The next year the Adams were staying at Pierrefonds. There George Sand joined them, and they spent together a delightful fortnight there. In all that concerned her young friend, in Juliette’s spiritual, professional, domestic and physical welfare, Mme. Sand took the deepest interest. She marvelled at the numerous activities Juliette continued to crowd into her life.
“J’admire q’étant ‘mondaine’ et toujours par monts et par vaux,” she writes, “et très occupée de la famille et du ménage, vous ayez le temps d’écrire et de penser. Au reste, cette activité est bonne à l’esprit, mais n’usez pas trop le corps.”[161]
Sometimes George Sand feared for her friend the consequences of her excitable temperament and her untiring energy. She would have liked to have seen in her something of the serenity which the great George had herself acquired. But she realised that with Juliette, as with herself, this calm, this aloofness from life’s petty worries, would come with old age. “We must not ask youth to anticipate age,” she wrote. “And youth’s charm is in its impressionability.”[162] Nevertheless, she adjures her friend to cultivate moderation in all things, not to strive after violent sensations. “You are passionate and exalted,” she wrote to Juliette; “that is good and beautiful, and we love you for it.” “But,” she adds, “do not, in your craving for emotion, afflict yourself unnecessarily. Spend yourself, but do not waste yourself.... Your sleeplessness is not natural to youth.” It indicated, thought Mme. Sand, that something was wrong in Juliette’s ordering of her life. She advised her not to work at night, but to go to bed at eleven, to rise at six and to write then, before the time came for her daughter’s morning lessons. The writer of this letter did not herself follow these precepts. But she had long passed out of Juliette’s condition of nervous excitability. “Work,” she added, “is an act of lucidity. Now, perfect lucidity is impossible without preliminary rest.”
Alas! the course of international affairs was rapidly rendering impossible that calm restfulness to which George Sand was so wisely exhorting Juliette.
In the summer of 1870 the Adams repeated their visit to Nohant. On the 15th of July diplomatic relations between France and Prussia were severed. On the 25th, M. Émile Ollivier read before the Corps Legislatif the French Government’s declaration of war.
The house-party at Nohant immediately broke up, and the Adams returned to Paris.
FOOTNOTES:
[138] W. H. Myers, Modern Essays (1883).
[139] George Sand, Correspondance, V. 164.
[140] Souvenirs, III. 282-3.