Having done his best to keep his word to his mother-in-law and to permit her to dominate Juliette’s mind until her first communion, once that event was consummated Dr. Lambert felt at liberty to educate his little girl in his own way, in his own ideas, and to make her, as he expressed it, “his daughter according to the spirit as well as according to the flesh.”
In his earlier talks with Juliette he had endeavoured to impose a certain reserve upon his expansive nature. Though finding it impossible to exclude his beliefs, his hopes and enthusiasms altogether from their conversation, he had but alluded to them vaguely, saying, “when you are older I will explain to you such and such, when you are older you will understand this or that.”
This seed, though sown in an almost infantile mind, had not fallen on barren ground. Not one of these remarks had been lost on Juliette’s precocious and naturally speculative intelligence. She was therefore well prepared to receive with enthusiasm those hopeful doctrines of liberty, fraternity and equality with which her father now set seriously to work to inculcate his eleven-year-old little daughter.
On Juliette’s return from Chivres in the autumn of 1847, she paid a visit to her parents at Blérancourt. And it was then that her father said to her: “Now that you have discharged your obligations to your grandmother’s religion, I can speak to you frankly of mine.”
The chief articles of Dr. Lambert’s creed were a belief in human solidarity and a conviction in the inherent goodness of nature. With the great Jean Jacques he held society, not nature, responsible for all the evils which have befallen mankind. His “great negation,” as his daughter was later to call it, consisted in the denial that the finite can ever be capable of comprehending the infinite. Nature, he held, was rich enough and vast enough to satisfy all man’s craving for knowledge, sociability and love. “If you must worship something,” he would say to Juliette, “then worship the sun which lightens and warms you, in whose rays all things germinate, breathe and blossom.” While for the Christian religion Dr. Lambert had little respect, its Founder he held in the greatest veneration. While Christ came to obliterate all distinctions of race and caste, Christianity seemed to Juliette’s father ever raising barriers between man and man. “Christ,” he used to say, “came to save what he called ‘souls,’ we [the social democrats] come to save society (la personne sociale) by establishing equality, fraternity, liberty.”
In days when trade unionism was beginning in Great Britain, and when Proudhon’s teaching was laying the foundations of future syndicalism in France, Dr. Lambert was a firm believer in the right of all men to work, and to insist on receiving for that work a just wage. “Juliette,” he would say, “I rejoice to see you talking to a working-man ... as if he were your brother. I want you to be an apostle of human happiness and universal good. I love the weak and helpless more than myself. To see struggle and suffering tortures me. To those who have nothing one must give oneself up entirely, keeping nothing back.”
At such words the little girl’s heart glowed within her. With all her passionate little soul she responded to her father’s pity for the unfortunate, with all the determination of her strong will she resolved to spend her life helping them.
Though in years to come some of her father’s notions were to appear to her quixotic, though even then she and her grandmother laughed at his affecting the workman’s blouse, for example, though as time went on his extravagance and lack of common sense were frequently to make her tremble for his safety, she never—not even when intellectually they had drifted apart—ceased to reverence the breadth of his knowledge, the range of his charity and his unfailing good nature. The words apostle and charity ever conjured up before her a vision of her father. In spite of their perpetual disagreement, even Juliette’s grandmother would say of her son-in-law: “He is a dreamer, but he is sincere, and he has a heart of gold.”
Dr. Lambert was indeed one of those intellectual enthusiasts who were largely responsible for the Revolution of 1848. For these men of 1848 Mme. Adam has always cherished the most profound respect. Though in after life she came to regard them as childishly ingenuous and heedless of the possibility of realising their dreams, she has ever venerated their “passionate altruism,” their “craving to sacrifice themselves in the people’s cause,” their revolt against that famous formula ascribed to M. Guizot, “enrich yourselves.” “The men of 1848,” writes Mme. Adam, “were apostles and saints. Never have there been more honesty, more virtue, a nobler simplicity. They were no mere politicians. They were souls in love with the ideal. All those whom I have known were as sincere as my father ... and to have associated with them is to honour and cherish their memory.”