THE VILLA BRUYÈRES, ON THE GOLFE JUAN, MADAME ADAM’S RIVIERA HOME
Each winter Mérimée and Juliette Adam became better friends. He paid her one of the compliments she appreciated most when he told Dr. Maure that she had made him understand fraternity.[132]
She enjoyed his conversation immensely. “A talk with Mérimée,” she writes, “is always full of surprises,[133] so wide is his knowledge and of a quality so superior.” His eclecticism delighted her. He belonged to no school, but was ready to appreciate anything that appealed to him, modern or ancient, idealist or realist, romantic or classical. His bête noir was exaggeration. He was artistic to the finger-tips. He detested the photographic method of treating life and nature. “Every artist at the beginning of his life,” he would say, “must, I admit, be carried away by passion, by rapture, but before long he must deny himself any ecstasy which might cloud his imagination and dim his vision of reality; he must retain of his passion only so much as is necessary for its description.”
Mérimée, like Juliette’s friend Flaubert, was a heroic worker. He would not hesitate to rewrite a page ten times. A term erased seemed to him but “a jumping-off place from which to reach le mot juste.” Mme. Adam highly prized the lessons he gave her on style.
In general conversation he was not at his best. However interesting the subject might be, he was ill at ease if the speaker did not appeal to him. He would assume a frigid manner. On the other hand, if the speaker pleased him, he would hasten to pour forth all the treasures of his accumulated reflections.
The events of the summer of 1868, and the troubles of L’Avenir National, an opposition newspaper founded in 1865, edited by Peyrat, and in which Adam had a large financial interest, had prevented Juliette and her husband from taking any honeymoon immediately after their marriage. Now, in the spring of 1869, accompanied by Alice, they took their postponed wedding-tour to Italy. They visited Florence, then the capital of the Italian kingdom, Milan, Turin and Genoa. Furnished with useful introductions by Thiers and other friends, they met many interesting people, Cairoli, the Marquis Alfieri, Nino Bixio, the Garibaldian soldier, whose brother Alessandro had been so intimate a friend of Adam. At Florence they rejoiced to meet again the Italian exiles whom they had known in Paris. Mme. Adam, while admiring the intense patriotism of the Italians, was grieved to perceive how Napoléon’s papal policy had alienated them from France. At the meetings of the Italian Chamber, the opposition’s violent attacks on France cut her to the heart.
“C’est pour Adam et moi une grande tristesse,” she writes. “Quoi! tout le sang versé, nos sacrifices, notre amitié, notre dévouement, notre enthousiasme, à nous, républicains, qui nous à fait accepter un armistice dans notre lutte contre l’Empire, n’ont servi qu’à nous faire une ennemi violente de l’Italie.”[134]
Juliette was glad to see her last novel, L’Education de Laure, displayed in the book-shops of Milan. Driving home, along the Corniche Road, in company with Nino Bixio, they had a memorable journey, to which we shall refer later.