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by Juliette Adam
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Title: The romance of my childhood and youth
Author: Juliette Adam
Release Date: April 16, 2023 [eBook #70563]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF MY CHILDHOOD
AND YOUTH ***
THE ROMANCE OF MY
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
[Illustration: _Léopold Flameng sc_]
THE
ROMANCE
OF MY
CHILDHOOD
AND YOUTH
MME·EDMOND ADAM
(JVLIETTE LAMBER)
1902
D·APPLETON & CO·
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Published, November, 1902
PREFACE
_At the present time, the interest which a writer’s work may have lies
greatly in the study of those first impulses which gave it birth, of
the surroundings amid which it was elaborated, and of the connection
between the end pursued and the achievement._
_In former times a writer’s personality was of small importance. His
works were deemed sufficient. The duality presented by a study of
the causes of production, and the production itself, was a matter of
interest only to a small minority of readers._
_By degrees, however, with the writer’s own consent, indiscreet glances
were thrown into the personal lives of those whose mission it was to
direct, enlighten, or amuse the lives of other people._
_Forty or fifty years ago the public first read the book, and judged a
writer by his writings, and then would often base their judgments on
the opinion of some great critic, who had slowly given proof of his
knowledge, and whose ideas were found worthy of adoption._
_To-day it is quite the contrary. A new book is so generally and
indiscreetly announced that the larger portion of the public is quite
aware both of the book and of the process of its production. A number
of small reviews of the volume are read; they often are, in fact, just
so many interviews with the author, and, under the general impression
thus imparted, the book is read--a great favour for the writer are such
notices, for people might speak of a book and criticise it in that way
without ever having read it._
_General curiosity is insatiable with regard to the small details
concerning the habits and customs of an author if he is already
celebrated, or is likely to achieve success._
_But, on the other hand, if the present custom weakens to an infinite
degree the elements of personal appreciation of any work, it adds to
knowledge of the author’s portrait, which stands out from all these
inquiries and indiscretions, with traits of physiognomy that possess,
perhaps, more lively interest._
_We must obviously submit to the custom, and ask ourselves whether, by
means of much observation of both the author and his work, we may not
obtain a broader and more enlightened criticism, uniting the author’s
intentions with the result achieved by his book._
_Or else is it because, overworked as we are, we have perhaps become
unable to enjoy the delight of reading a book for itself, containing,
by chance, no anecdotes which please us--nothing, in fact, outside the
actual interest of the book itself, but forming part of it; or is it
that we have no longer any time for profound or matured reflection,
or judgments expressed in axioms, the terms of which have long been
weighed in the balance of thought?_
_It requires time to discover the master thought of any work of real
worth, in order to disclose its high morality, its art tendencies._
_The maddening rule of our new mode of life being the desire to know
all things as quickly as possible, we ask the author, whose motives are
known beforehand, what he meant to say, or do, or prove, and in this
way we think to gain time and not run the risk of “idle dreaming.”_
_Ah! as to dreams, shall we speak of them?--golden money, no longer
current, which we scatter behind us in our haste to pursue what others
are pursuing. If, by chance, we find it again, how soiled by the road’s
dust it seems!_
_The asking of a question or two, and even the explanation of a
phenomenon which is often as clear as day, can be undertaken as we
hurry along, but simply to examine the “whys and wherefores” of
things, or to attempt to discover the laws of facts, and group them
methodically, giving the logical relation of these laws in general
origins--verily, only a few vulgar slang words can express the
impression made on the minds of those who wish to be considered “modern
men,” with respect to these very problems of which we, of the elder
generation, are so fond, and which are called by the moderns--“stuff.”_
_“In writing your memoirs you encourage what you appear to condemn,”
people will doubtless say to me. But I condemn nothing. I simply note
a state of mind and ways of life. I feel sure that if in “my time” an
author’s work held the first place, and that if nowadays the author
himself excites disproportionate interest, the future will establish an
equilibrium between these two extremes._
_If the candles of literary people of the present time are burned at
both ends, it is, perhaps, because there remain few embers of the
luminous torches of the past. The authors of the future will be obliged
to renew their provision of wood, which must burn itself out, normally,
in the middle._
_However this may be, it is, perhaps, profitable to register the facts
in a fleeting epoch for the use of those who are running in pursuit of
an epoch which is to take its place._
_Old people are fond of describing what took place in former times,
and they have a real mission so to do if only they will refrain from
trying to enforce upon us the superiority of the teaching of that
which has disappeared, and if they will tell their story simply,
leaving a younger generation to discover its lesson, and from it form
conclusions._
_Those of the older generation who educated us thought sentimentalism
and humanity, which appeared at first brutally, and then were
gloriously driven back by the Terror and the Empire, had returned again
triumphantly._
_Moreover, the Revolution and Bonaparte had opened our gates to a
foreign influx. Our fathers gave shelter to every Utopian idea brought
from Italy, Germany, Austria, and Russia. The mixture was so confusing
that all manner of extravagant things sprang from it._
_The consciences of the “men of progress” were concentrated around
the social conception of the “suffering classes,” and the political
conception involved in the crimes of the “higher classes.” Love and
indignation were the food with which they fed our youthful hearts._
_The Bible, the socialism of Christ, and examples of sublimity of
character taken from Greece and Rome, became the strange mixture that
was the guiding spirit of our fathers’ action, and inspired our primal
ideas._
_People of reason, who possessed solid common-sense, the Bourgeois,
were, naturally, to a much overrated degree, our enemies._
_We are, in all our primal impulses, the children of the men of 1848;
our very reaction was born of their action._
_We have been led on solely by their example; haunted, just as they
were, by the feeling that we should add to our unlimited dreams what
they had deemed to be the counterpoise to the great love of humanity,
namely, science; but a science which we thought was to bring relief to
the worker, by machinery, a cheaper rate of living to the poor, and a
more equal distribution of wealth to the unfortunate._
_“The rights of man,” that oft-repeated phrase which has never been
rightly understood by those who called themselves its defenders,
possessed for them, before, during, and after 1848, only one
significance, namely: the realisation by society in general of the
greatest sum of possible happiness for each individual._
_Those who at that time proclaimed themselves socialists--and this
tradition exists among the same class of the present day--took no
account of general society, of its affiliations, of its necessary
average existence, or of its “badly cut coats,” so to speak._
_They refused to see opposed to the rights of the socialist man the
general social rights, which mean, in plain words, the rights of each
individual man, and which, summed up, become the rights of all men._
_Religious dogma alone can affirm the absolute right of an individual
soul, because each soul comes in contact with other souls only in the
infinite. Absoluteness can only be realised in evolutions towards
death. But contact with living men has its contingencies which society
pulverises well or badly, according as individuals mingle together
happily or not, or according as they disturb society or serve it well._
_Social problems, whether robed in dithyrambic form or clad in
offensive rags, are unable to force upon society reforms which are
laid down in names unless society has become ready to assimilate
them; otherwise they upset society, agitate it, and throw it back on
reaction._
_I am the daughter of a man who was a sincere sectarian, disinterested
even to self-sacrifice, and who dreamed of absolute liberty and
absolute equality. Until the terrible year of 1870, his mind mastered
my own. For an instant, during the days of the Commune, he thought his
dreams were about to be realised. Were he alive now, he would be a
disciple of Monsieur Brisson, whose political ancestor he was. He would
have pursued only one idea: the upsetting of everything._
_The revolutionists and the Brissonists are, after all, only belated
and antiquated minds, not yet freed from sophistries by the terrible
vision of 1870; not stimulated by the lamentations heard from men
on French soil, when trodden under foot by Prussia; not armed with
patriotic combativeness by the sight of the panting flesh of those
provinces which were torn from France, and which, in the figurative
image of our country, occupy the place of the heart._
JULIETTE ADAM.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. MY GRANDMOTHER 1
II. WHEN THE ALLIES WERE AT THE GATES OF PARIS 26
III. THE MARRIAGE OF MY FATHER AND MOTHER 35
IV. BORN IN AN INN 46
V. MY EARLY CHILDHOOD 57
VI. FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL 68
VII. I GO TO A WEDDING 81
VIII. “FAMILY DRAMAS” 92
IX. LEARNING TO BE BRAVE 101
X. A THREE WEEKS’ VISIT 108
XI. A PAINFUL RETURN HOME 121
XII. A VISIT TO MY GREAT-AUNTS 129
XIII. I MAKE NEW FRIENDS 140
XIV. SOME NEW IMPRESSIONS GAINED 152
XV. THE END OF MY HOLIDAY 159
XVI. AT HOME AGAIN 165
XVII. I BEGIN TO MANAGE MY FAMILY 174
XVIII. I REVISIT CHIVRES 185
XIX. I BEGIN MY LITERARY WORK 191
XX. LOUIS NAPOLEON’S FLIGHT FROM PRISON 198
XXI. MY FIRST GREAT SORROW 207
XXII. MY FIRST RAILWAY JOURNEY 219
XXIII. MY FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE SEA 225
XXIV. I RECEIVE A HANDSOME GIFT 233
XXV. OUR HOMEWARD JOURNEY 240
XXVI. MY FIRST COMMUNION 249
XXVII. WE DISCUSS FRENCH LITERATURE 260
XXVIII. WE TALK ABOUT POLITICS 271
XXIX. TALKS ABOUT NATURE 279
XXX. A SERIOUS ACCIDENT 286
XXXI. “LIBERTY, EQUALITY, AND FRATERNITY” 291
XXXII. “VIVE LA RÉPUBLIQUE!” 299
XXXIII. “OTHER TIMES, OTHER MANNERS” 312
XXXIV. I GO TO BOARDING-SCHOOL 319
XXXV. DARK DAYS FOR THE REPUBLIC 333
XXXVI. ANOTHER VISIT AT CHIVRES 344
XXXVII. I BEGIN TO STUDY HOUSEKEEPING 350
XXXVIII. AN EXCITING INCIDENT 357
XXXIX. AN OFFER OF MARRIAGE 366
XL. THE “FAMILY DRAMA” AGAIN 382
XLI. MY MARRIAGE AND ITS RESULTS 393
THE ROMANCE OF MY CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
I
MY GRANDMOTHER
As I advance in years, one of the things which astonishes me most is
the singular vividness of my memories of my childhood.
Some of them, it is true, have been related many times over to
me--and these are the most indistinct--by the nurse who tended me and
by my grandparents, for whom everything that concerned their only
granddaughter had a primal importance.
However, amid these oft-repeated stories I discover impressions, acts,
that might have been known to any of my family, which arise before me
with extraordinary precision.
I am the prey, moreover, of a scruple, and I ask myself whether these
impressions really do come to me strictly in the manner in which I felt
and acted them at the time, or whether, returning to them after all the
experiences of life, I do not unconsciously exaggerate them?
To reassure my wish to be sincere, which has many disturbing
suggestions, I endeavour to recall to myself in what terms, at every
epoch of my life, I have spoken of my childhood, and also to obtain
information from a few notes, too rare, alas! that I wrote in my youth
which have been kept by my family. It is, therefore, preoccupied with a
jealous desire to be entirely truthful that I begin this work.
As I was brought up by my grandmother, I shall speak of her a great
deal. Shall I succeed in making her live again in all her originality,
in her passion for the romantic, which she imposed upon us all, making
the lives of her family, from the primal and dominating impulsion she
gave to all their actions, a perpetual race towards the romantic?
No woman in a gymnasium was ever more closely imprisoned. I never saw
my grandmother leave her large house and great garden a hundred times,
except to go to mass at eight o’clock on Sundays; on the other hand, I
never perceived in any mind such a love for adventure, such a horror
for preordained and enforced existence, such a constant and imperious
appetite for written or enacted romance.
Her affection for me was so absorbing that I monopolised her life, as
it were, from the moment when she consecrated it to me.
I loved her exclusively until the day when my father, with his power
for argument, in which he usually opposed the accepted ideas of our
surroundings, and, with his kindness of character, took possession of
my mind and led me to accept his way of thinking.
Between these two exceptional and somewhat erratic beings, the one
possessing admirable generosity of heart, sectarian uprightness,
passionately earnest in his unchangeable exaltations, the other with
true nobility of soul, rigid virtue, but with an imagination fantastic
beyond expression; between these two, loving them in turn, sometimes
one more than the other, I was cast about to such a degree that it
would have been impossible for me to find foothold for my original
thoughts, amid these continual oscillations, if I had not constantly
endeavoured to seek for my own true self and to find it. And yet, in
spite of this effort, what a long time it took me to free myself from
the double imprint given to my character by my beloved relatives!
What shielded me from total absorption by one or the other of them,
what caused me to escape from the ardent desire of both, to mould
me to their image, so dissimilar one from the other, was the very
precocious consciousness I had of the precious advantages of possessing
personal will.
Between my father and my grandmother I applied myself, instinctively at
first, determinedly later, to be something. Was that the starting-point
of my resolve to be somebody?
In the ceaseless struggle between my father and grandmother, myself
being the coveted prize, there were three of us.
Many stories are involved in my souvenirs, more strange, more
eccentric, one than the other, of the marriages of my grandparents and
great-grandparents in my maternal grandmother’s family.
Their adventures interested my youth to such a degree that I should not
hesitate to unfold them to the surprise of my readers were they not too
numerous.
My grandmother, who talked and who related stories with a very quick,
sharp, and bantering wit, took much pleasure in telling of the romantic
lives of her grandmothers. She delighted in repainting for me all these
family portraits on her side, never speaking to me of my father’s
family, which I grew to know later.
She possessed the pride of her merchant and _bourgeoise_ caste.
I learned through her many obscure things in the history of the
struggles of French royalty against the great feudal lords, the
internationalists of that time.
She said, speaking to me of her own people: “We are descended from
those merchant families of Noyon, of Chauny, of Saint-Quentin, so
influential in the councils of the communes, of whom several were
seneschals, faithful to their town, to their province above all,
faithful to royalty, not always to the king, to religion, not always
to the Pope; liberals, men of progress, of pure Gallic race, enriching
themselves with great honesty and strongly disdaining those among
themselves who, for services rendered to the sovereign, solicited from
him titles of nobility.”
My grandmother’s mother, when fourteen years old, fell madly in love
with one of her relatives from Noyon, who had come to talk business,
and who, after a day’s conversation, more serious than poetical, and
continued through breakfast and dinner, received at his departure the
following declaration from her: “Cousin, when you come next year it
will be to ask me in marriage.” They laughed much at this whim, but, as
the young girl was an only daughter and would have a large _dot_, the
relatives of Noyon, less well off, did not disdain the offer made to
their son.
When she was fifteen, the precocious Charlotte married her cousin
Raincourt, a very handsome youth twenty-two years of age, but she died
in childbed the following year, giving birth to my grandmother.
The young widower confided little Pélagie to his wife’s mother, now
a widow herself, and while my great-grandfather married again when
twenty-four years of age, and had three daughters, who were very
good, very properly educated--Sophie, Constance, and Anastasie--my
grandmother grew up like a little savage and sometimes stupefied the
quiet town of Chauny by the eccentricities of a spoiled child.
She read everything that fell into her hands, no selection being made
for her, and refused to allow herself to be led by any one, or for any
reason whatever.
As soon as she was thirteen she announced to her grandmother that her
education was finished. She left the boarding-school, where during five
years she had learned very little, and devoted herself entirely and for
the rest of her life to the reading of novels.
Witty, full of life, brilliant, and even sometimes a little impish,
my grandmother had red hair at a time when “carrotty”-coloured hair
had but little success. She had superb teeth, a delicate nose with
sensitive nostrils, bright green eyes, and her very white complexion
was marked with tiny yellow spots, all of which gave her the
physiognomy of an odd-looking yet very attractive girl.
Romantic, as had been her mother and her grandmothers, she wished to
choose her own husband, and she had not found him when she was fifteen.
In spite of the sad fate of her mother, who had died in childbirth,
being married too young, Pélagie was in despair at remaining a maid so
long.
Mlle. Lenormant’s predictions had given birth throughout France to a
crowd of fortune-tellers, and my grandmother consulted one, who told
her: “You will marry a stranger to this town.”
This did not astonish her, for she knew all those who could aspire to
her hand, and there was not one among them who answered to all that her
imagination sought in a husband. Not a single young man of Chauny of
good family had as yet had any romantic adventure.
She took good care not to confide her impatience to her three
half-sisters, their father having declared that Pélagie should not
marry before she was twenty-one. He wished to keep in his own hands the
administration of his first wife’s fortune as long as possible for the
benefit of the three daughters born of his second marriage.
These, moreover, continually said that Pélagie was too eccentric to be
marriageable. The eldest, Sophie, was only fourteen months younger than
Pélagie, but ten years older in common-sense and knowledge.
Pélagie made a voyage to Noyon with her grandmother to look for a
husband. She lived for a month in a handsome old house on the Cathedral
Square, owned by an aged relative who would have liked to make a second
marriage with her grandmother. The love-affair of these old people
amused her, but she did not find the husband for whom she was seeking,
and--she left as she came.
But one fine day a young surgeon arrived at Chauny in quest of practice.
Here is “the stranger to the town” predicted by the fortune-teller,
thought Pélagie even before she had seen him, and she spoke of her hope
to her grandmother.
“There is one thing to which I will never consent,” replied the latter,
“it is that you should marry any one who is not of a good _bourgeoise_
family,” and her grandmother assumed an air of authority, at which the
young girl laughed heartily.
The young surgeon’s name was Pierre Seron, and he could not have been
better born in the _bourgeoise_ class. He was descended from one of
the physicians of Louis XIV. His father was the most prominent doctor
at Compiègne, and his reputation reached as far as Paris. A cousin
Seron had been a Conventional with Jean de Bien, and had played a great
political rôle in Belgium, from whence the first French Serons had come.
“Of good family!” Pélagie and her grandmother repeated in chorus. “If
only he has not had too commonplace an existence,” thought Pélagie.
Pierre Seron went up and down all the streets of the town, so as to
make believe that he had already secured practice on arriving, and he
soon had some successful cases which gave him a reputation.
He was a superb-looking man, his figure resembling that of a grenadier
of the Imperial Guard. His face was not handsome. He wore his hair
flat _à la_ Napoleon, but his forehead was a little narrow, and he had
great, convex, grey eyes and too full a nose, but his mouth--he was
always clean-shaven--wore an attractive, gay, and mocking smile, in
spite of very thick, sensual lips.
He was never seen except in a dress coat and white cravat. In a word,
well-built, of fine presence, Pierre Seron had a distinguished air and
was really a very handsome man.
He would have needed to be blind, and not to have had the necessity of
making a rich marriage, if he had not remarked the interest which Mlle.
Pélagie Raincourt took in his comings and goings.
“Why, his father being a doctor at Compiègne, has this young surgeon
come to establish himself at Chauny?” asked the grandmother often.
“There must be something,” she said.
Oh, yes! there was something. And, as Pierre Seron was rather talkative
and as Compiègne was not a hundred leagues from Chauny, the story was
soon known.
He was simply a hero of romance. “His life is a romance--a great, a
real romance,” cried Pélagie one day on returning from a visit paid to
an old relative whom Pierre Seron was attending and from whom she had
heard it all!
Her grandmother, touched by her grandchild’s emotion, listened to the
story enthusiastically told by Pélagie, who was already in love with
Pierre Seron’s sad adventure as much as, and perhaps more than, with
himself.
He was the second son of a father who hated him from the day of his
birth. Doctor Seron loved only his elder son, his pride, he who should
have been an “only child.”
He continually said this to his timid, submissive wife, who hardly
dared to protect the ill-used, beaten younger son, who was made to live
with the servants.
Poor little fellow! except for a rare kiss, a furtive caress from his
mother, he was a victim to his family’s dislike.
One day, when very ill with the croup, his father wished to send him
to the hospital, fearing contagion for the elder brother. But his
mother on this occasion resisted. She shut herself up with him in his
little room, took care of him, watched over him, and by her energy and
devotion saved him from death. But she had worn out her own strength.
She seemed half-stunned, and the child suffered so much during his
convalescence that he was almost in as much danger as while ill.
When he was nine years old, a servant accused him of a theft which
he had committed himself, and he was driven from his home one autumn
night, possessing nothing but the poor clothes he wore and a few
crowns, painfully economised by his mother, who slipped them into his
hand without even kissing him.
He lay in front of the door when it was closed upon him, hoping
that some one passing would crush him. He cried, he supplicated. The
neighbours gathered around him, pitying him, and saying loudly that it
was abominable, that the law should protect the unhappy little child,
but no one dared to take him to his home.
