In almost every respect Juliette’s life at Chivres was a complete contrast to her life at Chauny or Blérancourt. Instead of, as at Chauny, sitting up late over her books and then going to bed in her grandmother’s stuffy chamber, with the windows tightly closed and the atmosphere infested by the midnight oil burnt to enable Mme. Seron to read her romances, Juliette at Chivres, after a day spent in healthy open-air exercise, lay down with the lamb and rose with the lark, having slept by herself in a large airy room with the windows wide open.
Whereas at Chauny no interest was taken in house arrangement, while picturesque old family heirlooms were regarded as lumber and relegated to the attic, and any artistic feeling found its only expression in personal adornment, at Chivres it was just the opposite: Juliette’s fine clothes were all folded away, and she was dressed like her aunts in peasant costume; but her natural love of the beautiful was gratified by the daintiness and artistry of all the household arrangements, by the handsome old chests and commodes, the embroidered draperies, the nosegays of fresh wild flowers, and the beautifully bound books ranged trimly on their shelves.
The intellectual atmosphere of Chivres was likewise entirely different from that of Chauny and Blérancourt. Dr. Lambert’s heroes, Louis Blanc and Proudhon, were anathema to such worshippers of the established order as the aunts. In the light of her aunts’ wide interest in all manifestations of nature, her grandmother’s concentration on the merely human aspect of life suddenly appeared to Juliette as intensely narrow. It was at Chivres that Juliette first acquired that passionate love of nature which she was later to express so eloquently in her books. It was at Chivres that Juliette learnt to take an interest in birds and beasts and flowers, and also in inanimate things, to find—
“... tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in everything.”
In her aunts’ company the simplest actions of rural life acquired for the little girl some deep significance: watering flowers in the garden she seemed to be quenching their thirst, gathering fruit in the orchard she was easing the burden of overladen trees, cutting clover in the paddock she was receiving a gift from bountiful earth.
For Aunt Sophie even stones and metals had a voice or resonance. She would place upon a crystal tray various substances differing in form, some round, some flat, and with a little hammer would play upon them curious melodies.
While Juliette’s father had brought her up on tales from the Iliad, Aunt Sophie, who was an accomplished Latin scholar, told her stories from the Æneid, which seemed to her strangely like an echo of her beloved Homer. While her grandmother’s favourite novelist had been Balzac, the aunts talked to her admiringly of George Sand’s peasant romances, and vaguely hinted at longer novels by the same author, which they did not altogether like, but which Juliette would read when she grew up.
But the greatest contrast of all was the atmosphere of calm which pervaded Chivres, the harmony in which the aunts and their mother lived, so different from the perpetual wrangling of Chauny and Blérancourt. No wonder that Juliette after two months of this serenity returned to her grandmother a new creature, in mens sana in corpore sano. No wonder that the perfect success of this first visit caused it to be repeated annually throughout Juliette’s childhood. Indeed, as time went on, as Juliette grew in years, as the feverish intellectuality of Chauny and Blérancourt intensified, the summer visit to Chivres became more and more necessary.