Scarcely had Louis Napoleon Bonaparte assured the country of the purity of his intentions, in November, before he took possession of France by fraud.
“France has understood,” he said at that time, “that I infringed the law only to enter into my rights.”
“All is over with the Republic, and through the fault of republicans themselves,” my father said, despairingly. “I hate in the same way those who have let themselves be conquered through weakness, and those who have conquered by brutality. And now they wish to sacrifice my daughter to I know not what idiotic dream of future celebrity. Juliette, Juliette, my child!” he cried, “I will protect you. You are my last refuge, my last hope—I cling to you!”
And my father wept like a child. I consoled him almost maternally, and said to him:
“Father, calm yourself; they cannot marry me against my will.”
The next morning my mother, who had been left behind, and who never knew how to hide a grievance, arrived, very angry, and had a quarrel with my father, during which never-to-be-forgotten words were said, wicked words, which my parents should never have used to each other before me, for they suggested to me for the first time the desire to escape from so much violence, and from the sight of so many cruel wounds opened under my eyes.
“Nothing more—they have left me nothing more! I have lost everything!” cried my father. “I am a shipwrecked man, struggling amid wreckage. I would like to die! Do not let them take my daughter from me, for pity’s sake!”
“Your daughter cannot remain here,” replied my mother; “her grandmother is waiting for her, for it was she who brought me home; she is at the Decaisne’s. Juliette will now be always tossed about between us; it is she who will be the shipwrecked one. Besides, I do not want her! Her grandmother has taken her, brought her up according to her ideas; let her keep her, marry her, arrange her happiness according to her will; it is not our place to meddle with it. The responsibility of it all remains with you, who forgot your fatherly duty years ago.”
And my mother took me away, vanquished, feeling myself reduced to powerlessness. And I was again wrapped up in the same shawl and returned to Chauny, this time in a closed carriage, for the night was dark and the rain fell in torrents.
My father wrote me a letter, which I had the misfortune to keep, and which later occasioned one of the most sorrowful crises in my life, which had already begun to number a good many.