FOOTNOTES:
[53] Souvenirs, II. 83. Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes was signed “Juliette Lamessine.”
[54] See Daniel Stern, Mes Souvenirs, 311.
[55] Daniel Stern, Histoire de la Révolution de 1848, 2 vols., Paris, Charpentier, 1862.
[56] Daniel Stern, Mes Souvenirs, 346.
[57] Ibid., 349.
[58] He had married Blandine, daughter of Mme. d’Agoult and Liszt.
[59] Mme. Adam, Souvenirs, I. 108-9, “Elle prenait la peine de faire d’une petite provinciale une dame.”
[60] See post, 209.
[61] Born in 1801, Littré had studied and qualified as a doctor of medicine, though he never practised his profession. He, like most of Mme. d’Agoult’s friends, was a “man of 1848.” Immediately after the Revolution he served for a few months as unpaid municipal councillor of Paris. But, disillusioned after the violent suppression of the July rising, he had retired from office and since then had lived in retirement.
[62] Hippolyte Carnot, born in 1801, had accompanied his father into exile. After the elder Carnot’s death, Hippolyte returned to France. There he became one of the leaders of the Saint-Simonian group of philosophers, see post, 86-90. During the Revolution of 1848 Carnot was Minister of Education. Like Littré, disillusioned by the reactionary movement which followed the July insurrection, he resigned. After the coup d’état of December 1851, he went into voluntary exile. During his absence he was elected member of the Corps Legislatif. But although he returned to France, he refused to take the oath to the Empire, thus forfeiting his seat. Since then he too had lived in retirement.
[63] Le Disciple, Preface.
[64] Mémoires de la Comtesse Diane, 146-7.
[65] Journal des Goncourt, VI. 184.
[66] Souvenirs, II. 155.
[67] Ibid., 147.
[68] Souvenirs, II. 214.
[69] Souvenirs, II. 166.
[70] Souvenirs, II. 85.
[71] Garibaldi: Sa vie d’après Documents Inédits, avec un portrait, Paris, 1859.
[72] Souvenirs, II. 315.
[73] Souvenirs, II. 317.
[74] Souvenirs, II. 421.
CHAPTER VII
AMONG THE UTOPIANS
1858-1864
“Often in the years that are darkening around me, I remember our beautiful scheme of a noble and unselfish life and how fair in that first summer appeared the prospect that it might endure for generations.”—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.
“Moi qui ait vécu une partie de ma jeunesse avec des cabétiens, des phalansteriens, des saint-simonians.”—Mme. Adam, Souvenirs.
Juliette’s energy was crowding her life with a variety of interests and occupations: literary work, plays, parties, picture shows and two distinct sets of acquaintances: Mme. d’Agoult’s rather aristocratic and elegant republican friends, and a much less fashionable circle. While Mme. d’Agoult and her associates concentrated on political reform, coming more and more into prominence in Parisian society was another group of reformers, the collectivists, who were followers of Fourier and Saint-Simon. They, placing little faith in politics, were working for a social revolution. With the latter’s schemes for humanity’s regeneration, her father’s enthusiasm had already made Juliette familiar. But we, too, if we would enter into her life at this time, must take note of these somewhat Bohemian reformers and of their Utopian aspirations, which, stimulating many of Juliette’s most intimate friends, could not fail to affect her own mind and character.
