FOOTNOTES:
[288] See Marcel Sembat, Faites un Roi ou faites le Paix (1915), passim.
[289] Souvenirs, V. 2.
[290] Ibid., IV. 316.
[291] Mr. Britling Sees it Through, 378.
[292] Souvenirs, VI. 330.
[293] Ibid., 198.
[294] Souvenirs, VI. 157.
[295] Ibid., 182.
[296] Souvenirs, VI. 290.
[297] It had been sitting since February 1871.
[298] Souvenirs, VI. 226.
[299] Ibid., 388.
[300] Henri Galli, Gambetta et l’Alsace-Lorraine, p. 315.
[301] Prince von Hohenlohe, Mémoires, II. 405.
[302] Souvenirs, VI. 16.
[303] Ibid., I. 208.
[304] Her references to England in her articles contributed to La Nouvelle Revue are somewhat contradictory. When a commercial treaty between our two nations was on foot, she would argue that our interests are identical. Generally she maintained that we are doomed to be rivals.
[305] Souvenirs, II. 22.
[306] Ibid., VI. 405.
[307] p. 9.
[308] Souvenirs, VI. 272.
[309] Ibid., 405.
[310] Souvenirs, V. 297.
[311] Ibid., VI. 84.
[312] Ibid., VII. 73.
[313] Souvenirs, VI. 472.
[314] For those rumours with regard to Gambetta, see ante, 186.
[315] Souvenirs, VI. 471.
[316] Ibid., VII. 112.
[317] See Henri Galli, Gambetta et l’Alsace-Lorraine, 314.
[318] Souvenirs, VII. 121-7.
[319] See Mme. Adam’s story of the “Affaire de la Rue Roquépine,” Souvenirs, VII. 55-60.
[320] See ante, 186; also Souvenirs, VI. 80, and Le cœur de Gambetta, by Laur.
CHAPTER XV
DISILLUSIONMENT
“Petit à petit, la guerre, nos malheurs, la Commune, l’abandon de la revanche, m’auraient détachée du jacobinisme et de la grande Révolution.”—Mme. Adam.
“L’âme de la France est-elle donc catholique, et ne peut-on être en contact absolu avec elle que par le catholicisme et sa plus pure tradition?”—Ibid.
“Something is dying within me” (quelque chose agonise en moi) Mme. Adam had written at the close of her most memorable talk with Gambetta in 1878. That something was not only her faith in her friend’s determination to achieve la Revanche, it was also her hope for the establishment of an ideal Republic. To her mind the Republic, for the sake of whose stability Gambetta had found it necessary to sacrifice la Revanche and to enter into an understanding with Bismarck, was not worth having.
“One does not make use of a Bismarck,”[321] Mme. Adam had said to her friend.
“Who knows?” was his rejoinder. “Perhaps it will be he who will give us the Republic.”
“Then it would be fatal to us,” she replied. And that this Republic was proving fatal to liberty and fatal to her hopes she was becoming more and more fully convinced. “It is disenchanting us all, alarming us all,” she wrote. “It is disappointing our dreams of greatness at home and showing itself incapable of any effort towards heroism and greatness abroad.”[322]
From the time of her rupture with Gambetta until the Great War, Mme. Adam was indeed what one of her contemporaries has most happily called her, la grande désabusée de la troisième république.[323]
Almost as strongly as of his abandonment of la Revanche did Mme. Adam disapprove of Gambetta’s virulent anti-clerical policy. She began to agree with Mérimée, who, though an agnostic, feared lest so-called free-thinkers might prove as intolerant as the Church. “Do you think,” he had said, referring to the anti-clericals of those imperial days,[324] “that these men, if they were in the Government would ever give you liberty? They are the sons of Robespierre, Saint-Just and Marat. If ever they come into power, they will follow the example not merely of the Terrorists but of the Church in its darkest days. For they themselves, the fanatics of anti-clericalism, they are a church, smaller than the other but equally dogmatic.”
In his first speeches after the war Gambetta had declared himself in favour of strict liberty of opinion. But, finding the Republic’s enemies too often in close alliance with the Church, he had become embittered against the Catholic party.
