FOOTNOTES:
[36] The edition from which I quote is that of 1870 in four volumes. The suppressed edition of 1858, according to Mme. Adam’s Souvenirs, II. 66, was in three volumes. In a few years the condemnation was removed and permission given to Proudhon to return to France. He elected, however, to remain in Belgium.
[37] La Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Eglise (ed. 1870), vol. iv. 203.
[38] Her best-known works are a novel, Nélida, and her History of the Revolution of 1848.
[39] Proudhon, La Justice, vol. iv. 140.
[40] Souvenirs, II. 68.
[41] M. Michel Lévy on his death in 1875, was succeeded as head of the firm by M. Calmann Lévy, father of the M. Calmann Lévy, who to-day presides over the business at 3, rue Auber.
[42] Souvenirs, II. 74.
[43] A brilliant and fashionable journalist of the day, who was also a poet and critic. His best-known work is Le Nain Jaune. Later, Mme. Lamessine was to see him frequently.
[44] Myosotis.
[45] For the discussion of Denise at the Poet’s Union see Souvenirs, II. 49.
[46] Souvenirs, II. 75.
[47] Souvenirs, II. 79.
[48] Ibid., 80.
[49] Referring to the unhappiness of her married life.
[50] Souvenirs, II. 81.
[51] Her reply to Alphonse Karr’s article on the crinoline. See ante, 44.
[52] An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (1903), 57.
CHAPTER VI
SALON LIFE DURING THE SECOND EMPIRE
1858-1863
“Le Salon était alors ... l’ambition suprême de la Parisienne, la consolation de sa maturité, la gloire de sa vieillesse.”—Daniel Stern (la Comtesse d’Agoult).
Dr. Lambert was right. Juliette’s book brought her influential friendships and distinguished acquaintances. It flung her right into the whirl of Parisian literary and political society.
The two women writers, whom Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes had defended, both wrote to thank their young champion. Of George Sand’s letter and of the friendship which some years later ensued between her and Juliette we shall hear much in another chapter. La Comtesse d’Agoult (Daniel Stern), after having read Juliette’s book, wrote to her—
“It is surprising, sir, that you should have assumed a woman’s name, while we women write under masculine pseudonyms.”[53]
“I replied to her,” writes Juliette, “that I was a woman, and very much a woman.”
Then there followed an invitation to one of the great lady’s evenings. This was a high honour. For Mme. d’Agoult’s salon in the Rue Presbourg was not only the centre of the Republican opposition to the Empire, it was a brilliant and cosmopolitan assembly, a meeting-place for many of the most distinguished men of the day. Renan, Littré and Émile de Girardin, here foregathered with Emerson, Heine and Kossuth. The life of Mme. d’Agoult herself had been as eventful as that of any of her guests. Born at Frankfort in 1805, she was the daughter of a German banker’s daughter and the Comte de Flavigny, a French emigré, who had been page to Marie Antoinette. When the Revolution had subsided, the Comte de Flavigny brought his wife and his daughter, Marie, back to France. Marie soon grew into an intelligent and beautiful girl of Germanic type—tall, golden-haired and blue-eyed. Having set her heart upon a man who married some one else, she refused offer after offer until well on in what was then regarded as spinsterhood. At the age of twenty-two she submitted to a mariage de convenance with the Comte d’Agoult. In a loveless life she found consolation in that joy of every clever Parisienne’s heart, the creation of a salon. She delighted to gather the élite of the aristocracy round her in her town house on the Quai Malaquais, facing the Louvre, or in her country château of Croissy, fifteen miles out of Paris. Soon this “Corinne of the Quai Malaquais,” as she was called, became one of the most attractive of Parisian hostesses. She aspired even to emulate the seductive Mme. Récamier, whose salon at L’Abbaye-aux-Bois was then at the height of its glory. But the Comtesse realised that without le grand homme, in other words, without a literary lion, a salon is nothing. Mme. Récamier had her Chateaubriand. Mme. d’Agoult selected for her “great man” the poet, Alfred de Vigny. So, while Chateaubriand was entrancing Mme. Récamier’s guests by the reading of his Mémoires d’Outre Tombe, the Countess invited her friend, Alfred de Vigny, to read his new poem, La Frégate, to an assembly of ambassadresses, duchesses, and countesses at Croissy. But alas! de Vigny, though a gifted poet, was no reader. And the chilling silence at the end of the reading was broken by the freezing question: “Is your friend an amateur, madame?” “Decidedly,” said de Vigny to his hostess, “my frigate has been shipwrecked in your salon.”
