“I fail to understand,” was the icy retort, “how the Republic can be any concern of yours.”
There was a deep silence, and then a voice—it was Juliette’s—made answer.
“But, mademoiselle, it interests us passionately.”
The end of morning school was a regular riot. The pupils rushed out into the playground, where they surrounded Juliette, in a crowd, clamouring to receive a full account of her famous interview. She, on her part, was only too eager to relate it in every detail, and to follow it by an appeal to her comrades to bear themselves like true and worthy republicans, not to be insolent towards their teachers, but to make them realise that, although younger than they, the Republic regarded them as their elders’ equals. Then followed a babel of conversation. Each schoolgirl had her own idea of what the Republic should do. But all were agreed that the first reform must be the establishment of universal suffrage. No mere tax-payers’ franchise would satisfy these ardent suffragettes. Every one must vote, men, women, and, of course, schoolgirls. Only thus could the Mlles. André’s pupils conceive of a really universal suffrage, and later they prided themselves on having invented it.
Nothing in the Revolution pleased Juliette’s father better than the opening of the National Workshops. An ardent believer in the right to work, he, with his idol, Louis Blanc, had always advocated them. And though Louis Blanc did not appear to be directly concerned with those that the Government was establishing, Dr. Lambert, like most people, believed that he was secretly connected with them. They had not been running more than a few weeks, however, when he began to suspect that he had been mistaken. As time went on he grew less and less satisfied with the Republic. There were too many reactionaries in the National Assembly. This Republic, from which he had hoped so much, was too pleasing to comfortable middle-class people like his mother-in-law.
“Jean Louis,” she would say, “I find that I agree very well with your Republic.” “Wait a little,” her son-in-law would reply at first. By and by he would answer: “You agree with it better than I do.” And finally there came a day when he exclaimed: “No wonder you approve of the Republic, for it is constituted for your advantage! The Orléans may come back and they will not need to alter anything as far as their bourgeois supporters are concerned.”[14]
Seeing his dream of a Christian, classical, social, scientific Republic vanish, Dr. Lambert resumed his old part of malcontent, and, of course, Juliette followed suit. She filled the house with her recriminations. She made herself excessively disagreeable to her grandparents. Her grandfather infuriated her by chuckling with delight and repeating: “All this augurs well for the Empire.”
That which most distressed Juliette and her father was the failure of the National Workshops. It had become obvious that, far from being organised by Louis Blanc, they had been initiated by his enemies. Émile Thomas, who directed them, was suspected of being Louis Napoléon’s agent. Far from constituting, as Dr. Lambert had fondly dreamed, a national benefit and a model for the whole civilised world, they proved useless and costly. They grew like an ulcer; as many as 119,000 men were on the pay-roll. They were a club of loafers, a reserve army of insurrection, a perpetual strike supported out of public money. No wonder there was talk of suppressing them. But Dr. Lambert, though bitterly disappointed with the way they were conducted, was horrified at the idea of suddenly depriving of occupation and turning adrift these thousands of workmen. It would mean, he thought, nothing short of a sanguinary revolution. Juliette, of course, shared her father’s horror. What had “the people,” “the people” who had behaved so admirably on the 26th of February, done to deserve such treacherous treatment? She could think of nothing else. Her rage and disappointment were such that she became absolutely insupportable. And when her grandmother remonstrated with her, she implored to be allowed to go to Blérancourt to her father, who shared her disappointment. But Mme. Seron was still living in dread of her son-in-law’s threat of a working-class marriage for his daughter. She had other ideas for Juliette. “Already,” she told her little granddaughter, “you have pleased young X——, who is seventeen; and his father, half in jest, half in earnest, because of your age, has suggested that in a few years’ time there might be an alliance between the families.” Moreover, Mme. Seron did not wish again to interrupt her daughter’s studies. So she proposed a compromise. Instead of going to Blérancourt, Juliette might become a boarder at the pension.[15]
This suggestion was a terrible blow to Juliette. That such a proposal should come from her grandmother, that she, who generally complained of the length of the school hours which deprived her of her idolised granddaughter’s company, should now of her own free will suggest a far longer separation, seemed incredible. The child was quick to see that her own behaviour had brought her grandmother to such a pass. By her ravings and recriminations she had made herself intolerable. Her grandmother was glad to get rid of her.
“I was thunderstruck,” she writes. “Nothing but wicked pride kept me from throwing myself on my grandmother’s neck and asking pardon for my folly; for I realised how wild and extravagant I had been. But what grandmother had told me about X——, a tall youth, whom I thought both handsome and clever, had so puffed me up that I could not see a young person like myself, close upon twelve, kneeling to ask forgiveness like a little girl. So, though my heart was in my mouth all the while, I merely said—