“He gave to each of us,” writes Juliette, “the ‘thank you’ we deserved.” Then he talked well of Parisians and their mocking spirit. He said how it grieved him not to be understood in France, and to have for a rival any one so eminent as Berlioz.
“It is impossible for you ever to understand one another,” said Mme. d’Agoult.
Despite the personal antipathy with which Wagner inspired her, Juliette made enormous efforts to sell tickets for the three concerts he was to give at Paris. And she disposed of so many that the musician actually sent de Ronchaud to her with a message of thanks from “the Hydrocephalous.”
The first two concerts at least were a distinct success. At the second even Berlioz applauded.
Mme. d’Agoult, unlike most aristocratic Frenchwomen of her day, was a brave pedestrian. That was what kept her such a good figure, said Juliette; and her young friend often accompanied her on her walks. In May 1859, after having visited the Salon, they walked through the Bois. Juliette seldom refers to her own toilettes. But on that day, she tells us, she was wearing a specially becoming costume, a frock of black taffetas with no trimming, but wide sleeves of white lace, a fichu of black chantilly and a Leghorn hat with a cluster of cornflowers and strings of black velvet. It was a glorious May day. All Paris seemed to be out enjoying itself. As the Countess and Juliette walked past the Arc de Triomphe, Mme. d’Agoult said—
“The war is imminent. Perhaps it will be declared to-morrow. God send we may see France victorious and Italy delivered.”[69]
For months Mme. d’Agoult and her friends had been eagerly following Italy’s struggle for liberty. With the whole of France they ardently desired their Latin sister’s liberation from the Austrian yoke. The Countess herself had Italian connections. She was related to a well-known Florentine family, the Peruzzi.
Juliette, before she came to Paris, had known little of foreign politics. Save for a vague prejudice against England, the legacy of the Napoleonic Wars, a mistrust of Prussia and a liking for the Russians because Russian soldiers, billeted in the house of Chauny, had been kind to her grandmother, Juliette had no very decided sympathies or antipathies towards countries not her own. But in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon such indifference speedily vanished. On the very first evening in the Rue Presbourg she met the Alsatian, Nefftzer, who had been editor of La Presse and was later to direct Le Temps. “By him,” she writes, “for the first time in my life I heard foreign politics lucidly discussed, and it was then that I began to take an interest in them.”[70]
Among the European nations outside France, Italy was Juliette’s first love and Garibaldi her greatest hero. Next to Italy, as one might expect from so ardent a Hellenist, came Greece. She and her Grecian friends were highly delighted when the Ionian Isles were reunited to Greece. She was in the South of France at the time, but de Ronchaud wrote announcing the good news and exclaiming “Vive l’indépendence.”