As soon as Pierre found himself alone again, abandoned by all, he
looked for a last time at what he called “the great, wicked and shining
eyes” of the lighted windows of the house.
“That,” said Pélagie to her grandmother, “was the very phrase Pierre
Seron used in relating his story, and the poor boy started off, not
knowing whither he went.”
Instinctively he turned towards a farm, where every morning at dawn,
and in all weathers, his father’s servants sent him to get milk.
The farmer’s wife had felt pity for him many times before when he was
telling her of his sufferings, and he now remembered something she had
one day said to him: “You would be happier as a cowherd.”
He entered the farmhouse, where the farmers were at supper, and,
sitting down beside them, he burst into tears. He could not speak.
“Have they driven you from your home?” asked the farmer’s wife. He made
a sign: “Yes.” Then the good people tried to console him, made him eat
some supper, and put him to sleep on some fresh straw in the stable.
They kept him with them, giving him work on the farm by which he earned
his food.
The next year, when he was ten years of age, though he looked fourteen,
so much had he grown, the cowherd being gone, he replaced him. He
did everything in his power to prove his gratitude to those who had
sheltered him. Being faithful at his work, devoted to his protectors,
and very intelligent, he compensated for his youth by his good will,
always on the alert.
The farmer, after the day when Pierre Seron went to him, refused to
sell any more milk to Doctor Seron, and later he went bravely to
express his indignation to him, thinking to humiliate him when he
should hear that his son had become a cowherd.
“So much the better,” replied his father, harshly, “it is probably the
only work that he will ever be able to do.”
These words, repeated to Pierre, instead of discouraging him, settled
his fate.
“I will also be a Doctor Seron one day,” he swore to himself.
His mother had taught him to read Latin-French in a small, old medical
dictionary, which never left him, and by the aid of which he improved
his very imperfect knowledge of the conjunction of words.
From that day, while he was watching his cows, not only did he learn
to read well and to write with a stick on the ground, but he learned
also the Latin and French words in the dictionary, one by one, and his
youthful brain developed with this rude and imperfect method of study.
Whenever he made a little money he bought books on medicine with it,
and studied hard by day; in the evenings he read under the farmer’s
smoky lamp, and at night by moonlight.
He gathered simples for an herbalist whom he had met in the fields, and
received some useful lessons from him. This herbalist took an interest
in the poor child, directed his studies a little, and bought him some
useful books.
Pierre invented a pretty wicker-basket in which to put fresh cheese
during the summer, and, as the farmer’s wife sold her cheese in these
baskets for a few cents extra, she shared the profits with Pierre.
Some years passed thus. Pierre tried several times to see his mother,
but she lived shut up in the house, sequestered, perhaps, and he could
never succeed in catching a glimpse of her.
His brother, who was five years older than himself, and studying
medicine at Paris, passed his time merrily during his vacations at home
with the young men of the town.
Pierre saw him pointed out by a friend one day, when he came with a
troop of young men and pretty girls to drink warm milk at the farm.
“This milk is served to you by the cowherd of this place, who is your
legitimate brother,” said Pierre to him, presenting him with a frothy
bowl of it.
“My brother is dead,” replied he.
“You will find him before many years very much alive in Paris, sir!”
answered Pierre.
On hearing of this incident there was much talk at Compiègne over the
half-forgotten story of the exiled and abandoned child.
As the elder son gave very little satisfaction to his father, they said
it was God who was punishing the latter for his cruelty, but no one
paid any attention to the cowherd’s prediction.
When he was nineteen Pierre possessed eleven hundred francs of savings.
One autumn day when his father took the diligence, as he did every
fortnight to go and see his eldest son at Paris, and especially to
recommend him to his professors, who could do nothing with this
student, an enemy of study, Pierre Seron, the younger, with bare feet,
in order not to use his shoes, and with his knapsack on his back,
started for the capital.
One can imagine in what sort of hovel he lived in the Latin quarter.
Before inscribing himself at the Faculty, he sought out night-work on
the wharves. His tall figure was an excellent recommendation for him,
and he was engaged as an unloader of boats from eight o’clock in the
evening to two o’clock in the morning at the price of forty-five cents.
He needed no more on which to live, and he even hoped to add to his
small hoard, which he feared would not be sufficient to pay for his
terms and his books.
How many times have I, myself, made my grandfather tell me of this
epoch of his life, which he recalled with pride.
Pélagie continued her story to her grandmother, who listened
open-mouthed, touched to tears.
Pierre had taken his working clothes with him, and every night he
became, not a dancing costumed sailor at public balls like his brother,
but a boat-heaver on the Seine wharves.
During the day he followed the lectures with such zeal, such
application, such passionate ardour, that he was soon remarked by his
professors.
His name struck them; they questioned him, and one of them whom Doctor
Seron had offended by reproaching him rudely for severity towards his
eldest son, extolled the younger Seron, took special interest in him,
and soon two camps were formed: that of the hard workers and friends of
Pierre, and that of the rakes, friends of Théophile Seron. One day they
came to blows, and Pierre, taking his brother by the arms, shook him
vigorously.
“I told you that your brother, the cowherd, would find you again in
Paris,” he said, letting him fall rather heavily on the floor.
While his brother was holding high revel, Pierre was freezing under
the roofs in winter, and roasting beneath them in summer, eating and
sleeping badly, and working every night on the wharves. On Sundays he
mended his clothes, bought at the old clothes-man’s, which were far
from being good, and he washed his own poor linen. Pierre wore only
shirt-fronts and wristbands of passable quality, his shirt being of the
coarsest material. His socks had only tops and no bottoms. He suffered
in every way from poverty and all manner of privations.
But he had, on the other hand, the satisfaction of feeling the
advantage it was to have had refined parents. He easily acquired good
manners, and his hereditary intelligence seemed to fit him for the
most arduous medical studies. He found that he possessed faculties
of assimilation which astonished himself. To be brief, he passed his
examinations brilliantly, while his brother failed in every one.
Doctor Seron, whom he met from time to time with his brother, was now
an old man, bent down beneath the weight of troubles; his well-beloved
son was ruining him.
When Pierre Seron had finished his studies and obtained his degrees,
he wrote to his father and mother, saying that he would return to them
like a son who had only been absent for a time, and that he forgave
everything. He received no answer from his mother, but a letter full of
furious maledictions from his father.
His friend, the herbalist of Compiègne, discovered that there was a
chance for him at Chauny, and lent him some money. He found no help
except from this faithful protector.
“And so it happens,” continued Pélagie Raincourt, “that Pierre Seron
has come to establish himself in our town, where I have been waiting
for him,” and she added: “Grandmother, he must be my husband.”
“Certainly,” replied her grandmother, “I love him, brave heart!
already, but he must fall in love with you.”
Pélagie had never thought of that.
A friend was commissioned to ask Doctor Seron--they already gave him
this title, without adding his first name, in order to avenge his
father’s cruelties--a friend was asked to question him with regard to
the possible feelings with which Mlle. Pélagie Raincourt had inspired
him.
“She is a handsome girl,” he replied, “but I detest red-haired women.”
It can be imagined what Pélagie felt when her grandmother, with
infinite precautions, told her his answer, for she had always thought
herself irresistible.
Her despair and rage were so great that she threatened to throw herself
out of the window. As she was in her room, on the first story, she
leaned out so suddenly that her frightened grandmother caught hold of
her, and pulling her violently backward, caught her foot in Pélagie’s
long gown, fell and dislocated her wrist.
They sent for Doctor Seron, who came at once, and more like a
bone-setter, anxious to make an effect on important patients than like
a prudent surgeon, he reset her wrist.
Pélagie lavished the most affectionate care on her beloved grandmother,
who was suffering through her fault. She was haughty, almost insolent
to Doctor Seron, who “detested red-haired women,” but she struck him
by her extreme grace, and by her wit, which he was surprised to find
so original, so brilliant in a provincial girl. He came twice a day,
and, cruel though he was, he pleased Pélagie more than ever with his
attractive Compiègne accent, and that of Paris, a little lisping.
But she had endured too many emotions. She was taken with fever and
obliged to go to bed. Pierre took great interest in attending her, and
soon lost his head seeing himself adored by an attractive, rich young
girl scarcely sixteen, and loved maternally by her grandmother, for he
had always considered family affection as the most rare and enviable
happiness.
One evening Pierre declared his love in as burning words as Pélagie
could desire; and then and there they both went and knelt before her
delighted grandmother and obtained her consent to their marriage.
Doctor Seron asked at once that the wedding day should be fixed,
but they were obliged to enlighten him on the existing situation of
affairs, and to acquaint him with the obstacles to so prompt a solution.
Pierre, who was very poor and in no wise insensible to the advantages
of his betrothed’s fortune, found it somewhat hard to abandon to his
father-in-law, as the grandmother advised, all, or the greater part of,
the famous _dot_ of his first wife, which Monsieur Raincourt did not
wish to relinquish. He proposed to reflect a few days over the best
measures to take and to see a notary. But the notary saw no possibility
of doing without the father’s consent, or to escape from the conditions
which Pélagie’s grandmother presumed he would exact.
“I will double,” said the latter, “what I intended to give Pélagie, if
her father bargains over my beloved grandchild’s happiness.”
Doctor Seron went off to ask Monsieur Raincourt for his daughter
Pélagie’s hand, which was refused until he proposed--if he obtained her
hand--very pretty, by the way--to ask no account of his tutorship.
The agreement was concluded and the wedding day fixed.
Pierre Seron wrote again to his mother and father, persisting in
begging some token of their affection. But he received no word, not a
single line from his mother, only more curses from his father.
He learned by a letter from his friend the herbalist, who consented
to be one of the witnesses to his marriage, that his brother was dying
at Compiègne; that his father, two thirds ruined by having lost his
practice through his too frequent journeys to Paris to snatch away his
son from his debaucheries, had been struck with paralysis.
Thus was misfortune overwhelming him who had grown hard in injustice
and in cruelty, while the poor boy, so shamefully driven from his home,
saw his situation greatly improved for the better, and the hour of
complete happiness approaching.
He was about to have his dreams realised, to possess a fine fortune, a
captivating wife, of whom he became more and more fond, and who loved
him madly.
But on the eve of the day so earnestly desired, Pélagie was determined
to provoke her sisters, already irritated at this marriage which made
her so insolently happy. She wished to take revenge for all she had
endured hearing her youngest sister, Sophie, say constantly to her:
“You are not marriageable.”
And, when the contract was signed, when everything was ready and all
obstacles overcome for the wedding on the morrow, a very violent
scene took place between the future Madame Pierre Seron and her three
sisters.
Pélagie’s stepmother took sides with her daughters, their father with
his wife, and the marriage was cancelled, Monsieur Raincourt taking
back his consent and disavowing his promises.
Pélagie’s grandmother lost patience with her, Pierre was in despair,
and the young girl took to her bed, furious with herself, weeping,
biting her pillow, haunted in her feverish sleeplessness with the
most extraordinary projects, and making up her mind to do the most
unheard-of things.
At break of day, beside herself, not knowing what she was doing,
she left the house in her dressing-gown and night-cap, and started
on foot for Noyon, saying to herself she would seek asylum with her
grandmother’s old friend and her relative.
What she wished above all was to escape Pierre’s reproaches, her
grandmother’s blame, and not to hear the echo of all the gossip of the
town, which she knew would reach her ears. The humiliation of being
condemned by public opinion, the sorrow to have made Pierre suffer,
who had already suffered so much, was such agonising pain to her
that she felt obliged to fly. She was trying to escape from her own
self-condemnation, which followed her.
After proceeding some miles, little used to walking, exhausted, she
sat down on a heap of stones, her head in her hands, weeping aloud in
despair.
A horseman passed in a dress coat and white cravat, bare-headed and
mounted on a saddleless horse: it was Pierre, and he saw her.
“Your father has consented again,” he said, jumping off the horse.
“Come quickly, I will put you up behind, and, to be sure that he does
not take back his word again and that you will not commit any other
folly, we will go straight to the church, where your grandmother has
had everything prepared. It was she who divined that you had taken the
road to Noyon, unless you should have come to my house, for she even
suspected you of being capable of that, silly girl that you are!”
He lifted her up on the horse, supported her there with one arm, while
with the other hand he held a simple halter passed round the animal’s
neck.
“Come, come,” said he, “it is high time you should have a master. You
deserve to be whipped.”
“But,” she replied, made merry with the romantic adventure; “I am not
going to be married in a night-cap.”
“Why not? It is a penance you deserve, and you have great need of
absolution. You can dress yourself as a bride when you have become
one, at the end of the wedding.”
And so it was, sitting up behind a bare-backed horse, that my
grandmother made her entrance into Chauny. It was nine o’clock in the
morning, and all the gossips were at the windows, in the street, and at
the church door.
Pélagie got down from the horse, with hair dishevelled under her
night-cap, and her eyes still swollen from tears. A woman in the street
pinned a white pink on her night-cap, and she entered the church on
Pierre’s arm. There was a general outburst of laughter. Never had such
a bride been seen.
The old priest, who was attached to Pélagie on account of her charity
and kindness, could not keep from laughing himself, and he made haste,
smiling through half of the ceremony.
Pélagie turned and faced the crowd. People thought her confusion would
make her feel like sinking to the ground. “It is a merry marriage,”
was all she said. And thus was my very romantic grandmother married,
scandalising a great number of persons and amusing others.
The white pink and the night-cap became family relics. I have seen and
held them in my hand, knowing their history.
II
WHEN THE ALLIES WERE AT THE GATES OF PARIS
Twenty days after his marriage, although he had drawn one of the first
numbers when the drawing for lots for the army took place, Doctor Seron
received orders to leave for the imperial army as surgeon. He was
obliged to find a surgeon to take his place, and this cost a very large
sum.
At the end of the year Madame Pierre Seron became the mother of twin
daughters. The young couple were perfectly happy. The poor, abandoned
child had become a tender, glad father, who would return often to the
house to rock his daughters and to amuse them by singing to them.
The children were not eight months old when the poor young surgeon
received new orders to join the Imperial army in Germany. Pierre
Seron did not look for a substitute this time. His wife’s _dot_ was
diminishing too fast, and he was obliged to think of future _dots_ for
his daughters. He left them with a breaking heart.
Pélagie’s grandmother went to live with her, because it was impossible
to leave the young woman alone, especially as her father, stepmother,
and sisters, to whom Doctor Seron had turned a cold shoulder, often
making them ridiculous by his witty remarks, and whose lives he had
made quite unpleasant, would seize the young surgeon’s departure as an
occasion to revenge themselves; but Pélagie and her grandmother were
upheld by Pierre’s numerous friends, and all the town took sides with
the half-widowed young woman, and blamed and annoyed Monsieur Raincourt
to such a degree that he finally left Chauny to go and settle in the
department of Soissons, from whence his second wife had come.
Pélagie breathed freely, for her father had never ceased to annoy her.
But, alas! misfortune came to overwhelm her. She lost her grandmother
and was left alone as head of the family, and obliged, before she was
eighteen, to look after her fortune, and the intervals between the
times when she received news from her husband became more and more
lengthened.
One morning Chauny awoke threatened with war. The Allies were at the
town’s gates, and it was said they plundered everything on their way,
and, what was worse, the first eight Prussians who had appeared on the
canal bridge had been slain. Two hours after, the inhabitants of Chauny
were apprised that if they did not pay within twenty-four hours an
enormous war indemnity they would all be put to the sword.
Madame Seron, alone, without protection, was one of the most heavily
taxed, and in order to pay the share exacted from her, she was obliged
to make ruinous engagements.
She passed a night digging a hole in her cellar under a large cask
which she removed with difficulty, and which the wet-nurse of one of
her young daughters--she nursed the other one herself--aided her in
replacing. In this hole she hid her jewels, her silver, and a box
containing her most valuable papers. This done, she decided, like many
others, to abandon her house, very prominent on the square, where the
invaders were to come and be lodged.
The inhabitants lost their heads, they fled and hid themselves in the
woods, where the enemy, they said, would not venture.
Madame Seron took a few clothes with her and a little linen, which she
put in a bag and carried on her back like a poor woman. The wet-nurse
carried the two babies, and they set forth on the road to Viry.
On the way Madame Seron saw a convoy of mules returning unladen from
the town whither they had carried wood. Each mule had two baskets
attached to his pack-saddle. She put the nurse on one of them and one
of the little twins in each basket. The nurse was a peasant and knew
how to ride a mule, but the young mother was now afraid of everything,
and, instead of mounting another, she walked by the side of the one
carrying her little ones, resting her hand on one of the baskets.
She met the Messrs. de Sainte-Aldegonde on horseback, wearing white
gloves, who, the mule-driver said, had been writing for their “good
friends the enemies” for several days and were now going to meet them.
The Messrs, de Sainte-Aldegonde were galloping, and the brisk pace of
their horses roused the mules, which started off in a mad race. The
nurse was thrown off. The little children screamed with pain; their
mother running, frightened, cried and supplicated for help.
“Never,” said she afterward, “did I suffer such torture.”
The mule-driver jumped on one of the hindermost mules and galloped
towards the one whose baskets held the twins. He stopped it, and their
mother and the nurse, who was only slightly wounded on the forehead and
cheek, ran and rescued the babies from the baskets, who, with their
hands and faces covered with blood, had fainted. The wretched women
held them in their arms, looking at them overcome with grief, and, as
if dumb-stricken, uttering not a word, they wept.
Mechanically they turned back on the road to Chauny, not knowing where
they went, nor what they were doing, with eyes fixed on the motionless
and bleeding little faces. They entered a house, where they asked for
water and washed the wounds. The poor mother had kept the knapsack
and bag of linen. They undressed the little ones, changed their
blood-stained frocks, rubbed them with vinegar and brandy, and almost
at the same moment they opened their eyes and began to sob and cry.
Their wounds continued to bleed and they were pitiful to behold. When
Madame Seron reached her house some Cossacks were about to blow open
the closed door; the nurse approached with the key and opened it. She
also had her forehead and cheek tied up with a bloody cloth. The child
she was carrying was groaning, the other in the mother’s arms was
crying.
The Cossacks spoke a little French and were touched with pity at the
sight. There were four of them, two of whom took the babies and held
them in their arms while the mother and nurse washed their poor little
faces and applied court-plaster to the wounds.
Madame Seron, after a few hours, felt a little reassured about her
children and was completely at rest regarding the Cossacks, whom she
treated as kindly as she could. The following days they assisted in
doing the housework, the cook having fled to the woods. They walked
with the children, amused them, and took devoted care of them, for the
little ones had not recovered from the shock they had suffered; their
nurses’ milk, disturbed by fright, gave them fever. The children grew
weaker and, in spite of the energetic care that a doctor, a friend of
their father’s, took of them, he could not save them; they were taken
with convulsions and both died on the same day. The Cossacks wept over
them with their mother.
Quite alone now, suffering from her country’s misfortunes, for she
was very patriotic, in despair at her beloved little children’s death
and that of her grandmother, at her husband’s absence and the dangers
he was incurring, cheated by the men of business with whom she was
struggling, life became so horribly hard to the young woman that she
attempted to kill herself. A Cossack saved her, and his comrades and he
tried to console her in such a simple, touching manner that she sadly
took up life again.
Madame Seron repeated all her life, and in later years she profoundly
engrafted in me, her grandchild, this axiom: “One must hate the
English, fear Prussian brutality, and love the Russians.”
My grandfather returned from the army followed by a German woman, who
would not leave him, and who refused to believe in his marriage. He
had great trouble in getting rid of her, and succeeded in so doing
only because his wife took up arms against her. Wounded to the quick,
Pélagie found courage to counteract this influence only in her passion
for the romantic. She was enacting a romance and her struggles with her
rival were full of incident. Finally she succeeded, after having been
assailed in her own house by the German, in having the woman taken to
the frontier.
Doctor Seron had been present at many battles, among which those of
Lützen and of Bautzen were the principal. He talked much about them,
as he also did of the arms and legs he had amputated with his master,
Larrey, surgeon-in-chief of the Imperial armies, the number of which
increased every year.
Pierre’s conjugal fidelity, lost during his campaigns, never returned.
He became a sort of Don Juan, about whose conquests the ill-natured
tongues of the town were always wagging. When I grew up, how many
great-uncles were pointed out to me!
Having been deprived of wine in Germany, he loved it all the more on
his return to France. Very sober in the morning until breakfast hour,
at which time he returned home after having performed his operations
at the hospital or in the town, he drank regularly every day a dozen
bottles of a light Mâcon wine, always the same. To say that this great,
portly man got drunk would be an exaggeration, but in the afternoon he
was talkative, full of jokes and braggings to such a degree that all
the white lies, all the jests that were told at Chauny and its environs
were called “seronades.”
