My aunt and grandmother agreed in disapproving of the writings of Eugène Suë, who taught the people to hate priests by his portrayal of the character of Rodin.

Grandmother sought distraction in her readings; aunt Sophie sought reflection. The one was interested only in lovers’ adventures, the other in the elegant forms in which thought was clad, in descriptions of nature, in the philosophy of life. They never understood each other nor agreed about any work whatever.

XXVIII
WE TALK ABOUT POLITICS

HAVING reached my eleventh year, I was quite convinced that I had become a young lady. Many persons thought me older than I really was on account of my height and my serious demeanour. My ideas at this time were very pronounced, but not always matured; my imagination ran wild; I was as simple as a child and I reasoned like a young woman. Nearly all of those who heretofore had treated me like a child, now called me “Mademoiselle,” and grandmother, desirous to justify the name, lengthened my skirts considerably, and I wore them almost quite long.

I stayed with grandmother nearly a week between my return from Chivres and my sojourn with my father, and my head was full of the literature of the day, and I now had my own opinions on Mme. de Staël, Mme. George Sand, Victor Hugo, de Balzac, and Eugène Suë. I had a book full of interrogative notes for my father, who had talked to me only of the ancient or “democratic and social authors,” as he called them. While I was at Chauny I put all these notes in order, and they were interesting from the fact that the greater part of them had been gathered from my aunts’ conversation.

I wondered whether my father would consent to discuss the literature of the day with me. My knowledge would assuredly surprise him, but did he even know the authors about whom I wished to talk with him? But as aunt Sophie, in spite of her love for Virgil and the Latin writers, was still much interested in the celebrities of the day, I thought that my father, too, might perhaps unite a taste for literature with his love of politics.

As soon as I arrived at Blérancourt I bombarded him with questions. What did he think of Mme. de Staël, of Mme. George Sand, of Victor Hugo, of de Lamartine, of de Balzac? My mother thought it scandalous that I should be allowed to read and criticise authors of whom she knew scarcely anything. Really, our family was quite crazy; even my aunts, whom she had always heard spoken of as sensible women, were more old-fashioned than modernised. My mother used to say that if she had brought me up she would have made a simple housewife of me, educated to live in her circle and to think like other people, and not a pedantic, unbearable child, already thrown out of her sphere by the training of her mind, and with her intelligence overheated at an age when it should have been set on calm foundations.

My father quite looked down on the literature of his own day. He answered my questions with commonplaces. Lamartine alone excited him, in the way of blame, not in his character of poet, but as a historian, and he declared that Les Girondins was the work of a “malefactor.” His admiration of Eugène Suë was so exaggerated that it would have made aunt Sophie repeat one of her favourite sayings: “There are some opinions which are crimes.”

“Eugène Suë,” said my father, “is a genius; he will deliver France from all the Rodins; a new epoch will begin from his influence, an epoch when our country will at last be delivered from the church; Eugène Suë has moulded the soft clay of which the people are still made; some other man will obtain hard marble from this same people on which to sculpture his ideas. Events in our day move rapidly forward. The great renovators have prepared all which they intend to renovate, definite freedom.” He added solemnly: “We are at last at liberty to speak of things of which you are as yet ignorant, and which I can now disclose to you. No one now can hinder me from forming your understanding on the same pattern as my own. You have been instructed concerning the religion of your grandmother and your mother; I can now talk to you of mine without hindrance; teach you and show you from whence comes light to the minds and hearts of men. It comes from nature; it is real because we can see it; it is ideal from the vast expanse it illuminates.”