Thirty years later Combes’ bitter attack on the Church was to arouse in many a free-thinker Catholic sympathies. In like manner Gambetta’s extreme anti-clericalism helped to make a Catholic of Mme. Adam. Towards the end of his life he tended more and more to throw in his lot with the extreme anti-clericals led by Paul Bert, who, adapting to the moment Peyrat’s famous phrase, le cléricalisme c’est l’ennemi,[325] declared le cléricalisme c’est le phylloxera.
That wily deist Spuller did not neglect this further opportunity of stealing a march on his rival.[326] He encouraged Mme. Adam in the idea that by waging war against the Church Gambetta was playing Bismarck’s game, and helping the Chancellor to carry on in France the Kulturkampf he was conducting with so much vigour in Germany. Had not Gambetta himself admitted that the Kulturkampf had changed the whole aspect of the struggle against the Church![327] In France, he had come to regard the separation between the Church and State as an almost necessary condition of any durable alliance with the Italian kingdom. “As long as we remain the eldest daughter of the Church,” he said to Mme. Adam,[328] “the papacy will rely upon our support, and this will inevitably endanger our friendly relations with Italy.”
Gambetta’s attitude in these vital matters was certainly changing his friend’s religious point of view. She was beginning to feel that she could no longer, as in 1866, describe herself as a pagan and an anti-clerical.[329] Then to oppose the Church had been to oppose the Empire. Now it seemed to her that to oppose the Church was to unite with Bismarck. The Catholic traditions of her country were beginning to appeal to her. “I remembered,” she writes,[330] “how for centuries Catholic France had been superbly patriotic, how for centuries the association between God and the King, God and la patrie, had perhaps been more essential than I had ever believed.”
Already she had travelled far from the days of the siege of Paris, when, in admiration of the nuns’ fearlessness during the small-pox epidemic, she had reflected, “Ought not my philosophy to give me as much courage as they derive from their religion?”[331]
By a strange contradiction Mme. Adam’s passion for revenge was carrying her towards a religion whose Founder had refused to countenance such a sentiment. But in wending her way Romewards she was obeying not so much the dictates of reason as ancestral voices, impulses arising from her subconscious self, beckonings from that Catholic past which is never far removed from any child of France.
The years 1876 and ’77 were dark years for Juliette Adam. They had reft from her George Sand, her father, Dr. Lambert, and then her husband. Dr. Lambert had died early in 1876, while his daughter was at Bruyères. Mme. Sand’s death occurred on the 8th of June. In the August of the following year, it fell to Mme. Adam’s lot to perform a melancholy mission. George Sand, shortly before her death, had expressed a wish that her study should remain under lock and key for one year, at the end of which it should be opened by her son Maurice and Juliette Adam. For this purpose Mme. Adam went to Nohant, where she found awaiting her a strange and sorrowful experience. When the seal was broken, there was the study just as George Sand had left it, with a partly finished manuscript on the desk, with the arm-chair half turned round as when its occupant had risen from it for the last time. During those moments the spirit of the departed seemed to come very near to her friend.
By that time Mme. Adam was a widow. Her husband had died in the previous May. Throughout her bereavement, there was no one to whom she turned more willingly for consolation than to Adam’s friend Thiers. He never tired of hearing her talk about her husband, whom he had known long and intimately, and whom he had never failed to appreciate. But three months after Adam’s death, Thiers followed him to the grave.
“Blow after blow falls upon me,” writes Mme. Adam. “Thiers’ loss creates another blank in my life.”
Her buoyant cheerfulness, however, her unquenchable hopefulness, her innate optimism would not permit her to remain long a prey to grief and melancholy. If earthly things disappointed her, if she failed to find here below the fulfilment of her hopes, the realisation of her dreams, then she would look elsewhere. She refused to be altogether disappointed. With Jean Jacques Rousseau she felt that she had wept too much in this life not to believe in another. Henceforth she began to dwell more and more on that other world, of faith in which her paganism had never succeeded in depriving her. With her the unseen had ever been vividly present.
