In vain did Dr. Lambert, penniless and disillusioned, plead for the return of his wife and daughter. “Not until you have proved yourself able to support them,” was Mme. Seron’s stern reply; and, she added relentlessly, “I adopt the child whom you abandoned, whom you left a prey to the direst poverty. She is mine, and shall be as long as I live.”
Thus ended the first of those kidnappings which were to recur at intervals through the first sixteen years of Juliette’s life, until her first marriage. They arose not merely from the rival claims of parents and grandparents to possess the child, but from the fact that each of these four persons held pronounced and divergent opinions as to the upbringing of their adored one. In the quarrels which ensued, Mme. Seron and Dr. Lambert were the protagonists; Dr. Seron and Mme. Lambert played the parts of supers, or supported one side or the other.
We are all, even the most obstinate and strong-minded, moulded, though often unconsciously, by various intellectual influences. To this rule Juliette, despite her indomitable will and personal idiosyncrasy, was no exception. And a study of her mental development shows her passing through three distinct phases: her childhood and youth, when her grandmother’s or her father’s influence dominated alternately: middle life, when broadly speaking she sympathised with her father’s opinions: her later years, after the war of 1870, when more or less she was returning to her grandmother’s point of view.
With these two formative forces, with these two remarkable persons, Mme. Seron and her son-in-law, Dr. Lambert, we must become intimately acquainted if we would understand Juliette’s character and career. We must also remember that the time of Juliette’s upbringing was the hey-day of the romantic period, a time when individualism ran rampant, when the most Utopian of dreamers believed they were about to realise their wildest hopes. It was true that after half a century of experiments in government France had practically settled down for a while into the jog-trot of Louis Philippe’s reign. But beneath the veil of the moderate and the commonplace which this compromise of constitutional monarchy had cast over the country, there bubbled and boiled a welter of effervescence which twelve years after Juliette’s birth exploded in the Revolution of 1848.
The national temperament of France during the first half of the last century partly accounts for the temperament of Juliette’s family, and for the atmosphere of intellectual and emotional feverishness in which she was brought up. Looking back from the vantage point of old age on the stormy scenes of her childhood, she asked: “Were we more sensitive then, more susceptible, more dramatic than to-day? I believe we were.”[3] It is not improbable also that Mme. Adam, regarding her childhood through the long vista of years, may have unconsciously exaggerated the violence of her sentiments and experiences. One of her charms is that feeling for the dramatic, with which Gambetta once reproached her, saying, “Vous dramatisez trop, madame!”
“My love for my grandmother and for my daughter,” said Mme. Adam to me shortly before her eightieth birthday, “have been the two great passions of my life.”
Of her grandmother, she announces in the beginning of her Souvenirs: “I shall write of her often, but shall I ever ... be able to make her live with that originality, that passion for the romantic which she infused into us all, lifting on to the plane of high romance the whole of our family life and each one of our daily actions?”
Though Mme. Seron hardly ever went outside her own domestic domain except to attend mass on Sunday, her granddaughter could say that never had she met a mind “more avid of adventure, more scornful of the every-day and the commonplace, more eager for the romantic in life and in literature.”