After extreme individualism had permeated the thought of the first half of the nineteenth century, a tendency towards solidarity began to declare itself among certain bold thinkers. A feeling for association was in the air. Association of whom and with whom was perhaps not quite clear. But, however defined, association, or, as we should to-day describe it, human solidarity, seemed in many enlightened circles to offer the only possible remedy for the ills of society. Even such an ardent idealist as George Sand had been converted to this comparatively new point of view. “Are there not misfortunes that call more urgently for relief than the boredom of this or the whims of that individual?” she writes.[75] Louis Napoléon himself, before he became Emperor, had shown in certain of those pamphlets, for which he was famous, that he was not unaffected by this new current of opinion. The feeling of solidarity had declared itself definitely in the early months of the 1848 Revolution. But its germs must be sought much earlier. We must go back fifty years to the time when the French Revolution was shaking society to its foundations. Then there appeared a man, who, standing apart, aloof from the great scuffle of parties, entertained the daring thought of reconciling them all and making them all pull together in a new system. That man was François Marie Charles Fourier. Born at Besançon in 1772, the son of a tradesman from whom he inherited a small fortune, Fourier became a commercial traveller in the grocery line. Then he served for a while in Napoléon’s campaigns. But, returning to his original occupation, he found employment in a wholesale house at Marseilles. There his employers instructed him secretly to throw into the sea a whole cargo of rice which that firm, in order to send up the price, had stored until it had become useless.[76] This commission opened Fourier’s eyes to the iniquitous waste proceeding in modern industry. Henceforth one of the most wildly imaginative minds that has ever existed outside a lunatic asylum was concentrated on social problems. To the ideas that resulted Fourier gave expression in a whole library of voluminous works, of which the best known is his Théorie des Quatre Mouvements. In this welter of elaborate theorising, wild schemes and absurd prophecies, such as that the ocean may one day be replaced by a sea of lemonade, and that humanity may once more develop a tail, it is possible to discover certain sane and essentially practical suggestions for social reform.
It seems incredible that this commercial traveller, who on one side of his brain was so completely unreasonable, should have produced a scheme which has in many respects now come to be regarded as fundamentally right. Fourierism, divested of its absurd extravagance, contains the germ of much modern socialism. For Fourier was one of the first to realise “that social organisation should rest on a comprehensive conception of human nature.” The first task of a reformer, he held, is to analyse human passions and to study their combinations. But Fourier’s psychology, as one might expect, is extremely fanciful. He discovered twelve major passions which can be combined into eight hundred and ten characteristic types. No one of these types can be fully himself, nor reap the greatest benefit from his labour in a state of isolation or in the state of permanent warfare, which we call competition. In our present inorganic condition, legitimate desires clash and may often be called vices. In the free and communistic régime of the future they will all be harmonised. Production will be increased a thousandfold by the association of efforts. Labour will be no longer a curse, for it will become attractive through the free choice and constant change of occupation.
The part of Fourier’s scheme which most appealed to his contemporaries was his ideal community, in which he hoped to embody his ideas in concrete form. This community he called the Phalanstery.
Juliette well remembered how, when she was a child, a fervent Fourierist had visited her father at Blérancourt. He had talked in such glowing terms of this ideal community that she forthwith resolved that on her return to Chauny she and her schoolfellows would lose no time in establishing a phalanstery. She was, however, reluctantly compelled to admit the justice of her father’s remark that at the age of nine and a half she was rather young to launch out on so complicated an experiment. For, indeed, simplicity was no part of the root idea of the phalanstery. This may be seen from the following enunciation of his principle by the master himself.
“Since there are only eight hundred and ten characters,” argued Fourier, “a phalanx of that number (or rather one thousand eight hundred with old men over one hundred and twenty and children under four) will be sufficient to realise Harmony on about a square league of ground. This phalanx would live in a handsome and comfortable building—farm, workshop and palace combined—called the Phalanstery. In this association capital and talent as well as labour would have their proper reward.”
Few of the various attempts to establish phalansteries met with any success. Fourier himself, aided by one of his most eminent disciples, Victor Considérant, and financed by a French Député, endeavoured in vain to apply his theories at Condé sur Vesgres.[77] After Fourier’s death in 1837, another vain attempt at a phalanstery was made at Citeaux.
But it was on the virgin soil of America, in the light of the New World’s sanguine hopefulness and fervent enthusiasm for social progress that the phalansterians were most confident of success. In America Fourierism had aroused intense interest. There it had met with its most ardent advocates and its bitterest opponents.[78] Victor Considérant, who after Fourier’s death became the chief apostle of Fourierism, had founded a newspaper La Démocratie Pacifique for the advocacy of his doctrines. In the columns of this paper in the year 1853, he sketched the outline of an ideal community, La Réunion, to be founded in Texas on the banks of the Red River. Subscriptions to the experiment flowed in from all parts of the world. The chief subscriber was a rich American, Albert Brisbane. He had sat at Fourier’s feet in Paris. Fascinated by this new gospel, he was spending his life translating the reformer’s colossal and for the most part incoherent works, vainly endeavouring to introduce into them something like order.