But a worse shipwreck than that of La Frégate was to attend the fair châtelaine of Croissy. Some one had described this statuesque beauty in terms she herself found not inaccurate as “six inches of snow on twenty feet of lava.” And the lava was soon to melt the snow. Mme. d’Agoult’s apparent coldness vanished before the noontide heat of an irresistible attraction, that of the most fatal Don Juan of Europe, none other than the musician, Franz Liszt, who had already melted many a distinguished feminine heart.
Casting to the winds her social reputation, her marriage vows, and her maternal affection (she had borne the Comte d’Agoult two children), she suffered herself to be carried off from a ball, and spent the next years of her life wandering over Europe with her lover.
Then, having quarrelled with Liszt, she returned to Paris in 1846, and settled down, in the Rue Presbourg, to write under the pseudonym of “Daniel Stern.”
Of course all the doors of her aristocratic friends in the Faubourg St. Germain were closed against her. But even before her flight she had made some friends in the bourgeoisie; and among them were M. and Mme. Émile de Girardin. Mme. de Girardin, the Countess had known when, as the clever and beautiful Delphine Gay, she was the poetess laureate of the Restoration. Now, married to Émile de Girardin, the Lord Northcliffe of that day, Delphine was one of the most successful of Parisian hostesses. While her mysterious husband, that Napoléon of the Press, that homme fatal, of whose origin no one was sure, muffled himself in a shawl and slumbered in a corner of the salon until such time as he should go to his newspaper,[54] the vivacious Mme. de Girardin gathered round her all the great literary celebrities of the hour, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Théophile Gautier and Eugène Sue. And in this brilliant circle, the Countess, ostracised elsewhere, was made warmly welcome. Here she formed her Republican opinions, here she came into contact with the leading figures of that Revolution of 1848, of which she was to become the historian.[55] Here, in Mme. de Girardin’s salon in the Rue Lafitte, the Countess replenished her emptied visiting-list and gathered material for her second salon.
With most of this story Juliette had become acquainted through the gossip of Mme. Fauvety’s drawing-room. And what she did not already know was told her by Mme. d’Agoult’s friend, de Ronchaud, whom the Countess had sent to escort the young Mme. Lamessine to the Rue Presbourg. Mme. d’Agoult could not have assigned Juliette a more congenial cavalier. De Ronchaud was a fervent classicist, one of the founders of that new Hellenic school which was just then coming into prominence. His delightful talk about Greek art in the book-shop of Père France on the Quai Voltaire had seduced young Anatole into playing truant from the Collège Stanislas in order to spend a whole day wandering through the Galerie des Antiques in the Louvre. Juliette found de Ronchaud’s conversation equally entrancing. “Our first talk,” she writes, “was one long hymn to Greece.” De Ronchaud promised to introduce his young friend to other Hellenists, and he foretold that together they would bring about a second Renaissance.
What an all-important event was Juliette’s first evening in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon may easily be imagined. She found the Countess, like many other distinguished Frenchwomen, anticipating her age, for although she was only fifty-three, she wore over her silver hair a light black lace mantilla. At the first glance she gave Juliette the impression of strength, almost virile, and yet of femininity. “J’ai atteint l’âge d’homme,” she used to say, echoing Catherine of Russia’s sentiment when she welcomed Diderot with the words: “As man to man we can discuss anything.” Tall and superbly graceful, it seemed to Juliette that she had never seen a more complete great lady. When Mme. d’Agoult described herself as a Democrat, it was difficult to suppress a smile, so anomalous on her lips sounded such a word. Her bearing, the pose of her head, her features, the lines of her face which betrayed no trace of the tempestuous passion that had swept over her in youth; everything about Mme. d’Agoult was aristocratic.
