My mother welcomed me in her usual cold manner. My father’s growing passion for me, to which he now freely abandoned himself, grandmother’s absence removing all restraint, seemed to her exaggerated.
“It would seem as if your child were a divinity on earth,” she said to him one day before me.
“Better than that; she is my daughter!” answered my father, and added, laughing: “I should not be far amiss in thinking her a daughter of Olympus.”
My mother detested witty sayings, which she classed in the same category with teasings, and this pun on her name did not please her. Ever since my father’s sojourn at Brussels, she called him nothing but Monsieur Lamber, although she still used the familiar thou.
“Oh! Monsieur Lamber, your speech is in very bad taste,” she answered.
On the contrary, it seemed to me very clear, and I often laughingly repeated it to father when he was instructing me about Greece. He had found my mind open to antique subjects, and I would say to him:
“Am I not the daughter of Olympus?”
My father would always take me with him on foot, on his visits round about to his patients. He taught me to drive his rather spirited horse, and we would drive in his two-seated carriage over good or bad roads to see the rich and the poor, especially the latter.
I told him of my studies in history, and of grandmother’s opinions, which I shared.
“See, child,” he said to me, “you and your grandmother have every reason to admire Louis XI. and Louis XIII., because you both think that under their reigns the nobles were cast down; whereas, they only changed their own condition vis-à-vis to royalty. They became courtiers; they were domesticated by the kings, but they remained much as they were towards the bourgeoisie and the people; they kept the same distance between themselves and their inferiors as the sovereigns had kept with them. Before the Revolution equality did not exist anywhere. That alone began the great work. Let me tell you of Saint-Just, whom, of all the makers of the Revolution, I understand the best. He is to me a friend known and lost. I will take you to see his sister, and you will see how sweet and charming she is. You will amuse her. She speaks so affectionately of her brother that he, my Saint-Just, will cease to be to you the beheader and monster that your grandparents have represented.”