“‘Very well, grandmother, it is understood, I will be a boarder as soon as you like.’
“‘To-morrow,’ she replied.”
It will be seen from these reflections that her father’s and grandmother’s adoration had not, as it might well have done, completely warped their idolised Juliette’s disposition. They had made her absurdly vain, but they had not stifled a certain critical sense which even at that early age the little girl was beginning to turn upon herself. In this wholesome exercise she was encouraged by her mother’s severity. Whenever her father praised, her mother scolded.
“When father,” she writes, “spoke of my intelligence and my good looks, mother declared that I was as stupid as I was plain. It seemed to me that both of them exaggerated. And I began to judge myself, as I have done ever since, with a certain detachment. At heart I am really grateful to my mother for having preserved me from complete self-satisfaction.”[16]
Juliette’s career as a boarding-school miss, which resulted from her enthusiasm for and her disappointment with the scheme of National Workshops, was destined to be as short-lived as that great national experiment.
It was bad enough to be un enfant gâté removed from her fond relatives and subjected to all the rules of an institution. But her personal sorrows were intensified by the thought of hundreds of thousands of workpeople about to be threatened with starvation. By this apprehension Juliette’s schoolfellows were likewise depressed. An atmosphere of gloom pervaded the playground. Instead of playing games, the girls gathered together to discuss the fate of their unfortunate compatriots. “There was not one of us,” Juliette writes, “who did not deny herself goodies in order to save a few pence with which to help these poor people. We were always counting up our resources. We thought we might just be able to feed one of them. I decided that we would address an elegant epistle to the minister Trélat,[17] whom we abhorred. For him we held responsible for everything. We would propose to him to undertake the support of one of the workmen from the National Workshops. Certainly one out of a hundred thousand (sic)[18] was not much; but if every pension did the same, some would be saved in any case.”[19]
The composition of such a letter was not easy. In order to bring to bear upon it as much intelligence as possible, the republican scholars classified themselves in groups, eleven in all. Each group drew up a draft of the letter. These drafts were compared, the best passages selected from each, and finally the letter was dispatched to a friend of Juliette in Paris, that same Professor Charles who had embraced her on her fourth birthday. He was now a public functionary, and he was requested to deliver to the minister the all-important missive.
“Daily,” records Juliette, “we expected the arrival of our protégée, our atelier national, as we called him. He had been instructed by the famous letter to present himself at the Pensionnat André, and to announce himself as Juliette Lambert’s protégée. His benefactresses meanwhile were busily preparing for his arrival. Cakes and sweetmeats were tabooed. ”Nous économisions avec frénésie,“ writes Juliette. They also, under every imaginable pretext, begged from their friends and relatives.
One of them had been so fortunate as to obtain a suit of clothes belonging to her brother. Having cleaned and mended it with the greatest care, she kept it in readiness for the atelier national, who would doubtless arrive in rags.
Meanwhile the plot was kept a dead secret; for the conspirators were well aware that their sympathy for ces monstres des ateliers nationaux would meet with no encouragement at home.