In the general conversation of her salon the Countess took little part, but, seated on the right of the fireplace, she would carry on a tête-à-tête with some single person. Unlike many another salon lady, Mme. du Deffand or Mme. de Staël or Juliette herself, she was no maker of mots; nor was she ready with repartee. She herself could never understand how she came by her reputation of a wit;[56] for she knew that she never appeared at her best in conversation. She was too reserved, too self-conscious to be a vivacious talker, and she could only be eloquent when intense feeling took her out of herself.[57]
Grave and a trifle solemn, her salon was frequented by serious students, such as Littré, who rarely went anywhere else, as well as by more sociable philosophers like Renan. The subjects discussed were politics, philosophy, art (music especially), serious literature, but seldom plays or novels. The guests were too addicted to monologue; and too often some weighty personage, leaning against the mantel-piece would discourse at such length that his talk became a veritable lecture. Sometimes Mme. d’Agoult would read a letter from some foreign correspondent, a famous revolutionary like Mazzini or Kossuth; for she had relations with the whole of Europe, including those illustrious Frenchmen whom Louis Napoléon’s coup d’état of December 1851 had driven into exile.
Though all Mme. d’Agoult’s friends were republicans and therefore opposed to the Empire, they were not all agreed as to the best way of conducting the opposition. About this year, 1858, two distinct parties were beginning to define themselves: the extreme republicans who, like Juliette and her father, believed in keeping entirely aloof from imperial politics, and who regarded as traitors to Republicanism any who should, no matter for what purpose, consent to swear allegiance to the Emperor. These uncompromising anti-imperialists went by the name of abstentionistes. But there was also coming into existence a more moderate party led by Mme. d’Agoult’s son-in-law, Émile Ollivier.[58] They held that opposition to the Empire could be most effectively carried out by entering the Corps Legislatif, for which it was necessary to take the oath of allegiance. This party, known as sermentistes, was to grow in strength until it succeeded in forcing its so-called Liberalism on the Emperor, and establishing what is known as L’Empire Libéral.
Juliette’s uncompromising nature, as we have seen, made it impossible for her to approve of the Sermentistes. And she loses no opportunity of ridiculing les petits Olliviers, as Ollivier’s followers were called, when they appeared in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon. Indeed, the Countess herself opposed her son-in-law’s policy; and, after her daughter’s death, there was an open breach between them.
From the very first the pretty, vivacious Mme. Lamessine made a highly favourable impression on Mme. d’Agoult. “She took the trouble,” writes Juliette, “to convert a little provincial into a society lady.[59] She encouraged me to talk of my work. When you are perplexed, come and tell me,” she would say. “I shall be delighted to give you the benefit of my observation of mankind and of all I have learnt in the hard school of experience.”
Soon Juliette’s invitation to the Countess’s evenings was extended to those smaller intimate parties, which met around the luncheon or the dinner-table. On these occasions the Hellenist, Louis de Ronchaud, was almost invariably her fellow-guest.
Mme. d’Agoult laughed at Juliette’s passion for antiquity. “My dear child,” she would say, “you must be of your time. At your age you ought not to be so antique.... I shall take you to the Opéra Bouffes” (the Italian theatre). “That will modernise you a little.”
“For the love of Greece, remain Greek,” pleaded de Ronchaud. But, indeed, there was no fear of the Opéra Bouffes perverting Juliette from Hellenism; for Offenbach’s caricaturing of her Homeric deities in Orphée aux Enfers so outraged her Grecian sympathies that Mme. d’Agoult was constrained to make amends by inviting her to a neo-Grecian dinner. “It will be a pagan party,” the Countess said. “De Ronchaud has arranged it.” The other guests were two brilliant Hellenists, Ménard and Saint Victor. They began by discussing the now much-disputed importance of a classical education. These neo-Grecians were firmly persuaded that the classics alone can inculcate those superior ideas of justice and heroism, which are all the more salutary because for ages they have permeated the race. Naturally they lamented over what seemed to them the decadence of French society under the Empire. Ménard maintained that periods of intellectual decadence are invariably periods of mechanical progress and of political despotism.
Then the worshippers of ancient Hellas fell with equal zest and vivacity to discussing the antiquity of the Orphic mysteries.
