1836-1839
“L’émotion, l’ébullition sont en permanence dans nos âmes.”—Mme. Adam, Souvenirs.
In the opening pages of her Recollections Mme. Adam has told, with more vivid detail than is unhappily here possible, the story of two generations of her ancestors. Her own career has not lacked romance; but many of its most thrilling incidents pale beside the experiences of her forbears. Tracing them back to the Napoleonic Wars, she presents us with a lively picture of domestic history, which is as far from being commonplace as it is possible to imagine. For it embraces moving scenes of rapturous love affairs, extraordinary marriages, a startling infidelity, quarrels about dowries, and the story of a son who had a rare precocious experience. At the age of nine, he found himself already disinherited and sent forth in the world, cast upon the mercy of the family milkman, with whom he took refuge. This juvenile outcast was Mme. Adam’s maternal grandfather, of whom, under the name of Dr. Seron, we shall hear much more anon. Only by unwavering persistence, and stern resolution did this unhappy boy escape from his benefactor’s vocation. Tramping to Paris, boots in hand, to save shoe-leather, he educated himself into the medical profession and ultimately married Mme. Adam’s grandmother, Pélagie Raincourt. Pélagie also was a highly romantic person, no less remarkable than her husband. For on her wedding morning, as the result of a family broil, by no means rare among Mme. Adam’s forbears, she escaped in a pet from her mother’s house, and was found sitting by the roadside, clad only in a nightcap and dressing-gown, by her bridegroom, who had pursued her on horseback. Swinging her into the saddle, in order to avoid further escapades, he carried her off to the church and there married her out of hand. Her sole bridal adornment was a white carnation, which a woman of the people pinned into her cap.
Juliette in later years was shown the cap and the carnation to illustrate the story, which she heard from the runaway’s own lips.
Mme. Seron continued all her life addicted to romance. When it became a question of marrying her daughter, Olympe, Mme. Adam’s mother, Mme. Seron, a catholic, chose a son-in-law who was an agnostic, because she was attracted by his appearance and his history. Jean Louis Lambert, Mme. Adam’s father, had for the sake of his opinions sacrificed brilliant ecclesiastical prospects, and from the prospective secretary of the Archbishop of Beauvais had become an usher in the boys’ school opposite Mme. Seron’s house. This heroic youth was taken by Mme. Adam’s grandmother, educated as a doctor, and married to the reluctantly quiescent Olympe, who from that time forward adopted that attitude of injured passivity which was expressed by her favourite phrase “where you have tethered the goat there it will graze.”
All this happened in Picardy, a province where people lived well and washed sparingly. The very name of Mme. Adam’s birthplace, Verberie, with its suggestion of oyster patties and sauterne, made Robert Louis Stevenson’s mouth water, as he paddled towards it in his canoe. Juliette remembers how on Fridays at ten in the morning the oyster cart from Boulogne would arrive, bringing twelve dozen oysters for her family, how they would all sit round the table, the oyster barrel in the centre, and how each with his or her knife would open his or her oysters. Juliette’s grandfather and father would consume four dozen each, her grandmother and mother two dozen each, while sometimes there would be a friend who would abstract as many as possible from his hosts’ respective shares. Wine flowed freely at these feasts. Dr. Seron was a twelve-bottle man. But fortunately his beverage was only light Macon; and this, happily for his patients, was not consumed until he had performed his operations at the hospital. Operations! One trembles at the very word when associated with Dr. Seron. For, according to his granddaughter, that country surgeon was a most diligent cultivator of microbes. Ablutions, as we have said, were rare in Picard households. A bath was unheard of. Dr. Seron held that the face should be washed as little as possible for fear of bringing out a rash. Soap was only used on Sundays. The windows, of course, were kept tightly shut. Physical exercise was carefully avoided. The women of Mme. Adam’s family, like old-fashioned Frenchwomen down to the present day, seldom went beyond their own house and garden, declining even the attractions of the provincial theatre, for they agreed with Mme. de Sévigné that une grande dame ne doit pas remuer les os (a true lady should not move about her bones).
Nevertheless, though their bodies were cribbed, cabined and confined, these Frenchwomen’s minds moved in the great world of romance, their fancies glowed with all the fervent imaginings of that effervescent age. Mme. Adam’s grandmother lived, moved and had her being in the “Human Comedy” of Balzac. Turning over the pages of his ninety-seven novels, or sitting over her embroidery frame, she lived the lives of his five thousand characters. Her unfortunate choice of a husband for her granddaughter, Juliette, was largely dictated by the suitor’s resemblance to one of her favourite novelist’s heroes.
Mme. Adam, as we have said, was born at the little Picard town of Verberie, a famous place in mediæval times, the residence of Frankish kings, whither in the ninth century had come Ethelbald, King of Wessex, to wed his thirteen-year-old bride, Charles the Bald’s daughter, Judith. Verberie in the last century was a favourite place of call for tourists, who in pre-motor-car days used to drive leisurely from Senlis to Compiègne. Our English poetess, Mary Robinson (Mme. Duclaux)[2], tells how from the steep brow of a down, known as “la Montagne de Verberie,” she saw through “the poplar screens of the precipitous hill-side, a lovely blue expanse of country with the Oise lying across it like a scimitar of silver”; how her carriage dashed down the hill “and clattered along the sleepy, pebbly ... street, past the inn, full of blouses and billiards.”