“Et me voilà,” writes Juliette, “aussi joyeuse qu’Edmond Adam va devenir jaloux.”[148] Mme. Sand, who adored children and was never tired of talking of her own little granddaughter Aurora, insisted on seeing Alice. With Juliette’s daughter it was a case of love at first sight. For Mme. Sand, who had a nickname for every one she loved, Alice was henceforth Topaz, because of the dark olive complexion she had inherited from her Sicilian father, Lamessine.
Henceforth Juliette lived in the hope of that promised winter visit to Bruyères. But before her southern flight in November, she was to see a great deal of her friend in Paris. In September they went together to Rouen and Jumièges.[149] They dined together in town. Once at Mme. Sand’s favourite restaurant, the famous Magny’s, on the left bank,[150] Juliette met for the first time an illustrious quartette of whom she was to see much later: Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Gustave Flaubert and Dumas fils. The friendship between Juliette and Flaubert, which dates from that evening, endured until the novelist’s death. With Flaubert’s family Mme. Adam has continued intimate, and the opening weeks of this year (1917) she spent with Flaubert’s niece at her country house in the department of Var. The talk, chez Magny, that evening[151] was lively and frank, to say the least of it. The youth, the beauty, the charm of Mme. Sand’s new friend, provoked Dumas to scoff at the idea of her becoming a writer and a bas bleu. He, like Michel Lévy of old,[152] believed, as he put it, that she had something better to do. “Il faut aimer, aimer, aimer,” he cried. And Flaubert and the de Goncourts repeated, “Il faut aimer.” “To learn that, gentlemen, I have not waited for your words of wisdom,” replied Juliette. “I love to love whom I love, and he, whom I love, loves to see me write.”
“The fool,” cried Dumas.
“What an extraordinary idea,” exclaimed Mme. Sand, “to attempt to prove in my presence that a woman who is a writer cannot love.”
“There is truth in it all the same,” said Edmond de Goncourt.
“Never,” protested George Sand. “The reproach which may be brought against women writers is precisely that they have loved too much. Et la preuve, dedans moi-même, je la treuve,” she added, relapsing into patois.
“You,” cried Dumas, “why you have never loved anything but the prefigurings of the heroes of your future novels, something like the marionettes,[153] whom you have rigged out to repeat your play. Can that be called loving?”
“Come,” said Flaubert. “Now, we four are writers of some standing. Can we be called great lovers?”