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.