But this was not the end of it. There was a closer connection, Léon Marillier’s mother, the great-granddaughter of Madame Roland, and they quickly passed me on to her.
Here again I was invited to dinner, and here I discovered a circle different from anything I had ever known, a household of brilliant men presided over by Madame Marillier, a most gracious woman, of fine intelligence, freed and mellowed by a tragic life, as I was to learn. More than any woman I have ever known, Madame Marillier came to stand in my mind and heart as the personification of that quality which the French hold so high—bonté.
The leader of the group of men was a Sorbonne professor of history—Charles Seignobos. He was a learned man who carried his learning not as an accomplishment but as a social utility. Seignobos was a not too dogmatic socialist and materialist, a good pianist, a marvelous talker, a lovable and pungent personality. Around him there gathered every Wednesday evening for dinner at Madame Marillier’s table a number of young men—all serious students, liberal minds, hard workers. After dinner six or eight more habitués of the house were sure to drop in for coffee and for talk.
Among these regular habitués was Lucien Herr, who at that moment was seeking to convert to socialism the two men who in the years since have done most to make the doctrine an impregnable factor in political life in France—Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum, the recent premier of France. Herr at that time was the librarian at the Ecole Normale, as well as managing editor of the Revue de Paris. In both positions he met many young would-be scholars and writers. When one of them seemed to him to have the makings of a liberal thinker he worked over him as a missionary works to save a soul. He was so working in the early nineties over Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum.
Occasionally Lucien Herr brought to the Seignobos circle one of those whom he was seeking to convert. If Jaurès and Blum were ever among them they made no particular impression on me, much as I dislike to think so. They were simply a couple of Lucien’s young men.
Although Herr believed the socialistic state he sought would and could come by a peaceful evolution, the thing I remember best about him was an exhibit of indifference to bloodshed which shocked me to the core. The night that Vaillant threw the bomb in the Chamber of Deputies the group was dining with Madame Marillier; Lucien was late, not an unusual happening. We were halfway through when he came in, pale, exalted. We all turned in our seats as he standing told us how he had been in the Chamber when the bomb was thrown, of the explosion in mid-air, of the wounded all about him. He had no word of the suffering, only of the political bearings of the deed.
“But the wounded, Lucien,” broke in Seignobos, who could not endure the thought of pain.
“Cela ne me fait rien,” said Lucien.
His opposition to bloodshed was intellectual, not emotional like that of Seignobos.
On the face of it nobody could have been less at home in such a group than I, a tongue-tied alien, all eyes and ears, contributing nothing but my presence; yet it came about before many weeks that “Mademoiselle Mees,” as Seignobos called me, had a place at the weekly dinners. Undoubtedly the friendship that sprang up quickly between Madame Marillier and me, as well as the fact that I asked nothing but to listen, explained it. I could afford to listen; I had never heard such talk. There was nothing on earth that was foreign or forbidden. Opinions were free as the air, but they had to fight for their lives. There was a complete absence of pretense, and sophistry was thrown as soon as it came to its feet. That it was a friendly circle, its acceptance of me was proof enough.