My grandmother’s passion for her husband faded away, illusion after
illusion, in spite of the prodigious effort she made not to condemn
my grandfather on the first proofs he gave of his sensual appetites,
of his brutal way of enjoying life. Pierre’s strength was so great
that in all physical exercises, hunting, and fishing he wore out the
most intrepid; his love for excitement was so artless, his gaiety so
exuberant that people overlooked the sensual self-indulgence of his
temperament, his excesses even, when they would not have pardoned them
in others.
But little by little they wearied of all this at his home, while his
friends could not have enough of him. His wife saw him depart at dawn
and not return until far into the night without regret. He was never
late for meals, about which great care had to be taken for him.
“It is elementary politeness,” he would say, drawing out his lisping
accent on the word “elementary,” “not to leave the companion of one’s
home, if not of one’s life, alone at table.”
III
THE MARRIAGE OF MY FATHER AND MOTHER
A daughter, Olympe, was born to them after the German woman’s
departure; her mother nursed her, brought her up with loving care, and
you may be sure that the imaginative Pélagie dreamed at an early hour
of the possible romance of the future marriage of her only child.
Unfortunately Olympe distressed her by the fantastical turn of her
mind. She took great interest from her earliest age in the details of
housekeeping, was troublesome, humdrum even, said her mother.
She disliked to read, was much annoyed at her father’s absence from
home, whose motives she loudly incriminated. Urged to this by the
servants’ stories, she quarrelled with him, bitterly reproached her
mother for the number of books she read; and she introduced into the
home, where the careless indifference of one member, the resignation of
the other, might have brought about peace, an agitation which fed the
constant disputes.
However, the husband and wife, so much disunited, were proud of their
daughter’s beauty. Her father would often say: “She deserves a
prince,” while her mother would reply: “A shepherd would please her
better.”
Nothing foretold that this admirable statue would be animated some day.
Olympe was fifteen years old, and in her family the marriage bells
had always rung at that age. Olympe’s parents were humiliated at the
thought that no one had as yet asked for their daughter’s hand.
The romantic Pélagie dreamed of an “unforeseen” marriage for Olympe,
as she had done formerly for herself. But no predictions had been made
concerning it. Madame Seron could never induce her daughter to go to a
fortune-teller with her. Alas! the way seemed obscure, but just as it
had been impossible for her to find her own hero among the youths of
the town, so did it seem impossible to discover another hero for Olympe
at Chauny.
How was it, one would say, that she did not judge her own experience
of the “unforeseen” lamentable? On the contrary, Pélagie regretted
nothing, and, were it to be done over again, she would have made the
same marriage, taking all its consequences.
The desired romance had, after all, been written. How many finalities
of marriage resembled hers! The important thing was to have loved. Her
Don Juan of a husband did not disgust her. She, the faithful wife,
although living in a manner separated from him, still preserved, in
the romance of her life, a rôle in no wise commonplace. Her husband,
obliged to respect her, could not forget the past either, and he
sometimes courteously alluded to it, adding: “I am always constant to
my affection for my better half, even amid my inconstancies.”
And this was quite true. He did really love his wife, and would not
have hesitated to sacrifice his most devoted women friends to her. He
never opposed any of her plans, and he repeated her words: “What shall
we do, where shall we seek, how shall we discover a husband for Olympe?”
They lived in the Rue de Noyon, the house on the square having
become hateful to Madame Seron, who had lost, while living in it,
her grandmother and her twins, and had also suffered there from the
invasion and from scenes with the German woman. Now, in this street,
opposite to one of the windows of the large drawing-room where Pélagie
passed the greater part of her days embroidering, and especially
devouring novels by the dozen, was the large front door of a young
boys’ school. Madame Seron knew every pupil, every professor.
She had remarked among the latter a young man of tall stature and
handsome presence, who never left the school without a book in his
hand. He bowed respectfully to her several times a day, for she
involuntarily raised her eyes every time the door opposite was shut
noisily.
One evening, when the master of the school, M. Blangy, came to consult
Doctor Seron, whom he knew he would find at meal-time, Madame Seron
questioned him about his new professor.
“He has a very romantic history.”
“Tell us about him.”
“His name is Jean Louis Lambert. His father, when a baby, was brought
one day dressed in a richly embroidered frock covered with lace by a
midwife to a well-to-do farmer of Pontoise, near Noyon, who, having no
children, consented to receive the child (who, the midwife said, was an
orphan), and to bring him up. A girl was born to the farmer five years
later, and the two young persons, who loved each other, were married
afterwards.
“My professor is the eldest of four children. His father wished to make
him a priest and placed him at the Seminary of Beauvais. On entering
there he was remarked for his intelligence, his religious ardour, his
poetic talent, and for his theological science, and they soon endowed
him with the minor orders.
“The archbishop of Beauvais became his protector and made Jean Louis
Lambert his secretary. He was not bigoted, but very pious, even
mystical, and they hastened on for him the moment when he should be
invested with the major orders.
“On the evening before the day when he was to pronounce his new
sacerdotal vows, he was present at a dinner which the archbishop gave
to the members of the high clergy of his diocese, and he heard these
gentlemen talk at table like ordinary convivial guests. As the dinner
went on, they exchanged witty remarks on things terrestrial and even
celestial, which seemed to Jean Louis Lambert suggested by the devil
himself. A stupid joke about the pillars of the church confessing idle
nonsense completely revolted the young postulant. On account of a few
jests the young fellow, who was so artless, so little worldly, felt the
whole scaffolding of his faith fall to the ground. He wished to speak,
to cry anathema to those who seemed blasphemers to him, but, trembling,
he slid out of the dining-room, went up to his room, took a valise,
in which he packed his books, the manuscript of his ‘Canticles to the
Virgin,’ his scant wardrobe, and left the archbishop’s residence half
wild. Almost running, he walked twenty-four leagues, and arrived at his
father’s house exhausted, in despair, and declared he would never be a
priest.
“His excitement, the mad race he had run, gave him so bad a fever that
his life was in danger. When he was cured he was obliged to suffer the
pious exhortations of the old village priest who had instructed him;
his masters came themselves to endeavour to win him back and calm his
indignation. They succeeded in proving to him that he had exaggerated
things to a ridiculous degree, but the ideal of his vocation was so
shattered that his disillusions soon made him an atheist.
“I confess to you,” added M. Blangy, “that I am somewhat alarmed at
having him as professor of philosophy, and I made some observations
lately which offended him; but he is such a hard worker, and so
intelligent, so full of loyalty and so conscientious, that in spite of
my fears I do not regret having taken him into my school. His pupils
adore him and make rapid progress with him, and were it not for his
passion for negation, I think I should take him as my partner.”
This was sufficient to inflame Olympe’s mother’s imagination. A romance
was within her reach. She would protect this young man, thrown out of
place, who had abandoned his first proposed career and who was without
fortune; she would make something of him, and induce him to accept the
career she proposed for him, that of a physician. She would have in him
a grateful son, who should become her daughter’s husband, and, perhaps,
the father of a little girl whom she would love as her grandmother had
loved her, and whom she would bring up as she had been educated.
“As badly?” asked her husband, laughing, to whom she at once confided
her plans.
One Sunday Madame Seron invited Jean Louis Lambert to breakfast. He
almost lost his mind with joy, for he was hopelessly in love with
Olympe, his inaccessible star.
After breakfast my grandfather, according to his habit, hastened to
leave the house, understanding besides that he would be in the way.
Olympe also having left home to pass the afternoon with a friend, the
romantic Pélagie, alone with her _protégé_, whom she already called to
herself her “dear child,” experienced one of the sweetest joys of her
life.
She questioned him, and--miracle of miracles! His great ambition was to
be a doctor! But he could not impose upon his parents the expense that
would necessitate the taking up of a new career. They were all so good
to him, his sisters so devoted; and his young brother had just entered
the army in order that he should not be obliged to perform his military
service.
Madame Seron waded in complete felicity. She talked, and appeared to
the young professor like some unreal, beneficent fairy, who, with
a touch of her magic wand, changes a woodcutter into a prince, a
disinherited man into the most fortunate one in the world.
Jean Louis Lambert’s emotion, his gratitude, were expressed in such
noble, almost passionate, terms that it brought tears to her eyes, and
she at once assumed the rôle of an ideal mother to him.
They agreed, approved, and understood each other in everything. Jean
Louis--his protectrice already left off the Lambert--during the next
three months would prepare himself for his new studies, and then, on
some very plausible pretext, would leave the school and go to Paris,
where his future mother-in-law, as an advance on her daughter’s
_dot_, would provide for all expenses until he should have passed his
examinations.
He would study doubly hard, and, as soon as he should have obtained his
degrees, he would return and marry Olympe, whom, meanwhile, her mother
would influence favourably towards the match.
Isolated in Paris, with but one friend from Chauny, Bergeron, who later
fired a pistol at Louis Philippe, Jean Louis worked with passionate
ardour. In love for the first time and with the woman whom he knew
would be his wife, infatuated with his studies, his mystical adoration
for the Virgin transformed into a desire to possess the object he
adored, he lived in a fever, impatient to deserve the promised
happiness, and finding the reward for all his struggles far superior to
the efforts he made to acquire it.
Doctor Seron completely approved his wife’s romantic plan, considering
that it was without question his place, who had been so cruelly
abandoned by all save the humble, to protect a young, hard-working, and
virtuous man.
This latter adjective he rolled out with great emphasis, which much
amused Olympe’s mother every time he pronounced it.
“No one more than myself esteems, admires, and honours purity and
virtue,” said Pélagie’s amusing husband, “for no one is so conscious of
the rarity, the beauty of these two traits.”
A renewal of good feeling flourished between the husband and wife.
Every letter from their future son-in-law was read, commented upon,
admired, and even re-read by them both; these youthful, exuberant,
loving letters, often containing very good poetry, rejuvenated the
parents’ hearts, already extremely proud of him whom they called
between themselves: “Our son.”
Olympe, while her parents were enthusiastic, was perfectly indifferent.
One day, when they were both exasperated at her, they asked whether or
not she would consent to this marriage. The young girl replied to her
anxious mother, and to her father, revolted at seeing her so prosaic:
“Since you desire it, since you have committed yourselves so far that
you cannot withdraw, I will resign myself to it. Where you have tied
the goat she will browse.”
Ah! that phrase, what a rôle it played in the disputes between the
Lambert and Seron families, so frequent in later years.
Olympe’s parents were assailed day and night by these words, which they
repeated to themselves aghast. “Where you have tied the goat she will
browse.”
Jean Louis Lambert returned to Chauny and was married, a little
disappointed at his wife’s coldness, but trusting to his passion to
inspire her with the love he himself felt.
Olympe Lambert was tall, with a handsome figure like her mother’s; she
had an olive complexion, large, velvety, and luminous eyes, a charming
mouth with small teeth, a delicate nose with pink nostrils, brown hair
with ruddy tints in it, handsome arms and hands, and a very small foot.
It was impossible to discover a more fascinating creature to look at
and one of less good-humour.
IV
BORN IN AN INN
Doctor Seron, after the death of his parents, had renewed acquaintance
with one of his uncles on the maternal side, a physician in a hamlet in
the department of Oise, between Verberie and Seulis. This uncle, then
very old, had become a widower and, being without children, he ceded
his practice to the son-in-law of his only remaining relative, and
gladly welcomed the young couple in his house.
Living with his uncle, following his counsels, Jean Louis Lambert
succeeded marvellously well with his new patients for three years.
A son was born to them, and the young people were happy, he
singing always the praise of love in his letters to his mother and
father-in-law, while she “browsed” agreeably without wishing to confess
it.
Doctor and Madame Seron congratulated themselves daily for the happy
choice they had made in their daughter’s husband.
But misfortunes came, one after another, to the young couple. Their
great-uncle died suddenly of an attack of apoplexy. Their well-beloved
son, who, even at the age of eighteen months, gave proof of exceptional
intelligence, died after a three days’ illness from the effects of a
violent scolding from his mother, which gave him convulsions; finally,
the small borough they inhabited was entirely burned down, except their
grand-uncle’s house which his nephews had inherited, and which Madame
Lambert, with a heroism admired by everyone, saved from the flames with
a small watering-pump, in spite of the wounds she received from the
burning brands.
The small borough was completely destroyed, deserted, ruined; the young
physician’s patients were dispersed and captured by competition in an
adjacent town. The uncle’s house was sold at a very bad bargain, the
furniture given away, so to say, and, after some debts had been paid,
there remained very little for the young couple, who took refuge at
Verberie at the Hotel of The Three Monarchs.
The _dot_, broken into for Jean Louis Lambert’s studies, and wasted
afterwards in expensive chemical experiments--he had had a laboratory
built for himself--dripped away as money always dripped through the
impracticable hands of Olympe’s husband.
As he was very intimate with the Decamps, Alexandre, and the painter,
who lived near Verberie during the summer, Jean Louis hoped to create a
position for himself in new surroundings.
A certain Doctor Bernhardt, a great chemist, who lived at Compiègne and
often went to visit his friends, the Decamps, struck with the science
and original views of the young physician, proposed to make him a
partner in certain researches which were to bring about a discovery as
extraordinary as that of the philosopher’s stone.
One fine day, influenced by the Decamps, fascinated by a sort of German
Mephistopheles, he left his wife, who was expecting the birth of a
child, at the Hotel of The Three Monarchs; but he was to receive a
large salary and go to see her every Sunday until the time came when he
could settle her in a home at Compiègne.
Madame Lambert, after her baby son’s death, had wounded her mother
cruelly. The latter had scarcely seen her and her husband more than
three times at Chauny in three years. She invited her to make her a
visit, saying they could mourn over the child together and adding that
only a mother with her affection could console a daughter for a son’s
loss.
Olympe wrote to her mother that her sorrow was too dumb to be
understood by her. Madame Seron, in despair at receiving such a letter,
addressed one to her son-in-law; but as it was at the time when the
fire took place, her letter received no direct response. Jean Louis
merely related to her in full the details of the catastrophe of the
small borough and of Olympe’s heroism which had saved the house, and
he added unkindly, being ungrateful for the first time in his life:
“Your daughter’s heroism was not expressed merely in words.” He thus
accentuated the tone of his wife’s letter instead of attenuating it.
He did not wish to have any explanations with his mother-in-law,
neither to have her come to his house, nor to go to hers, knowing very
well that if circumstances had turned against him he was responsible
for them in part from the manner in which he had mismanaged his
resources.
The sale of the house, the departure for Verberie, his entering Doctor
Bernhardt’s employ, all was done without a word from Jean Louis to his
father and mother-in-law.
Doctor Seron heard of these things from his friend, the herbalist of
Compiègne, who came to warn him about Doctor Bernhardt and to give
him the most alarming information concerning him. He was worse than
an impostor, living a luxurious life, and pulling wool over people’s
eyes; it was said he was a swindler.
Madame Seron, on hearing this, addressed a supreme appeal to her
son-in-law, enlightening him on the danger he was running, but, alas!
it was too late. Jean Louis, completely hypnotised by Doctor Bernhardt,
following his researches with passion, not only received no salary, but
he had thrown the money received from the sale of the house and what
remained of his wife’s _dot_ into Doctor Bernhardt’s crucible, which
was like that of the philosopher’s stone.
I was born at the Hotel of The Three Monarchs. My father announced the
happy event to my grandmother by this simple note: “Your grandchild,
born on the 4th of October at five o’clock in the afternoon, is called
Juliette.”
What! this granddaughter, so much dreamed of, so much desired, was
there, at Verberie, not far off, and she could not run to embrace her,
to take and hold her for an instant in her arms?
My grandmother did not cease weeping and my grandfather shed tears with
her.
“Think, Pierre, of that little one in an inn, of Olympe, our daughter,
in such a place, with, perhaps, only a partition separating her from
some drunken brute making a noise. Oh! it will kill me.”
“And her husband far from her, and in his perpetual goings and
comings not able to watch over our only child’s health or that of our
granddaughter,” added Doctor Seron, “it is dreadful.” And, with hands
clasped together, they sobbed. What was to be done?
They wrote again several times, but received only one answer as curt as
it was short:
“The mother and child are well.”
A commercial traveller, a patient of my grandfather, had heard at
Verberie that my father was a victim of a miserable fellow, who imposed
upon him, making him work like a labourer, promising him everything
under heaven, and spending every cent he possessed, and that my mother,
still at Verberie, owed a large sum at the hotel and might at any
moment, together with her daughter, be turned out of doors without
resources.
My grandmother at these revelations wished to leave immediately
for Verberie; my grandfather prevented her. He sent the commercial
traveller to the proprietor of The Three Monarchs to assure him that he
would be paid by Madame Lambert’s parents, but that he must say nothing
of it to her, and must, on no account, acquaint her husband about it.
On the commercial traveller’s return my grandmother had all the
details she desired, some of which were lamentable, others consoling.
My mother nursed me herself. I was a very healthy baby, but Madame
Lambert, suffering from poverty and cold, for she often deprived
herself of fire, the commercial traveller said, was evidently losing
her health. But the hotel proprietor, reassured about his debt, would
arrange things so that the young mother should suffer no longer.
My grandfather loved his daughter Olympe more than did my grandmother,
because she resembled his own mother. She was submissive to her husband
to the point of sacrificing her child to her wifely duties, and
therefore he suffered about his child as well as his grandchild, while
my grandmother suffered especially on my account.
Again, my grandmother wished to leave to come to us, but her husband
calmed her with his oft-repeated words:
“You will only upset her, and, as she is nursing her child, she will
give her fever and you will kill her. Wait at least for nine months,
and then you can wean Juliette, and we will decide what to do according
to circumstances.”
Hour by hour, day by day, week by week, the nine months, sadly counted,
passed at last. At the end of the ninth month the commercial traveller
received a letter from the proprietor of The Three Monarchs, saying
that my father had gone to Brussels with Doctor Bernhardt, who went
there ostensibly to make some final experiments, in reality to escape
legal prosecution by flight, and that my mother and I were abandoned.
As soon as this letter was communicated to my grandparents there was no
longer any hesitation, and my grandmother left for Verberie.
My mother, clad in a worn-out gown, was shivering over a small fire of
shavings, thin, pale, her handsome face grown more sombre than ever.
She welcomed her mother with a violent scene, but my grandmother had
come with prepared resolutions which nothing could move.
“You have not the right, through fidelity to I know not what wifely
duty and which your husband, it seems to me, is far from reciprocating,
to live here in this wretchedness, and, above all, to impose it on your
child. You shall leave this hotel to-morrow and return to your parents,
and your husband, when he desires to do so, can come to find you as
well at their home as here in this inn.”
“Where you have tied the goat she must browse,” she replied.
My grandmother, exasperated at these words, exclaimed: “Your husband
doesn’t even give you grass to browse on.”
My mother remained obstinate with her habitual sourness, her bad
temper, and her motiveless recriminations which she tried, as usual,
to combine together, in order to prove that she was made unhappy by
everyone.
“But, if you are turned out of doors with your daughter, where will you
go?”
“Into the street, and Jean Louis will have the responsibility of having
put me there. I do not wish that he should be absolved for his conduct
by any one.”
It was therefore in order to prove her husband’s wrong-doing that she
suffered abandonment and privations.
My grandmother said nothing more; but she arranged in her mind a plan
for carrying me off.
“Whatever you decide,” she said, after the scene was over, “you must
pay your debts, if you have any here. Do you wish me to give you some
money?”
“Willingly.”
“Well, about how much do you think you owe?”
My mother named a sum.
“I am going to unpack my bag, have my dinner served, and send you some
wood, and I will return with the money you need to pay your debt.”
My grandmother often told me afterwards that she did not look at me,
nor kiss me, so as not to betray her emotion.
She went to find the proprietor and arranged my carrying off with him.
A berline would be ready in a moment to take my grandmother and me to
the town gates. The driver of the diligence which would leave an hour
after us would reserve the _coupé_ seats for us, and would pick us up
at a point agreed upon between the berline-driver and himself, and
we would speed, changing horses once or twice, to Chauny. The hotel
proprietor was to detain my mother discussing the bill, and to keep
her for an hour at least, and he promised not to furnish her with a
carriage to pursue us. Besides, it was agreed that my grandmother was
to give to him the money necessary for my mother to join us in a few
days.
My grandmother learned from him the amount of the bill, and it was
arranged that she should give my mother a little less than the amount,
so that the latter should not feel justified in taking any of the money
in order to follow us.
