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.