Soon Juliette’s invitation to the Countess’s evenings was extended to those smaller intimate parties, which met around the luncheon or the dinner-table. On these occasions the Hellenist, Louis de Ronchaud, was almost invariably her fellow-guest.
Mme. d’Agoult laughed at Juliette’s passion for antiquity. “My dear child,” she would say, “you must be of your time. At your age you ought not to be so antique.... I shall take you to the Opéra Bouffes” (the Italian theatre). “That will modernise you a little.”
“For the love of Greece, remain Greek,” pleaded de Ronchaud. But, indeed, there was no fear of the Opéra Bouffes perverting Juliette from Hellenism; for Offenbach’s caricaturing of her Homeric deities in Orphée aux Enfers so outraged her Grecian sympathies that Mme. d’Agoult was constrained to make amends by inviting her to a neo-Grecian dinner. “It will be a pagan party,” the Countess said. “De Ronchaud has arranged it.” The other guests were two brilliant Hellenists, Ménard and Saint Victor. They began by discussing the now much-disputed importance of a classical education. These neo-Grecians were firmly persuaded that the classics alone can inculcate those superior ideas of justice and heroism, which are all the more salutary because for ages they have permeated the race. Naturally they lamented over what seemed to them the decadence of French society under the Empire. Ménard maintained that periods of intellectual decadence are invariably periods of mechanical progress and of political despotism.
Then the worshippers of ancient Hellas fell with equal zest and vivacity to discussing the antiquity of the Orphic mysteries.
How intensely alive for Juliette was this Hellenic past she has proved over and over again in her literary work, and most notably in three novels she was to produce some years later, Laide (1878), Grecque (1879), and Païenne (1883).[60]
That great wave of philosophic speculation which was sweeping through France could not fail to affect so intellectual a salon as Mme. d’Agoult’s. An earlier dinner-party, Juliette’s first at the Rue Presbourg, had been a veritable symposium of philosophers. The great Littré,[61] the eloquent exponent of Comte’s philosophy, was the lion of the evening. His famous Etymological Dictionary of the French Language was then going through the Press.
“Littré,” writes Juliette, “inspired me with a sentiment which was almost worship.” When they had met before they had talked of Greece. The editor of Hippocrates and Pliny, though laughing at his young friend’s fervent passion for ancient Hellas, had been able to reveal to her things in the Iliad which neither she nor her father had dreamed of.
Among the other guests were De Ronchaud, of course; Hippolyte Carnot, son of the “Organiser of Victory,” and editor of one of the leading magazines of the day, La Revue Encyclopédique;[62] Dupont-White, the friend of John Stuart Mill, a bold thinker and an ardent apologist of centralisation in government. In the presence of such an august philosophic trio Juliette for the first part of the dinner was content to listen; and we may be sure that, like her illustrious namesake, Mme. Récamier, she listened “with seduction.” But towards the end of the evening we find her warmed to take part in the discussion. Although she admired, almost worshipped Littré, she could not tolerate his positivism. Positivism suggested Comte, and Comte suggested the husband whose conduct was rendering her domestic life unbearable. But Littré seemed to her to out-Comte even Comte; for Littré would stifle the slightest breath of idealism. While Comte admitted that there are as many arguments for as against the existence of an unknowable, Littré seemed to Juliette absolutely to deny it. This may have been so at that time; but surely Littré must later have become less dogmatic. For we remember Paul Bourget’s description of “Old Littré” as a saint who spoke eloquently of that ocean of mystery washing our very shores, but over the waters of which we have no barque to carry us.[63]
When Littré maintained that as “light cannot exist without a luminous body, neither can life without organs nor spirit without matter,” Juliette protested that vehicles are not essences. “The Homeric past,” she added, “presents us with a poetic conception of things which encourages the belief that the future has something better in store than your immutable law and its brutality.”
“Yes, I agree,” replied Littré, “the immutable law is brutal in its partial manifestations, but its general action, based on the unvarying conditions of proportion and order, inspires us with the idea of absolute justice.”