My grandmother returned to her daughter’s room, now well warmed. All
was ready in her own room for departure--a nursing-bottle full of warm
milk and a large shawl in which to wrap me.
Her heart, she told me later many times, beat faster than it would have
done had she run off with my grandfather in her youth.
The hotel proprietor had the bill taken to Madame Lambert, and sent
her word that he was ready to discuss it if she should have any
observations to make concerning it. My grandmother looked at the bill
and told my mother that she had not quite enough money to pay it all,
being obliged to keep some for her return home, and that, on glancing
at it, it seemed to her that the proprietor of The Three Monarchs had
added to the actual expenses too much interest for the delay of payment.
My mother was of the same opinion, and said the sum would suffice, as
she should discuss the point with the proprietor, and no doubt obtain a
reduction.
“Go,” said my grandmother in an indifferent tone. “I will take care of
the child.”
Everything succeeded marvellously well, and I was carried off at the
rather young age of nine months old, and weaned in a diligence.
V
MY EARLY CHILDHOOD
I was pleased, it seems, with the voyage and with the nursing-bottle.
Warmly wrapped up, I slept in my grandmother’s arms. In the morning
everything I saw from the diligence windows amused me greatly. The
movement delighted me and made me dance. Every time I asked, “Mamma?”
my grandmother answered: “Yes, look, see, she is down there.” At the
relays I walked a little, for I already walked at that early age, and
was much taken with and curious about the dogs, the chickens, and
people, and was instinctively drawn to my grandmother, whom I soon grew
to love fondly.
My mother, informed by a letter which my grandmother had left for her,
of my being carried off, did not hasten to join us, but grandmother
knew by frequent letters from the hotel-keeper at Verberie that she was
taking care of herself and did not suffer, and that, moreover, she had
written several letters to her husband and had received no answers.
Finally my mother decided one day to take the diligence and come to
us, after having borrowed a sum strictly necessary for her voyage.
The large drawing-room at Chauny, with its high chimney-place, where a
great wood fire burned constantly, seemed more pleasant to me than the
gloomy room of The Three Monarchs, and I expressed my admiration for
all that it contained by throwing kisses to the fire, to the clock,
and above all to my grandparents. I had room in which to trot and
amuse myself, and I took an interest in everything in this large room
where they received visitors, where they dined and lived. I heard a
great many things which I repeated and understood. My mother did not
cease to complain about the education my grandparents were giving me
and on the airs of “a trained dog,” that I was assuming, but she did
not succeed in troubling the cordial understanding between us four--my
grandparents, my nurse Arthémise, and myself.
My father, very unhappy, repenting of his foolish act, ashamed of the
blind faith he had placed in a cynical impostor, had returned without
a cent to his parents at Pontoise. He begged by letter for my mother,
humiliated and submissive, but my grandmother replied that she would
not give him back his wife until the day when he should have made
another position for himself and could prove that he had the means to
support her. As to his daughter Juliette, she would never be given back
to him.
“I adopt this child which you have abandoned and given over to dire
poverty,” wrote my grandmother, “and she belongs to me as long as I
live.”
It was at this time that my father went to live at the pretty
borough of Blérancourt, three leagues from Chauny and two from
Pontoise-sur-Oise, where his people dwelt. A year after he came and
proved to my grandmother that he was in a position to support his wife
and to fulfil the conditions she had imposed upon him before he should
be allowed to take her back.
“Return and browse,” said my grandfather to his daughter, laughing, as
he put a well-filled purse in her hand.
I remained, of course, with my grandparents. Neither my father nor
mother would have dared at that epoch to question my staying.
It was some years after this that the long series of dramatic scenes
began of which I was the cause, and which occasioned my being carried
off many times.
The effort made by a matured mind to recall its early impressions is
most curious. We evoke them, and they rise before us in the form of
a little person whom we succeed in detaching from our present selves,
but who, however, continues to remain a part of what we have become.
The image, the vision of ourselves is clear and perfectly cut in our
minds when we say: “When I was a child.” We see ourselves as we were
at a certain age, but as soon as we particularise an event or question
a fact we cannot escape from our present personality, and it is
impossible to rid these facts and events from connection with it, or
from their later consequences.
We should like to write of our childhood with the childish words we
then used, but we cannot, and memory only suggests some striking
traits, some simple phrases, which make clear the facts registered in
the mind.
How many things more interesting than those we remember do we doubtless
forget!
One day--it was not on a Sunday--my grandmother dressed me in a pretty
white gown lined with pink and embroidered by herself with little
wheels, which I had often watched her making. Later, overcome with
emotion, I dressed my own daughter in this same gown.
“It is your birthday, the fourth of October, and you are three years
old,” said my grandmother.
Three years! these words re-echoed in my head: there was something
about them solemn and gay at once. To be grown up is a child’s
ambition. Children create in their minds many surprising illusions.
People said frequently to me, which made me very proud:
“She is very tall for her age. She looks five years old.” Those two
figures, three and five, were the first I remembered, and I used them
on every occasion. I looked at and compared myself with children
smaller than I, and considered myself very tall indeed.
On this 4th of October my nurse Arthémise called me “miss” for the
first time. I can hear her even now. On that day, the first that stands
out distinct in my memory, everyone who saw me kissed me. I returned
my grandparents’ caresses, hanging on their necks, but I remember
perfectly that a number of persons made me angry by kissing me too
hard. However, I allowed myself to be embraced rapturously by my nurse
Arthémise, who wished to “eat me up,” as she said, and also by my great
friend Charles,[A] who called me his “little wife.”
I told him with a dignified air that now, being three years old, he
must call me his “big wife,” which he did at once, presenting me with a
trumpet, on which I began to play with all my might.
My grandparents were expecting my mother and father to dine. They
always arrived late, because the road across the Manicamp prairie was
so bad that they related this story to children about it: “One day a
cowkeeper lost a cow in one of the ruts, and he tried to find it by
plunging the handle of his whip in the mud, but he could not succeed.”
One should hear this story in Picard _patois_, which gives a singular
force to the words, especially when the cowkeeper turns his whip-handle
in the mud and cannot feel the cow, so deeply is she buried in it.
I ran every few minutes to the front door and leaned out. I was a
little afraid, for the entrance, with its four steps, seemed very high
to me, but I thought I should be very useful to the kitchen-folk if I
could be the first to cry out: “Here they are! here they are!”
I ran about a great deal, I even fell once, to Arthémise’s great alarm,
who feared I should spoil my pretty gown.
At last my parents arrived from Blérancourt.
They told a long story which I have forgotten. The cabriolet and the
horse were covered with mud. Papa and mamma repeated that the road was
execrable. The word struck me and I used it for a long while on all
occasions.
My mother wore a dark blue silk gown, caught up under her shawl. I can
see her now, undoing her skirt and shaking it. I helped her by tapping
on the silk and I said admiringly: “Mamma is beautiful!”
My father took me in his arms and covered me with kisses, and he also
said “that I was very, very tall, and that he had not seen me for a
long time--not for three months.” That was the same number as my age,
it must therefore be a long time, and papa looked so sad that he made
me feel like crying. His own eyes were full of tears.
They sat down to dinner. My grandfather told stories which made them
laugh, but I thought they would not laugh long, for whenever my parents
came from Blérancourt they always ended by quarrelling together.
My father said suddenly:
“This time we will take Juliette home with us!”
I did not dare to say that I did not wish to go. I was much more afraid
of my parents than of my grandparents.
“No, I shall keep her,” replied grandmother.
“It is more than two years since you took her from us,” continued my
father. “If we still had her brother, or if she had a sister, I promise
you that I would give her to you, but think, mother, I have only this
little one.”
“It is not our affair, but yours, to give her a brother or sister,” my
grandfather replied, laughing.
Certainly, I thought, grandfather was right. Why did not papa and mamma
buy me a little sister or brother? Then they would not need to say they
would take me from grandmother.
“You must give Juliette back to us,” my father repeated. “I want her.”
“Never!” cried grandfather and grandmother at once. “She belongs to us;
you abandoned her.”
Then began a scene which is easy to me to recall, because it was
renewed three or four times every year during my childhood. They
dragged me first to one side, then to the other, they kissed me with
faces wet with tears, they grew very angry with one another, and they
almost made me crazy by asking and repeating: “Don’t you want to
come with your papa and mamma?”--“Don’t you want to stay with your
grandfather and grandmother?”
I would answer sobbing, not realising my cruelty to my father, who
adored me:
“I want Arthémise, my grandmother and grandfather.”
My father was very unhappy. My mother, who was jealous of everything
and everybody, suffered less, however, from my grandmother’s passion
for me than for my father’s; but she naturally took her husband’s part
against her parents.
On that day, as on many subsequent days, my parents from Blérancourt
yielded and grew calm. My grandmother, by much show of affection and by
all manner of promises, succeeded in making them leave me at Chauny.
My father said a hundred times to me: “You love your papa, don’t you?”
“Yes, yes, yes!”
And it was true. I loved my papa, but not as I loved grandmother.
“Juliette must begin her education,” added grandmother, “and she can
do so only at Chauny. As soon as the vacations are over she must go to
school.”
The next morning they woke me very early. I was sleepy and rebelled.
What grandfather called “the family drama” had fatigued me. Arthémise
took me in her arms, half asleep, for me to say good-bye to my parents.
My mother was putting on her bonnet as I entered the drawing-room, my
father was wrapping her shawls about her. They got into the carriage
and I waved kisses to them for good-bye.
“Above all, be good at school,” said my mother to me as she left.
One morning Arthémise carried me half asleep into the drawing-room. I
wanted to be put back to bed. My grandmother said severely to me that
it should not be done, that Arthémise was to dress me and that I was to
go to school.
I was before the fire in the large drawing-room with its four windows,
which seemed to my childish ideas immense and which has much shrunken
since, and I was passed from grandmother’s lap to Arthémise’s. They
dressed me, after having washed me, the which I did not like, although
it amounted to but little, only my face and my hands, and grandfather
did not even wish that they should “clean me” every day--they did not
say “wash” in those days--water, he declared, made pimples on the face.
Ah! how that surgeon cultivated microbes! He could not have suffered
much from the want of a dressing-room when in the army. One cannot
imagine nowadays how little they washed themselves in our Picardy in
the year of grace 1839. They soaped their faces only on Sundays in the
kitchen and their hands every morning.
My grandfather, who the barber, Lafosse, shaved every morning in the
drawing-room at dawn, wiped his face with the towel under his chin when
it was untied, and that was all. And yet he looked clean, his white
cravat and his pleated shirt-front were always perfectly immaculate,
spotted over only with snuff, which he would knock off with graceful
little gestures with his finger and thumb. As to my grandmother, she
was always handsomely dressed and had her hair arranged every day by
the barber, Lafosse.
In the rooms of the hotels of Picardy, which had been occupied by
travellers, cobwebs would be found at the bottom of the water-jug long
after the epoch of which I speak.
VI
FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL
Instead of one of my numerous pretty gowns, grandmother dressed me in a
green frock which I did not like.
To my surprise my grandfather, after the barber’s departure, did not
leave immediately to go to his hospital. He looked at me and kept
repeating:
“Poor, dear little woman!”
I burst into tears without knowing why.
They covered my white apron with a frightful black one. It was for
school. I knew what the school was; I had many big friends who went to
it, I ought to have been proud to be considered a big girl, but I was
in despair. I repeated, weeping: “Grandmother, I will be very good. I
don’t want to go to school. Keep me with you.”
My grandfather said he thought they might very well wait until the
winter was over before shutting me up in a prison.
I screamed all the louder at this word, Prison. Arthémise declared,
crying herself, that I was still too young to go, that it was a murder!
“A murder! a murder!” repeated grandmother in anger. “That woman must
be mad,” she said to grandfather, who in his turn called Arthémise
“insolent.”
Here was another “family drama”; but they did not “make up” with each
other after being angry, as they did with my parents.
“I shall send you out of the house!” said grandmother to Arthémise;
“you shall make up your packages to-day, and to-morrow you shall return
to Caumenchon. Leave the room!”
“You might scold her, but not send her off,” said grandfather. “That
woman loves Juliette sincerely. And, do you know what I think? She is
right. It is a murder. Leave the little thing to play for a year or two
more, she will make all the greater progress for it later.”
“I wish her to surpass all the others at once,” replied grandmother;
“and then I’d like to know what you are meddling yourself with it for?
I know what I am doing. Hold your tongue.”
“Ta, ta, ta!” replied my grandfather, whose resistance always ended
with those three syllables.
My grandmother took me to the school. I realised that it was an
extraordinary event to which I was obliged to submit.
My friend the grocer was at his door. He bowed to grandmother, much
surprised to see her in the street “on a working-day,” and told her so.
She answered that she was taking me to school for the first time.
“You want to make her a learned lady,” he replied.
The butcher’s wife was at her desk in her open shop. She, also, ran to
the door astonished, and asked grandmother where I was going with my
black apron--was it a punishment? “Because for you, Madame Seron, to
be out with your Juliette in the street, she must have been very bad,
indeed,” she added, laughing heartily.
I wanted more and more to cry again.
The large door of the school, of the prison, opened and shut behind us
with a noise like thunder.
We went into a court where the large and small pupils were together.
Madame Dufey, the school-mistress, appeared. She had mustaches, I
thought her ugly, and she terrified me.
“I had the mother, I have the daughter now. I am delighted,” she said.
But her voice seemed to roar.
My grandmother made a motion to leave me. I clung to her skirts.
I implored. I rolled on the floor. I was choking, and I repeated,
sobbing:
“You don’t love your grandchild any more!”
My grandmother for the first time in her life remained insensible to my
sorrow. She pushed me away from her. She, who had spoiled me so greatly
until then, thought the moment had come in which to be severe to excess.
“Be obedient,” she said to me, “or you shall remain here and not return
home any more.”
I revolted and answered: “I will go to my parents at Blérancourt.”
Madame Dufey intervened.
“I will take her to breakfast with me and another new little pupil,”
said the school-mistress; “don’t send for her until this evening.”
She carried me off in her arms, and my grandmother went away.
Nothing had ever seemed to me so frightful as this abandonment. I felt
a poor, miserable, forsaken little thing. I leaned against the wall of
a corridor under a bell which was ringing, and from which ear-rending
noise I had not the strength to flee, although it fairly hurt my head.
I was pushed by my new companions into a dark, gloomy class-room where
they obliged me to sit alone on the end of a bench.
I had a fit of despair; I cried as loud as I could. I called for
Arthémise and my grandfather.
An under-mistress approached me and ordered me to be quiet, and shook
me severely. I did not stop crying. I defended myself, and struck her
because she had used me so roughly.
They carried me upstairs to a garret and left me there, I know not for
how many hours. Even yet, to-day, at my age, I recall the impression
of that day and it seems to me that it lasted for an infinite time. It
holds as much place in my memory as a whole year of other days which
followed it.
The under-mistress came at breakfast-time. I had not ceased crying. If
I had known what it was to die I should have killed myself.
“Will you hush?” said the under-mistress to me, striking me roughly.
“Will you be good?”
This wicked woman seemed execrable to me, like the bad road of which my
father had spoken. I told her so and the word avenged me. She was my
first enemy. It was the first time that I had been beaten. I repeated,
“Execrable, execrable!” She placed a piece of dry bread by my side and
left me, saying:
“You shall obey.”
Madame Dufey had forgotten me, as my grandmother learned later. I have
certainly never in all my life been so angry as I was at that closed
door. I have never found people so implacable as they were to me that
day.
From crying, screaming, and knocking against the door I fell down on
the floor exhausted and went to sleep.
I awoke in Arthémise’s arms, who was weeping and frightened to see my
swollen, tear-stained face. She had rocked me to sleep every night
since I was three years old, telling me pretty stories of Caumenchon,
and she kept saying now:
“They don’t love you any more, they don’t love you any more!”
Now, as I clung to Arthémise’s neck, I grew brave again and felt a
great desire to return the harm they had done to me. I said to my nurse:
“Arthémise, do you love me?”
“My little one, do I love you!” she exclaimed, hugging me.
“Then Juliette wants to go to Caumenchon and you must obey her.”
She resisted. “They will say that I have stolen you and will put me in
prison. I cannot, I cannot. But won’t I give a bit of my mind to your
grandmother! Don’t you fear! for, if she has not killed you, it is not
her fault.”
“Juliette will go to Caumenchon, then, all alone, at once,” I replied,
and, as we left the school, I slipped down from her arms, escaping
her, and climbed the steps of the ramparts. When I got to the top I
ran as fast as I could. Arthémise caught me, took me in her arms, and
besought me to return to my grandmother, but as I got angry again, she
walked off very fast in the direction of the village, carrying me.
When she grew too tired she put me down, and I ran, holding her hand,
to keep up with her fast walking. It seemed to me that I was doing
something great, that I was in the right and my grandmother in the
wrong. Running, or in Arthémise’s arms, I did not cease repeating the
two words which seemed to me the most expressive: “It is execrable, it
is a murder!”
“Yes, a murder,” said Arthémise, “and they will see what they’ll see!”
We walked in the mud; it was a very dark night, and I thought, if I had
not been with Arthémise, how afraid I should have been of the deep ruts
in which they lost cows.
I was very, very hungry, and I thought myself a very unhappy, cruelly
abandoned, but very courageous little girl.
We arrived at Caumenchon, at my nurse’s house. The door was open. A
large fire burned in the hearth. Arthémise’s mother and father looked
older than my grandmother and grandfather, but I did not dare to say so.
They were eating their soup and they rose, frightened at seeing me.
“Why have you brought the young lady here?” they exclaimed.
“They were making her unhappy.”
“Who?” said the father.
“The masters.”
“You are crazy. It is not your business, it’s not your business,”
repeated her mother.
“I am hungry; will you give me a little soup?” I asked, taking on the
tone of a poor little beggar girl.
The good people both served me.
“Eat, mam’zelle, all that you want,” said the mother to me.
This Caumenchon soup seemed delicious.
When I was warmed and had my fill of apples and nuts after the soup,
Arthémise took me to a room with a very low ceiling and put me to bed,
only half undressing me. She left a lighted tallow candle on a board,
saying she would soon return to sleep with me.
The sheets were very coarse and of a grey colour. There were
spider-webs and spiders that ran along the rafters; but I was not
afraid of them like a little friend with whom I played and who
screamed when she saw one, even in the garden, on the trees.
In the room there were bars of wood through which the small heads of
rabbits popped out and in.
My head burned a great deal; I heard a loud noise in my ears. It seemed
to me that the little rabbits looked at me to ask me my history. I
knelt down on my bed and said to them:
“My good rabbits, I have a grandmother who doesn’t love me.”
I do not know what the rabbits were going to answer me. I often
wondered later, for at that moment I was caught up in my grandfather’s
arms, who devoured me with kisses and carried me to the fire on which
they had just thrown an enormous bunch of fagots.
Aided by Arthémise, he tried to dress me, but he trembled.
“Bad little girl, your grandmother is nearly wild with grief.”
“I don’t love her any more,” I cried. “I want to stay at Caumenchon, in
the room with my friends the rabbits, and not leave my Arthémise.”
The old peasants both said to me with rather a severe air:
“Come, come, mam’zelle, be more reasonable.”
My grandfather answered them:
“Speak more gently to her. When I think that her brother, whom she
resembles, poor little thing, died of convulsions after having been
scolded by his mother--I do not wish that she should be spoken to
harshly.”
“That is what I told you just now, sir,” added Arthémise, who was very
red and seemed very angry, “and I have not told you half the fear I
felt when I found her in that garret. I didn’t think I was speaking so
truthfully this morning in calling the dragging of this poor little one
to the school a murder.”
“My Juliette,” began my grandfather again, “I beg of you, let us return
to Chauny. Arthémise’s papa and mamma want her to come back to our
house and she will not disobey them. Ask her if she will.”
“I want to return,” said Arthémise, “if Madame regrets having turned me
out like a thief.”
“She regrets it, Arthémise.”
“I will go to Chauny, yes, but never again to the school,” I said to
grandfather.
“No, no, don’t worry about it.”
We left in my grandfather’s cabriolet. I was seated, well wrapped up,
on my nurse’s knees. I saw the full moon for the first time. I still
recall my astonishment and the confused ideas I had about the great
night-sun, so pale and so cold.
When I arrived at the house my grandmother was at the door, greatly
upset. She had cried so much that I saw how great her sorrow was. She
asked my pardon for all the horrible things endured by her poor little
girl. She knew them all, having obtained the information while my
grandfather went to Caumenchon, where he had felt sure of finding me.
