. Adam’s salon there had been an assembly every evening. Juliette and her husband were full of alarm. Their German friend, Louis Bamberger, said: “This time, my children, you will have to give in.”[166] One evening Adam, who had been to see Thiers in the afternoon, related how the petit grand homme had entreated him to supplicate his friends not to play with fire. “It is pure folly,” he exclaimed, “we are on a volcano.”

Then had come the news that Prince Anthony of Hohenzollern had on his son’s behalf renounced the candidature. “The incident is closed,” said the chief minister, Émile Ollivier. “We were on the eve of war,” said Thiers, “but now everything is arranged.”

With immense relief, believing peace to be assured, the Adams, who had postponed their visit to George Sand on account of the national crisis, now left Paris for Nohant.

But, alas! their equanimity had soon been disturbed. The French Government, not content with Prince Anthony’s undertaking, had required from the King of Prussia a promise that henceforth no Hohenzollern should ascend the Spanish throne. King William’s refusal of this demand, and the events of the following fortnight, had culminated in the French Government’s declaration of war on July 20th.

On the afternoon of that day George Sand and her guests were sitting in the park at Nohant. Conversation languished, for the menace of war was in the air. Suddenly the sound of a drum was heard. Every member of the company trembled.... Maurice came towards them, girded with a drum, and crying, Vive la France! George Sand and Juliette Adam burst into tears, while all echoed that cry Vive la France, which henceforth was to be the motive power of all Mme. Adam’s being.[167]

On their return to Paris the Adams found awaiting them numerous letters from their friends, containing various opinions as to the declaration of war. France in those days was not without her conscientious objectors. The pacifist Arlès Dufour would have preferred civil to international war. “The former would have cost less in men and in money,” he wrote. M. Adam’s German friend, Louis Bamberger, took his leave of him, saying, “Love your country, Adam, as I love mine. I send you a last remembrance before the shock of arms.” Bamberger, desiring with all his heart German unity, was the fervent admirer of Bismarck, whom he regarded as alone able to achieve it.

Hetzel reported in Juliette’s salon how he had just seen Mérimée. In the previous winter, at Bruyères, Juliette had found her friend obsessed by the impending calamity.[168] “You republicans,” he had said, “you have disarmed France; and we imperialists, asleep in our false security, have abandoned her.” “Now,” said Hetzel, “Mérimée is deploring his country’s unpreparedness.” “We have soldiers, but we have no generals,” he lamented.... “Je supplie le grand Mécanicien, si nous devons être vaincus, de faire cesser mes tours de roue.”[169] Mérimée’s prayer was granted: dying on the 24th of September, 1870, he did not live to see the consummation of his country’s defeat.[170]

Paul de Saint-Victor, Juliette’s Catholic friend, was furious against Renan, whom he accused of being pro-German. It was true that Renan had admired much that was German, and that he had often despaired of the future of France. He believed that the Germans would be the teachers of the world.[171]

“Several of the University professors,” remarks Mme. Adam, “have not yet been able to bring themselves to love France as much as they have admired Germany.”[172]

Nevertheless, despite these differences of opinion, a great wave of patriotism swept through the country. “Il n’y a plus de petits crevés,” writes Juliette, “ils ont disparu comme par miracle et sont devenus les soldats de notre France.”[173]

“People are beginning once more to use the word patrie.[174] It had been forgotten, buried beneath humanitarianism. Now it returns. It is uttered with reverence and devotion. Adam and I, when we pronounce it, feel that to us both it is equally sacred.”

Mérimée had deplored the lack of generals in France. Bixio had said, “You have neither a Moltke, nor a Bismarck, nor a William.” When Bazaine was appointed to command the Lorraine army, Mme. Adam went to see her old friend Toussenel, who had known Bazaine at the time of the Mexican expedition. “He is no soldier,” said Toussenel; “I am more of one than he. He may be a politician. He is probably not lacking in diplomacy, neither will he be above intrigue.”[175]

The hesitations and inactivity of the French army during the first days of the war filled with misgiving the Adams and their friends. “We had thought,” writes Juliette,[176] “that we could arrest the Prussian advance by throwing ourselves before the enemy with all our furia francese and our united forces. But already our troops are scattered. There are marches and countermarches, but no advance. As during the Italian war, so now, there is no unity of command.” In those days Parisians, like ourselves during the present war, were troubled by the lack of news. Silence, suspense, were harder to bear than anything. “A frightful silence fills the boulevard,” writes Edmond de Goncourt. “There is not a carriage to be heard, not a child’s cry of joy, and on the horizon is a Paris where sound itself seems dead.” When it did arrive the news was as bad as could be. All through August came tidings of defeat after defeat: Wissembourg on the 4th; Forbach and Woerth on one day, the 6th; then, on the 9th, the fall of Ollivier and the Ministry; finally, on the 1st of September, the rout of Sedan.

