FIRST MARRIAGE AND PARIS
1849-1858
“Je vais devenir quelqu’un. J’irai à Paris.”—Mme. Adam, Roman de mon Enfance.
It will be seen from the events recorded in the last chapter that Juliette at thirteen was both mentally and morally much more developed than a young English girl of eighteen or even twenty. Children in France, largely because they associate constantly with their elders instead of being relegated to the nursery, grow up more quickly than in England. A little French girl often is quite a little woman. She will go with her mother to pay calls, and at home help her mother to entertain visitors. The system in vogue in Juliette’s childhood of marrying girls at fifteen or sixteen naturally favoured their early development. The early marriage was the outcome of the mariage de convenance, which was more general in Juliette’s youth than now. When marriages were arranged by the family it was unnecessary to wait until the young people, the bride at any rate, was old enough to choose wisely for herself. Though it would not have been admitted that girls were married against their will, though their consent to the marriage was generally asked, not by the aspirant, usually, but by the girls’ parents, it was a mere matter of form, everything having been settled beforehand. Moreover, the girl in question, when appealed to in this perfunctory manner, was not encouraged to consult her heart. Indeed, that very uncertain and awkward factor is not supposed to intervene in what is known as the real French marriage. It is essentially a business affair, a matter of social position and of pounds, shillings and pence. We shall find, for instance, that in arranging a marriage for her granddaughter, Mme. Seron’s chief concern was that Juliette should have an establishment in Paris. This, in the first place, would give her an opportunity of displaying to full advantage her many gifts, and, secondly, would enable her fond grandmother to shine in metropolitan circles, for Mme. Seron hoped to make some arrangement whereby she could for a considerable part of the year reside with her granddaughter.
Juliette was not married until she was sixteen. But, as we have seen, no sooner had she entered her teens than her grandmother and father began—in divergent directions, of course—to make plans for her alliance.
It was about this time, that the parents of young X——, a youth of seventeen, proposed to Mme. Seron that in a few years he should marry Juliette. The following year brought a renewal of this proposal and also a second offer of marriage from another quarter. Dr. Lambert refused to listen to either of these requests for his daughter’s hand. His persistence in his idea of a working-class marriage for his daughter drove his mother-in-law into a frenzy and produced another drame de famille. Mme. Seron threatened her son-in-law with the gendarmes if he attempted to carry out his nefarious scheme. Dr. Lambert threatened to take Juliette abroad out of her grandmother’s reach. But in the end Mme. Seron conquered, and Dr. Lambert went off in a towering rage. For several months he ceased to visit Chauny.
Juliette, who had now grown into a handsome girl, had already attracted considerable attention at Chauny. Those who are privileged to know her now, in her declining years, can see how lovely she must have been in her youth. “She has had that singular good fortune ...,” writes one of her friends to-day, “to have been adorably beautiful (adorablement belle).”[26] The delicately moulded features, the animated expression, the satirical glance, the dignified bearing, the vivacious manner, which at eighty never fail to charm, must have indeed been dazzling in her far-off girlhood. In a word, Juliette Lambert was as gifted physically as mentally. No wonder that when, wearing a pretty blonde cap with pink roses, and escorted by her grandfather and an old friend, Blondeau, who lived in the same house, she made her first appearance at the Chauny theatre, there was quite a sensation, although when she returned her grandmother had to scold her for having marred her beauty by weeping over the play.
The quarrel between Mme. Seron and her son-in-law having died down, Juliette was permitted to spend the Christmas of 1850, and to stay on into the New Year, at Blérancourt.
It was during this visit that she made the acquaintance of the man who was to be her first husband. She was told one day that her father expected a friend to lunch, that the guest was an advanced republican and a Comtist to boot. This was the first time that Juliette had heard that name of Comte, which she was to learn to know only too well later. The guest came. He was a barrister (avocat) at the Paris Court of Appeal. But he lived at Soissons, where he was conducting a series of law-suits on behalf of an aunt. His name was Lamessine. He was of the south Italian type, with dark eyes, olive skin and shining black hair, for his grandfather had been a Sicilian who had settled in France and been naturalised during the Revolution. Dr. Lambert’s visitor was reputed a man of talent. His brilliant conversation pleased Juliette; but she detested the scepticism which led him to maintain that good is merely the necessary balance to evil, and that society must grow increasingly corrupt until it produces a new “vegetation.” Against such doctrines Juliette could not refrain from protesting. There was an animated discussion between the Sicilian, who believed in nothing, and his host’s idealist daughter, who was ready to believe in everything that was good. The guest departed with the words, “And I hope you bear me no grudge, Mademoiselle la Batailleuse.” “I only pray,” she replied, “that Heaven may reveal to you some knowledge, however slight, of the good and the beautiful.”[27]
In the spring, while Juliette was visiting her aunts, M. Lamessine came to Chivres. There, though he found La Batailleuse more charming than ever in her peasant’s costume, which by clever contrivances and adaptations she had learnt to make extremely becoming, he met with a cold welcome from the aunts and was not encouraged to return. In June, however, while Juliette was at Blérancourt, he came to see her again. Political affairs were moving towards Napoléon’s December coup d’état and the empire which Dr. Seron had so persistently prophesied. There was a mysterious meeting at Dr. Lambert’s. And the next day Juliette’s father said to her, “The crisis is grave; but we have with us a man in whose veins flows the blood of the carbonari. He will do something.” That man was M. Lamessine.