“My darling, they put you in a garret! It was frightful,” said
grandmother to me. “You did right to punish me; I will never torment
you again as long as I live, my little one.”
I felt a certain superiority which inclined me to indulgence. I
approved my own conduct. Perhaps that moment decided the way in which
my character was formed.
“Juliette will always act like that when grandmother is bad,” I said,
“and then she does not wish that Arthémise should ever be sent away
like a thief.”
“Yes, yes, yes!” repeated grandmother, covering me with kisses.
“Arthémise,” she continued, “you must tell me all that she said, all
that she did. It was she, wasn’t it, who wanted to go to Caumenchon and
who made you take her there?”
“Yes, madame.”
“She is like me, the little love. Arthémise, promise me that you will
make her some day like her school. We must furnish her head with study,
it deserves it.”
“No, not furnish my head, not the school!” I cried.
“Really, Pélagie, you are mad; you keep on exciting the child, who has
a fever. Have you never once thought of her brother’s death?” said
grandfather, snatching me out of grandmother’s lap. “Wait until she is
as strong as I am, to be able to support your exaggerations.”
Grandmother turned quite white and became very gentle.
“Arthémise, put her to bed,” she ordered in a calm voice. “You must
tell me when she has gone to sleep.”
During the following days it was impossible to prevent my relating in
detail my horrible experience. I talked of it, I cried over it, and
they could not make me stop. Arthémise, my grandparents, my friend
Charles, were all obliged to listen to the recital, and I did not
become calm until I had the sure conviction that I had made those who
loved me suffer, the suffering that I myself had endured. I promised my
grandmother, however, that I would not relate my history to my parents
at Blérancourt. Arthémise and grandmother together arranged about my
going to school.
I returned there later, influenced to do so by a little friend of my
own age, whom they had made me know, and who taught me how to amuse
myself with pictures of the letters of the alphabet.
VII
I GO TO A WEDDING
A few months later, in the summer, I went to Blérancourt with my
grandfather to a wedding. I had already seen a great number, Arthémise
having a passion for looking at brides, but I had never participated in
person at the ceremony.
A friend of my mother, Camille--I cannot recall her family name--was
going to marry Monsieur Ambroise Godin, under-director of the
manufacture of glass of Saint-Gobain, the head office of which was at
Chauny. My grandfather was to be her witness, and grandmother took the
trouble to explain to me that the witness to a marriage acted in place
of the bride’s father, Camille having lost her own.
My joy at going to the wedding expressed itself in all manner of freaks
and excessive selfishness. I neither showed nor felt the least sorrow
at leaving grandmother and Arthémise. However, my absence was to be
only for four days.
My grandfather, since my “campaign of Caumenchon,” as he called it, had
conceived such a passion for me that he stayed for long hours together
in the house, even after meals. In the evening, when I so wished it, I
would also keep him at home. His friends at the club could not believe
their eyes.
“He is his granddaughter’s slave,” would they say, and he would repeat:
“Yes, I am my granddaughter’s slave.”
He was so tall, so big, so noisy, he talked so much that I would stare
at him from his feet upward, my head raised, always laughing, and I
would only play “at making faces” with him, while I often played with
grandmother “at being good.”
He could not contain himself with joy at going away quite alone with me.
“It is my turn to carry her off,” said he on the day of our departure.
They tied me with two silk handkerchiefs in grandfather’s cabriolet,
and they stuffed behind my back, at my sides, and under my feet a
number of packages well sewn together by Arthémise, in which, folded
and packed carefully, were my linen, my gowns, and everything that I
might need. They did not make use of valises or trunks at that time at
grandmother’s.
I can still remember my three white frocks with their coloured ribbon
sashes, which had to be ironed when we arrived and which my mother
showed to her friends at Blérancourt, who came to see me and to make my
acquaintance. I had held my handsome Leghorn straw hat, ornamented with
white ribbons, in a box in my hands and had never let it go once in
spite of the jolts of the famous “execrable” road.
Having left at eight o’clock in the morning to drive three leagues, we
did not arrive until two o’clock in the afternoon. One cannot fancy
what the road was, going through meadows and alongside of a river which
continually overflowed.
How many times since have I passed over that road, where one ran the
risk of actual danger, and where the ruts were so deep that people were
frequently upset.
My grandfather kept up my courage, for I did not hide my fears, by
saying that Cocotte was a very good horse, the carriage strong, and
that he knew how to drive very well.
My father kissed me many times when I arrived, and directly after
breakfast took me by the hand to see all his friends. We went to the
château where the Varniers lived and where I found a dear little girl
of my own age, with whom I often later played at the house of her
neighbour, the chemist Descaines, “nephew of some one whom I shall
teach you to know and to love later,” said my father, “but remember
his name now--Saint-Just.”
“Saint-Just,” I repeated.
I can perfectly recall the effort I made to please my father’s friends
at Blérancourt, and how, after having gone in quest of compliments
about me, he brought back a great number to my grandfather and mother.
“How charming she is, how good she was, and how she talks!” he said.
My mother had unsewed Arthémise’s packages and she ironed my frocks
herself. I took part in the ironing and the hanging up, and I asked
innumerable questions about the wedding.
On the morrow, the great day, all the guests gathered at the bride’s
house near the church. The weather was superb. They went on foot, two
by two, in a long file, the bride leading with my grandfather, of whom
they said: “What a handsome man he is who is acting as father.”
I leaned out from the rank and dragged my mother’s hand so as to see
better, and, perhaps, to be better seen, for there was a row of people
along the length of the cortége.
The gentleman who gave his arm to my mother was very handsome and he
laughed to see her continually dragged out of file by me.
All Blérancourt was there to see the fine wedding pass by, and several
times I heard, not without pleasure, little boys and girls and even
grown persons say:
“Look, look, it’s Monsieur Lambert’s little Juliette. How prettily she
is dressed.”
Some one added:
“Monsieur Lambert is not here. He never goes to churches.”
I asked mamma why they said that. She drew me brusquely towards her and
did not answer.
We reached the church. I heard the music of the organ and was going to
enter, when my mother, after having spoken in a low voice to an old
lady with a cap and dressed in black, who was not of the wedding party,
said to her:
“Two ceremonies will tire her too much, please keep her for me and
amuse her in the curé’s garden. Give her some flowers, don’t let her
soil her frock, and I will come for her myself.”
I protested, I struggled, I wanted to be all the time at the wedding,
but the old lady took me in her arms, passed through the crowd, opened
a door, shut it, and put me down, laughing.
“You will amuse yourself a great deal more here than at the church, my
darling,” she said to me; “see the lovely garden and the beautiful
flowers, they are all for you.”
She put a cushion on the doorstep, and gave me some nasturtium flowers
to suck. There was near the stalk a little bud that I found of a sweet
taste. I see myself still on the doorstep of Monsieur the Curé’s
garden, pointing out to his servant the flowers I wanted, which she
went and pulled for me.
I think I forgot the wedding a little describing to her my large garden
at my grandmother’s, speaking of my plums and apricot tree, of my
strawberries and raspberries, when suddenly my mother appeared, very
pale and excited.
“Quick, quick, come!” she said to me.
“To the wedding, mamma?”
“Yes, to the wedding.”
I entered the church. The bride was near the door with the groom, all
the wedding party gathered around them. They drew me to a corner where
there was a large stone vase full of water, like one in our garden at
Chauny. I saw that everybody was looking at me.
The curé was near the vase, the bride and groom approached, my mother
took me in her arms.
“Mamma, what are they going to do to me?” I asked, rather frightened.
“Be good, my Juliette, be very good, I beseech of you,” she replied in
a very troubled voice, “they are going to baptise you.”
“No, no, not baptise me,” I cried in tears.
The bride said smiling to me: “You are going to cease being a vile
heretic and enter the Catholic Church.”
I saw my grandfather and I cried out to him, thinking the vase full of
water was the Catholic Church.
“Grandfather, come and prevent them from throwing me into the Catholic
Church.”
My grandfather not only remained insensible to my appeal, but looked at
me very severely.
“Be still,” said the curé to me, “or I will open your head and put the
oil and salt in it.”
These threatening words put the finishing touch to my despair, and I
cried and struggled all through the ceremony of my baptism. Finally
grandfather came and took me from my mother’s arms.
“Juliette, you are a big girl,” he said, “listen to me. I am very
pleased you are baptised, your grandmother will be so happy. You were a
poor little unbaptised child, we did not know it. Your father forbade
you being baptised. He doesn’t like churches.”
“Yes, grandfather, I heard people say so just now.”
“So, you understand, he is not like everybody else; it is a pity he
is a heathen. Your mother had great courage in making you a Christian
without his knowledge. He will be furious, and I shall not be sorry to
be at Chauny. Oh! my darling, my darling, may the Supreme Being protect
you!”
My grandmother made me say my prayers night and morning. She often
spoke to me of God, but my grandfather never spoke except of the
Supreme Being; I had known for a long time that the Supreme Being was
God.
There was a table for children at the wedding. It was very amusing.
At the end of the repast some persons rose from their seats and they
talked and talked without any one stopping or answering them; then
there were some others who sang, and then my grandfather said things
which made everybody laugh, and we little ones laughed also.
And then finally papa read out something in a loud voice. One of the
children said it was like a fable, and they repeated several times at
the large table that “it was fine, very fine!”
Papa looked pleased. They danced to the music of a large orchestra, and
I danced also, turning around as much as I could. A child older than
I called me Camille Ambrosine. My father was near me at the moment,
amused at seeing me enjoy myself so much.
“Why do you call her Camille Ambrosine?” asked my father. “Her name is
Juliette.”
“I know it, Monsieur Lambert. Her name is Juliette Camille Ambrosine.
Juliette is her every day name, Camille is her godmother’s, Ambrosine
her godfather’s. I say so, because they baptised her after the wedding.
I was there. It is droll, because she is very old to be baptised.”
My father shook me so violently that I screamed with fright. My
grandfather and grandmother ran up to us and there was another “family
drama.”
My father cried out insulting things to the bride and groom. But they
did not get angry. They only laughed. My father ended by taking my
mother by one hand and me by the other, and leading us back to the
house, grandfather coming behind us.
My mother wept, grandfather did not say a word, my father kept
repeating:
“You wish that my daughter should not be my daughter.”
A poor woman entered.
“Quick, come quickly, Monsieur Lambert,” she cried, “my husband
Mathieu, the thatcher, you know him, has fallen off Monsieur Dutailly’s
roof and is almost dead.”
My father and grandfather left suddenly together.
My mother undressed me, made up the packages and sewed them together,
and put me to bed very early.
The next morning, while my father was still sleeping, because he had
watched by Mathieu, the thatcher, all night, mamma tied me with my silk
handkerchiefs in the cabriolet, together with my packages, the box with
my handsome white hat, and without my going to the wedding festivities
the next or the third day, without my being able to wear my two other
pretty frocks, grandfather took me back to Chauny.
As I left, my mother told me to be sure to tell grandmother that in
spite of my father’s anger she would never regret what she had done for
me, and that she ought long ago to have confessed that I had never been
baptised.
Grandmother was astonished to see us returning so soon.
“What is the matter? what is the matter?” she cried.
Grandfather related all the story to her, and I can hear now her
exclamations:
“She had never been baptised, never baptised! My son-in-law is a
dangerous madman with his democratic, socialistic ideas, without God,
good heavens! Such ideas mean the end of religion, of the family
circle, of the right of property, of the world!”
I still have this long phrase with all its terms ringing in my ears,
from “My son-in-law is a dangerous madman,” because it never ceased
for years to keep alive my grandmother’s political griefs against my
father.
VIII
“FAMILY DRAMAS”
The terms Jacobite, Republican, Socialist, the names of Robespierre,
of Saint-Just, of Louis Blanc, of Pierre Leroux, of Proudhon, and
of Ledru-Rollin, pronounced over and over again with terror by my
grandparents and with a manner of adoration by my father, engraved
themselves upon my memory and still more in my thoughts. The “My
son-in-law is a madman” began the anthem and the “without God,
good heavens!” ended it; the middle part was varied according to
circumstances, but the same terms, the same words were interwoven
together.
My father, who was extremely eloquent, very well read, and full of
knowledge, delighted and charmed my grandmother, provided he spoke
neither of politics nor of religion. Being very fond of Greek, no one
could relate the Hellenic legends better than himself. While still
quite a small child, whenever I saw him I would make him repeat to me
the stories of old Homer, and I got to know them as well as little Red
Riding Hood and Cinderella.
My father was a poet, and his verses were always classical, at least
those were which he read to my grandmother, but we knew, and I, like a
parrot, would repeat indignantly that he also wrote _red_ verses!
How was it that my relatives were mad enough to talk politics every
time they met? My grandmother was a governmental Orléanist, my
grandfather a most passionate Imperialist, and it was amusing to hear
him say with his lisping accent: “The emperor!” My father declared
himself a Jacobite.
No one can imagine the scenes which took place between them. I can well
remember my fright at the first I witnessed; I screamed and sobbed, but
none of them heard me. One day (I was about four or five years old) I
climbed upon the table and put one foot in a dish and with the other I
rattled the glasses and plates. The discussion, or rather the quarrel,
ceased immediately as by a miracle, my grandfather, grandmother, and
father being convulsed with laughter.
My mother alone, of whom I stood greatly in awe, snatched me off the
table roughly and was going to whip me, but in an instant I was taken
from her by three people, and from that day I concluded I was very
foolish to be afraid of her, as the others would always protect me
from her severity.
The years went by without bringing any great changes in our habits. I
had become used to the “family dramas” all the more easily because, by
common accord, I was not included in their sulks, and had no part in
their quarrels.
I was about six years old when my grandfather, my grandmother, and my
father each tried in turn to convert me to his or her own ideas. I am
not exaggerating. It is true that when six and a half years old I was
in the second division of the second class of my school, that I knew
many things of the kind one can accumulate in the memory, which was
in my case an exceptional gift. Added to this, my grandmother and my
father crammed me with everything with which it is possible to fill an
unhappy child’s mind.
I remember that often of an evening, after dinner, while my grandfather
and grandmother were playing their game of “Imperiale,” which they
always did before my grandfather went to his club, I would prepare
my books and papers as grandmother _desired_, for since my flight to
Caumenchon she had never given me an order. As soon as grandfather had
gone I would work with her until I fell asleep over my books.
Seeing this preparation, grandfather would always say: “Now,
phenomenon, walk to your execution, pile up your instruments of
torture, and don’t forget a single one!” And, going away, he would add:
“They will kill the child, they will kill her!”
When by chance grandfather blamed any act of grandmother’s he never
addressed himself directly to her. The pronouns _they_ or _one_ allowed
him to appear unattacked if she cut him with one of her words, sharp as
a whip-lash, and to reply without answering her personally.
Whenever my grandparents were angry with each other these pronouns,
_they_ or _one_, were of the greatest use. They spoke _at_, not _to_,
each other, and so avoided an open quarrel. They would say, for
instance, during one of their sulks, which would sometimes last for
several days:
Grandmother: “Will _one_ be at home at such an hour?”
Grandfather: “_One_ will do _one’s_ best to accomplish it.”
At table: “Does any one wish for some beef?”
At play: _One_ has this or that.
While I, much annoyed at all this, would say _one_ to both of them.
Then, suddenly, without any one knowing why, or, perhaps because the
quarrel had lasted long enough, the familiar names were spoken again:
Pélagie, Pierre, Juliette; a general kissing followed, and all was over
without a word of explanation.
Heavens! how dramatic, and, in turn, how funny were my dear
grandparents.
As I have already said, each member of the family tried to convert me
to his or her own ideas.
Grandmother would try to prove by French history that the greatness
of France was due to our kings, who had suppressed the “great feudal
lords.”
She detested every form of feudal and autocratic systems. She loved the
“First Communes,” the “Tiers-Etat,” the “Bourgeoisie,” the moderate
ones in everything--“the middle course,” as she would say. She made
me, at a very early age, prefer Louis XI. to Louis XII., the “Father
of his People,” and Louis XIII. to Henry IV., on account of Richelieu,
who had overthrown the great vassals. What the kings had done for the
people interested her as little as the people themselves, for whom she
professed the greatest contempt. The people, the lower classes, were
simply to her “those who worked at gross things, and could have no idea
of anything refined.”
For these opinions, expressed at school, I was often severely
remonstrated with by the teachers, and looked upon with indignation by
my companions.
I professed my grandmother’s ideas as if they were my own, and I
upheld them without saying whence they came. This came from a double
feeling of pride--for I gloried in thinking differently from my
little schoolmates--and also, I recall, in order not to compromise
my grandmother, or, rather, to avoid having her opinions either
discussed or blamed. I spoke of her with a passionate admiration,
which, willingly or unwillingly, people were obliged to submit to,
under penalty of blows. I strongly denied that any other little girl
could have a mother or grandmother comparable to mine. They could do
what they liked with me by saying that from Chauny to Paris there
was not another mother or grandmother who loved their daughter and
granddaughter as I was loved. Then my generosity knew no bounds, and
would flow abundantly over the flatterers; usually this generosity
consisted in the offering of certain sugar-plums made of apples and
cherries, red and yellow, which were delicious, and of which I bought a
daily supply from a grocer on my way to school, thereby obliging him to
renew his stock at least twice a week.
These sugar-plums became later a source of reproach to me, for through
them I established my dominion over the girls I liked best, probably
the most greedy ones, and really corrupted them. But my domination,
it is true, was also built on more honourable foundations; for,
although I directed the games, and although my companions obeyed me at
recreations, it was not solely on account of the sugar-plums, quickly
eaten up, but because I was always inventing new games. Being both
tall and strong also helped me to head the ranks. It was dangerous to
measure forces with me.
My budget of political opinions was consequently thus made up: Worship
of Louis XI., “the Father of the Communes,” as grandmother called him;
worship of Louis XIII., who had cut all the feudal towers in two;
worship of Louis Philippe, “the Liberal King.”
Grandfather seized every occasion to try to convince me that the
Emperor had carried the glory of France on the wings of Fame to the
uttermost ends of the earth, that the whirling of his sword (he would
make the movement with his two large arms, one after the other,
inversely, which delighted me) had terrified not only the beheaders of
“Lambert’s Jacobite Revolution” (this a shaft at my father), but had
conquered the sovereigns of Europe as far as Africa and Asia.
How often I heard this speech! But, unfortunately for grandfather, it
used to convulse grandmother and me with laughter.
“I have had the honour in person of serving the Emperor, and neither of
you can say as much,” he would add with superb dignity (rising if he
happened to be seated), “and I will not allow a word, a single word, to
be spoken which might impair a hair’s-breadth his immortal, his eternal
memory.”
Grandfather knew all of Béranger’s songs, especially and exclusively
those that exalted his Emperor; but he made an exception of the “Old
Vagabond,” which saddened him, and brought back the memory of his own
misery--“the misery of my youth,” he would say--and his philosophy
during that time.
I have already said what a colossally big man grandfather was, and that
he drank copiously. Towards evening, speaking of the Emperor and the
campaigns he had followed at Lützen and elsewhere, he usually made a
mistake in the final triumphant phrase. There I had him.
“Take care, grandfather, not to upset your fine phrase.”
He would begin it, and, invariably being troubled by my interruption,
would end it in an emphatic manner impossible to describe, and with an
outburst of inimitable pride:
“And when Larrey needed me no longer, I fought on my own account,
joining the Grenadiers’ Guards, and I was always the _last_ to fight
and the _first_ to run.”
Then I would clap my hands and cry: “Bravo, grandfather!” and he would
understand by that that he had made a mistake.
IX
LEARNING TO BE BRAVE
If my grandmother, who was not a learned person, and who acquired much
knowledge in educating me, wished to make me learned, my grandfather,
who as a general rule was lacking in courage, wished me to become a
brave woman.
Early on Sunday mornings, before going to high mass with my
schoolmates, he would take me with him to the Hospital. I was a friend
of Sister Victoire, who used to aid my grandfather in his dressing of
wounds and his operations. Both of them were forming me to look on
human misery, they said.
I often assisted at small operations, and grandfather promised that
when, by my good behaviour, I was worthy of it, I should be present at
more important ones.
He showed me what he called “fine” wounds. Sister Victoire often taught
me, especially if she were dressing a child’s wound, how to roll
and place a bandage. When I was seven years old I knew a good many
things about surgery, and could be of some help to Sister Victoire and
grandfather. I could prepare an arm for bleeding; I learned how to
bleed, myself, and how to bandage an arm after the operation, and this
was most important, for, in those days, bleeding was an important part
of medical practice.