On the evening of the 3rd, when about six o’clock the terrible tidings began to spread like wild-fire through Paris, people came out into the streets, crowds thronged the boulevards, growing every hour. By ten o’clock, Paris between the Rue Montmartre and the Grand Opéra presented the appearance of one immense forum. Juliette went down and mingled with the people, listening to their conversation.

Everywhere the humiliation and disgrace of France were described as unbearable. All manner of charges were brought against the Emperor. Napoléon was said to have surrendered, not himself alone, but the munitions of the army. His own personal baggage, however, that long train of wagons encumbering the march of his soldiers, which had won for him the nickname of Empereur Colis (Luggage Emperor), he had saved from the hands of the enemy.[177]

“The Prussians will be at Laon to-morrow, and in three days before Paris,” murmured one. “Wherever you look it is ruin. Our last army has capitulated. We are a nation no longer. We are nothing but a troop of prisoners.”

“Down with the Empire!” shouted hundreds of voices. All the hatred of the crowd at first focussed on Buonaparte, then it turned against the Corps Legislatif, the Parliament, which had voted this accursed war, and by its baseness had consummated the national disaster. The Chamber had been hastily convoked, and at midnight it was still sitting. “We must march against it and turn it out,” howled the crowd. But on the point of falling in for this purpose there was a hesitation. “What should be the rallying cry?” Parisians more than any other people in the world have ever been dominated by fine and appropriate words. And it was perfectly characteristic of the Paris mob that it found itself incapable of proceeding until it should have discovered le mot juste, the rallying cry, which should lead it like a banner.

“Down with the Corps Legislatif?” was suggested.

“No! No!”

“Long live the Republic?”

“No, it is too soon for that.”

“Vive la France?”

“No, that is too well known.”

“Death to the Prussians?”

“Better wait for that.”

But suddenly the crowd found the word, a word which indicated the tenor of the Revolution which was to follow: a word which like a ray of light was to conciliate a hundred opinions, to gather into one collective act a hundred individual energies, a simple, powerful, irresistible, sonorous word, the voice of the people pronouncing the people’s sentence upon that imperial régime, which, for close on a score of years, had been preparing the ruin of France; the word was déchéance (dethronement). To the refrain of that word scanned thus—Dé—ché—ance, and sung to the refrain of Les Lampions, the crowd thronged westward on to the Place de la Bastille, to awake that revolutionary quarter, the Faubourg Saint Antoine, asleep for twenty years. Then back again it surged on to the boulevards, there to deliberate and to postpone the attack on the Corps Legislatif until the morrow, Sunday.

In the small hours of that Sabbath morning Juliette from her window watched the boulevards emptying, the people going home, but not to sleep. Lights in the windows announced a vigil—la veillée des larmes.

“Il semble”, writes Mme. Adam, “que sous chaque toit un malade est à toute extrêmité et qu’on passe la nuit à son chevet. Ce malade c’est La France à l’agonie.”[178]

The 4th of September dawned resplendent, an ideal autumn day. “The sun shines to-day,” writes Juliette in her diary.[179] “It is the people’s sun. There is no fear of rain damping our patriotism.”[180]

In this diary, which she kept for her daughter, who was away in Normandy, staying near Granville with her grandparents, Mme. Adam, as they passed, described the events of those memorable hours. By ten o’clock all Paris was in the streets, thronging towards the Place de la Concorde and the bridge leading to the Chambre des Députés, where the members of the Corps Legislatif were to meet at twelve o’clock. Meanwhile, as the surging crowd outside grew larger and larger and more and more clamant, in the smoking-room of the House of Representatives perplexed deputies were vainly seeking some new form of government to replace the Empire. They were hurriedly turning over pages describing those numerous constitutional experiments which France had been trying since the Great Revolution; between the Palais Legislatif and the Palais des Tuileries, where the Empress was on the point of flight, all the time despairing ministers were hurrying to and fro. To Thiers’ house on the Place St. Georges the dying Mérimée was dragging himself to entreat, on behalf of a woman and her son, the intervention of le petit grand homme on whose wisdom every one counted.