How intensely alive for Juliette was this Hellenic past she has proved over and over again in her literary work, and most notably in three novels she was to produce some years later, Laide (1878), Grecque (1879), and Païenne (1883).[60]
That great wave of philosophic speculation which was sweeping through France could not fail to affect so intellectual a salon as Mme. d’Agoult’s. An earlier dinner-party, Juliette’s first at the Rue Presbourg, had been a veritable symposium of philosophers. The great Littré,[61] the eloquent exponent of Comte’s philosophy, was the lion of the evening. His famous Etymological Dictionary of the French Language was then going through the Press.
“Littré,” writes Juliette, “inspired me with a sentiment which was almost worship.” When they had met before they had talked of Greece. The editor of Hippocrates and Pliny, though laughing at his young friend’s fervent passion for ancient Hellas, had been able to reveal to her things in the Iliad which neither she nor her father had dreamed of.
Among the other guests were De Ronchaud, of course; Hippolyte Carnot, son of the “Organiser of Victory,” and editor of one of the leading magazines of the day, La Revue Encyclopédique;[62] Dupont-White, the friend of John Stuart Mill, a bold thinker and an ardent apologist of centralisation in government. In the presence of such an august philosophic trio Juliette for the first part of the dinner was content to listen; and we may be sure that, like her illustrious namesake, Mme. Récamier, she listened “with seduction.” But towards the end of the evening we find her warmed to take part in the discussion. Although she admired, almost worshipped Littré, she could not tolerate his positivism. Positivism suggested Comte, and Comte suggested the husband whose conduct was rendering her domestic life unbearable. But Littré seemed to her to out-Comte even Comte; for Littré would stifle the slightest breath of idealism. While Comte admitted that there are as many arguments for as against the existence of an unknowable, Littré seemed to Juliette absolutely to deny it. This may have been so at that time; but surely Littré must later have become less dogmatic. For we remember Paul Bourget’s description of “Old Littré” as a saint who spoke eloquently of that ocean of mystery washing our very shores, but over the waters of which we have no barque to carry us.[63]
When Littré maintained that as “light cannot exist without a luminous body, neither can life without organs nor spirit without matter,” Juliette protested that vehicles are not essences. “The Homeric past,” she added, “presents us with a poetic conception of things which encourages the belief that the future has something better in store than your immutable law and its brutality.”
“Yes, I agree,” replied Littré, “the immutable law is brutal in its partial manifestations, but its general action, based on the unvarying conditions of proportion and order, inspires us with the idea of absolute justice.”
Against such determinism Juliette revolted with all the fervour of her rebellious and romantic soul.
“I protest,” she said. “If I feel myself a mere atom of dust swept about by the wind and not an intelligence dominating matter, why should I make any effort?”
“Because action is the law of humanity.”
“Ah! but for me belief in man led by the spirit and nature by the divine is a necessity.” Here, in these words indicating so plainly the wish to believe, lies the key to Juliette’s whole mental and spiritual evolution. It was a key which her philosopher friends were quick to grasp.
“We shall see this pagan turning Christian,” said Littré.
“And I should not be at all sorry,” remarked Mme. d’Agoult, “if it were only for the pleasure of exasperating that Hellenising Ronchaud.”
Juliette and her hostess would appear to have been the only women at these dinner-parties. There may have been others, whom Juliette does not mention. But Mme. d’Agoult was essentially a man’s woman. The wives of her guests, with very few exceptions, did not interest her. There were, however, a few clever and distinguished women who frequented her salon. There was the masculine Mme. Royer, who was as much of a blue-stocking as her friend Jenny d’Héricourt, and whom Juliette equally detested; there was the heroic Mme. Hippolyte Carnot, the Cornelia of French republicans, who, when her husband was resisting Louis Napoléon in December 1851, said, “If you die you will bequeath to your sons the example you inherited from your father.” Then there was that queen of raconteuses, the witty but rather Rabelaisian Comtesse de Pierreclos, the poet Lamartine’s niece. This tall and powerfully-built lady, with large prominent features, was one of the most striking figures in salon society. She was pleased to joke about her own appearance. Being asked what part she would take in a play, she replied, “I think mine should be the part of the bust of Louis Philippe.” But if other people attempted to make fun of her she resented it strongly. Thus when she said she had met a certain person face to face, which in French is “nose to nose,” and some one ejaculated, “Then it must have been yours that conquered,” she was on the point of bursting into tears.[64] But Mme. de Pierreclos passed as quick as lightning from tears to laughter. She and Juliette were equally exuberant and impulsive. Perhaps it was this that made them sworn friends. They corresponded regularly, and during Juliette’s frequent absences from Paris she depended on her friend to keep her au courant with all the doings of the metropolis, with the latest mot, the last scandal, the newest play and the best music.
