“I ought to have understood, Juliette,” he said. “I was mad. I ought to have realised that your beloved Bruyères, which you had made with your own hands, you could not leave for another house so close. It was with money only that I created Le Grand Pin. To-morrow I will summon the builders. I will enlarge Bruyères, and next year, when we return, we shall be at home in your own house.”
The year 1868, the year of her second marriage, opened well for Juliette. “Tellement riante,” she writes, “que j’y vois tout en beau. Je suis heureuse autant qu’on peut imaginer....”[111] As she awoke on New Year’s Day, Alice whispered, “Dear mother, I wish you what you already possess.”
Her father, who had not come to Bruyères that year, wrote that he, too, was the happiest of men. For cet étudiant rive gauche, ce fanatique de science, as Juliette called him, was now at liberty to quit cette rue impériale, as he called the Rue de Rivoli, infestée par les allées et venues de l’empereur et de l’impératrice, and to inhabit the quarter of his dreams, to take a flat in the Rue S. Jacques close to the lecture-rooms and laboratories of those eminent scientists, Paul Bert and Claude Bernard.
In every respect it was well that the two families should separate. The discordant temperaments of Juliette and her mother rendered it impossible for them to agree long together. Neither their summers in Paris nor their winters on the Riviera had been very happy. And as for Juliette, the bliss of life with a husband who adored her and shared all her interests soon compensated her for the loss of her favourite street. “Nous sommes heureux à rendre jaloux,” she wrote soon after her marriage.[112] “But, on the contrary, our friends enjoy our happiness. Their assiduity in visiting us grows. They love our home, and they cannot pass along the Boulevard Poissonnière without coming up to see us, especially in the evening.”
Thus the minuscule salon of the Rue de Rivoli was transformed into the Great Salon of the Boulevard Poissonnière.
In the two troubled years which were to elapse before the outbreak of war, the Adams’ salon was to serve, as we have said, as a meeting-place for representatives of all parties in opposition: for abstentionistes and for sermentistes, for the elder republicans who followed M. Thiers, and for les Jeunes who followed Gambetta.
“Bientôt,” writes Juliette, “notre salon réunit toutes les opinions, depuis les orléanistes jusqu’aux irréconciliables.”[113]
Mme. Adam’s own attitude remained irreconcilably abstentioniste. She had no sympathy whatever with those who, like her husband’s friend, Jules Grévy, took the oath to the Empire in order to upset it. “Prêter un serment qu’on est résolu à ne pas tenir,” she writes, “c’est être déloyal et coupable.”[114] Imagine her horror, therefore, when she found her own husband wavering—first inclined to listen to the arguments of his friend Thiers, and then, on the eve of the 1869 election, announcing that he is going to his native Normandy, there to stand as candidate for the village of Brionne.[115]
“And you will take the oath—you?”
“Yes; I have thought it well over. Whatever objection you may have to offer has been considered and rejected.”