My father’s dearest dream was to travel in Greece. “No one would enjoy it more than I,” he said, and added: “Be a Greek, Juliette, if you wish to live a privileged life in the worship of what is eternally beautiful, of that which elevates man above his epoch.”
Always deeply distressed about politics, execrating General Cavaignac, who had, he said, more than any one else, opposed all attempts at conciliation “in order to plant his banner in ground sodden with blood,” my father, alarmed at the progress Bonapartism was making in the country, and who until now had talked to me only of public events, scarcely ever mentioned them any more.
One day, when I asked him the reason for this silence, he said to me: “Since the love of politics is the most grievous of all passions when one is sincere, the most deceptive when one is loyal, the most despairing when one loves justice, leave politics alone. Perhaps better days will be born from our present sufferings. Await them. We, the old, enlisted combatants, cannot leave the field of battle, but why should you enter it?”
The proclamation of Louis Napoleon: “If I am made President, I promise to leave to my successor, at the end of four years, strengthened power, liberty intact, and real progress accomplished”—this shameless lie alone reawakened my political indignation. Grandfather, who read it to us, burst out laughing. The five million votes which had elected Louis Napoleon President of the Republic seemed to me an insane act of the French people. From having heard grandfather say that all Bonapartists made game of Republican riff-raff, I believed it, and was not surprised when he said to us one day:
“My Pretender has sworn to be unfaithful to the democratic Republic, and not to defend the Constitution. The fools believe he has pledged his faith to the contrary! Well! I’ll wager my life that Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, simple Prince Louis, a simple Bonaparte, will be, before the expiration of his Presidency, the Emperor Napoleon III.”
“Alas! he is right,” said my father, who was listening to grandfather, and when talking to me one day later of his sadness, his heart-sickness, reproaching himself for having preached his beloved doctrines so earnestly to me, for having initiated me too young in the disillusions of life, he said: “I implore you, Juliette, banish from your memory this lamentable year. Your youth must not be fed on doubt, your faith in the future must not be shadowed by death. I have weighed men, and I despise and hate them. As to the principles in which I believed, they have received so many blows that I no longer know what I wish or what I do not wish. The Liberals are no sooner in power than they become cynically authoritative. The Republicans have scarcely left the ranks of the governed, to become governors themselves, before a touch of madness seems to enter their minds, and they become Cæsarian. All my beautiful edifice has fallen down, stone by stone. I am crushed beneath it. If, for a short moment, I knew the joy of building it, its ruin has soon followed. I would not at any price impose upon your young life the pain of living amid its destruction. I will not speak to you again of politics, I will not write to you about them. You must take note only of facts, and feel compassion that each one will be a fresh torture to your father.”
My grandmother felt much pity for her son-in-law’s sorrows and disillusions. “He exaggerates, but he is sincere,” she said, “and he has a heart of gold.”
My father’s only consolation was to occupy himself a great deal with me. He advised that, as I had not studied primary branches, I should go back to the sources of our literature. He read me numerous passages from Homer in the text, to familiarise me with the admirable sonorities of our “initiative tongue,” as he called it. He dictated to me, word by word, entire chapters from the Iliad and from the Odyssey, those which he thought the most beautiful, saying to me that we had years before us, and that he would take charge of my instruction in Greek.
“You shall learn with me the history of that nation in which nature incarnated herself to such a degree that she made it supernatural. Your aunt Sophie will teach you as much Latin as is necessary for a cultivated woman to know. She loves and understands Roman literature, and I do not fear that she will reap for Rome’s benefit the admiration I shall have sown in your mind for Athens. At Chauny you will have an exceptionally good professor of literature, who will teach you many things you will never forget, and who will interest your grandmother in your studies, which will take her somewhat away from her novels. All this seems excellent to me, and I do not doubt that, if you desire it, you will succeed in knowing more than all the schoolmates you left behind in your monotonous boarding-school!”
