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.”