After a fortnight spent with her husband in an hotel on the Place Louvois, she still found herself, “uninitiated into the hundredth part of what she wanted to know.”[30] Herein lies the secret of the overpowering impression which Paris made upon her: “What she wanted to know!” Paris was to her the master-key to all knowledge. In Paris lived the great leaders of thought, with whose ideas her father had made her familiar, the idealist politicians, whose Utopian dreams she had made her own. In the streets of Paris had ebbed and flowed the tide of that wonderful revolution which had found an echo in Chauny streets, and even in Mlle. André’s pension. In Paris might be seen those exquisite masterpieces of Greek art, the living symbols of her divine Homer.
Nevertheless a shadow fell even over the radiant exultation of those first weeks in Paris. From infancy to old age Juliette Adam has always been ambitious. It was no mere obscure existence in the great city that she had pictured in her youthful dreams. Hers was to be no diary of a nobody. Encouraged by her grandmother, she longed for fame. But alas! her hopes were dashed when she found herself lost in the vast crowds which thronged the boulevards, when she regarded the miles of well-filled shelves in the immense halls of the Imperial Library. It seemed as if the only homage Paris would ever render her would be the admiring glances of street arabs, who distinguished her as they had done another Juliette. The young Mme. Lamessine despaired of ever emerging from the mass, of ever carving for herself even the tiniest niche in the temple of literary renown. For it was to be a distinguished writer that she aspired. Already she had quite a hoard of youthful scribblings, infantile verses which her grandparents thought wonderful, romances over whose patriotic incidents the youthful authoress had wept bitter tears, a prize essay, written in competition with the pupils of the boys’ school opposite her Chauny home.
During her life at Soissons, it was in study and in literary composition that Juliette had sought distraction from domestic unhappiness. Some of her verses, a poem entitled Myosotis, had actually been published and set to music by the cathedral organist.
But it was after her return from Paris that she achieved a success which encouraged her to hope that, perhaps, after all she might not pass her life unnoticed.
The popular novelist, Alphonse Karr, was then contributing to the Siècle weekly articles on social subjects, entitled “Buzzings” (Bourdonnements). A girl friend of Juliette’s, Pauline Barbereux, used to bring her the Siècle and together they read Karr’s articles. One of these was on the crinoline, then at the height of its vogue. After having thoroughly enjoyed himself at the expense of all its absurdities, Karr declared that there was not a single young and pretty woman in France with sufficient independence of mind not to wear it. “There is I,” cried Juliette. “And what if I wrote and told him so?” For though affecting the full skirt, pretty Mme. Lamessine had always stopped short of the crinoline. Pauline was delighted with the idea. So together they set to work to concoct the letter, which should, of course, be anonymous. The writer, therefore, was able to enlarge on the charms of this independent young female who refused to answer to the beck and call of fashion.
“Yes, sir,” wrote Juliette, “there is a pretty woman of twenty who does not wear the crinoline, who has never worn it, there is one in France, in the provinces, and that one is I, Juliette.”[31]
Mme. Adam, throughout her long life, has ever been a fervent feminist, passionately interested in woman’s rôle and position in society. In her childhood’s desultory reading she had eagerly devoured a volume on the Fronde. It interested her because women played the principal part in it. And she was thinking of those frondeuses when she led her schoolfellows round the playground behind the banner of the social democratic handkerchief.
It was not unnatural, therefore, that Juliette should insinuate into this, her first contribution to the press, her own views on feminism, though they were expressed as far as possible in the style of Alphonse Karr. To the accompaniment of little Alice’s baby gurglings, she read the rough draft to Pauline, who, having declared it superb, dictated it solemnly while Juliette copied it on to magnificent paper. Then the wonderful document, “the article,” as Pauline christened it, was re-read, folded carefully, put into an imposing envelope, signed with a beautiful seal, which was engraved with the writer’s Christian name. Thereupon, writes Juliette, we repaired (no word less ceremonious could express such an act) with our precious packet to the post.
Oh, that week, how interminable it seemed! Could it be possible that Alphonse Karr would reply to the letter? On the night before the Siècle’s appearance Juliette dreamed of her poem, Myosotis. She interpreted that dream as a good sign. The 20th of February, 1856, dawned. Would Paris read that letter signed Juliette?... Pauline comes in breathless, pale with excitement. The Siècle flutters in her hand. “Juliette,” she cries, “it is all there.” “All.” “And then,” writes Juliette,[32] “we take two chairs and we draw them close to one another. We unfold the paper, and each holding one corner, we read. Yes, the whole of my letter is there. I read it. Pauline reads it. Not a word has been changed. I burst into tears. Pauline weeps too. Baby Alice, playing on the carpet, when she sees us crying, begins to howl. Her godmother, Pauline, soothes and consoles her. I think of my grandmother ... and I cry: ‘Grandmother, I shall be a writer.’
“I send father my article and tell him how I came to write it.”