By the time that Juliette came to Paris the Saint-Simonians had split up into two sects. The scission had first declared itself during the Revolution of 1830, when Enfantin insisted on standing aloof from politics, while his colleagues, Bazard and Rodrigues, declared that the Master’s teaching rendered it incumbent upon them to take an active part in political affairs. Further contention occurred over the relations of the sexes. Enfantin declared himself the apostle of free love, Bazard and Rodrigues upheld marriage; and it was on this point that the Saint-Simonians finally separated into a school which was entirely political and philosophical—that of Bazard and Rodrigues—and the so-called church of Enfantin, which represented the mystic and individualist side of the Saint-Simonian doctrine.
Enfantin and such followers as remained to him, only forty in number, left the Rue Taitbout, which had been the Saint-Simonian headquarters, and went off to the suburb Menilmontant, where they established a settlement. Singing songs especially composed for them, and attired in tam-o’shanters and light blue dalmaticas, the brethren, most of whom were university students, cultivated the ground under the supervision of Father Enfantin, who wore a scarlet robe with a violet girdle and a large metal necklace, each link of which represented one of his disciples.
Father Enfantin and his followers lived in the hope of the coming of a feminine Messiah, who, in conjunction with the Father, was to redeem the world. But their labours were interrupted and their hopes dashed to the ground by the intervention of justice. In the columns of the Saint-Simonian newspaper, Le Globe, the Father had enunciated his views of marriage and sexual morality, with the result that he found his settlement at Menilmontant broken up, and himself (in 1832) condemned to a year’s imprisonment. It was on his release that he went to Egypt and studied the feasibility of cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Suez.
When Juliette published her Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes Father Enfantin was back again in Paris acting as director of the Paris-Lyons Mediterranée Railway. Struck by the cleverness of Juliette’s first book, he sent two of his followers to invite the young authoress to a Saint-Simonian banquet. But she thought it prudent to refuse the invitation, having heard that the Father regarded her in the same light as his Master had regarded Mme. de Staël, viz. as a possible feminine Messiah, who with the Father should make all things new. “Enfantin,” remarks Juliette, “at the age of sixty-two, was somewhat late in discovering his fellow-saviour,” though for her at twenty-two the discovery was premature, for she did not feel herself ripe for so exalted a mission. “Just think what I was expected to bring to the world!” she exclaims. “Nothing less than the golden age!”
Though Juliette had refused the invitation to the banquet, she permitted her friend Arlès Dufour to take her to one of Enfantin’s evening receptions, where she found him assisted by a stout and comely lady. Arlès Dufour had been one of those who had brought her the invitation to the Father’s banquet. From the first he had taken a fatherly interest in the young Mme. Lamessine; and she felt drawn to him by a sentiment of filial devotion which never left her. He must indeed have been an attractive character. An ardent Saint-Simonian, a pacifist, an advocate of women’s rights and an Anglophil, he was the friend of John Stuart Mill and Richard Cobden. “It is charming to see him, at sixty-five, with his heart still running off with his head,” writes Cobden in 1860.[84] “He would not allow the word ‘obey’ to be used by women in the marriage ceremony, and has other very rebellious notions.”
Though in practice a staid citizen of Lyons, a devoted husband and father of a family, theoretically Dufour, like his master, Enfantin, believed in free love. This was the only point on which he and his young friend Juliette disagreed. “Woman needs a certain dignity,” she argued, “which can never be hers if she violates convention and neglects her duty to society.”
Arlès Dufour, a convinced free trader, was deeply interested in his friend Cobden’s mission to Paris, for the purpose of arranging a commercial treaty between France and England. During these negotiations, Arlès, who was regarded as an authority on free trade, was more than once consulted by the Emperor, and at a restaurant dinner in the autumn of 1860 he entertained Juliette, Mme. Reybaud, Girardin and some Saint-Simonian friends with the story of his imperial audiences. Unlike most of Juliette’s acquaintances, Dufour was an Imperialist. But he had spoken rather freely to Napoléon on the subject of his Saint-Simonian faith and his dreams for the future. Thereupon the Emperor had remarked, “Don’t you think, M. Arlès, that people may not be far wrong when they call you a crank?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Arlès Dufour, “I am a crank, but your Majesty knows it is only the cranks who succeed.”
The Emperor laughed loudly; then he rose and said: “Go, you bold man, and don’t return until to-morrow at two o’clock.”