But, despite its brilliant prospects, La Réunion too was a failure. Victor Considérant, though a clever organiser, possessed neither legislative nor administrative gifts. He was an apostle, nothing more. And when adherents from all parts of the world flocked to the Red River, they found this anticipated ideal community, not, as they had fondly hoped, the embodiment of perfect harmony, but a chaos of hopeless confusion.
Warned by Brisbane’s experience and much to his disappointment, George Ripley, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others, when they were organising the comparatively successful socialist community of Brook Farm, at West Roxbury (Mass.), carefully kept off phalansterian lines.[79]
Thus by the time Juliette came to live in Paris the Phalansterian Movement had been tried and found wanting. Nevertheless it was not dead. Its spirit still breathed in the numerous co-operative experiments, which were being tried on every hand; and one of these, the famous foundry at Guise, run on something approaching phalansterian lines, met with considerable success, owing to the organising genius of the founder, the Fourierist Godin. It endured until shortly before the Great War.
Fourier’s disciples, when in 1858 Juliette first came into personal contact with them, had grouped themselves into what was called l’École Sociétaire, which numbered some four thousand adherents. The school had its headquarters in the Rue de Beaune, in a shop for the sale of Fourierist literature, kept by a certain Mlle. Aimé Beuque.
It was to this shop that Juliette, soon after the publication of Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes, was taken by her good friend Dr. Bonnard. She found Mlle. Beuque an odd creature. A quaint birth-marked, shrivelled-up little old maid, wearing a rough black serge gown, a big black poke bonnet tied with broad strings, she had invariably hanging over her arm, a capacious bag, half satchel, half basket. Aimé Beuque had known Fourier when he was a grocer at Lyons. Sitting at his feet she had imbibed his doctrine and become one of its most convincing advocates, winning for the new philosophy many a distinguished adherent. For in that poor little wizened unattractive body there burned a great soul passionately convinced that perfect harmony would one day evolve out of all our apparently hopeless social chaos.
This little woman so charmed Juliette that she came away from the Fourier shop feeling that in la chère petite vieille Beuque, she had made a life-long friend. And for many a year whenever she was downhearted, depressed by the domestic trials which were now thickening around her, Juliette’s due feet would not fail to cross the bridge to Mlle. Beuque’s shop, in search of that encouragement and consolation which the “adorable” little spinster never failed to give her.
One of the most delightful features of Paris literary society has ever been the habit of writers and readers to foregather for leisurely afternoon talk in some well-known book-shop—at Anatole France’s father’s, for example, on the Quai Voltaire; at his successor’s, Honoré Champion’s, on the Quai Malaquais, or at Charles Péguy’s at the office of “Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine,” in the Rue de la Sorbonne.
Mlle. Beuque, too, had her afternoons; le Jour des amis de notre vieille Beuque was an institution highly valued by Juliette and her Fourierist friends.
The great and shining light, le grand homme of Tante Beuque’s shop parlour, was the eminent writer on natural history, Alphonse Toussenel.
His name had been a household word for Juliette in her childhood. Out of Toussenel’s book L’Esprit des Bêtes, Dr. Lambert had told his little girl many a thrilling tale about the habits of insects. And when, in their walks, they came to an ant-hill, father and daughter would both lie down flat while the red republican parent showed the ants at their work, designating the fighters, the layers of eggs and so forth, and declaiming loudly against the laziness of the queen ant as against that of all other royalties.
Now that Juliette made the acquaintance of Toussenel in the flesh she found him no less delightful than in his books. Though in certain respects wildly extravagant and greatly given to paradox, in others he appeared abundantly gifted with common sense. Some of his theories were almost as curious as those of his master, Fourier. In his manner of life he was as eccentric as his devoted comrade, Mlle. Beuque. In appearance, however, he presented a striking contrast to his meagre little companion. For Toussenel was a fine figure of a man, an athlete, whose face was tanned by life in the open air, a sportsman in spite of his love for animals, and also a bitter anti-semite[80] in spite of his aspirations after social harmony. Toussenel’s attractive personality and eloquent talk brought into the Rue de Beaune book-shop an atmosphere of the most brilliant salon.