For Juliette’s interests were far from being concentrated on philosophy or even on neo-Hellenism. Plays, picture-shows, fancy-dress balls and the opera crowded her days, leaving her, one might have thought, no time for literary work. Nevertheless, she had contrived before 1863 to produce a novel, Le Mandarin, three volumes of short stories, Mon Village, Récits d’une Paysanne, Voyage autour du Grand Pin, besides pamphlets on public questions and newspaper articles.
JULIETTE LAMBER
From a portrait by Léopold Flameng, 1860
Among all these various pleasures and duties one wonders what became of Juliette’s little daughter Alice. The child was now old enough to notice the strained relations between her parents, and in order to remove her from the unedifying disputes between her mother and father, Alice had been sent to her grandparents at Chauny.
As far as her literary and social life was concerned Juliette’s most ambitious dreams were about to be realised. She was on the way to become a queen of society. True, she had enemies, chiefly pedants like Mme. d’Héricourt and Mlle. Royer, or the friends of Proudhon. No one so convinced, so outspoken as Juliette could avoid arousing opposition. But, with the exception of that little coterie, all hearts were hers, won by her good nature, her charm, her genius for friendship, her vivacity, her intelligence and her loveliness.
A leading French journalist, now no longer living, who followed Mme. Adam’s career with interest and admiration, told me that in her youth she was entrancingly beautiful. Referring to the salon she was shortly to establish, to the princes, ambassadors, writers and artists who crowded round the brilliant young hostess, that journalist said: “We were all in love with her.”
Moreover Juliette, though an advocate of the rights of woman in days when feminists tended to affect masculine attire, discarded none of her femininity. It has always been her opinion that Pour une femme, c’est une infériorité que se deféminiser. She who had been independent enough to abstain from the crinoline, knew how to dress. One of her gowns, velvet gorge de tourterelle, with large steel buttons, worn at Alphonse Daudet’s dinner-party, made such an impression on Edmond de Goncourt that he described it in detail, in the pages of that Journal which has now become a classic.[65]
It is not surprising that more than one distinguished artist—Flameng, Charpentier, for example—painted Mme. Lamessine’s portrait. Charpentier’s picture was exhibited in the salon. Mme. d’Agoult’s friend, the famous sculptor, Adam Salomon, photographed her in a Charlotte Corday costume, which she had worn at a fancy-dress ball, and wished to model her bust. The photograph was a success, not so the bust. After having made many attempts in clay, the sculptor gave it up. Some time later, however, when Mme. Lamessine was in his studio, he persuaded her to let him take a caste of her face. “It was horrible,” she writes.[66] “I thought I should have been suffocated; and I felt as if my eyebrows and eyelashes were being torn off. The agony of those few seconds when Adam Salomon was piercing holes for my nostrils and making slits for my lips, when I could hardly breath, pursued me for months.” “I quite understand,” she adds, “that a cast of the head and face is not usually taken until after death.”
It was at the Adam Salomons’ that Juliette met Lamartine. He came there every day: and it saddened her to see this great poet worried by financial embarrassments and attempting to retrieve his fallen fortunes by soliciting subscriptions to his Cours Familier de Littérature. Ce pauvre Lamartine, wrote the witty Mme. Mohl, ce n’est plus une lyre, c’est une tire-lire (a sealed earthen pot with a slit into which a peasant puts his money). The poet’s fine, handsome countenance still lit up when he spoke of art, letters or politics, but that unhappily was but seldom.[67]
There are those for whom socially the Second Empire signifies little more than hollow splendour, ostentatious display and vulgar luxury. No doubt these tendencies were strongly marked; but at the same time there flourished a rich and original development of art, music and literature. When Juliette was making her début in Paris drawing-rooms, Alexandre Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias and his Fils Naturel were being played at Le Théâtre Français, Millet and Puvis de Chavannes were exhibiting their first pictures in the Salon, Renan was writing his Vie de Jésus, Erckmann and Chatrian their Napoleonic romances, and Victor Hugo, in exile, his Légende des Siècles. Those were the days when two of the greatest composers of the modern world, Berlioz and Wagner, were rivalling one another on the Parisian operatic stage.
