“And,” said aunt Sophie, “whatever may be the form of government we shall have after this of Louis Philippe, authoritative ideas, I am afraid, will triumph. Liberalism, which can alone save France, which can give her her political existence, and make her benefit by the intelligence of her race, seems to exist only in Odilon Barrot’s mind and in de Lamartine’s writings.”
They read and re-read his Les Girondins, and the manner in which they spoke of it remains ineffaceably in my memory.
“The old provincialism of France must be reawakened, the country must be governed by a great number of administrative seats; there must be decentralisation; France must return to the Girondist programme and struggle against the exclusive influence of the capital, against the autocracy of new ideas, more oppressing, more tyrannical than the tyrants themselves”—this was my aunts’ and my great-grandmother’s political programme, which they made me write out in order to communicate it to my parents and grandparents.
“You will keep it, Juliette,” aunt Sophie said to me one day, “for there will come a moment in your life, I am certain, when, after Jacobite and Bonapartist experiences, after probable revolutions, you will remember how wise and truly French and nationalist were your old aunts’ ideas. France should act from her centres of action, and not revolve like a top, in her capital.”
My aunts had never talked politics together before me so much as during my vacation in 1847.
“You are wearying that child,” great-grandmother would say, to which one or the other of her daughters would reply: “She is old enough to listen and to understand.”
“It will not be useless to you should you have to listen—not with your ears, but with your mouth yawning—to know what such persons of high competency as your aunts think of public affairs,” said aunt Constance, with her habitual mockery. “So listen, Juliette, listen!”
I listened without yawning, for my mind was open to all political and literary things. My aunts were the personification of that bourgeoise class, of whom my father spoke, who admitted only the medium way in social experiments, who cared only for average impressions—“natures insupportably equibalanced,” he would say.
My aunts found Victor Hugo too sonorous, too resounding for their calm minds. Aunt Sophie said he was “not sufficiently bucolic.” They detested Quasimodo’s ugliness, criticised the Ode à la Colonne Napoleon II., which seemed to make Victor Hugo a Bonapartist; they found his plays too intense, too pompously improbable, too wordily humanitarian. Lucrèce Borgia, Marie Tudor, Les Burgraves, Ruy Blas, put them out of patience. Their classicalism was revolted. They blamed his political conduct, too oscillating and too diverse. Aunt Anastasie implored grace for his Les Rayons et les Ombres, in which she delighted.
They spoke of Mme. George Sand with reserve. I heard more exclamations than approbation about her novel, Lélia, whose pretty name I remembered, as I had seen the book in grandmother’s hands. But they liked many of Mme. George Sand’s writings, especially those on peasant life. La Petite Fadette they considered a chef-d’œuvre.