Toussenel was an enthusiastic feminist; so, of course, he had read and appreciated Idées Anti-Prudhoniennes; and for its charming author he speedily developed a rapturous adoration. One of his eccentricities was to illustrate human intelligence by that of animals. He likened Juliette to the falcon, because in that species of birds apparently the intelligence of the female is superior to that of the male bird. To his “falcon,” or gerfaut, he wrote ecstatic love-letters. Though she laughed at her elderly amoureux, she kept his letters; and one of them, she quotes in her Souvenirs.[81] It closes pathetically with this sentence—
“It is not your fault if you hold a larger place in my life than I in yours. I do not write to complain, but to tell you that, whenever any happiness comes to you, you may know that one of my wishes has been fulfilled.
“Yours in heart, mind and soul,
”Toussenel.“
As well as in the shop in the Rue de Beaune, Fourierists used to gather in the salon of Mme. Charles Reybaud. She was a novelist of distinction, whom Juliette thought the only contemporary woman of letters worthy to be compared with George Sand.
At Mme. Reybaud’s Juliette met many prominent socialists, belonging to various groups. Some were Saint-Simonians, the followers of that extraordinary person Claude Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). This philosopher, realising, like Fourier, the disastrously chaotic condition of society, had propounded various comprehensive schemes for its reformation. Saint-Simon’s life had been one long series of romantic experiences, wild adventures and hair-breadth escapes. Born of a noble family, priding himself on being descended from Charlemagne, at sixteen he was a volunteer under Washington. Returning to Europe, he grew rich on land speculations and stock jobbing under the Revolution, but was imprisoned at the time of the Terror. In prison his ancestor Charlemagne, appearing in a vision, revealed to his descendant that he was destined to be a second Messiah. On his release, to prepare for the accomplishment of this high mission, Saint-Simon entered on a course of scientific study and European travel. He had married; but he divorced his wife in order to marry Mme. de Stäel, who had recently become a widow. Journeying to Geneva, he asked the author of Corinne to unite her life to his, for he pleaded: “You are, madame, the most extraordinary woman in the world. I am the most extraordinary man. Our offspring ought therefore to be still more extraordinary.” To such an argument, however, unfortunately for the human race, this otherwise public-spirited lady turned a deaf ear.
Having wasted his substance in wild schemes and extravagant living, Saint-Simon was reduced to poverty. At one time he attempted to blow out his brains, but only succeeded in disfiguring himself for life and in blinding one eye. He died in 1825, leaving behind him the reputation of a crack-brained Bohemian.
Saint-Simon had been fortunate, however, in meeting with clever collaborators, Augustin Thierry and Auguste Comte. These two eminent writers helped him to formulate his somewhat incoherent notions, and to express them in a series of works[82] which exercised no little influence. Some of Saint-Simon’s ideas discussed in these works, notably the piercing by a canal of the Isthmus of Panama, have already been carried out; others, like the institution of a parliament of nations for the regulation of international affairs, are still in the air.
The dominant aim of all Saint-Simon’s schemes was the moral and physical well-being of the least favoured and most numerous class of humanity. His doctrines had at once a practical and a mystical tendency. This dreamer, at a time when French industry was still in its infancy, “had a prophetic vision of modern production, with its scientific management and its unlimited capacity. He communicated his enthusiasm to his disciples, most of whom never saw him in the flesh.”
For it was not until after the apostle’s death that the Saint-Simonian school of philosophy was formed. Its rapid success, its acceptance by “all the superior and even all the exceptional young men of the day,” was largely due to the proselytising vigour and organising faculty of Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, a man whom Lord Morley describes as “the most wonderful and impressive figure of modern enthusiasm.”[83]
Father Enfantin, as he was called, had only been introduced to Saint-Simon as he lay on his death-bed.