Juliette first met Berlioz at the representation of Orpheo at the Théâtre Lyrique. Mme. Viardot’s sublime rendering of the part of Orpheo avenged Juliette and her neo-Grecian friends, Ménard and de Ronchaud, who accompanied her, for the insults Offenbach had offered to their Greek gods. During the song “I have lost my Eurydice,” Juliette, overcome by emotion, paid the singer the superb compliment of momentarily losing consciousness. When Berlioz himself came round to their box at the end of the act, Ménard did not neglect to tell him of the beautiful Mme. Lamessine’s little swoon. Highly flattered the composer took her hand in his and kept it there.[68]
“Yes,” he said, “it is quite beautiful.... Orpheo is near enough to the real Orpheo for the expression of grief rendered as we have just heard it to overwhelm the senses.”
Juliette appreciated Wagner’s art, though she was far too much of a Latin to prefer this Teuton to Berlioz. “Berlioz,” she wrote, “is the initiator, he stands above all others. He can well afford to let the Wagnerian fanatics assert that Wagner’s is the music of the future.”
Juliette first met Wagner and heard him play at the Comtesse de Charnacé’s. The Comtesse was Mme. d’Agoult’s daughter by her husband, the Comte d’Agoult, and, strangely enough it may seem to us, she was in the habit of receiving her half-sister, daughter of Liszt and Mme. d’Agoult, and wife of the celebrated pianist, Hans von Bülow. Von Bülow was Wagner’s shadow; and it was Von Bülow who brought Wagner to the Rue Vaugirard. About twenty-five people were present. Juliette thought Wagner’s enormous head not lacking in character, at least the upper part of it. His forehead was broad and high. His questioning eyes were now tender, now hard; but his ugly mouth, with its sarcastic expression, seemed to press back his cheeks and like nut-crackers to bring together an authoritative chin and an arrogant nose. She found him caustic and witty as he talked of everything and seemed to know everything. Then suddenly he would become vulgar, personal, conceited.
He played the Prelude to Lohengrin. “Never has anything been written to equal it,” exclaimed Von Bülow.
“I alone,” said Wagner ..., “can do these things. No one else in the world would dare to attempt them.”
Then laughing, and, with a strong Germanic accent, he added: “People can never tell whether I am hydrocephalous or a man of genius.”
“Something of the first,” whispered Juliette to Mme. d’Agoult.
“A great deal of the second,” rejoined the Countess, rather severely.
Wagner, who was extremely quick of hearing, had caught this whispered conversation.
“He gave to each of us,” writes Juliette, “the ‘thank you’ we deserved.” Then he talked well of Parisians and their mocking spirit. He said how it grieved him not to be understood in France, and to have for a rival any one so eminent as Berlioz.
“It is impossible for you ever to understand one another,” said Mme. d’Agoult.
Despite the personal antipathy with which Wagner inspired her, Juliette made enormous efforts to sell tickets for the three concerts he was to give at Paris. And she disposed of so many that the musician actually sent de Ronchaud to her with a message of thanks from “the Hydrocephalous.”
The first two concerts at least were a distinct success. At the second even Berlioz applauded.
