“‘Be modest, but not self-effacing. Be simple, but distinguished. Express your opinions with a certain confidence. Appear firm, but also tolerant.
“‘If you would preserve your salon your first duty should be to stimulate the intellectual curiosity of those whom you have gathered round you.
“‘Be careful to make them feel that you are more occupied with them than with yourself.
“‘Twenty men friends and five women will suffice to found a salon. You have them already.’”
Juliette had not only the requisite number of friends, but now, in the spring of 1864, she had also a home in the very heart of Paris, where she could receive them. And the dinner-party which, by way of house-warming, she gave in the flat in the Rue de Rivoli may be regarded as inaugurating her salon, that salon minuscule, as she called it, which was to be the summer ante-chamber to Mme. d’Agoult’s grand salon d’Hiver.
Seven out of her twenty men friends were invited to dinner. They all accepted, and hence may be regarded as the pious founders of Juliette’s first salon. They were Edmond Adam, a wealthy financier, an ardent republican, one of the men of 1848, of whom we shall hear much later; Edmond Texier, a distinguished writer and a brilliant wit; the amorous Toussenel, of course; Peyrat, the most bigoted of anti-clericals; Nefftzer, now editor of the Temps; that polished Jacobin, Challemel-Lacour; and the ever-faithful Ronchaud.
Following Mme. d’Agoult’s instructions, and preserving, roughly, the feminine proportion of one quarter which she had indicated, Juliette had invited two women guests—Mme. d’Agoult herself and Mme. de Pierreclos. But neither was able to come. The Countess, who seldom went out anywhere, considered herself excused from accepting her young friend’s invitation by the recent death of her daughter, Mme. Ollivier. Mme. de Pierreclos was away at Macon, staying with her uncle, Alphonse de Lamartine.
The conversation that evening gave the tone for the conversations in all Juliette’s salons: of the little salon in the Rue de Rivoli, of the greater salon in the Boulevard Poissonnière, of the pre-war and the post-war salon, of that extension of her salons which was La Nouvelle Revue, and likewise of those latter-day assemblies which, since her retirement from La Nouvelle Revue, seventeen years ago, Mme. Adam has gathered round her on the terrace or in the spacious drawing-room of her beautiful country home in the Abbey of Gif.
Whether the late M. Émile Faguet ever visited either of these salons, I do not know. But if he did, he must have been ill at ease, for he was one of those who found the political salon “uninhabitable.”[88] And at Mme. Adam’s, though literature, art, philosophy, and other subjects were by no means excluded, politics held the first place. Throughout the Empire Juliette’s salon, first in the Rue de Rivoli, later on the Boulevard Poissonnière, was a centre of energetic republican opposition to the Empire. The hostess’s chief desire was to reconcile the diverse currents of republican sentiment, to blend in the broad stream of freedom the various and too often conflicting strands of progress.