Barely initiated (à peine catéchisé), writes Mme. Adam, this Elisha of Saint-Simonianism went forth to preach throughout the towns and villages of France the golden age of the future. Signal success attended his crusade. There was much in the Saint-Simonian doctrine which accorded with the romantic humanitarianism of the age. “Its key-note was love—love and pity for the oppressed, for the poor, for the fallen woman, for the sinner, for Satan himself.” The service of mankind was the essence of this religion. For Saint-Simonianism was a religion. As such, its founder and many of its disciples regarded it. Le Nouveau Christianisme is the title of Saint-Simon’s last book, published in the year of his death.
But, as we have said, this new philosophy had also its extremely practical side. Its adherents preached “the gospel of great public works, railroads, maritime canals, free trade.” Here again they were responding to one of the great needs of the age.
A striking characteristic of society under the Empire was the intensity of its material activity. Industry on a large scale had begun to develop under Louis Philippe. It had received a powerful impetus from railroad construction.
One of the most wonderful experiences of Juliette’s childhood was her first railway journey. When she was ten and a half, her father took her by train from Amiens to Boulogne. This line, the first in France, had recently been opened. Juliette was horribly frightened. Everything terrified her: the snorting of the engine, the diabolical air of the engine-driver and fireman, the piercing shriek of the whistle, and, above all, the darkness of the tunnel, in which, she was told, a poor lady, who had put her head out of the window, had only that morning been guillotined by a passing train. When Juliette returned to Chauny, quite a heroine, because she had been in a train, this story told to her schoolfellows had a brilliant success. That unhappy passenger’s tragic fate remained for many a long day an object of intense interest to the Mlles. André’s pupils, to whose inquisitiveness it suggested all manner of questions.
“Why did she lean out of window?” asked the elder girls. “People who go on journeys ought to take care.”
“Had she any children?” asked the juniors, “and, if so, were they present?”
And when Juliette replied that they were, the horror was indescribable.
Juliette’s fame as a train traveller, however, soon faded, for so rapid was the spread of railway construction throughout France that train journeys soon became every-day occurrences. Chauny was before long united by a railway line to Paris, which Haussman was rapidly rendering almost unrecognisable. And in all this mechanical activity the Saint-Simonians were playing a prominent part. With them originated many industrial enterprises: the Saint-Simonian Pereires founded the Magasin du Louvre and the General Transatlantic Company. Father Enfantin himself, a capable railroad administrator, was the first to conceive the project of the Suez Canal.
Mme. Adam inclines to the opinion that as employers the Saint-Simonians were inferior to the Fourierists; for the latter practised division of profits among employers and employed, whereas the Saint-Simonians showed a tendency to exploit their workers. They encouraged trusts. Their system Benjamin Constant described as le papisme industriel.
By the time that Juliette came to Paris the Saint-Simonians had split up into two sects. The scission had first declared itself during the Revolution of 1830, when Enfantin insisted on standing aloof from politics, while his colleagues, Bazard and Rodrigues, declared that the Master’s teaching rendered it incumbent upon them to take an active part in political affairs. Further contention occurred over the relations of the sexes. Enfantin declared himself the apostle of free love, Bazard and Rodrigues upheld marriage; and it was on this point that the Saint-Simonians finally separated into a school which was entirely political and philosophical—that of Bazard and Rodrigues—and the so-called church of Enfantin, which represented the mystic and individualist side of the Saint-Simonian doctrine.
Enfantin and such followers as remained to him, only forty in number, left the Rue Taitbout, which had been the Saint-Simonian headquarters, and went off to the suburb Menilmontant, where they established a settlement. Singing songs especially composed for them, and attired in tam-o’shanters and light blue dalmaticas, the brethren, most of whom were university students, cultivated the ground under the supervision of Father Enfantin, who wore a scarlet robe with a violet girdle and a large metal necklace, each link of which represented one of his disciples.
Father Enfantin and his followers lived in the hope of the coming of a feminine Messiah, who, in conjunction with the Father, was to redeem the world. But their labours were interrupted and their hopes dashed to the ground by the intervention of justice. In the columns of the Saint-Simonian newspaper, Le Globe, the Father had enunciated his views of marriage and sexual morality, with the result that he found his settlement at Menilmontant broken up, and himself (in 1832) condemned to a year’s imprisonment. It was on his release that he went to Egypt and studied the feasibility of cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Suez.