Mme. d’Agoult, unlike most aristocratic Frenchwomen of her day, was a brave pedestrian. That was what kept her such a good figure, said Juliette; and her young friend often accompanied her on her walks. In May 1859, after having visited the Salon, they walked through the Bois. Juliette seldom refers to her own toilettes. But on that day, she tells us, she was wearing a specially becoming costume, a frock of black taffetas with no trimming, but wide sleeves of white lace, a fichu of black chantilly and a Leghorn hat with a cluster of cornflowers and strings of black velvet. It was a glorious May day. All Paris seemed to be out enjoying itself. As the Countess and Juliette walked past the Arc de Triomphe, Mme. d’Agoult said—
“The war is imminent. Perhaps it will be declared to-morrow. God send we may see France victorious and Italy delivered.”[69]
For months Mme. d’Agoult and her friends had been eagerly following Italy’s struggle for liberty. With the whole of France they ardently desired their Latin sister’s liberation from the Austrian yoke. The Countess herself had Italian connections. She was related to a well-known Florentine family, the Peruzzi.
Juliette, before she came to Paris, had known little of foreign politics. Save for a vague prejudice against England, the legacy of the Napoleonic Wars, a mistrust of Prussia and a liking for the Russians because Russian soldiers, billeted in the house of Chauny, had been kind to her grandmother, Juliette had no very decided sympathies or antipathies towards countries not her own. But in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon such indifference speedily vanished. On the very first evening in the Rue Presbourg she met the Alsatian, Nefftzer, who had been editor of La Presse and was later to direct Le Temps. “By him,” she writes, “for the first time in my life I heard foreign politics lucidly discussed, and it was then that I began to take an interest in them.”[70]
Among the European nations outside France, Italy was Juliette’s first love and Garibaldi her greatest hero. Next to Italy, as one might expect from so ardent a Hellenist, came Greece. She and her Grecian friends were highly delighted when the Ionian Isles were reunited to Greece. She was in the South of France at the time, but de Ronchaud wrote announcing the good news and exclaiming “Vive l’indépendence.”
But that was in 1862. To return to 1859 and to the cause of Italian unity as it appealed to Mme. d’Agoult’s salon. Napoléon’s declaration of war against Austria so delighted Juliette and her friends that for a moment they almost forgot their opposition to the Empire. The news of the victories which followed increased their rejoicing, but their joy was short-lived; for in a few weeks came a bitter disillusionment. In July the Peace of Villafranca was signed. Instead of fulfilling Napoléon’s proud boast and freeing Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic, it delivered her tied hand and foot into the power of Austria. Francis Joseph remained master of Italy, the most powerful member of the Italian Confederation, over which the Pope, Pio-Nono, presided.
“Ah! we felt that Napoléon’s promises had been too good to be true,” exclaimed Juliette and her Republican friends. And, with more reason, “I told you so,” exclaimed M. Thiers. For the ex-Minister had advised the Emperor not to engage in war against Austria. Italian unity, he foretold, would be followed by Prussian unity. And now he pointed out that France had not only made an enemy of Austria, but she had offended Italy, who saw that she had been duped. Italy was still further offended when Napoléon in direct violation of the Treaty of Villafranca insisted on annexing Savoy and Nice. Then, not content with ranging against him Italy and Austria, the Emperor proceeded to alienate the Pope, whom he was pledged to support.
Out of that mind which, as Lord Palmerston said, “was as full of schemes as a warren of rabbits,” Napoléon III produced at this juncture one of his numerous pamphlets. In this one he attacked nothing more nor less than the Pope’s temporal power, urging him to acquiesce in the independence of Romagna. This dangerous policy of playing first with one party then with another made Juliette and her friends tremble for France, despite their anti-clericalism.
They were kept closely in touch with Italian affairs by a friend of Mme. d’Agoult’s, a man equally remarkable in the three fields of science, literature, and politics, Alessandro Bixio, the founder with Buloz of the Revue des deux Mondes. Born in 1808, Bixio was a Genoese by birth, but had been educated in France. A moderate Republican, during the terrible insurrection of July 1848, in an attempt to keep order in Paris streets, he had been severely wounded. Having lost consciousness he was taken for dead, and left lying near one of the barricades. Not having been heard of afterwards, his death was announced, a memorial service was arranged, mourning was ordered, when suddenly his friend Hetzel, the publisher, received a letter from him. A concierge had found the wounded man lying in the street, had taken him into the house, and there, after some days of coma, he had returned to consciousness. He wrote to Hetzel entreating him to announce his resurrection as delicately as possible.
