“Good-bye?” said Juliette, “why not au revoir? Don’t you like me? Don’t you wish ever to see me again?”
Shrugging his shoulders and looking through the open windows, he said, “I think that I shall soon be going up there to see the Dieu des bonnes gens.” He died shortly afterwards at the age of seven-and-seventy, in July 1857.
Before her reluctant resignation from the Poet’s Union Juliette had begun to frequent a philosophical circle to which Dr. Bonnard introduced her. We have seen how from her tenderest childhood her father had made her acquainted with most of the numerous philosophical systems—the ideas of Cousin, Fourier, Comte, Proudhon, and others—which were at that time revolutionising human thought. With her natural quickness and keenness of intuition Juliette had comprehended their main principles. Consequently she was not the least confused by the learned discussions which took place in the salon of her new friends, M. and Mme. Fauvety.
M. Charles Fauvety was founder and editor of a well-known publication, La Revue Philosophique. Among the chief contributors to this erudite magazine was the philosopher, M. Charles Renouvier, the author of a learned work, Essais de Critique Générale, in four volumes, which he was then preparing, and which was not completed until 1864.
M. Renouvier possessed that inestimable gift of lucid exposition, which is so essentially French. Listening to, engaging in, and noting down his conversations with his editor, Juliette continued and carried to a point far advanced for one of her age and sex that philosophical education which her father had begun. It had long been her habit to keep a diary and to insert in it accounts of any discussion which interested her. And it is to this habit that we owe the reproduction in her Souvenirs of those entrancing conversations which give us so vivid a picture of the intellectual life of the period.
Throughout Juliette’s early womanhood and maturity there was no one who exercised a greater influence on French thought than Hippolyte Taine. His influence was at its zenith in the sixties; but already in this year, 1857, those who like Fauvety and Renouvier were gifted with prophetic insight could discern his coming greatness.
The publication of Taine’s Essais de Critique et d’Histoire was a great event in the circle of La Revue Philosophique.
“These young men[34] are admirable,” cried Renouvier.[35] “And seldom has it been given to forerunners, such as I, to take so great a delight in their disciples. For I, in a way, hatched Taine.”
“Taine,” said the editor of La Revue Philosophique, “will remain the hope or the anxiety of every philosophical system. He has taken a scourge in his hands. For the next half-century, he will enthrone himself on the judgment seat, and he will scathe every idea which wears out with use. I, as a philosopher, fear him and rely upon him alone.”
Mme. Lamessine was not the only woman member of that erudite circle. There was Mme. Fauvety, a clever woman, who had been an actress, and for a time the rival of Rachel. She mingled intelligently in the philosophical discussions of her husband and his friends. There was also a certain Mme. Jenny d’Héricourt, the only member of the circle whom Juliette disliked. She too contributed to La Revue Philosophique; and she was tainted with that narrow bigotry and dogmatism which were characteristic of the publication, but from which the broad-minded Renouvier was entirely free. A blue-stocking of the most objectionable type, une vertu farouche, as Juliette called her, la forte Jenny was conceited, censorious, pedantic and an inveterate scandalmonger. Such a person would naturally refuse to believe that any one so young and pretty as Juliette could have the slightest comprehension of philosophy. Nevertheless, on one subject at least the feminine Juliette and the Amazonian Jenny were agreed: they both detested Proudhon. Jenny had attacked his doctrines in an extremely able book, which Juliette had read and appreciated; for the materialistic and purely economic ideas of the father of modern syndicalism had never appealed to her, and she had fought many a battle of words on that subject with Dr. Lambert, who admired him. But, when Juliette ventured to discuss the economist with his female critic, Mme. d’Héricourt was furious. “Would you believe it,” she exclaimed to Fauvety, “that young lady actually dares to take upon herself to underline Proudhon!” It was bold, doubtless, in one so young and so charming. But Mme. Lamessine, nothing daunted by Jenny’s gibes, was to be bolder still, as we shall see in the next chapter.