When Juliette published her Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes Father Enfantin was back again in Paris acting as director of the Paris-Lyons Mediterranée Railway. Struck by the cleverness of Juliette’s first book, he sent two of his followers to invite the young authoress to a Saint-Simonian banquet. But she thought it prudent to refuse the invitation, having heard that the Father regarded her in the same light as his Master had regarded Mme. de Staël, viz. as a possible feminine Messiah, who with the Father should make all things new. “Enfantin,” remarks Juliette, “at the age of sixty-two, was somewhat late in discovering his fellow-saviour,” though for her at twenty-two the discovery was premature, for she did not feel herself ripe for so exalted a mission. “Just think what I was expected to bring to the world!” she exclaims. “Nothing less than the golden age!”
Though Juliette had refused the invitation to the banquet, she permitted her friend Arlès Dufour to take her to one of Enfantin’s evening receptions, where she found him assisted by a stout and comely lady. Arlès Dufour had been one of those who had brought her the invitation to the Father’s banquet. From the first he had taken a fatherly interest in the young Mme. Lamessine; and she felt drawn to him by a sentiment of filial devotion which never left her. He must indeed have been an attractive character. An ardent Saint-Simonian, a pacifist, an advocate of women’s rights and an Anglophil, he was the friend of John Stuart Mill and Richard Cobden. “It is charming to see him, at sixty-five, with his heart still running off with his head,” writes Cobden in 1860.[84] “He would not allow the word ‘obey’ to be used by women in the marriage ceremony, and has other very rebellious notions.”
Though in practice a staid citizen of Lyons, a devoted husband and father of a family, theoretically Dufour, like his master, Enfantin, believed in free love. This was the only point on which he and his young friend Juliette disagreed. “Woman needs a certain dignity,” she argued, “which can never be hers if she violates convention and neglects her duty to society.”
Arlès Dufour, a convinced free trader, was deeply interested in his friend Cobden’s mission to Paris, for the purpose of arranging a commercial treaty between France and England. During these negotiations, Arlès, who was regarded as an authority on free trade, was more than once consulted by the Emperor, and at a restaurant dinner in the autumn of 1860 he entertained Juliette, Mme. Reybaud, Girardin and some Saint-Simonian friends with the story of his imperial audiences. Unlike most of Juliette’s acquaintances, Dufour was an Imperialist. But he had spoken rather freely to Napoléon on the subject of his Saint-Simonian faith and his dreams for the future. Thereupon the Emperor had remarked, “Don’t you think, M. Arlès, that people may not be far wrong when they call you a crank?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Arlès Dufour, “I am a crank, but your Majesty knows it is only the cranks who succeed.”
The Emperor laughed loudly; then he rose and said: “Go, you bold man, and don’t return until to-morrow at two o’clock.”
At the same restaurant dinner the talk fell on the Suez Canal, which had been begun two years earlier. The Saint-Simonians were aggrieved by Ferdinand de Lesseps’ appropriation of an idea which they regarded as the property of their sect. Girardin argued that de Lesseps had conceived the idea independently; that it was he who had communicated it to Saïd Pasha, who had received it with enthusiasm, and that de Lesseps alone could carry the project through, particularly in the face of England’s opposition. Lord Palmerston, always suspicious of Napoléon’s designs, was, as Girardin remarked, conducting a veritable campaign against the making of the canal.
“Come, Arlès,” said Girardin. “You know how malicious Palmerston can be when it is a question of any French enterprise. Your friend Cobden has suffered enough from that. Palmerston’s campaign against the canal ought to make you support de Lesseps instead of attacking him.... When de Lesseps comes to Paris I will take you to him, and you are too much of a Frenchman not to say, ‘Succeed, and you will have deserved well of the Saint-Simonian School in France.’”
Thus did this wily journalist of a Girardin win Arlès Dufour to his side. But with the other Saint-Simonians present he was not so successful; and one of them, who had a prophetic soul, was heard to mutter: “We shall see. But if the canal is a failure it will remain French; if it succeeds the English will buy it, as they buy everything that is worth buying.”
