RUINS OF THE ABBEY OF GIF IN THE PARK OF MADAME ADAM’S PRESENT HOME
It would be difficult to imagine surroundings more essentially French than those amidst which Juliette Adam spends the evening of her days. High above the large and commodious house, with its spacious salon, filled with memorials of its mistress’s travels, rise in the park the ruins of the Abbey refectory and chapel. The ivy which covers them our Abbess, who has ever been an enthusiastic gardener, tenderly trims with her own hand, despite her fourscore years. Gradually, under her direction, new portions of the ruins are being excavated. Every time one visits Gif one finds some fresh part of the Abbey has been unearthed. Each stone as it is dug up Mme. Adam reveres as a relic of le Grand Siècle. There is not one of those mute memorials of past glory which Mme. Adam’s vivid Gallic imagination does not invest with some special physiognomy; this is like Juno’s sacred owl, that bears the semblance of a Gorgon. “And is not this the image of le Père Eternel?” she said to me, pointing to a rocky fragment in the centre of her bois sacré. I, alas! was afflicted with blindness. I was as dull of comprehension as the mother of the little boy who, asking her son what he was drawing and being told it was God, answered, “But no one knows what He is like,” and was promptly crushed by the answer, “When I have finished they will know.”
In this beautiful country home Mme. Adam practises with a success no less signal than that of her old friend, Victor Hugo, the art of being a grandparent.
Her daughter Alice had married in February 1873 a brilliant young medical student, Paul Segond, who became one of the leaders of the medical profession in France.[388] “Do not marry your daughter into a circle too political,” had been George Sand’s advice. But George Sand’s young friend “Topaz” had married herself; for her mother had suffered too much from a mariage de convenance to wish to impose one on her daughter. Though the bridegroom was no politician, his mother-in-law’s political fervour could not refrain from introducing into the wedding ceremony a political significance. The chief witnesses who signed the marriage register were Louis Blanc, the leader of the old Republicans, and Gambetta, the leader of the new. At the ball in the evening the appearance of the ex-Mayoress of the conquered town of Mulhouse, Mme. Koechlin-Schwartz, wearing in her white hair a tricolour cockade, reminded the guests of the national defeat and of la Revanche. The ex-Mayoress was escorted by her husband the Mayor, whom the Prussians had two years before held as a hostage.
A few weeks before the wedding George Sand, in her New Year’s letter to Juliette Adam, had written: “Who knows whether the year which opens to-morrow may not make you a grandmother?”[389]
“C’est aller vite,” exclaimed her friend. “My daughter will be married in February. But if the year does not bring me the joy of being a grandmother, it may give me the hope of being one. In any case, it will make me the mother of a big son, my daughter’s husband. To have children by my two children! Ah! I should go mad with joy. No persons in the world have I envied so much as Mme. Sand and Mme. Dorian, who are grandmothers. And I, who am much younger than they, I shall see my granddaughters marry and I shall become a great-grandmother. Ah! les superbes chaines enchainantes que celles de la famille! And to think that there are those who would break them! Les malheureux et les misérables!”
Things did not move quite so quickly as George Sand had anticipated. Three years elapsed before Juliette Adam, at the age of forty, could revel in the raptures of grandmotherhood, before she could place in the adorable Moise, the gift of George Sand, Alice’s wee daughter, Pauline. Mme. Sand sent with the cradle a long letter of advice as to the conduct of a grandmother. Juliette had her own views on that subject: on the day of Pauline’s birth she began to powder her hair and to wish henceforth to be taken not so much for a woman of charm as for une femme de valeur.
“At what age did you first begin to love your grandchildren?” asked Victor Hugo, during one of their long talks on the mysteries of grandparentage.
“I loved my first little granddaughter passionately from the very first,” Mme. Adam replied; “as soon as I received her in my apron.”