Her exuberant Celtic imagination had projected itself into the spirit world. She believes that her grandmother appeared to her after her death, and that many important events of her life have been prophesied to her by some soothsayer, palmist or somnambulist. She herself used to tell fortunes; and, at the close of her evening receptions, to a few favoured guests, Gambetta, Girardin, Spuller, for example, who liked to linger after the rest had gone, she would predict the future by cutting cards. But her own soothsaying must not be taken too seriously. For she admits she was glad to take this opportunity of telling some home truths, and giving to her friends useful advice which, administered in any other way, might have offended them. Gambetta was frequently the recipient of such counsel. The cards, for instance, warned him that by a meeting as “diabolical as that of Christ’s temptation on the mountain” he was risking the loss of his prestige.[332] He was also enjoined to beware of women and their advice. Some would dash him into the abyss of ruin, he was told, while others would raise him on to dizzy heights no less dangerous. He was bidden to be a lover and a friend, but to choose only men for his confidants. Refusing to recognise in such warnings anything but the advice of the fair necromancer herself, Gambetta replied mischievously, “You are rather hard on yourself. But perhaps it is in order that you may be still harder on others.”
In the past, the main object of Mme. Adam’s adoration had been la patrie. So it will continue to be until the end. In her pagan days, after la patrie, she had adored the gods and heroes of Greece and Rome. They had represented to her the ideals of a civilisation which she regarded as the highest and most complete to which humanity has yet attained. When Mme. Adam became a Christian the gods and heroes of antiquity made way for Christ and His Saints, and for Mme. Adam’s patriotic soul first among the latter is Jeanne d’Arc.[333] For even now la patrie remains enthroned in the first place in her hierarchy. Indeed, she has returned to the Catholic Church chiefly because thus she hopes best to fulfil her mission as a patriotic Frenchwoman. “I believe,” she said to me, “that a true French patriot can no more escape being a Catholic than can a truly patriotic Turk escape being a Mussulman.” Nevertheless, that it may not always be easy to reconcile patriotism and religion is suggested by the following letter, which Mme. Adam wrote in reply to my inquiry as to her views of the reputed pro-German attitude of the present Pope—
“Abbaye de Gif,
”14.ii.16.
“.... Pour le Pape—Je suis catholique, apostolique et romaine. Revenue aux croyances de ma grand’mère.... Vous comprendrez que je n’ai pas, si tardive croyante, le droit de discuter les actions du St. Père. Mais mes vœux étaient pour le Cardinal Rampolla, que l’Autriche détestait et que la France eut tant aimé! Là encore je dois me taire. Vous pouvez seulement dire à quel point mes vœux accompagnaient le Cardinal Rampolla, que j’avais la fierté de connaître.”
(1885)
We have seen how Mme. Adam’s father had brought her up in communion with the Hellenic soul; how in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon she delighted to fraternise with those enthusiastic Hellenists, de Ronchaud, Paul Saint-Victor, and Louis Ménard. After her rupture with Mme. d’Agoult, and throughout all the vicissitudes of the intervening years, this Grecque ressuscitée, as Victor Hugo used to call her, had never ceased, whenever she met her Hellenic friends, with them to live and move and have her being in the world of ancient Greece. Together they dreamed of seeing established in France what they described somewhat vaguely as “the Athenian Republic.” Together they welcomed the advent of those young poets, “the incomparable Parnassians,” whom Ménard fathered, François Coppée, Sully Prudhomme,[334] Hérédia, Alphonse Daudet, Baudelaire, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Anatole France and Lecomte de Lisle. Mme. Adam had been delighted when Gaston Paris brought to her salon that wonderful Sully Prudhomme, who from a workman in Creusot’s factory had developed into a poet, scholar and philosopher.[335] Volume by volume, as they appeared, she devoured Lemerre’s edition of the Parnassians’ collected works, becoming every day, she writes, sauf quelques réserves, a convinced admirer and an ardent propagandist of the new school of poets.[336]
The reserve she referred to was this: she could not bring herself to admire the marmoreal immobility cultivated by the Parnassians. “Ils ne rêvent pas comme moi” she writes,[337] “de draperies flottantes au vent qui souffle du golfe de Phalère ou du mont Hymette: ils veulent le pli statuaire, moi je l’aime vivant.”
One, who attended Mme. Adam’s reception when her salon was at the height of its political influence, tells how eager she was to withdraw from political discussion whenever an opportunity offered of talking about Greece and things Greek.