It was in this year, 1860, that Mme. Lamessine published her second volume, Mon Village,[85] a series of charming rural sketches, stories, dialogues, quaint old country ballads put into the mouth of a village weaver. From the beginning to the end of this little book, one breathes the atmosphere of the Picard countryside, when it was still remote, before railways and motor-cars had brought it within reach of the capital. Juliette had written the book at the suggestion of George Sand, who, replying to a letter in which Juliette had said that the days spent at her village of Blérancourt were the happiest of her life, enjoined her to write her memories while they were fresh. “Your title is found,” she added, “Mon Village.” The publishers were, by a curious irony of fate, Hetzel and Lévy, the very two who had most emphatically refused her first book. M. Lamessine, having taken advantage of the power given him by the Code Napoléon, had appropriated the profits of her earlier publications. Juliette now, at Hetzel’s suggestion, by dropping the last letter of her maiden name, made use of the pseudonym “Juliette Lamber.” “It is a clever trick,” said her husband. “But I will make you pay for it.”
Juliette’s domestic life was growing steadily more and more unhappy. Arlès Dufour, her bon père, as she called him, advised her to separate from her husband. But to such a course Dr. Lambert was strongly opposed. However, the two fathers—the adopted and the natural one—met at Chauny. There Arlès, “the white-haired old gentleman,” whom little Alice described as un bon génie, arranged everything, and for a time Juliette gave up her life in Paris and returned to her parents’ home.
Mme. d’Agoult approved of the course her young friend had taken. And Juliette for some months devoted herself entirely to her literary work. She was writing her third volume, a study of a Chinaman, who visits Europe and somewhat in the manner of the travellers in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters compares Eastern with Western civilisation. Under the title of Un Mandarin this book appeared in the same series as Mon Village, before the end of the year 1860.
Juliette at Chauny, now that the railway line had been opened, was not altogether isolated from her beloved Paris. Her friends were able to come and visit her on Sundays. Hetzel on his way to Brussels made a point of calling at Chauny; and Juliette herself sometimes went to town.
On one occasion she went to Paris to visit her friend Eugène Pelletan,[86] who was in Sainte Pélagie prison. The Imperial Government always kept a watchful eye on the press; and Pelletan had been sentenced to three months imprisonment for an article attacking the Government, entitled La Liberté comme en Autriche, which had appeared in the Courier du Dimanche.
This was the first time that Juliette had been in a prison. The visit left an impression of horror on her mind, which obsessed her for many weeks. Pelletan took her to see one of his fellow-prisoners, that famous “monomaniac of conspiracy, Blanqui, who spent half his political life in the prisons of four different régimes.” Juliette respected and pitied Blanqui as a martyr to Republicanism and the only kind of martyr with whom she could ever sympathise, the kind that returns blow for blow. Passive resistance never appealed to Juliette’s rebellious spirit. Not even now, when she has become a Christian, does she believe in the doctrine of turning the other cheek. In Blanqui she found all the bitterness and disillusionment of the defeated rebel. When she offered him Daniel Stern’s History of that Revolution of 1848, in the first months of which he had played a prominent part, he seemed to regard it as an insult and refused even to touch the volume.
Juliette returned to Chauny depressed and ill. She had contracted a severe cold, which speedily developed into hæmorrhage of the lungs. She concealed this alarming symptom from her parents, however, and made an excuse to return to Paris, where she saw her doctor, not Dr. Bonnard, but a throat specialist, a Dr. Cabarrus, whom she had lately been in the habit of consulting. He thought so seriously of her case that he hurried her off to the South of France at once. From Paris to Cannes in those days was a long journey. The train took a day and night to reach Toulon, which was the terminus. Then before Cannes was reached there were two days of driving.