During the summer grandfather would often bleed people in the courtyard
of our house, near the garden, under a lilac tree of which I was very
fond, and whose perfume when in flower intoxicated me. It was not a
shrub but a real tree, affording shade.
People used to come and, without giving any explanation or asking for a
consultation, say simply: “I have come to be bled,” and they were bled
on the spot.
I was sent to fetch the lancet, basin, and bandages. I held the basin,
and, when the operation was over, I dug a hole at the foot of my lilac
tree, and poured in the blood. Perhaps that was the reason why it was
so beautiful, and why the flowers were so plentiful and sweet.
Grandmother could not look at a drop of blood. Had she been obliged to
witness a simple bleeding, she would have fainted.
Grandfather would keep saying all the while to her: “I am making a
brave woman of your grandchild. She, at least, is not afraid of a few
drops of blood. The only thing she needs now is to love war, renown,
and the Emperor.”
“And to be as brave as you are,” grandmother would add. “I am afraid
of the sight of blood,” she said, “but if France were again invaded, I
feel that I should fear neither Prussians nor English.”
Although grandmother would laugh at grandfather’s want of courage, she
was very pleased that I was not afraid at the sight of blood, and she
often thanked him for having kept me from this weakness. My schoolmates
thought more highly of me for my courage, and sugar-plums had, in this
instance, nothing to do with their estimation of me.
In the little school-world, and even in the town, some traits of my
courage were told; among others this rather ghastly one:
A notary of Chauny had some time before committed suicide, and his
body had been given to my grandfather, who had asked for it. He had a
very fine skeleton made from it, which was kept in the garret, and was
called “the notary.” Arthémise was dreadfully afraid of it. I knew the
“notary” very well, being always prowling about the garret to hunt for
the place where grandfather hid his money, which I always found. I was
passionately fond of this special kind of hunting. When I had found
the money, I changed the hiding-place, and would tease grandfather for
days by not letting him know where I had hidden it, and defying him to
find any hiding-place that would be secret from me.
When at last I told him where the money was, I deducted, according to
the sum, a small percentage for my sugar-plums.
I used then to tell grandmother (when grandfather did not tell her
himself, for there was never the slightest discussion about money
matters between them), I used to tell her the adventure, which would
greatly amuse her.
“Only,” she would say, “do not take any money from what you find. I do
not think it is nice. Whenever you want money for your sugar-plums, ask
me for it.”
“No,” I replied, “with grandfather I earn it.” And I really thought I
had earned the money by all the trouble I had taken.
I always fancied that the “notary,” whose horrid history I learned
only long afterwards, helped me to find grandfather’s money, and
consequently I considered the skeleton my friend. So it did not strike
me as unusual when, one summer evening, while some neighbours were
enjoying the cool air with us in our moonlit garden, my grandfather
should have told me to go and fetch the “notary” from the garret,
which, by the way, he would not have done himself.
Grandmother nodded approvingly, delighted at the idea that I was about
to do something extraordinary, which would the next day electrify the
town. She looked at me with her bright eyes and her red-gold hair
shining in the moonlight. She was dressed in white, her favourite
colour for herself and for me, and wore a large bunch of lilacs I had
pinned on her bosom.
“Shall I go?” I asked her in a low tone. “They will be frightened--they
do not know what the ‘notary’ is.”
“Yes, go,” she said, laughing.
I went up to the garret to fetch the “notary.”
He was very large, and I was very small. I put his head under my left
arm, and with my right hand took hold of the banister. The moon was
shining through the window. I can still hear the noise his bones made
as they rattled on the stairs behind me.
I entered the garden, and threw the “notary” on grandfather’s knees.
There was a general scream. The children shrieked, and hid their heads
in their mothers’ laps. The mothers cried: “Oh! what a horrible thing!
It is frightful! Monsieur Seron, take it away!”
Grandfather enjoyed the joke, and laughed with all his might. One woman
fainted, and, while grandmother was throwing water on her face, he took
the “notary” and placed it at the foot of the stairs. He did not dare
to take it up himself.
We found this out afterwards, because Arthémise, coming into the room
which I shared with grandmother, when we had gone to bed, cried out:
“Madame, Mam’zelle, the ‘notary’ has got downstairs alone. He is at the
foot of the staircase!”
Grandfather was obliged to get up and put it back in the garret, but he
made Arthémise go with him carrying a light.
My grandfather--who would believe it?--had very poetical tastes and
was fond of pigeons. We had hundreds of them, and he had made me share
his passion for these pets, and every day after breakfast he and I
would feed them. They flew all about us, just as later in life I have
seen them do on the Piazza di San Marco at Venice. We slipped on large
linen blouses with hoods, and the pigeons would cover us entirely, head
and shoulders, arms and hands. They clung to us and picked at us. The
flutter of their wings and their cooing delighted me, and seemed like
music. When we moved, they followed us with their pretty, mincing steps.
Grandfather and I were very fond of our pigeons, but grandmother,
finding that they multiplied too fast, had the young ones taken from
their nests, while we were absent, by a man who sold them, which
grieved us very much. I heard of it through a little schoolmate, whose
mother had bought some, and who told me one day that she had eaten some
of my pigeons.
I scolded grandmother, who asked me if I would rather have eaten them
myself.
“Most certainly not!”
Grandfather calmed me by saying that we could not possibly keep all
that were born, and that grandmother did quite right, provided she
would only take the young ones, and leave us the fathers and mothers.
She promised this, and kept her word, and the old ones became more and
more tame.
X
A THREE WEEKS’ VISIT
On October 4th, when I was eight years old, my father obtained
grandmother’s approval to take me to Blérancourt for a three weeks’
visit, until All Saints’ Day, for she felt sure of having directed
my ideas according to her way of thinking by that time. We had never
before been separated for so long, and were much grieved--I less than I
thought I should be, and she more than I feared.
My father loved me so tenderly, so passionately, he took so much
trouble with a few words, spoken here and there, to make his ideas
interesting to me; he treated me so like a woman, desiring, I could
feel, to overcome the repugnance with which my grandmother had inspired
me concerning his democratic, Jacobite, free-masonic, anti-religious
opinions--“without God, oh, heavens!”--which, like a spoiled child, I
had often expressed to him, that this journey with him seemed to me a
most serious thing. I fancied that his companionship during the next
three weeks would do more toward drawing me to him, and taking me from
grandmother, than absence itself.
“Jean Louis,” said my grandmother to him, after kissing him warmly, as
he got into the carriage where I was already seated, “bring her back to
me the same as I give her to you. You owe it to me!”
We were starting. My father answered, laughing:
“I do not promise any such thing.”
I heard grandmother cry out:
“Juliette, stay!”
A strong cut of the whip started the horse.
I did not turn back my head, but burst into tears. My father did not
attempt to console me, as my grandmother would have done. She could
never bear to see me cry.
He kissed me violently, repeating: “My daughter, my child, my own--at
last, at last!”
* * * * *
My mother welcomed me in her usual cold manner. My father’s growing
passion for me, to which he now freely abandoned himself, grandmother’s
absence removing all restraint, seemed to her exaggerated.
“It would seem as if your child were a divinity on earth,” she said to
him one day before me.
“Better than that; she is my daughter!” answered my father, and added,
laughing: “I should not be far amiss in thinking her a daughter of
Olympus.”
My mother detested witty sayings, which she classed in the same
category with teasings, and this pun on her name did not please her.
Ever since my father’s sojourn at Brussels, she called him nothing but
Monsieur Lamber, although she still used the familiar _thou_.
“Oh! Monsieur Lamber, your speech is in very bad taste,” she answered.
On the contrary, it seemed to me very clear, and I often laughingly
repeated it to father when he was instructing me about Greece. He had
found my mind open to antique subjects, and I would say to him:
“Am I not the daughter of Olympus?”
My father would always take me with him on foot, on his visits round
about to his patients. He taught me to drive his rather spirited horse,
and we would drive in his two-seated carriage over good or bad roads to
see the rich and the poor, especially the latter.
I told him of my studies in history, and of grandmother’s opinions,
which I shared.
“See, child,” he said to me, “you and your grandmother have every
reason to admire Louis XI. and Louis XIII., because you both think
that under their reigns the nobles were cast down; whereas, they
only changed their own condition _vis-à-vis_ to royalty. They became
courtiers; they were domesticated by the kings, but they remained much
as they were towards the bourgeoisie and the people; they kept the same
distance between themselves and their inferiors as the sovereigns had
kept with them. Before the Revolution equality did not exist anywhere.
That alone began the great work. Let me tell you of Saint-Just, whom,
of all the makers of the Revolution, I understand the best. He is to
me a friend known and lost. I will take you to see his sister, and
you will see how sweet and charming she is. You will amuse her. She
speaks so affectionately of her brother that he, my Saint-Just, will
cease to be to you the beheader and monster that your grandparents have
represented.”
“Oh! papa, I shall never be, like you, the friend of that dreadful
Saint-Just, or that horrible Robespierre--never!”
“Don’t be too sure. You have as yet heard only one side of the
question. You hate all injustice, you love the poor and the humble
people; you will therefore absolve those who have emancipated them,
even at the cost of violence. You see, there is no moderation in
politics. They are like a swing,” he said with a smile. “You are thrown
twice up to the extreme heights, and you pass the middle line only once
out of three times.”
“Well, papa, I am for the middle place--the middle, above all. Like
grandmother, I hate extremes.”
“Juliette, you are not serious?”
“But, papa, you began while smiling in your talk about the swing.”
“Well, I am sorry, and I wish to tell you, once for all, that the great
Revolution itself has not done sufficient work.”
“Oh! papa, for shame!”
“No. Listen to me. The nobles had oppressed the people--you know in
what manner, you know all about it, for you speak as one well informed.
Your grandmother and you judge the ‘great ones,’ as they should be
judged. But that is not everything; you must not stop on the road.
Since the nobles have been cast down, other oppressors have sprung
up, just as hard, just as tyrannical, to the poor and humble ones as
the former were, and these are neither as valiant nor as fine as were
the feudal lords, the knights of chivalry. The ‘great ones’ of to-day
belong to the upper bourgeoise class. We require a second Louis XI.,
a second Richelieu, and another Revolution, to destroy this new feudal
system. We have found the new formula, my child, to open, at last, the
reign of absolute justice, and we shall achieve it by a Republic, and
by the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. There will be
no colossal fortunes on one side and complete misery on the other.
Suffering and justice will be equitably distributed.”
“That will be a magnificent time, papa, but will it ever come to pass?”
I had been so often told that my father was an absurd and dangerous
dreamer that I was doubtful of the perspicacity of his judgment; and
still his words sank into my heart, because I found them generous and
tender towards the unhappy ones of the earth.
It is easy to explain the fascination such simple theories would have
for a child’s mind. Such conversation made a deep impression. My father
was of the type of those who were called later on “the old beards of
1848.” An idealist, without any notion of the probabilities of reality,
my father thought that his political conceptions were absolute truths.
As sentimental and as romantic as was my grandmother, he fostered
illusions about political life resembling those which she fostered
about individual life.
However, some of his conceptions seemed sublime to me in my childhood.
My father gave a place to nature in all that he said to me, for he
sermonised me continually. The doctrine of Christ, which had given the
formulas of liberty, equality, and fraternity, was mingled in his mind
with an exuberant, poetical paganism, and this amalgamation furnished
his discourses with pompous arguments on charity, on the laws of social
sacrifice, and on the divine attributes of human heroism. My childish
imagination, already initiated in researches for what grandmother
called “superior things,” was dazzled and fascinated by degrees.
My father’s professional ability served marvellously well in placing
all things of which he spoke within my mind’s reach. He simplified
questions to such a degree that he succeeded in leading me to converse
with him, and in making me feel that he took an extreme pleasure in our
conversations.
This made me very proud. He was prudent in all that he said to me:
“I do not say this to influence you; you are still too young for me
to enforce any ideas upon you; I will teach you later,” etc., etc. I
listened to admirable sonorous phrases, but could not judge of the
gaps in their practical demonstrations, or of the possibility of the
application of his ideas. I was touched by his devotedness to the
suffering classes, of whom he often spoke.
I had, however, an instinctive feeling that the violence of my father’s
character, of which he gave too frequent proofs, might make him, like
his friend Saint-Just, cruel towards the fortunate ones of this world,
as his good heart made him kind to the unhappy. And I wished to know
whether I had guessed rightly. It was a hidden place in his heart to
discover.
“I agree, after all, that your Saint-Just loved the humble and poor as
much as you do,” I said to my father one day, “but you cannot prove to
me that he was not cruel, that he did not kill.”
He answered:
“Action changes a man’s nature; you must judge Saint-Just from his
intentions.”
“Hell is paved with them, papa,” I said.
I had discovered what I wished to know.
“In spite of what your grandmother says,” he added, “I do not love
Robespierre, because he was born a Jacobin. One should not be born a
Jacobin. A person may become one, but it is necessary first of all
to have been a humanitarian. Ferocity is permissible only to defend
one’s principles, or one’s country when it is in danger. In order to
legitimatise it, there must be provocation.”
He had told me about the leaves of the sensitive plant, and, when he
said something which displeased me, I would reply:
“Enough, papa, I fold myself up!” Then he would call me sensitive, and
we would cease talking.
Sometimes it seemed to me that he actually probed in my brain as with a
red-hot poker, as grandmother, also, too often did. I felt great pain
in my temples, and would say:
“I can’t listen to you any longer. I feel ill.”
My father took a great journal, _La Democratie Pacifique_ of
Victor Considérant, to which he was one of the first subscribers.
My grandmother did not read newspapers. She heard the news from
grandfather, who read the _Gazettes_ at his club. I thought my father
admirable because he read four great pages every day, and knew at
Blérancourt everything that was taking place in the whole world.
Later, in recalling what I had suffered in my childhood and the first
years of my youth, I remembered that at that time it seemed to me that
the “walls” of my brain were too light to support the pressure of the
mass of ideas which my father and grandmother strove alternately to
force between them. I felt these “walls” tremble at times and threaten
to fall in.
I often played with the chemist’s daughter, Emilienne Decaisne,
great-niece of Saint-Just. I thought her kind and charming, but my
father said she was not sufficiently proud of her great-uncle. He
often made his friend Decaisne angry--“the too lukewarm nephew of
Saint-Just,” as he called him.
I went one day to see Saint-Just’s sister, Madame Decaisne, the
chemist’s mother, and Emilienne’s grandmother. She lived at the extreme
end of that beautiful quarter of Blérancourt called the Marais, where
the lines of plane-trees perfumed the place in the spring, and where
the ruins of the Louis XIV. château are so fine. Madame Decaisne
inhabited a well-preserved house of the eighteenth century, looking on
a garden, surrounded by high walls.
She was a very old lady of extreme elegance, tall and slight, dressed
in the antique fashion. She made pretty curtsies, and raised her gown
with her two hands very gracefully when she walked in the garden, and,
as my father said, seemed always about to dance the minuet.
In her large drawing-room, furnished with Louis XV. and Louis XVI.
furniture, which my grandmother had taught me to discern and to admire,
and which my father thought old-fashioned and horrible, as he cared
only for modern furniture--the furniture of “progress” made of mahogany
and ebony--Madame Decaisne seemed to me like an apparition.
There lived with her in her house (although her son did not like it,
my father told me before we went in) an old friend, the Chevalier de
Saint-Louis, dressed also in old-time fashion, who was called simply
“Monsieur le Chevalier.”
Madame Decaisne and the Chevalier had both remained thorough Royalists
and Legitimists, detesting the “Egalité branch,” but faithful to the
memory of Saint-Just, of whom the Chevalier had been the friend. “In
spite of the crimes they had made him commit,” said Madame Decaisne,
“she and the Chevalier had not ceased to love him.”
The Chevalier amused me very much because he glided and skipped over
the waxed floors, and kissed Madame Decaisne’s hand when he left her
only for an instant. He spoke of Saint-Just with affection.
“Monsieur le Chevalier,” my father said, “is it not true that
Saint-Just still strikes you as having been, above all, a humanitarian
and a poet?”
“Yes,” he replied, and added: “Besides, he, who was so intelligent, so
superior, so full of hope for the great future, expiated his errors by
his death. One should have seen him in the political storm to be able
to understand how so good and so noble, but too fanatical, a man could
at certain moments have thought that ‘blood was necessary.’”
The “necessary blood” remained in my mind after I heard the Chevalier
use the phrase.
I spoke to grandmother about it on my return to Chauny, and she was not
as indignant as I supposed she would be.
“When the kings protected the people from the nobles, they caused
necessary blood to be shed,” she said to me, “and the kings grew
greater in spite of their crimes. If the men of the Revolution had shed
only the enemy’s blood at the frontiers, and that of traitors--of which
there were a few like the Messieurs de Sainte-Aldegonde, who during the
invasion called the invaders of France, ‘Our friends, the enemies’--if,
I say, the men of the Revolution had not killed for the desire of so
doing, they would have been absolved, but they sacrificed innocent
persons to their ferocity, and they will never be forgiven. Your father
is one of those who, like Saint-Just, wishes to purify society more
and more, after having shed ‘necessary blood.’ He is one of those
humanitarian Jacobins, people more cruel than the wickedest, who think
they have the right to be implacable under the pretext that they have
been tender-hearted in their youth.”
But, to return to Saint-Just’s sister: She took a fancy to me. Living
with my grandparents, whom I still considered young, I adored old
people. Madame Decaisne one day read to me some of Saint-Just’s poetry.
It was about a little shepherd leading his flock to pasture, and the
unhappiness of roses because they had thorns. She threw so much feeling
into the reading that I shed tears, and thereby won her heart and that
of the Chevalier.
XI
A PAINFUL RETURN HOME
The three weeks passed so quickly that I had written very seldom to my
grandmother, not daring to speak to her about the conversations with my
father, or of the impression they had made upon me. I said to myself
it would be better to make my confession slowly. In like manner, as my
father had enlightened me with regard to his ideas, I would enlighten
my grandmother concerning mine. Moreover, I had not been converted.
Saint-Just’s ferocity was absolved, for reasons I could not quite
remember; my father, so good, so benevolent, was capable of becoming
cruel after “provocation”--I remembered that word--all this aroused a
great revolt in me, and overthrew my first enthusiasm.
There had been several “family dramas” on my account. I occupied too
large a place in my father’s life, and my mother could not overcome
that unfortunate jealousy which caused us all so much sorrow.
My father loved her passionately for her beauty, which should have
given her every right to believe herself loved; I looked at her
with admiration, and bestowed upon her a sort of worship; and my
grandparents were very proud of her. But she had spoiled our mutual
affection by her coldness, and destroyed our confidence in her love for
us, because she constantly doubted our love; none of our assurances
would convince her, whereas a careless word, spoken by chance, without
any real intention of wounding her, became to her a proof of all she
imagined, and then she became so unjust it made one believe she was
hard-hearted. Whereas, in truth, her undeserved, cutting reproaches,
her insinuations, her accusations, were only a sort of despair at not
being able to force us to love her as she wished to be loved, and at
not having won a larger amount of our affection precisely on account of
that conduct which made us love her less.
My father wished to take me back to my grandmother himself. She opposed
his wish, and it was she who accompanied me home. The pain she caused
me during that short journey recalled to me my first day at school.
We were both mounted on the same donkey, and had not gone very far on
our route when, the animal becoming fatigued, my mother got down. She
talked as she walked along, while I, very proud, held the reins and did
not wish to think of anything else.
My mother questioned me in a wearisome and annoying manner about my
grandmother’s love for me. She made me impatient, and, not being
accustomed to control myself, I answered two or three times:
“Mamma, I beg of you, leave me alone; you torment me more than the
priest at confession.”
“Has your grandmother ever told you she would find a husband for you
and give you a great deal of money--a _dot_?” she asked me suddenly
after a silence.
Having got up early, with my head drowsy, and having been tormented for
half an hour, I answered unfortunately:
“Yes, grandmother will give me as large a _dot_ as she can. Are you
satisfied?”
My mother struck the donkey, which was also half asleep. I was jolted
so unexpectedly that I fell off on the opposite side from my mother on
a heap of stones.
The shock stunned me. I was blinded by blood. I called “Mamma!” and
found she was no longer by me. I got up, took my handkerchief and tried
to collect the blood on my forehead; my flowing tears enabled me to
open my eyes. I looked for her, but a turn in the road prevented me
from seeing how far away she might be. She had disappeared in order to
punish me. I thought she had abandoned me, alone and bleeding.
I started to run as fast as I could. My mother was waiting for me.