Her three best novels, Laide, Grecque and Païenne, are inspired throughout by these Hellenic sympathies. In a delightful article on Le Néo-Hellenisme,[338] Jules Lemaître, that most eminent of French critics since Sainte-Beuve, bestows high praise on this trilogy of novels, which he describes as “a rare effort of sympathetic imagination.” Nevertheless, though in all sincerity Mme. Adam strove hard to attain to the Greek point of view, a mind so essentially actual as hers could not fail to introduce a certain modernity into her portrayal of what seemed to her the Greek atmosphere and temperament. As Lemaître points out, in these novels every passion, every impression, every phrase, is obviously three thousand years older than a line of Homer, twenty-four centuries older than a line of Sophocles.
Mme. Adam, with her antipathy to everything Gothic, Teutonic and mediæval, may try to cultivate a dislike of romanticism, she remains notwithstanding, and her criticism of the Parnassians quoted above proves it, a romanticist, the child of Chateaubriand and Mme. de Staël. She may try to ignore the Middle Ages, but she cannot suppress them. And Jules Lemaître may well inquire whether “if the whole Middle Ages had not groaned and bled beneath the Cross Mme. Juliette Lambert would be able to rejoice so rapturously in her Greek gods.” For the vague paganism of that day depends for its very existence on the Christianity of which it was the negation. The paganism of Mme. Adam and her friends was provoked by the Christian’s enmity to all things carnal. It was a protest in favour of that joie de vivre, of that physical beauty, of those natural joys which the mediæval Christian had condemned as the works of the devil. When life’s joyfulness began to fade, Mme. Adam, like so many others, turned to Christianity. She had always, as she had confessed to Littré at Mme. d’Agoult’s dinner-party,[339] had the will to believe.
“Would you know how and why I became a Catholic, then you must read Chrétienne,” said Mme. Adam. And indeed this novel describes her conversion from paganism to Christianity. Here we see how that adoration of Greece, which she owed to her father’s upbringing had ceased to be a living inspiration, how it had been relegated to the past. That old conflict of her childhood between her father’s paganism and her grandmother’s Christianity recurring, resulted in her grandmother’s influence gradually alienating her soul from Greece, and transforming into a mere literary preference what was once a religious inspiration.
Chrétienne is the sequel to Païenne. The two novels tell the story of a beautiful Frenchwoman, Melissandre. She is married to a heartless rake, whom she has never loved, a M. de Noves. She has a lover, a gifted painter, Tiburce. Both novels are in the form of letters. They contain few incidents. But they tell the story of a consuming passion, which in Païenne burns with fierce ardour and in Chrétienne cools down into serene affection. The death of the husband, M. de Noves, which occurs in a duel at the close of Païenne does not, as one might expect, lead to the lovers’ immediate marriage. Before the consummation of their legal union intervenes the whole of Chrétienne. For religious misgivings, which have arisen in the heart of Melissandre, cause her to banish her lover for a while. He goes to Greece. She remains in France. In the interval, Melissandre and Tiburce, who had both been fervent pagans, fall under Catholic influences, which convince them that their Hellenic ideals are only to be cherished so far as they lead to Christ. In the words of Tiburce, they follow “the great pagan” St. Paul on the road to Damascus.[340] And not until they have been received back into the Church of their fathers do they become man and wife.
In these two books Mme. Adam brilliantly displays one of her most eminent literary gifts, which she has shown in all her writings: her passion for the beauties of nature and her power of describing them. It was their love of nature that had first attracted her to the Greeks.
The idea of race has ever played a dominant part in Mme. Adam’s mentality. “Je suis Gauloise, je suis Grecque, Latine, mais rien d’autre,” she writes.[341] In returning to Christianity she flattered herself that she was returning to the traditions of her race, to the Roman Church which she regards as the highest expression of Latin culture, and of that Mediterranean tradition, which embodies all that she loves and respects, and which is the direct antithesis to the northern tradition, to the Kultur of Berlin.[342] Bismarck she hated, not only as the conqueror of France and the persecutor of Catholics, but as the sworn foe of Latin culture. Spuller had told her that the Chancellor had a horror of everything Latin, that in his Kulturkampf he was warring not merely against the religious idea, but against Latin influence in letters, philosophy and art.[343]