At the same restaurant dinner the talk fell on the Suez Canal, which had been begun two years earlier. The Saint-Simonians were aggrieved by Ferdinand de Lesseps’ appropriation of an idea which they regarded as the property of their sect. Girardin argued that de Lesseps had conceived the idea independently; that it was he who had communicated it to Saïd Pasha, who had received it with enthusiasm, and that de Lesseps alone could carry the project through, particularly in the face of England’s opposition. Lord Palmerston, always suspicious of Napoléon’s designs, was, as Girardin remarked, conducting a veritable campaign against the making of the canal.
“Come, Arlès,” said Girardin. “You know how malicious Palmerston can be when it is a question of any French enterprise. Your friend Cobden has suffered enough from that. Palmerston’s campaign against the canal ought to make you support de Lesseps instead of attacking him.... When de Lesseps comes to Paris I will take you to him, and you are too much of a Frenchman not to say, ‘Succeed, and you will have deserved well of the Saint-Simonian School in France.’”
Thus did this wily journalist of a Girardin win Arlès Dufour to his side. But with the other Saint-Simonians present he was not so successful; and one of them, who had a prophetic soul, was heard to mutter: “We shall see. But if the canal is a failure it will remain French; if it succeeds the English will buy it, as they buy everything that is worth buying.”
It was in this year, 1860, that Mme. Lamessine published her second volume, Mon Village,[85] a series of charming rural sketches, stories, dialogues, quaint old country ballads put into the mouth of a village weaver. From the beginning to the end of this little book, one breathes the atmosphere of the Picard countryside, when it was still remote, before railways and motor-cars had brought it within reach of the capital. Juliette had written the book at the suggestion of George Sand, who, replying to a letter in which Juliette had said that the days spent at her village of Blérancourt were the happiest of her life, enjoined her to write her memories while they were fresh. “Your title is found,” she added, “Mon Village.” The publishers were, by a curious irony of fate, Hetzel and Lévy, the very two who had most emphatically refused her first book. M. Lamessine, having taken advantage of the power given him by the Code Napoléon, had appropriated the profits of her earlier publications. Juliette now, at Hetzel’s suggestion, by dropping the last letter of her maiden name, made use of the pseudonym “Juliette Lamber.” “It is a clever trick,” said her husband. “But I will make you pay for it.”
Juliette’s domestic life was growing steadily more and more unhappy. Arlès Dufour, her bon père, as she called him, advised her to separate from her husband. But to such a course Dr. Lambert was strongly opposed. However, the two fathers—the adopted and the natural one—met at Chauny. There Arlès, “the white-haired old gentleman,” whom little Alice described as un bon génie, arranged everything, and for a time Juliette gave up her life in Paris and returned to her parents’ home.
Mme. d’Agoult approved of the course her young friend had taken. And Juliette for some months devoted herself entirely to her literary work. She was writing her third volume, a study of a Chinaman, who visits Europe and somewhat in the manner of the travellers in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters compares Eastern with Western civilisation. Under the title of Un Mandarin this book appeared in the same series as Mon Village, before the end of the year 1860.
Juliette at Chauny, now that the railway line had been opened, was not altogether isolated from her beloved Paris. Her friends were able to come and visit her on Sundays. Hetzel on his way to Brussels made a point of calling at Chauny; and Juliette herself sometimes went to town.
On one occasion she went to Paris to visit her friend Eugène Pelletan,[86] who was in Sainte Pélagie prison. The Imperial Government always kept a watchful eye on the press; and Pelletan had been sentenced to three months imprisonment for an article attacking the Government, entitled La Liberté comme en Autriche, which had appeared in the Courier du Dimanche.
This was the first time that Juliette had been in a prison. The visit left an impression of horror on her mind, which obsessed her for many weeks. Pelletan took her to see one of his fellow-prisoners, that famous “monomaniac of conspiracy, Blanqui, who spent half his political life in the prisons of four different régimes.” Juliette respected and pitied Blanqui as a martyr to Republicanism and the only kind of martyr with whom she could ever sympathise, the kind that returns blow for blow. Passive resistance never appealed to Juliette’s rebellious spirit. Not even now, when she has become a Christian, does she believe in the doctrine of turning the other cheek. In Blanqui she found all the bitterness and disillusionment of the defeated rebel. When she offered him Daniel Stern’s History of that Revolution of 1848, in the first months of which he had played a prominent part, he seemed to regard it as an insult and refused even to touch the volume.
Juliette returned to Chauny depressed and ill. She had contracted a severe cold, which speedily developed into hæmorrhage of the lungs. She concealed this alarming symptom from her parents, however, and made an excuse to return to Paris, where she saw her doctor, not Dr. Bonnard, but a throat specialist, a Dr. Cabarrus, whom she had lately been in the habit of consulting. He thought so seriously of her case that he hurried her off to the South of France at once. From Paris to Cannes in those days was a long journey. The train took a day and night to reach Toulon, which was the terminus. Then before Cannes was reached there were two days of driving.