We should convey a very wrong impression of Juliette’s early womanhood if we represented her as entirely absorbed in abstruse studies and frequenting only philosophers and blue-stockings. The lighter sides of life have always appealed to her. As a schoolgirl she excelled in games, and she has ever loved play as well as work. Now she was eagerly grasping the opportunities of amusement which Paris of the Empire knew so well how to offer, especially to one as attractive as Mme. Lamessine.
Mme. Fauvety took her to the theatre—not to first nights, this wise ex-actress preferred to wait until the players had perfected their parts, and it was not until the last performances were announced that she considered a play really worth seeing. Alexandre Dumas fils was then at the height of his popularity. La Dame aux Camélias, Diane de Lys, La Question d’Argent, were the talk of the town. Though Juliette had ceased to write poetry, she had not ceased to associate with poets. And it was a member of the Poet’s Union who took her to her first fancy-dress ball, where her escort appeared as Vercingetorix, and she herself was disguised as the Gallic Cassandra, Vellèda. She wore a long white robe, confined by a golden girdle from which hung a gilded scythe. Her arms were bare to the shoulder, and it was for the first time in her life, she writes, “for even at dances in those days we wore sleeves.” Her light brown hair with its gleam of gold hung over her shoulders, crowned with a wreath of mistletoe. Meyerbeer, the musical idol of the early Empire, happened to be present. Vellèda made a great impression on this queer little old man. “Why! she will make me forget my Selika!” (the composition on which he was then engaged), he is said to have exclaimed. “I am too old to fall in love with a new face,” and he left the ball-room abruptly. For months afterwards every morning Juliette received a bunch of violets with the words, Souvenir ému à Vellèda—and one day came a ticket for a box for the first night of the Pardon de Ploërmel. But she never saw her aged admirer again. Some years after his death, on the occasion of the first performance of his L’Africaine, Juliette received a ticket for a box in a little casket with a bunch of violets, tied with a ribbon on which was written le dernier. “She will come to the first night of L’Africaine wherever she is,” Meyerbeer had said.
Already the Lamessines were in the whirl of political life. On the 14th of January, 1858, the evening of Orsini’s attempted assassination of the Emperor, while they were shopping in the Palais Royal, a Sicilian friend, who was with them, was arrested. On the next morning their flat was searched. But this time there were no compromising documents for Juliette to conceal. M. Lamessine had no difficulty in proving his friend’s innocence and obtaining his speedy release.
Those were the days when the long conflict between sermentistes and abstentionistes, which later was to rage high in Juliette’s salon, was just beginning. The sermentistes were those who consented to take the oath of allegiance to the Empire, the abstentionistes those who held themselves completely aloof.
Juliette and her friends at Mme. Fauvety’s were all ardent abstentionistes. They were disgusted when, in June 1857, the first so-called republican, Émile Ollivier, took the oath, on his election to the Corps Legislatif. Ollivier’s betrayal of the republican cause, they regarded as all the more inexcusable because his father, one of the stalwarts of 1848, was then in exile through his loyalty to the principles his son had sacrificed. But Ollivier and many others, who speedily followed his example, had on their side no less a democrat than Proudhon. That unflinching advocate of the people’s cause maintained that to take the oath to the Emperor was merely to recognise the people’s sovereignty embodied in the chief of the State. Such an argument did not raise Proudhon in the esteem of so uncompromising a person as Juliette.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] Léon Daudet, L’Entre-Deux-Guerres, 235 (1915).
[27] Souvenirs, I. 353.
[28] Souvenirs, II. 13.
[29] Souvenirs, I. 214.