In no point, save in their passionate adoration of Juliette, did Mme. Seron and her son-in-law agree. Yet in temperament they were not altogether unlike; for they were both dreamers. But Juliette’s grandmother, if she did not possess it, at least respected that worldly wisdom which Dr. Lambert regarded with the utmost contempt. He was an idealist pure and simple. We have seen him sacrificing a brilliant ecclesiastical career to conscientious scruples. We have seen him risking the happiness of his wife and child in his pursuit of science. We shall see him again, more than once risking not only his family’s happiness but his own life in the cause of political reform.
“I am the daughter,” writes Mme. Adam, “of a sincere sectary ... of one who dreamed of absolute liberty, absolute equality.... Only for a moment, during the Commune, did he believe his dream realised.”
Jean Louis Lambert was one of those rare persons with tastes both scientific and literary. But it was only classical literature that appealed to him. He was a passionate Grecian and an ardent admirer of the French masterpieces of le grand siècle. In the remarkable literary works which his own day was producing, in the novels of Balzac and George Sand, which were his mother-in-law’s meat and drink, he took not the slightest interest. His Homer, on the other hand, he almost knew by heart; and he made his little daughter as familiar with tales from the Iliad as are most children with “Red Riding Hood” or “Cinderella.” Dr. Lambert himself wrote verses in the classic style, which he would recite to his mother-in-law; but there were others which were red republican, and which he would have kept from her hearing had not that enfant terrible of a Juliette caught them up and repeated them parrot-like to her grandparents. Dr. Seron, an old soldier of la grande armée, was infuriated by poems in which his son-in-law dared to attack his idol, the Emperor.
Indeed, the family tendency to wrangle was considerably accentuated by the fact that three of its members (Juliette’s mother took no interest in public affairs) held directly divergent political opinions. Mme. Seron was a liberal monarchist, Dr. Seron a Buonapartist, and Dr. Lambert a social democrat. None of these fervent partisans had the remotest idea of keeping their opinions to themselves. Consequently, whenever Dr. Lambert and his wife drove over from Blérancourt, a village nine miles from Chauny, where Juliette’s father had set up in practice, the voice of controversy rose high. These debates generally occurred at meal time. And baby Juliette, accustomed to have the attention of her doting elders fixed upon herself, strongly objected to these diversions. She tells how to restore herself to the limelight she would clamber into the middle of the table and begin to upset the plates and glasses. The device never failed. Discussion ceased; the three controversialists would be overcome with laughter, while the silent member of the group, Juliette’s mother, would suddenly become active. Snatching her daughter from the wreck on the table, she would be administering a sound smacking when three pairs of hands would be eagerly outstretched to rescue the culprit. Thus Juliette learnt two lessons: first, not to fear her mother’s severity, from which she might always count upon the indulgence of her other relatives to deliver her; second, to appreciate “that first born of common sense,” the comic spirit. In her earliest years it was her inestimable privilege to have “laughter for nurse, pure fun for friend.”
George Meredith, it will be remembered, divides humanity[4] into three classes: the non-laughers, the excessive laughers and those who stand where the comic spirit places them, “at middle distance between the inveterate opponents and the drum and fife supporters of comedy.”
In the table scene just described, each of these three classes is represented. Juliette’s mother was a non-laugher, a morbid person whose lack of fun, as is inevitable with women, degraded her to be a mere household drudge. Juliette’s grandfather, the jovial doctor, whose funny stories, nicknamed Seronnades, enlivened the countryside, was of the drum and fife order, an apostle of le gros rire. Juliette’s grandmother and father, though differing in so many respects, were alike endowed with the true comic spirit. Long years later, looking back on her turbulent childhood, Mme. Adam wrote: “I should probably have been intolerable, had not the gay and merry temperaments of my grandparents ... introduced into our relationship a jocular spirit which did not admit of solemnity, even in our grievances. Whenever I succeeded in reconciling them after one of their disputes, it was because I had made them laugh.”[5] “Certainly,” exclaimed a character in one of Pierre Mille’s stories, “he was no Latin, for he took everything seriously.”[6] Juliette Adam, Gallic by birth, Græco-Latin by education, as she likes to describe herself, has always been ready to see a joke, even when it was at her own expense. Thus she is proud to relate, how when at one of George Sand’s dinner-parties, Flaubert, in Dumas’ presence, pointed out that in one of her books she had made a man who had lost an arm take a box in both hands, she joined in the laugh, saying gaily, “Merci, Maître.”[7]
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Fields of France, 163.
[3] Souvenirs, I. 350.
[4] An Essay on the Spirit of Comedy, 62, 1903.