Mme. Adam, from her place of vantage in a corner of the bridge close to the balustrade and the great lamps, listened to the talk which surged around her. Some wanted a republic, others feared that a republic would mean a revolution. With the fire of republicanism burning in her own heart like a religion, Juliette felt moved to intervene in what she describes as her first public speech.

“The Republic,” she exclaimed, “is not decreed, it is made, it is born of yourselves. It represents the highest degree of courage, of intelligence, of activity, of expansion to which a nation can attain. If society be a magnified edition of individuals, then the Republic is the result of our noblest actions, a living assemblage of our broadest and most progressive duties, rights and interests. Henceforth no social malady, no monarchical canker shall kill it. Then long live the Republic.”[181]

“My pathos,” writes Mme. Adam, “was not without its success. But my chief delight was to hear repeated around me by thousands of voices: Vive la République.”

From twelve till three, while ministers were deliberating and Eugénie de Montijo was escaping from her Palace, the mob continued to surge round the Chambre des Députés.

At half-past three the deputies heard the crashing noise of doors being broken open: the crowd had invaded the Chamber. But, like Charles I, the Parisians found that the birds had flown; no ministers were present, there were only a few deputies of the left. Among them was Gambetta. He vainly tried to address the mob. But even that resonant voice could not obtain a hearing. Amidst cries of “Where are the ministers?” he was howled down. And it was not until the ministers had reappeared, and the President of the Chamber, M. Schneider, from his official seat, had reminded the people of the danger threatening them, with the enemy barely one hundred miles away, that there was something like order. The ministers, fearing the violence of the mob, stayed but a brief space in the Chamber. After their departure, Gambetta entered the tribune and declared that Louis Napoléon Buonaparte and his dynasty had for ever ceased to reign in France.

Forthwith, at the invitation of another deputy of the left, Jules Favre, the crowd followed Favre himself and Gambetta to the Hôtel de Ville. There at half-past four the Republic was proclaimed and the Government of National Defence declared. Its President was General Trochu, Governor of Paris and Minister of War. Of the fourteen members, all deputies either for Paris or the department of Seine, nine were the Adams’ personal friends. Gambetta was Minister of the Interior, Ernest Picard of Finance, Jules Simon of Education, Jules Favre of Foreign Affairs, Dorian of Public Works. Garnier-Pagès, Pelletan, Emmanuel Arago and Rochefort were all ministers without portfolios.[182] When the Revolution broke out Rochefort was in prison on a charge of high treason, based on his attacks on the Empire in his paper La Lanterne. On the afternoon of the 4th, he was liberated by the crowd and brought in triumph to the Hôtel de Ville.

“The end of that day was splendid,” writes Juliette.[183] “A fresh breeze blew from the old river of Paris on to the assembled multitude. Once again the Hôtel de Ville had become le Louvre superbe des révolutions. The last rays of the setting sun gilded that people’s palace, played upon its windows, causing them to sparkle with a brilliance far surpassing the glitter of all the diamonds in the imperial crown.”

The Revolution had passed without the shedding of a drop of blood, without a single deed of violent disorder. The forecast of a working man, whom Juliette had overheard that afternoon, had come true. “Ah, well!” he had exclaimed, looking round on the crowd,[184] “we are all here—we, the robbers, les partageux, the assassins! Here we are on this fine Sunday. And there will be no robbery and no assassination.... Every one is pleased, even the omnibus company; for not one of their ‘buses has been held up and they have not lost a threepence.”

Indeed, there was universal rejoicing. Confidence and determination shone on all faces. Old friends met in the street and embraced one another. The fall of that oppressive régime established on the 2nd of December brought intense relief. On the day after the Revolution, George Sand wrote to Mme. Adam from Nohant a letter of fervent rejoicing: “Quelle grande chose,” she exclaims, “quelle belle journée au milieu de tant de désastres! Je n’espérais pas cette victoire de la liberté sans résistance.”[185] Even with the enemy advancing to their gates Parisians breathed again, realising that henceforth it was for la patrie and not for a dynasty that they would fight.

