Juliette, having been once captured by her catholic relatives, Dr. Lambert agreed to surrender her mind to their keeping until she had taken her first communion. And he must have been pleased that Mme. Seron, with her usual ambitious desire to force the pace in Juliette’s education, persuaded the Dean to admit her clever little granddaughter into the Church one year earlier than was customary, at ten instead of eleven.
“We must furnish the little brain,” was Mme. Seron’s favourite expression. She herself had never acquired much book learning. But, in order to educate her grandchild, she for a while put on one side her adored novels and studied French history, of which she was most eager that Juliette should take a correct view. That correct view was, of course, Mme. Seron’s own, and was the contradiction of her husband’s and son-in-law’s opinions. Juliette’s grandmother taught her to regard the French middle-class, the bourgeoisie, as the salt of the earth, and the government of Louis Philippe as the only possible government, infinitely superior to the Buonapartism which Dr. Seron and to the Jacobinism which Dr. Lambert would have liked to restore.
So Juliette, surrounded by piles of lesson-books, was kept hard at work till late in the evening, while her grandfather laughed at her for being a blue-stocking, and dubbed her “Mlle. Phénomène.”
But even the jocular Dr. Seron could sometimes be serious: and he gravely warned his wife that if she continued thus to press the little girl beyond her years misfortune would follow.
His warning being unheeded, the prognostication came true. Its fulfilment was hastened by three weeks at Blérancourt, where Dr. Lambert talked to his little daughter as if she were grown up, and by a tempestuous journey home with her mother, followed by an even stormier drame de famille on her arrival at Chauny.
Juliette fell seriously ill. On her recovery, Dr. Seron, who seems to have been the only member of the family endowed with common sense, insisted on his granddaughter being removed from the atmosphere of school-books and drames de famille to a serener and healthier air.
The child was sent to visit her grandmother’s three step-sisters, three maiden ladies who lived with their mother, in the heart of the country, at a village called Chivres, not far from Soissons.
“My aunts! Ah! you must love my aunts!” exclaimed Mme. Adam, as one day, in the salon at Gif, we talked of these delectable virgins. And indeed one could not help loving the charming, though eccentric ladies, les demoiselles Sophie, Constance and Anastasie Raincourt. They represent a type totally unknown in Great Britain, though I suspect it might not at that time have been altogether impossible to discover their counterparts in other French country districts, or perhaps in remote corners of New England.
The aunts were a bundle of contradictions and surprises. In their short gathered print skirts, aprons and kerchiefs, they looked like peasant women, and they worked like peasant women too, at hay-making, poultry-keeping and fruit-farming. But so distinguished was their bearing that in their humble attire they had the air of great ladies in disguise, while their discussion during hay-making of Sismondi’s Italian Republics showed them to be veritable femmes savantes. Though living in the heart of the country, these original spinsters took a deep interest in all the literary and political movements of the town. Though, with their step-sister, Mme. Seron, they were firmly convinced that a constitutional monarchy was the only ideal form of government, they did not altogether share Mme. Seron’s admiration for Louis Philippe. They criticised his policy and approved of the opposition led by M. Odillon Barot.