The sight of the blood which covered my face, and which came from a
wound under my hair near my temple, and which grandfather said in the
evening might have killed me, did not touch her heart. She raised me
from the ground by my belt without getting off the donkey, which she
had remounted, placed me on her lap without saying a word, holding me
tightly with her left arm while she drove the donkey with her right
hand, tapping its head with the reins.
I was very uncomfortably seated, and suffered much from my position,
but I did not complain. I thought only of getting home, of seeing my
grandmother, whom I would never leave again.
I did not cease sobbing, and the people who met us could not understand
my evident despair nor my mother’s impassibility.
My grandmother, informed of my coming, was at the window with
Arthémise. They ran to the door on seeing us. When my grandmother saw
the state I was in, she took me into the drawing-room, overcome with
grief. She could not kiss me, there was so much clotted blood on my
face.
She had begun to question me, anxiously, when my mother, who had taken
the donkey to the stable followed by Arthémise, came like a bomb into
the drawing-room, and began again the eternal “family drama” so angrily
that the quarrel became more and more passionate. Finally I, crying in
despair, was taken with a nose-bleeding, which my handkerchief, already
saturated with blood, could not stanch, and I was literally covered
with blood.
I could understand nothing of my mother’s and grandmother’s
explanations, they were so mixed up, and, besides, my head was aching
so badly.
I had certainly done wrong to say what I had said, and I felt myself
miserably guilty, but because of the thoughtless words of a child, did
I deserve to be left in such a state?
“So,” said my mother, “you have promised to give Juliette as large
a _dot_ as you can, and, doubtless, your fortune also? Am I, then,
absolutely nothing to you? Do you disown me, your own daughter? I don’t
care a fig for your money, but the humiliation of being treated thus by
you is something I will not bear.”
When I think of my distress during those not-to-be-forgotten minutes, I
still feel the effect of it, so convulsed was I in all my being, and
so keenly did I realise my mother’s cruel jealousy.
My grandfather appeared at one door, Arthémise at the other. He looked
at me, listened for a moment, and understood what was taking place.
I threw myself in his arms, crying, my face bloated, swollen, and
bleeding, in such a misery of abandonment and feeling so forsaken that
my grandfather’s heart was convulsed with pain.
“You are, each of you, madder, more wicked, more ferocious than the
other,” he cried, in a furious voice. “Your quarrels, your suspicions,
your idiotic, imbecile explanations crush every atom of maternal
feeling in your hearts. You will kill the child, do you hear? you will
kill her! Olympe, do you not remember that your son died of convulsions
after one of your quarrels? Look, both of you, at your only child.
Don’t you feel any pity for her, shrews that you are? And then you will
dare say to me that you love Juliette! I have half a mind to take her
from you both, and to fly with her to the ends of the world. Just look
at her!”
And grandfather, who was fond of dramatic scenes himself, placed me
standing on a chair. My sobs redoubled, and I must have been pitiful
to see, for my mother and grandmother threw themselves upon me,
frightened. Grandfather pushed them aside, and put me in Arthémise’s
arms, who again began her song: “It is murder!”
This phrase made me remember, with singular clearness, my adventure at
school, and I cried out to grandmother:
“This time I will never forgive you!” My lips trembled, my throat was
on fire, and I was shivering.
While grandfather washed me, grandmother made up the fire, weeping.
When I was warmed and calmed, my grandfather, with an anger and
hardness I had never seen him show before, flew at my mother, seized
her by the wrists, and, shaking her, said:
“It is not enough that her father and grandmother should over-excite
this child’s brain enough to make it burst, but you must go and give
her such a cerebral commotion that it is enough to make her crazy.”
And as my mother, in excusing herself, began again to accuse me----
“Hold your tongue, and take care!” cried grandfather, in a threatening
voice. “I thought until to-day that you resembled my poor mother,
too passive and too ‘browsing.’ Don’t recall my father to me by your
ferocious hard-heartedness! If you go on like this, I will make you
kneel and ask your daughter’s pardon.”
“You are breaking my wrists,” she said, “let go of me. I have the
right----”
I thought then that grandfather was going to beat her. His voice became
so terrible that I saw my grandmother tremble.
“Do you repent of the wrong you have done to your daughter?”
“Yes!” she said, falling on a chair, overcome by her father, whom alone
she feared, and who was never violent, never showed firmness except to
her.
Poor mother! she suffered, herself, to such a degree from her morbid
passion of jealousy that, when she was stricken with paralysis and
confided her mental tortures to us, we heartily forgave her for those
fits of anger.
XII
A VISIT TO MY GREAT-AUNTS
I was ailing all winter. I had attacks of intermittent fever, followed
by the measles, with delirium.
My father and mother came in turn to help my grandparents take care
of me. For a week they all feared not only for my life, but for my
sanity--fears which re-established for a while perfect accord between
them.
My father, talking one day at my bedside to grandmother, who was
accusing her daughter of being responsible for my illness, said:
“It seems to me, mother, that you, too, deserve reproach in this
respect, from what my father-in-law tells me. As to Olympe, I assure
you she is more unhappy from her suspicions than those whom she
suspects. Her jealousy is not her own fault; it is a malady. If you
will look at her during her fits of anger, you will see that she has
already certain tremblings of her head, too characteristic, alas! Do
not forget that her paternal grandfather died of paralysis, which is,
perhaps, the explanation of her unconscious cruelties. You must take
care of Olympe, mother, rather than blame her. I, also, have a great
defect in being too violent, and it comes to me from an affection of my
heart, an inheritance from my father.”
My father expressed these words so gently, so sadly, that I at once
forgave my mother, with whom I had until that moment still been angry,
and I was most unhappy to hear that my father had a disease of the
heart.
During my delirium my grandfather had no difficulty in discovering the
cause of the tension of my little brain, overheated by the struggle to
understand the contradictions between my father’s and grandmother’s
ideas. I was endeavouring with all my might to make the ideas agree,
and could not succeed, which tormented me. In my fever I did nothing
but talk of politics and socialism.
“She must escape from both of you for a time,” he said to my father and
grandmother, “and I am going to accept her great-aunt’s invitation to
her.”
My grandmother’s half-sisters, Sophie, Constance, and Anastasie, lived
with her mother at a country-seat in the environs of Soissons, at
Chivres. They led a monastic life, having, all three, refused to marry.
Since their father’s death they had, no one knew why, desired to know
me, and this seemed all the more extraordinary to my grandparents
because they had never taken any interest in my mother.
A friend of my grandmother’s having spoken to them about me, they said
to this friend that if grandmother desired me to be their heiress,
instead of one of their mother’s cousins, to whom they were somewhat
attached, she must let me go and visit them alone every year during the
vacation season, in July and August.
My grandfather said to himself that such a complete separation from
my father and grandmother would put my brain “out to grass,” as he
expressed it, and would do me immense good. He induced grandmother to
write to her friend that she would send me at that time to visit my
great-aunts.
The prospect did not please me at first. I was so weary, so weak, that
I asked only to be allowed to dream, lying in the large drawing-room
beside grandmother, who read or embroidered without speaking to me.
My brain was hard at work during my convalescence. It appeared to me
that I was making a great journey in life, and that I discovered many
new and serious things every day.
I had taken no interest in money affairs until then, except for the
purchase of my sugar-plums. But was it not money which had been the
cause of the great quarrel on my return from Blérancourt? Was money,
therefore, a very great, very important thing? And now, again, I heard
it spoken of _apropos_ of these aunts for whom my grandparents cared so
little, and of whom they thought so ill.
This money, which had made my mother so cruel to me, was now going to
make my grandparents more kind to my great-aunts.
I discussed these questions very naïvely with myself, although my mind
was wide awake with regard to other things; but there was never any
question of money affairs between my grandfather and grandmother. My
grandfather kept his own accounts with his patients; my grandmother
took care of her own fortune.
I questioned grandmother about the necessity of my being my aunts’
heiress, asking her why she considered it so important that I should
have money.
“It is not for the money itself,” grandmother answered, “that your
grandfather and I desire that you should be your aunts’ heiress, but
for a certain satisfaction it would give us, and because it would be
creditable to them. You know, for I have told you so several times,
that my father kept my mother’s _dot_, and that he was obstinate in
making the keeping of it a condition of my marriage. If my half-sisters
desire to repair the wrong they have done me, I approve their conduct;
if my stepmother, now very old, wishes to die without remorse, I
understand it. That is why I desire that you should play a part in this
scheme of reconciliation, more worthy of our family than the unworthy
machinations of former times. It is not a question of money, but of a
triumph for your grandfather and myself, should your aunts make you
their heiress. You see, Juliette, there is nothing more noble than
to repair one’s wrong by a righteous act. Try to help in bringing it
about.”
I had a mission. I was going to aid in the triumph of justice, and
in that of my grandparents. I was still very weak, incapable of any
great effort, for a fever brought on by growing pains hindered the
progress of my convalescence; but the great rôle of ambassadress
extraordinary--“something like a diplomatic work of Monsieur de
Talleyrand,” said grandfather, not mockingly, but solemnly--that was
worth thinking of.
I had, besides, some experience to guide me. How many times had I not
reconciled my grandfather and grandmother, as well as my parents at
Blérancourt, or all of them together? While still very small, I had
often played the part of arbiter. I gave my personal opinion on all
matters and in all discussions.
I should probably have been insupportable had not my grandparents, both
of whom were very gay and witty, kept up a spirit of fun between us
which banished all gravity, even in questions of quarrels, instead of
preserving a tone of stiff, solemn, and stately importance, so that,
when I succeeded in hushing up a quarrel between them, it was usually
because I had made them laugh.
My father, also, submitted to this course of action on my part, but it
exasperated my mother, who would always say:
“I will never admit that a joke should get the better of a grief.”
Might it not be probable that my great-aunts would resemble my mother
in character? Ah! in that case I would resign my mission very quickly,
so much the worse for the inheritance! I would write at once to be
taken home.
“My sisters cannot be dull,” grandmother said to me. “Having remained
unmarried, they certainly must have kept their original characters.”
The great day for my departure for Chivres arrived. What an excitement,
to be going to pass two months away from my father and grandmother,
and with old people whom I had never seen, and on whom I must make a
favourable impression, “or else suffer the humiliation of being sent
home,” said grandfather.
I was going to be shut up in a sort of cloister. My three great-aunts,
their mother, and a servant whom they had had for twenty-five years,
lived alone in an old house, situated in an enormous domain surrounded
by high hedges and walls. This was the description my great-aunts’
friend gave to us of “the convent.”
My grandfather was to take me, with my packages sewed up by Arthémise,
as far as two leagues beyond Coucy-le-Château. Grandmother told me to
look well at “the monstrous feudal towers of Coucy.” Marguerite, my
aunts’ servant, would await us at the village, her native place, at her
mother’s house on the Square opposite a cross. She would meet me there
with my aunts’ donkey. I was to dine at her mother’s cottage, after
which we would leave Coucy, taking cross-roads, and would arrive at
Chivres late at night.
I had been much sermonised by grandmother before I left, and on our way
grandfather continually joked me about my “mission _à la Talleyrand_.”
“Your old aunts must die of ennui,” he said to me; “you will amuse
them, and they won’t return the compliment, if I remember them
rightly. Sophie will teach you Latin, she knows it very well; you will
use some of it with Marguerite in the kitchen, perhaps also with the
donkey, and you must bring back to me what remains of it. Mind you
don’t forget, for I have great need of it.”
Grandfather left his carriage at the entrance of the village, at the
only inn of the place, and as we walked along he continued his jokes.
I laughed so at all the nonsense he said to me that, when I saw
Marguerite and the donkey to which I was to talk Latin, I forgot to cry.
Grandfather kissed me quickly, more overcome than myself. After giving
Marguerite instructions concerning my health, and the care to be taken
of me, he handed her a complimentary note for my aunts, and then flew
off so rapidly towards the entrance of the village where he had put up
his carriage, that when I turned, after caressing the donkey, I saw no
sign of him.
We were to have gone to the inn, on leaving the village, to get my
packages to put on the donkey, which had a basket hung on his saddle,
but a servant from the inn brought them to us.
My heart was a little heavy at this sudden separation, but my stomach
was very empty, and I ate with a good appetite for the first time in
many weeks.
Marguerite’s mother had announced my passage to the whole country-side;
all the urchins of the place were grouped around the cross. I smiled at
the little girls and boys, who followed me into the house to see the
“young Miss” who looked like a little “Parisienne.”
My way of speaking, which had no Picardy accent, struck them all.
Neither my grandfather, who was from Compiègne, nor my grandmother,
which was more extraordinary still, had the least _patois_ accent.
The little chits gathered around the long oaken table at which I was
eating, and made me talk by asking questions. I had brought with me
some sugar-plums, a necessary cargo for a great journey to an unknown
country. I distributed my sugar-plums with the greatest success. I
drank to the health of the troop, who had cried: “Vive! the young
Miss!” and, a little intoxicated with the bracing air, I half remember
having made a speech to the young people, a very moral one, concluding
by saying one could never love one’s grandfather and grandmother
enough, or one’s father and mother.
“Why is it that you don’t say first that we should love our mother and
father?” asked one of the little peasants.
“Oh! that’s as you like,” I answered, thinking it would require too
many explanations to be understood.
Marguerite, who took a fancy to me at once, had her share in my
success. The “young Miss” already belonged to her.
I mounted Roussot, who intoned at his departure a song so odd for a
donkey, with such a ludicrous search for harmony, that I began to
imitate him, which encouraged him to continue.
My new friends, the children, burst out laughing. They followed me for
a long way, and, on the thresholds of the houses and huts, which became
farther and farther apart, their mothers saluted me, waving their
hands, wishing Marguerite and her “young Miss” a good journey.
I tasted the sweets of popularity. It was due to my sugar-plums, to my
Parisian accent, and to my perfect imitation of the donkey’s bray.
Marguerite made me think of Arthémise. She was full of admiration for
everything I did, for all that I said. She answered all my questions
with the desire to please me, she said.
Roussot found me a light weight. He trotted along briskly, while
Marguerite, holding the bridle, walked beside us with long strides.
I thought the sunset was beautiful; it shone over an immense plain,
inundating it with its rays, and its reflection illuminated the sky
long after it had set.
We journeyed on under the brilliant stars, not along a straight road,
for we took many turnings, which by degrees brought us near to Chivres.
The rolling country was so pretty that it pleased me exceedingly, and I
should have liked to gather all the flowers which a bright moon showed
me along the sides of the road.
“There are flowers in plenty in the close, Mam’zelle Juliette,” said
Marguerite. “There are bachelors’ buttons and poppies in the wheat, and
daisies around the wash-house; you shall pick as many as you like. You
are not so cityfied, after all, if you love the beautiful things in the
fields.”
XIII
I MAKE NEW FRIENDS
My three aunts and my grandmother’s stepmother, whom I afterwards
called great-grandmother, appeared before me, standing together on
the steps, as soon as the front door was opened. For a moment I stood
aghast, for my grandmother’s three sisters, unlike her, who always wore
such handsome gowns, were dressed as peasants, just like their maid
Marguerite, in cotton jackets, cotton skirts gathered full around the
hips, cotton kerchiefs, large grey linen-aprons with pockets, and they
wore caps on their heads!
The youngest of them, aunt Anastasie, cried out, “Good-evening, niece!
and welcome here!” in a clear, gay voice, and with the pretty accent of
Soissons, the native place of her mother, who had returned thither with
her husband, and from whom she had inherited it, doubtless. Marguerite
took me off the donkey. My two other aunts and my “great-grandmother”
had such high-bred manners that I concluded they must have disguised
themselves to amuse me.
I went indoors, while Roussot was led off to the stable, braying
loudly, I accompanying his song, which sent my aunts into fits of
laughter.
The ice was broken; I had my supper, I chattered, and then fell asleep.
It was about eleven o’clock at night.
At noon the next day I was still sleeping, and aunt Anastasie became
frightened, and awakened me. They had been waiting an hour for
breakfast.
Marguerite appeared, a parcel of clothes in her arms, and said to me:
“Now, Mam’zelle Juliette, you must dress as a peasant. We will put all
your fine clothes away in a cupboard, and then you can enjoy yourself
without fear of spoiling anything.”
So I tried on jackets and skirts belonging to aunt Anastasie, who was
the most coquettish of the three! And such coquettishness! Coarse print
gowns, faded, and washed out; and the old-fashioned patterns of them
all, and the way they were cut! I was at last equipped in a horrible
fashion. The skirt, being too long, was pulled over the waist-band, and
bulged out all around my waist; the apron, rolled up in the same way,
came nearly up to my chin. I pulled the sleeves up above my elbows. My
cap I pushed back as they wear them in Bordeaux, so that it just rested
on my long, braided hair.
It was too funny! I nearly fell over from a chair on which I had
climbed to look at myself in a mirror. I screamed with laughter, for
it is impossible to describe how absurdly I looked thus transformed.
Grandmother would have cried out in holy horror--she who was
scandalised if my dress was a little soiled, or my hair “_à la
quatre-six-deux_,” as she would say.
I entered the dining-room with complete success. I did not know where
to place my elbows, because the rolls of my skirt quite covered my
hips. I was forced to raise my shoulders, and great-grandmother,
after much laughter, declared that, when breakfast was over, the hem
of the skirt must be cut off and the skirt made shorter, and all the
rolls taken away, as they deformed my shoulders, and might make me a
hunchback.
“I will look droll as much as you like, dear, adorably rustic aunts,
but not hunchback,” said I.
I was less of a child than these five women, including Marguerite, who
ate at the same table with us. They were interested in little nothings;
my manner of talking, my funny ways, my assurance and important air
were taken in earnest whenever any “great questions” were discussed. My
aunts were delighted to feel their minds in constant movement under my
impulsion.
Monsieur de Talleyrand had found his equal, and I thought how in my
turn I could chaff grandfather.
After breakfast I went out into the garden with aunt Constance, and no
sooner was I on the steps than I saw Roussot coming along for his daily
piece of bread, his “tit-bit,” as we used to say. As soon as he saw me
he began to bray, and I answered. Outside the gate we heard the village
children laughing at Roussot’s extraordinary music, answered by another
song.
I went to visit the donkey-stable, Roussot following. He seemed quite
at home in it, walking about and showing us around. Then I went to the
poultry-yard, and saw the cow and her little calf, the rabbits, the
ducks, the fruit-storehouse, the cellar, and the large garden. It was
so large that it took me a long while to look, one by one, at all the
fruit-trees, laden with fruit, and to discover at the end a nice little
covered wash-house, in which I promised myself I would often dabble.
I came back after a while, and little aunt Anastasie--she alone in my
mind deserved this endearing epithet--showed me the lovely flowers she
had made during the winter to trim the altar, which was always raised
in the garden, on Corpus Christi Day, and was admired by the whole
country-side. The large gate was opened wide only on that day.
Aunt Sophie showed me her room, which she always cleaned herself, and
into which not one of the household, still less an outsider, not even
Marguerite, was ever admitted.
To see me in aunt Sophie’s room seemed an extraordinary and astonishing
event, and the whole bee-hive was in commotion. Marguerite told me
afterwards of the sensation created by my hour’s stay in aunt Sophie’s
room.
Her room was much more elegantly furnished than our rooms at Chauny,
only the walls were simply whitewashed. Opposite each other stood two
old chests of drawers with fine, highly polished brass ornaments; on
the other side of the room stood a very handsome bed of carved wood,
without curtains, but covered with a pale-green coverlet embroidered in
fine wools, the design of which formed large bouquets of shaded roses,
surrounded with dark-green foliage, which pleased me so much that when
I left she made me a present of it.
The two large windows were draped with small pink and green muslin
curtains, trimmed with guipure, and sliding on rods. There were books
on shelves and on the chests of drawers, and on a very handsome consol
table were several vases filled with field-flowers, so artistically
arranged that I at once said to aunt Sophie:
“You will teach me, won’t you, how to make these lovely bouquets of
field-flowers?”
A large tree in the garden outside threw a cool shade in the room;
near one window stood a table, on which were scattered, in graceful
disorder, books, papers, a bowl of flowers; and everything, in fact,
that was needful to study, to read, and to write in quiet, and amid
pretty surroundings.
I thought of grandfather’s speech:
“Your aunt Sophie will teach you Latin, which you can afterwards
translate to Marguerite, to the donkey,” etc.
“Is it true, auntie, that you read Latin books?” I asked.
“Oh! yes.”
“Does it amuse you?”
“Very much.”
“I would like to see one.”