Earlier in the year, Bixio had been French Ambassador at Turin, later, during Prince Louis Napoléon’s presidency, he was French Minister of Agriculture. After the coup d’état he had retired into private life. But he remained in close touch with Turin, which he visited every fortnight, never failing on his return to bring to the Rue Presbourg the latest news from the Piedmontese capital. On one occasion, when Mme. d’Agoult was going to Turin to see the performance of one of her plays, Bixio was her escort. The Countess’s story on her return of her reception by Victor Emmanuel and of her having seen Cavour, fanned into yet greater ardour her guests’ passion for Italian unity.
Alessandro’s brother, Nino Bixio, played a prominent part in Garibaldi’s Sicilian expedition, having commanded one of the two ships which sailed from Genoa. This adventure he related in detail to Juliette some time later. Nino Bixio was one of the most fearless of men; he was said to have plucked a bullet out of his own flesh, saying to his men, “See, such things are quite harmless.” When Juliette in conversation with his brother, referred to Nino’s intrepidity, “Yes, by my faith,” exclaimed Alessandro. “Did I not bring him up not to know fear? Did I not, when he was a boy, hold him by one foot and let him dangle from the balcony over the street?”
Juliette eagerly and sympathetically followed Garibaldi’s adventures. She collected all the details she could glean about her hero, and, in 1859, published a pamphlet[71] which caused her to be regarded as an authority on the Italian liberator.
Her admiration for Garibaldi did not prevent her from appreciating the services rendered to Italian liberty by the more judicious Cavour. The tidings of Cavour’s illness, broken to Mme. d’Agoult in a letter from Turin, cast a gloom over the salon of the Rue Presbourg. “Cavour,” wrote the Countess’s correspondent, “is in extremis, the Italian doctors are killing him. They are butchers. They have bled him fourteen times.”[72] “Alas,” adds Juliette, “they bled him once more, and he died on the 6th of June” (1861).
Almost as fruitless as the Italian War was Napoléon III’s expedition to Syria on behalf of the Christians of Mt. Lebanon, threatened with extermination by a neighbouring Mussulman tribe, the Druses. This expedition, which was much discussed in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon, had ended in the French, as the result largely of Lord Palmerston’s intervention, evacuating Syria and leaving the cause of the persecuted Christians to the Sultan’s somewhat uncertain championship. Renan, appointed to an archæological mission in Syria by the French Government, had chanced to sail with the expedition. As soon as he came back, and returned to the Rue Presbourg, he was eagerly questioned by Juliette and her friends as to his opinion of the settlement.
“What do you think of it?” inquired Dupont-White, referring to the Sultan’s protectorate and the French evacuation of Syria.
“I think well of it,” replied Renan. “It will put an end to the massacres.”
“ What,” exclaimed Dupont-White, “then do I understand that you were sent there to stir up religious fanaticism? I knew you received your mission through Prince Napoléon, so I thought your object would be rather to come to an understanding with the infidels. For I regard your prince and you as being two of the finest specimens of infidelity in the world.”
“But Prince Napoléon is a deist,” said Renan.
“Very well. And you?”
“I have no objection to saying Mon Dieu,” replied Renan. “But ...”
“I don’t see Renan going to preach a crusade in Syria or anywhere else,” said Littré, who had seemed to be dreaming.[73]
Two years later, on the 23rd of June, 1863, after Juliette had separated from her first husband and was living with her parents at Chauny, appeared Renan’s Vie de Jésus. From the point of view of its influence on free thought Dr. Lambert considered the publication of this book the most significant event of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Juliette received twenty letters from her friends, some extolling, others attacking the book. Mme. de Pierreclos thought it abominable and pernicious, all the more because of the perfection of its style. Ronchaud wrote admiring its poetry. “Even those,” he added, “who disbelieve in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth must henceforth worship him.”
“Renan,” said Dr. Lambert, “was like myself, a simple-minded, sincere and pious student of theology. But when he found the sacred text distorted by those to whom it had been entrusted, he lost faith as I did.”
Dr. Lambert on hearing that Renan had been deprived of his chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France, exclaimed, “You see, imperialism, by treating Renan as an enemy, is pointing him out to us as our friend.”[74]