JULIETTE LAMBER
From a portrait by Léopold Flameng, 1860
Among all these various pleasures and duties one wonders what became of Juliette’s little daughter Alice. The child was now old enough to notice the strained relations between her parents, and in order to remove her from the unedifying disputes between her mother and father, Alice had been sent to her grandparents at Chauny.
As far as her literary and social life was concerned Juliette’s most ambitious dreams were about to be realised. She was on the way to become a queen of society. True, she had enemies, chiefly pedants like Mme. d’Héricourt and Mlle. Royer, or the friends of Proudhon. No one so convinced, so outspoken as Juliette could avoid arousing opposition. But, with the exception of that little coterie, all hearts were hers, won by her good nature, her charm, her genius for friendship, her vivacity, her intelligence and her loveliness.
A leading French journalist, now no longer living, who followed Mme. Adam’s career with interest and admiration, told me that in her youth she was entrancingly beautiful. Referring to the salon she was shortly to establish, to the princes, ambassadors, writers and artists who crowded round the brilliant young hostess, that journalist said: “We were all in love with her.”
Moreover Juliette, though an advocate of the rights of woman in days when feminists tended to affect masculine attire, discarded none of her femininity. It has always been her opinion that Pour une femme, c’est une infériorité que se deféminiser. She who had been independent enough to abstain from the crinoline, knew how to dress. One of her gowns, velvet gorge de tourterelle, with large steel buttons, worn at Alphonse Daudet’s dinner-party, made such an impression on Edmond de Goncourt that he described it in detail, in the pages of that Journal which has now become a classic.[65]
It is not surprising that more than one distinguished artist—Flameng, Charpentier, for example—painted Mme. Lamessine’s portrait. Charpentier’s picture was exhibited in the salon. Mme. d’Agoult’s friend, the famous sculptor, Adam Salomon, photographed her in a Charlotte Corday costume, which she had worn at a fancy-dress ball, and wished to model her bust. The photograph was a success, not so the bust. After having made many attempts in clay, the sculptor gave it up. Some time later, however, when Mme. Lamessine was in his studio, he persuaded her to let him take a caste of her face. “It was horrible,” she writes.[66] “I thought I should have been suffocated; and I felt as if my eyebrows and eyelashes were being torn off. The agony of those few seconds when Adam Salomon was piercing holes for my nostrils and making slits for my lips, when I could hardly breath, pursued me for months.” “I quite understand,” she adds, “that a cast of the head and face is not usually taken until after death.”
It was at the Adam Salomons’ that Juliette met Lamartine. He came there every day: and it saddened her to see this great poet worried by financial embarrassments and attempting to retrieve his fallen fortunes by soliciting subscriptions to his Cours Familier de Littérature. Ce pauvre Lamartine, wrote the witty Mme. Mohl, ce n’est plus une lyre, c’est une tire-lire (a sealed earthen pot with a slit into which a peasant puts his money). The poet’s fine, handsome countenance still lit up when he spoke of art, letters or politics, but that unhappily was but seldom.[67]
There are those for whom socially the Second Empire signifies little more than hollow splendour, ostentatious display and vulgar luxury. No doubt these tendencies were strongly marked; but at the same time there flourished a rich and original development of art, music and literature. When Juliette was making her début in Paris drawing-rooms, Alexandre Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias and his Fils Naturel were being played at Le Théâtre Français, Millet and Puvis de Chavannes were exhibiting their first pictures in the Salon, Renan was writing his Vie de Jésus, Erckmann and Chatrian their Napoleonic romances, and Victor Hugo, in exile, his Légende des Siècles. Those were the days when two of the greatest composers of the modern world, Berlioz and Wagner, were rivalling one another on the Parisian operatic stage.
Juliette first met Berlioz at the representation of Orpheo at the Théâtre Lyrique. Mme. Viardot’s sublime rendering of the part of Orpheo avenged Juliette and her neo-Grecian friends, Ménard and de Ronchaud, who accompanied her, for the insults Offenbach had offered to their Greek gods. During the song “I have lost my Eurydice,” Juliette, overcome by emotion, paid the singer the superb compliment of momentarily losing consciousness. When Berlioz himself came round to their box at the end of the act, Ménard did not neglect to tell him of the beautiful Mme. Lamessine’s little swoon. Highly flattered the composer took her hand in his and kept it there.[68]