“When Peyrat and Duclerc were discussing,” comments their hostess, “arguments flew so rapidly from side to side that we listened without interrupting. Moreover, there was not the slightest chance of getting in a phrase or even a word edgeways.”
Though politics held the first place in Juliette’s salon, as we have said, literature and art were by no means neglected.
The hostess herself, an ardent romanticist and idealist, if ever there were one, had no sympathy with the realism which in the middle sixties was beginning to invade French art and literature. Manet’s “Olympia,” when it was exhibited in the Salon, filled her with loathing. When she first saw it, she knew not whether to laugh or to cry.
“Quelle horreur et aussi quels rires,” she exclaims. “Voici l’Olympia de Manet. Nue, étendue, accoudée sur un drap blanc. Derrière elle une negresse tient un bouquet. Sur le drap blanc un chat noir déteint et laisse la trace de ses pattes sales. Germinie Lacerteux en littérature, le chat noir aux pattes sales en peinture, c’est complet! O idéal, idéal! Je vais revoir Picardia.”
The de Goncourts’ novel, Germinie Lacerteux, on its recent appearance, had been vehemently discussed in the Rue de Rivoli. “It is Lucrèce Borgia graillonnante,” exclaimed Lamartine’s niece, Mme. de Pierreclos. And most of her fellow-guests as well as her hostess were up in arms at once when some one described the de Goncourts and Flaubert as the leaders of the realistic school. Flaubert, they contended, would never have condescended to wallow in the mud which seemed as much the de Goncourts’ natural element as it was to be that of their disciple Zola. For the author of La Terre and for all his tribe Juliette has ever manifested an extreme aversion.
From the de Goncourts’ realism our passionate idealist turned with relief to the classicism of her Grecian friends, Ronchaud, Saint-Victor, Ménard, and to those poets of the new Parnassian school who shared her enthusiasm for the gods and ideals of antiquity.[94]
Juliette’s Salon Minuscule, as she modestly called it, had now become a regular institution in Parisian intellectual society. Possibly it had been a greater success than its originator, Mme. d’Agoult, had ever anticipated. Possibly this may have accounted for the clouds which now began to appear on the horizon of Juliette’s friendship with that great lady, clouds which threatened to repeat in the nineteenth century that earlier story of the jealous Mme. du Deffand and her gifted young protégée, Mlle. de Lespinasse. Certain of Mme. d’Agoult’s friends were thought to be too often in the Rue de Rivoli. Consequently, Juliette began to be coldly received in the Rue Presbourg. Mischief-makers were not lacking: they told the Countess that in the Rue de Rivoli her works were somewhat severely criticised. While Juliette was at Bruyères in the winter of 1866-67 she received a letter from Mme. de Pierreclos[95] warning her that somehow she was not in the Countess’s good books.
“Attention, petite Juliette!” wrote Lamartine’s niece. “Vous n’êtes pas en faveur. Je ne jurerais qu’à votre retour vous ne subissiez une bourrasque qui vous écarte à tout jamais de la Rue de Presbourg.”
In the crisis now approaching, one of the most momentous of Juliette’s life, Mme. d’Agoult vouchsafed her young friend no sympathy whatever.
For some years, as we have seen, Juliette had been living apart from her husband. M. Lamessine had used to the full the powers, which until a few years ago the French law gave a husband, of appropriating his wife’s earnings. Little Alice lived in terror that one day her father might even claim that house and garden on the Golfe Juan, the beloved Bruyères, where she and her mother spent happy winter months. “You must make haste and grow up,” Dr. Lambert used to say to his granddaughter, “and then you will marry and Bruyères shall be your dowry.”