In the afternoon, she helped the tutors with her daughters, or herself received visitors. Her house and discourse were to her neighbors an attraction far exceeding that of the majestic austerity at the great house, the Hotel de Lamartine. The Chevalier would go out to visit some former comrade, or one of the older inhabitants, when they would amuse themselves with playing at checkers, backgammon or "Boston."
Lamartine himself would repair to his room, or walk out with his dog in the paths that intersected the fields behind the Alms House. There were grand views in the distance, but he only gazed on the Alps as the prisoner looks on the wall beyond which he has tasted of sunshine, love and freedom.
He also visited a comrade of his father's at the place. The man was unable to use his limbs, and kept himself cheerful by working as a jeweler and repairer of watches. Lamartine helped him and became daily a welcome visitor.
The leading families of Mâcon cultivated social relations, and there was a drawing-room party somewhere every night. Lamartine accompanied his mother and sisters, but made his escape before diversions began.
At his uncle's, however, it was different. The visitors included the most eminent men of the district, diplomats, scholars and others of distinction. Ten of these, with his uncle, organized the Academy of Mâcon. It held meetings in the library which were usually attended by thirty or forty members. Papers were presented on subjects of importance, social, industrial or scientific.
Lamartine was admitted to membership despite his youth at the proposition of his uncle. He delivered his first discourse upon the Advantages Derived from Interchange of Ideas between Peoples by Means of Literature. Years after he burned this paper in disgust at its commonplace character.
One of the most interesting members of this Academy, M. de Larnaud, he describes as "a Universal Dictionary in a human form, all the ashes of the Alexandrian Library contained in the skull of a living man." M. de Larnaud, he declares, "knew everything and impassioned everything." He had engaged in the Revolution in 1789 with the ardor of a delirium, but after the massacre of the Tenth of August, he turned his sympathies to the victims. He was intimate with the Girondins,—above all with Madame Roland and Vergniaud—and he accepted heartily their doctrine of a free Republic which should be wise and pure. He did not mourn their fate on the scaffold which was their pedestal for history, but he mourned that vote which they gave "for the death of the king to save the people." Although a nation is often saved by a martyrdom, he knew that it is never saved by a crime.
M. de Larnaud had no less enthusiasm for poetry and literature than for politics. He was a comrade of Rouget de Lisle, the author of the Marsellaise Hymn; he had taken part at sittings of the Academies; he was a member of all the Cercles; he followed all the Courts, visited all the Salôns, attended all the theatres, absorbing all that was knowable, all that pertained to the two orders of things. He remembered everything and would tell it with a manner and gesture that made the hearer understand and behold it all. Everything—antiquity, past history and present—was to be learned from him.
He was quick to perceive the bent of Lamartine. He visited the young man in his chamber and discoursed familiarly with him, as though both were of the same age and plane of intelligence. He did not venture, however, to speak with like freedom in the drawing-room in presence of the uncle, the pious aunts, and the various classes of visitors. But in young Lamartine's chamber he would display his old-time enthusiasm for the great men and great achievements at the beginning of the Revolution before the period of the ascendancy of the populace, the Commune of Paris, and the Terror. The philosopher was again manifest in him under the simulacrum of the man of the world, and he denounced the Imperial régime of Bonaparte with fierceness.
From him Lamartine derived the conception of the scenes, the men and characters which he set forth so admirably in the History of the Girondists. His friendship remained constant till his death.