With that difference Juliette Lambert in her old age has remained what she was in her youth, a noble, charming woman, kind and affectionate, with the warmest of hearts and the most generous character. She lives mostly in the country, in a dear old house, formerly a cloister in those olden times when a king reigned over France. L’Abbaye du Val de Gyf, as it is called, is one of those lovely dwellings where everything speaks of peace and rest, and of the high soul and earnest mind of its owner. There, among her books and her roses, and her dogs and her birds, she lives in quietness, and spends her days thinking of the past, and writing her wonderful reminiscences. There her friends come and see her, as often as she allows them to do so, there one of her best loved friends, the unfortunate Queen Amélie of Portugal, has often fled for consolation, because the closest intimacy unites the fiery Republican and the daughter of the Bourbons. There Madame Adam forgets her disillusions, and thinks only of the good things which life has left her.
The last time I saw her in her beautiful home at Gyf we talked about old times, and all those hopes of the great things which we both had expected out of the Franco-Russian alliance. She frankly owned to me that it had not realised the great hopes that she had trusted it would, and rather bitterly remarked that “things we yearn after very much never turn out quite like we have expected they will when they come to be realised. But then,” she added with a shade of malice, “how very seldom do we see what we wish for realised in general?”
And thus I take leave of her, after an acquaintance that stretches over more than a quarter of a century, the same loving, delightful, clever and kind woman that she has always been, with her serene smile, and grave, serious eyes that have always looked upon humanity through the windows of her soul, and never through the spectacles of envy, hatred, or any of those bad feelings that most human beings indulge in. An exception she has always stood amongst women, and an exception she will remain for all those who later on, even when she too has disappeared from this mortal scene, will read about her, and think what a noble, beautiful creature she has always proved herself to be.
CHAPTER XVIII
A Few Literary Men
During the many years which I spent in Paris I had numerous opportunities of meeting the majority of the remarkable literary men who abounded in France towards the end of last century. Since then their number has considerably decreased, indeed it is very much to be doubted whether the great thinkers, such as Taine, Renan, Guizot, or Thiers, have ever been replaced.
I knew Renan intimately, and wish I could describe him as he deserves. To hear certain people speak of the author of the “Origines du Christianisme” one would think that he was a ferocious hater, not only of religion, but also of everything that approached it. In reality Renan was intensely religious. Few people have understood so fully the beauties of the moral preached by Christ, and few people have had more reverence for the sacred individuality of the Saviour of mankind. He tried to imitate Him in all the actions of his life, to be, like Him, kind and indulgent and compassionate for the woes of the world. From his sojourn in the seminary of St. Sulpice, he had kept the demeanour and the manners of a Catholic priest, and do what he could, that atmosphere clung to him.
But he had a quality which many clericals fail to possess, a very clear insight into religious matters, and the faculty of being able to set aside what was superstition, and retaining what could be kept of the poetry that attaches to the teachings of the different churches that divide the world. He always sought truth, and never rested until he thought he had found it, but he never gave out his own ideas as perfect ones, nor tried to impose them upon others. His was essentially an impartial and a tolerant mind. Indeed his thoughts were so constantly directed towards those regions where it is to be hoped eternal truth exists, that he did not believe it worth while to assume an intolerance which I do not think he could ever have felt, no matter in what circumstances nor under what provocation. I have never met a man more indifferent to criticisms directed against his person or his works, and I remember once when a very bitter article concerning his book, “La Vie de Jésus,” had been brought to his notice, he merely smiled and quietly said: “Why do you think I must be angry at this? Isn’t every one entitled to have an opinion of his own?”
This book, so wonderful in its simplicity, among all those which he had written, was the one he cared for the most, partly because he had composed it in collaboration with his sister, Henriette Renan, who had such a singular influence over his life, and who was as remarkable a personality as himself. During the journey which they had undertaken together in the Holy Land, they had thought about the book which they wanted to write. In his “Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse,” Renan recognises that the person who had had the greatest influence over his mind had been his sister, and he walked in the road her footsteps had trodden until he also saw the great Light after which they had both longed so much. In speaking about him, one could use with justice the words he applied to his sister when he wrote that “though noble lives haven’t the need to be remembered by anyone else than God, one must nevertheless try to fix their image in the minds of the generations that come after them.”
I am thinking about these words as I am now remembering all the conversations we had together, and the patience with which he explained to me all the various points I asked him to develop. He was patience personified; he never regarded anything trouble when, by inconvenience to himself, he could be useful to others. His conversations were always instructive, always attractive, and always worth listening to, even when they strayed on to frivolous subjects, which he often liked to touch. It must not be supposed that Renan was a grave philosopher who did not care for the congenial or the pleasant, or the amusing things which happen in life. He could enjoy mirth like, and with the frankness of, a child.
His works have been discussed more perhaps than those of most writers of his time, and though they have left a deep impress upon the minds of serious people, no one who has read them can say that their influence has been anything else but to good. The image that he has drawn for us of the person of Christ is so pure, so noble, so entirely religious, that even those who object to the way in which he has presented it cannot but be attracted by the image that his pen has evoked.