Search as we will among the numerous records of those memorable hours, penned by those who lived through them, we shall find none describing more vividly than these forty pages of Mme. Adam’s Souvenirs, the talk, the incidents and the movements of that vast crowd, thronging the Paris streets, all swayed by the excitement of a revolution. For la grande Française, as Mme. Adam was later to be called, never lives more intensely than when in a crowd. “Je vis d’une autre existence dès que je me mèle à la foule,” she writes.[186]

The gladness of that September evening, however, was but a rift in the clouds now rapidly enveloping Paris. The Prussians were expected to reach the capital on Thursday, the 8th of September. They did not arrive until the 19th. In the interval, Mme. Adam took a hasty night journey to Granville, in order that Alice might have a glimpse of her mother before she was shut up in the besieged city. After waiting five hours in a queue at the Gare Montparnasse, she obtained tickets for herself and her maid, and caught one of the few trains running. Adam feared that she might not be able to return. But after spending a few hours with her family, whom she was not to see again for many months, she tore herself away and entered the Paris train, which was said to be the last. Indeed, whether it would continue as far as Paris seemed doubtful. Juliette and her maid, who, with three fellow-travellers and a dog, were the only passengers bound for that destination, were, however, promised by the driver that, if compelled to abandon his train, he would take them on his engine into Paris. This was unnecessary, for, to the immense joy of Adam, who had almost ceased to hope for his wife’s return, the whole train steamed into the Gare Montparnasse.

This was on the 11th of September. During the following days Juliette was busy stocking her larder ready for the siege.

“Je vais, je trotte, pour compléter mes provisions,” she writes. “Il faut tant de choses! Tout peut manquer a un moment donné, jusqu’au sel, jusqu’au poivre, jusqu’à la moutarde. Je déploie dans mes recherches tout mon génie domestique. Je ne rève que mouton d’Australie, Liebig, jambon, légumes Chollet, épicerie, comestibles. Mes poches, ma robe, mes bas, mes mains, sont toujours encombrés quand je rentre. Si je découvre une conserve nouvelle, je rève à l’étonnement qu’elle causera dans trois mois, aux amis que j’inviterai à la manger! Verrai-je des héros surgir dans mon entourage: au lieu de leur tresser des, d’orner leur maison de guirlandes, je leur offrirai une bouteille de jeunes carottes confites, un sac de choux frisés: il faut qu mon héros ait accompli les plus grands exploits pour que je lui présente un fromage tête de mort de Hollande.”[187]

All Juliette’s friends were similarly employed. “Le fanatisme de la provision nous possède tous!” she exclaims, on meeting a Member of Parliament loaded with boxes of sardines.

Having furnished her larder, Mme. Adam next volunteered to nurse the wounded, who were pouring into Paris. Her father’s lessons in anatomy, her grandfather’s lessons in the dressing of wounds, now stood her in good stead. She was appointed to install in the Conservatoire de Musique a private hospital with fifty beds. Henceforth the provisioning and equipping of this hospital and the others which she organised later became her chief concern. “I hold out my hand to every one; I beg, I write, I do everything to get money,” she says. It was a grand day when the hospital workers, well provided with bags, bottles and baskets, were permitted to penetrate into the Tuileries, now given back to the nation, and to replenish their stores from the imperial larder. Lists had been made out of the viands to which each hospital was entitled: macaroni for the Conservatoire de Musique, sausages for the Picpus Hospital, kidney beans for the Théâtre français, oil for the Grand Orient, jam for all.

In connection with the Conservatoire Hospital, Mme. Adam organised a workroom where the wives, mothers and daughters of the men who were fighting, instead of staying at home and eating their hearts out with anxiety, could meet together, and, while sewing for the wounded, encourage one another and sympathise with one another’s sufferings.

Edmond Adam was a member of the Government Committee appointed to investigate the condition of the general hospitals. This he found so lamentable, that in many instances, owing to the infection of wards and operating theatres, amputation cases had no chance of recovery.

Despite the difficulties and dangers which beset her on every hand, Mme. Adam’s heart burned with a courage and a hope, which her friend, George Sand, appreciated to the full, when she wrote to her from Nohant on the 15th of September.[188] “Vous êtes généreusement exaltée par un peril prochain et défini.” This was one of the last letters Mme. Adam received before the gates of Paris were closed.

FOOTNOTES:

[163] See ante, 99.

[164] Ibid., 118.

[165] Souvenirs, III. 349 et seq.

[166] Souvenirs, III. 448.

[167] Souvenirs, III. 464.

[168] Ibid., 409.

[169] Ibid., 470.

[170] For Mme. Adam’s description of the grim incident which occurred at his funeral, see Souvenirs, V. 66.

[171] Grant Duff in Notes from a Diary, September 1864.

[172] Souvenirs, III. 471.

[173] Ibid., 468.

[174] Ibid., 471.

[175] Ibid., 470.

[176] Ibid., 473.

[177] Souvenirs, IV. 2.

[178] Souvenirs, IV. 7.