The much-vaunted Riviera seemed to this young Picarde at first extremely dull. In her Voyage autour du Grand Pin, a book published in 1863, she writes: “I loathe travelling. I love the things I know, old books, old friends, familiar landscapes, familiar melodies, familiar enthusiasms.... I feel much worse at Cannes than I did at Paris, and I can’t forgive the people who are for ever praising Provence.... What has happened to the sun? I have been asking. I am told that it will soon come out. I wait. If you have heard any news of Phœbus do be kind enough to send me a telegram. I fear that some accident may have befallen him. Perhaps a seal may have devoured him over there at the back of the sea, where he is said to set in this country.”
But it was as she had been told, she had not long to wait, Phœbus Apollo soon rose radiant from the sea; and with the glorious sun of Provence returned Juliette’s health and spirits.
Introductions from the north speedily surrounded her with interesting acquaintances: her physician, Dr. Maure, the friend of Thiers; Dr. Maure’s friends, Prosper Mérimée and Victor Cousin; Jean Reynaud, an eminent Saint-Simonian, but not of Enfantin’s group. At Jean Reynaud’s villa, la Bocca, she met Lord Brougham. Mme. Reynaud, one of Chopin’s most accomplished pupils, entranced Juliette by her rendering of Beethoven. Jean Reynaud took her long rambles. In one of these he related how he had come to leave Enfantin, having found his views on sexual morality quite impossible.
Next winter, when Juliette returned to Cannes, her little Alice, now seven and a half, came with her and joined in these rambles at her mother’s side. Jean Reynaud was amused by Juliette’s respect for her daughter’s personality. For Mme. Lamessine, mindful of the suffering endured in her own childhood through the proselytising ardour of her grandmother and father, was careful not to impose on Alice any of her own ideas. With regard to fundamental things Juliette would say to the child: “Grandfather thinks so and so, my view is such and such. You must form your own opinion.”
The first time Jean Reynaud heard this kind of conversation he burst out laughing, and was about to repeat the phrase in jest, when Juliette stopped him with a look, and sending her little girl away to pick some flowers, said: “Joke with me as much as you like, but not before her. Remember she has only me to respect.”
So charmed was the young author with her life at Cannes, so beneficial for her own health and her daughter’s did she find the climate of Provence, that, before the end of her second winter there, she had persuaded her father to buy a building site on the Golfe Juan; and before her return to the north in the spring of 1862, the walls of her villa of Bruyères were already rising.
Dr. and Mme. Lambert were thinking of selling their house at Chauny, in order to spend the summer months with their daughter in a Paris flat and their winters on the shore of the Mediterranean.
The winter of 1862-3 found Juliette and Alice installed in their villa of Bruyères. Mme. de Pierreclos was their first visitor. Dr. Maure called frequently, always bringing with him his last letter from his friend Thiers, which he was proud to read to his friends at Bruyères. But, alas! he by whose advice Juliette had settled on the Golfe Juan, Jean Reynaud, her “third father,” as she called him, was no more. He had died in Paris, during the summer, after a surgical operation. His loss left his adopted daughter disconsolate. Her book Mon Voyage autour du Grand Pin she dedicated to his memory; for every one of its pages, she writes, had been inspired by their walks and talks at Cannes.
Dr. Lambert, when he came to Bruyères, was as charmed as his daughter and granddaughter with the villa and its surroundings. He was delighted with the garden which Juliette had planned. But, above all, he was enraptured by the Mediterranean, which he saw for the first time, and by the view of the island of Corsica in the distance.
Gazing upon this lovely prospect, the fervent classicist cried: “Ah! this is Greece. And to think that I could ever have imagined that I understood Homer and all he described! Why, I must read him again, in the light of this new experience. And I will begin this very day. Juliette, have you our old Homer here? If not, I must go and buy a copy at Cannes, at Nice, or even in Corsica, if need be.”
Henceforth Dr. Lambert had no hesitation as to leaving Chauny. He wrote to his wife that the house must be sold. Juliette, as soon as the winter months were past, returned to Paris to look for a flat.
Dr. Lambert, le vieil étudiant, as his daughter called him, would have liked to settle in the Latin quarter, but Alice was bent on the Rue de Rivoli, opposite the Tuileries Gardens, where she loved to play. And it was Alice who had her way. Besides, as Juliette explained to her father, all Revolutions began in the Rue de Rivoli, and a flat in that street would be like a place in the stalls at the theatre.