She showed me a pretty little old book with gilt edges, which enchanted
me, and told me that it was Virgil’s “Bucolics.” She read me a passage
and translated it, and I said to her:
“Why, it is just like the stories of old Homer, which papa tells so
well. In the seventh canto of the Odyssey, old Homer, in speaking of
the four-acre garden of Alcynous, enumerates the fine trees which
yield such beautiful fruit, and which Ulysses so admires. Your Virgil
is like my Homer, but he is not so old.”
Aunt Sophie kissed me.
“Why! do you know Homer? Do you love him, and like to talk of him?”
“Certainly, I do, aunt Sophie; that and the history of our France are
my favourite studies. Whenever papa comes to Chauny he recites to me
a new canto of the ‘Iliad,’ or the ‘Odyssey.’ I make him begin over
again those I like the best. You can question me, aunt Sophie; I know
the names of all the gods and the heroes of Greece. Ancient Greece and
ancient Gaul are my two passions. But I shall not like your Latin. I
hate the Romans, whose greatest man was Cæsar; he put out the eyes of
our Vercingetorix; the Romans pillaged Greece and then----”
“We shall get on very well, Juliette,” said aunt Sophie, “and I will
teach you to love Virgil, who is the most Greek of the Latin poets.
I will teach you, as he has taught me, to love Nature, and to find
pleasure in a country life. I will repeat to you the cantos of the
‘Æneïd,’ as your father has told you those of Homer.”
“But, aunt Sophie, I am not so ignorant as you suppose. Papa has
taught me to know and to love Nature. I will love it with you, but not
with your Latins. I cannot bear them.”
During the next few days the chief thought of my great-grandmother, of
aunt Constance, and aunt Anastasie, was to know what aunt Sophie had
said to me, and what her room was like. Marguerite even questioned me.
On leaving her room, aunt Sophie had followed me into the dining-room;
then, having taken her mother into the drawing-room, which was up a few
steps, and seated her near the large window, out of which she could see
the field and her daughters at their work, she gave her a trumpet to
call us in case of need, and then said to us all:
“To work!”
A skirt, shortened by aunt Constance, was put on me, and each of us,
with a sickle in our hands, proceeded to cut fresh grass and clover for
the cow and for Roussot.
My aunts showed me how to use my sickle, and I was really not too
awkward. Marguerite made small heaps of the grass we cut, and carried
them to the stable in a little low-wheeled cart, which she drew herself.
They made me wear my cap more forward, and I overheard my aunts, who
were already dear to me, discussing a book which they were in turn
reading aloud in the evenings. It seemed to number many volumes, for
they had been reading it for the last eight months, and still it was
not yet finished. I asked aunt Constance the name of the book, and she
told me that it was “The History of the Italian Republics,” by Sismondi.
My aunts spoke so clearly of things, in such simple language, their
ideas, clearly and precisely expressed, were so easily comprehensible
to me that I became much interested in their conversations.
I can see them now, on their knees, cutting clover, and judging of
facts, of actions, of ideas of men in a way that kept my curiosity on
the alert. The conversation was about Savonarola, a sonorous name that
at once struck my memory, and of his mad attempts to transform society.
Many of Savonarola’s ideas resembled my father’s, but I did not dare
to say so, nor to uphold any principles contrary to those which my
aunts seemed to defend. I might, perhaps, do so at some later time. I
could already have said my say in this conversation had I wished, and
I was inwardly grateful to my father for having opened my mind to the
comprehension of politics.
So, while cutting away at my clover, I thought what true ladies, clever
and cultivated, were my aunts under their peasant garb. They looked as
if they wore a disguise, but the expression of their faces, their way
of speaking, and all their gestures, were distinguished and elegant.
“We are boring this child; she is cutting the clover as hard as she can
so as not to fall asleep,” said Anastasie.
“You are mistaken, auntie,” I answered, “I am listening. Papa wants
to make a Republican of me, grandmother is determined that I shall be
a Royalist, and grandfather tries all the time to make me love his
Emperor. So I am delighted to hear about the Italian Republics. I learn
things I never knew before, and I love to be instructed.”
Aunt Constance was the only one who would not use the “thee” and “thou”
to me. She was very witty and quizzical, her eyes and lips expressed
great fun, and she pretended in a laughing way to have an exaggerated
respect for my very youthful self.
“You are a young lady like few others, I must confess,” said aunt
Constance, suddenly laying her sickle down by her side.
Marguerite came past them and said that sufficient clover was cut. My
aunts and I went to the foot of a tree, and when we were all seated
side by side in the shade, I answered aunt Constance in the same tone
she had taken:
“I am, indeed, a young lady like few others, and this is not the end
of my being so. I promise you, auntie, that I do not mean to stop
half-way.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked aunt Sophie.
“You can easily understand,” I answered, in a serious, grave,
mysterious tone--for I felt that I must initiate my dear great-aunts
in my secret thoughts, that they were worthy of my confidence, and
that I could repeat to them what my grandmother was always saying to
me--“you can easily understand that I am not going to live all my life
at Chauny, that I shall go to Paris and become a woman unlike everyone
else.”
“Are you going to be a celebrity, dear?” asked aunt Sophie.
“How long a time do you propose to take before you render your family
illustrious?” asked aunt Constance.
“Forty years,” I replied.
Aunt Constance and aunt Anastasie burst out laughing at my answer.
Marguerite, leaning on her little cart, was listening, open-mouthed.
“It is just possible that it may be,” she said.
“Well, Juliette, I promise you I will live to see it,” said aunt
Sophie, solemnly and seriously.[B]
XIV
SOME NEW IMPRESSIONS GAINED
I spent two full months at Chivres. I learned from Marguerite and
aunt Constance all about the care to be given to animals, all about
fruit-trees from aunt Anastasie, who also taught me how to make very
pretty artificial flowers.
One of the most enjoyable hours in the day was the hour when aunt
Sophie would give me a lesson in her room.
I used to sit in a pretty arm-chair, painted white and covered with
some fresh pink and green material. Aunt Sophie was embroiderer,
upholsterer, painter, carpenter, and locksmith all in one, and it
was she who had painted and covered her arm-chairs, having first
embroidered the material. We sat in similar arm-chairs, without our
caps, which we took off; we chatted by the pretty table covered with
books and papers, and it was I now who made the lovely nosegays of
field-flowers.
Aunt Sophie placed before me a large sheet of paper, and gave me a
pencil, and, every quarter of an hour, that is, four or five times
during the lesson, she would say: “Sum up in a few words what you have
just heard.”
It is to aunt Sophie that I owe my tendency to condense, to simplify,
and to store in my memory a very closely packed supply of knowledge.
She would talk to me, too, of the Paganism of modern times and of the
danger of its encroaching upon divine things. She would read me a
short Latin sentence, repeating the words several times, and making me
say them over mechanically; then she would explain them one by one,
making of them living images, so that I was delighted with the poetical
interpretations. I understood everything that she explained to me.
“Juliette,” she would say, “let us look at what we can see in things,
and seek for what is not visible.”
“Oh! auntie, let us look at once for what is not seen. I can find out
for myself, even away from you, what is visible.”
Aunt Sophie explained to me that life exists in everything, even in
what are called inanimate things. Every object had for her its own
peculiar voice or sound. She taught me to distinguish, with my eyes
closed, the difference between the sound of wood and of metal. She had
a crystal slab on which she placed balls of various substances, and
with a little hammer she would play the strangest airs.
“If things can so speak to us,” she would say, “I am convinced that
flowers look at us. They all have faces which express something, and
most of them have perfumes which penetrate to our very souls. We can
the more easily understand what is called the spirit within us, by
smelling the perfume of a flower. I will explain that to you more fully
a few years hence.”
Ah! the fairy-like, well-remembered hours I spent every morning with my
aunt!
I was talking to her one day about the wind and she said: “I do not
like it.”
“Why?”
“Because the voice of the wind is made up of borrowed sounds which it
gathers on its way. Wind annoys me, makes me sad or puts me to sleep
just like those authors who borrow ideas from others.”
I feel that I am badly expressing all that my aunt Sophie told me, that
I speak less clearly and less originally than she. I was only eight
years old and yet I understood all she said. She must have made herself
much clearer than I can. I lived with aunt Sophie a life of dreams
and a life of action at the same time. Every action accomplished by
me when near her, seemed to have a fuller significance. If I watered
a plant I seemed to be caring for it, and delivering it from the
horrible pains of thirst; if I cut clover with a sickle, I seemed to be
receiving a present from the earth, and felt that I must be grateful;
if I plucked a ripe pear, I was easing the overloaded tree, which
seemed to lean and offer it to me, and still did not let it drop. If I
killed any harmful insect, I fancied I was doing, in person, the work
of Hercules, and could hear around me a kind and approving murmur.
When Roussot and I sang our duet we were really having a musical
discourse.
I could not stay indoors. The rain-drops, big and little, called me out.
Since my illness, a very strange thing had taken place in my young
brain. I fancied that I had just been born or had been born over again.
All that grandmother, who hated Nature, and thought it cruel and false,
had taught me--which teaching had been already greatly counteracted by
my father’s influence--had so entirely disappeared from my mind that I
could not conceive how it had ever existed there.
All that grandmother believed in on this earth was love. “The passion
of loving alone brings us near to superhuman truths,” she said. “All
things that can be reasoned about, and proved, and weighed, come from
what is inert and material, and ought therefore to have no place in
our souls. It is a kind of knowledge that may be left, like cumbersome
luggage, by the side of the road, that leads us to the Beyond.”
Grandmother seemed to me at that time really to be the incarnation
of what people said of her--“romantic.” I loved her just the same as
before; I paid her in my heart the same tribute of affection I owed
her, and which she deserved, but I was much more attracted by the minds
of my father and of aunt Sophie, and felt great curiosity about them.
I loved Nature as aunt Sophie loved it, and I was interested in the
past history of Nature according to the Greek and Latin poets, and I
suffered with my father for the misery of mankind, for the wretchedness
of the poor and the unfortunate in life.
“Aunt Sophie,” I asked her once, “why is it that all that you show me
which is so divine in Nature, hides from me that God who is so great
and so far off, and whom grandmother taught me to adore? Why is it that
I care no longer for the sufferings of ‘misunderstood souls’”--this was
one of grandmother’s sayings--“and that I care a great deal more for
the welfare of poor miserable wretches?”
“It is just because God is so great and so far off that you are
too little to understand Him,” answered aunt Sophie. “When you are
as old as I am”--she was forty-six and grandmother a little over
forty-eight--“everything will find its place in your understanding,
especially if the basis of what you know is built on a sure foundation.
You must be able to touch with your feet the ground you walk on. Mother
Goose certainly said that before I did. You must love intensely all
that lives while you live. I am a child of Nature; I live in it and for
it. Your father loves mankind, and wishes it to be happy, because he,
himself, is so human.”
At Blérancourt I had adopted the habit of writing down in a little book
a summary of the conversations I had with my father. Aunt Constance,
having found the book in one of my pockets, was always teasing me about
the depth of my reflections. I let her laugh, but, when in possession
of my “Notes of Blérancourt” again, I added to them my “Notes of
Chivres,” and the serious thoughts exchanged with aunt Sophie.
I kept this little book, written in small handwriting which only I
could read, until I came to Paris, when, to my great regret, it was
lost, but the sense of what was therein written has never left my
memory.
XV
THE END OF MY HOLIDAY
Marguerite was appointed to show me the environs of Chivres. I put on
my pretty frock, and for a week, the harvest being over, seated on my
friend Roussot’s back, I roamed over the lovely valley through which
runs the river Aisne. I saw the whole country between Soissons and
Chivres, and around Chivres itself.
Marguerite took me to see the Dolmens, the Druid stones, of which
aunt Sophie had told me the history and legends. On the evening when
I returned from my visit to the Dolmens, I refused to wear my peasant
clothes, and appeared at table in a white frock, with a wreath of
mistletoe and laurel-leaves on my head, dressed as a Druid priestess of
my Gauls.
Grandmother and my father did not write to me for fear of tiring me.
Had they known that aunt Sophie was teaching me Latin and other things
beyond my age, they would have grieved at having been parted from me
for so long a time and for no benefit to my health, as they would have
thought.
Now, I was in perfect health because I worked in the fields for hours
every day; because I went to bed and got up early, and because I slept
alone in a large room, where a distant window, protected by a screen,
was left open all night; whereas at Chauny I slept in grandmother’s
room, and she had the habit of reading in her bed, by the light of a
great lamp, which she often forgot to blow out, and which many times
smoked all night.
I had recovered all my strength; my recent “growing” fever had left no
trace whatever, except a slight increase added to my height. I looked
fully ten years old, and was exceedingly pleased at the fact.
I was almost perfectly happy. To the success of my mission this
pleasure was added: that, although I had been sent to please my aunts,
it was they who had pleased me.
My mind was more at work during the time I spent with my beloved
relatives than at any other moment of my life, insomuch that I asked
questions on every subject, and that I pondered over all the “whys and
wherefores,” and all the answers given me. What a happy holiday, and
what perfect rest as well!
Ah! if only grandmother and my father were living at Chivres with my
aunts and great-grandmother and Marguerite, not forgetting Roussot,
the cow and the calf, etc., etc., I should then be perfectly happy!
I was certainly very fond of grandfather, and my mother’s beauty, as
I looked at her, effaced any trace of unjust scoldings and of the
sadness I felt at seeing her so frequently pain both my father and
grandmother; but I could not but think that my mother and grandfather
could very well live at Chauny quite contentedly, while my four aunts,
my great-grandmother, Marguerite, father, grandmother and I would be so
unspeakably happy living at Chivres.
The time for departure, however, drew near. I had only a few days left.
Grandfather had written (grandmother not being as yet in harmony with
her sisters) that he would come for me on the following Monday, at
the same place where he had given me into Marguerite’s care. This was
Friday.
Neither my aunts nor myself dreamt of prolonging my stay. We felt that
it might compromise the possibility of any future visits.
At my age, a year seemed a century. With their gentle philosophy and
their equal tempers, my aunts told me that July and August would come
quickly around again, and that now that they knew me, they could both
think of and talk of me.
“You will leave us with perhaps more pain than we shall feel at losing
you, Juliette,” said my teasing aunt Constance, when I was lamenting
our separation, “but you will as certainly sooner forget the pleasure
of our society than we shall forget the pleasure of yours.”
“You are naughty,” I answered. “You know very well it is just the other
way. Have I left off thinking of my father and grandmother, and wishing
they were here? I have, perhaps, talked of them too much; well, that is
how I shall talk of you.”
Tears were shed at my departure, and aunt Constance was not the least
sad of them all; but I was too grieved to bring it up to her notice.
Aunt Sophie had prepared some short exercises which she made me promise
to go over for a quarter of an hour every day. On every Sunday I was to
know seven new Latin words, without forgetting a single one of those
learned before. I was to return to Chivres with two hundred and fifty
Latin words in my mind, placing them as I chose, as all the first Latin
words aunt Sophie had taught me were words in common use.
The day I showed my father the exercises prepared for me by my aunt, he
exclaimed:
“Why! this is a bright thought! Your seven words put together have a
general meaning. They form a little story, and each word is necessary
in daily life.”
“Good-bye, good-bye, dear aunts!” I waved kisses to them until I was
out of sight, for, a fact commented on by the whole of Chivres, my
three aunts and great-grandmother were standing outside the big gate,
so as to watch me as far as the end of the village.
Marguerite was crying and blowing her nose; Roussot most certainly
understood the situation, for he held his head low and made a noise
resembling a moan.
I tried to console Marguerite by talking fast, but did not succeed.
“There’s nothing to be done, Mamzelle Juliette, you are going away, and
I can think of nothing else. The only thing that will help me to bear
it until next summer, when you are coming back, is that now that the
ladies have told me that the money is to be yours, I shall work harder
and economise more than ever.”
I again found myself in full popularity on entering Marguerite’s
village. The whole band of children was waiting for me.
Alas! I had no more sugar-plums. Why, yes, I had! my dear grandfather
had brought me a large parcel of them. His joy at seeing me look so
full of health quite touched Marguerite. I thanked the dear woman for
all her care of me, and begged her so warmly to assure my aunts of all
my gratitude, that she said:
“Perhaps, after all, you do love us as much as we love you.”
And she added, turning to my grandfather: “you will take great care of
her, Monsieur?”
From Marguerite’s tone, when she said these words, you might
have supposed that it was she and my aunts who were giving me to
grandfather, and not he who was taking me home.
After we had eaten some luncheon at Marguerite’s home, I kissed and
kissed the old servant, I kissed Roussot, who I thought moaned more
sadly under my embrace, and jumped into grandfather’s carriage.
I turned around to look back as long as I could. Marguerite waved her
arms, the children shouted: “Come back soon!” and Roussot went on
braying.
XVI
AT HOME AGAIN
“Well?” asked grandfather, as we drove away, “has everything
really gone off well? Have you made a conquest of your aunts and
great-grandmother? They dote on you, don’t they? Answer! they really
dote on you?”
“Grandfather, they love me dearly; they really do. And I love them; you
can’t think how nice and amusing they are, and good and tender, and not
solemn a bit.”
“But do you think they realised what a wonderful niece we sent them?”
I remained unembarrassed, being accustomed from my earliest days to the
broadest compliments. I answered simply:
“Yes, grandfather, they found your granddaughter wonderful.”
“You must tell us everything in detail. Your grandmother and I wish to
know all that happened hour by hour, day by day, word for word, all, in
fact, and even what you thought.”
“And dreamed?” I asked. “What an effort of memory I shall have to
make!”
“We have been so lonely. Your father came once a week to talk you over
with your grandmother.”
“And did the usual ‘family drama’ happen every time?”
“Of course, but it always ended happily, because when your father rose
to take leave, either your grandmother or I would always say: ‘Dear
me! how we must love that little woman, to be always quarrelling about
her,’ and then we all said good-bye with a laugh.”
“I shall have to take seriously in hand the matter of reconciling my
grandmother’s and my father’s ideas concerning me,” I answered so
gravely that grandfather began to laugh mockingly.
“Nonsense!” said he, moving so suddenly that he dropped the reins. When
he had picked them up, I grew angry.
“Who reconciled my aunts and my grandmother, if you please? Was it not
I?”
“Beg pardon, my Emperor!” answered grandfather cracking his whip, “I
forgot that we are all only simple soldiers.”
Then a rain of amusing jokes began. I was seized with grandfather’s
contagious gaiety. He laughed so heartily and unaffectedly at his own
jests, that no one could help laughing with him.
Both my father and mother had come from Blérancourt to welcome me on
the evening of my return; all were loud in admiration of my tanned face
and hands, and were delighted to see me plumper, as well as much taller
and stronger.
My mother, I suppose, was pleased, although she did not show it in
her manner. I perceived that in her presence I should have to reduce
considerably the report of the success of my mission, and I took good
care not to repeat Marguerite’s saying: “Now that the ladies have told
me that the money is to be yours, I shall have more courage to work and
economise.” I knew from experience that it was best in any conversation
with my mother to leave out the money and legacy question. Marguerite’s
saying had touched me only in so much as it proved her love and
devotion for me.
The moon shone clear, and as the weather was very dry, my father and
mother did not fear the fog on Manicamp Common, so they started for
home that same evening after dinner, having arrived much earlier than I.
The story of my transformation into a peasant the day after my arrival
at Chivres, of the way my aunts worked out of doors, greatly amused
my relatives during dinner. It was supposed then they had remained
cockneys, for at Chauny they were always called “the fine ladies.”
“They really used to be most affected,” said grandmother. “They
took no interest in household matters and would spend their time in
the drawing-room, reading, doing fancy-work, and quarrelling among
themselves.”
Just then I made a most unlucky speech which very nearly provoked the
inevitable “drama.”
“Well,” I said, “I am glad to say that they have improved in every way.
They take part in all that goes on, and I never heard a single quarrel
or dispute during my two months’ stay; it was a change for me.”
“You are really very amiable to us,” replied my mother in a sharp tone.
“If it was you who brought about this miracle, you can repeat it here,”
said grandmother, who had no idea of losing her temper.
“Why, Juliette, how can you have such excessive, scandalous, dreadful,
criminal audacity as to dare to imply that you have ever heard a single
quarrel or witnessed a single dispute in your family either at Chauny
or Blérancourt? In truth, you baby, your health is only skin deep; you
are still suffering. Go to bed, my child, go to bed.”
You should have heard grandfather say all this in his shrill, lisping
voice. He was perfectly serious and solemn, and irresistibly funny.
“I was wrong, I was wrong, a hundred times wrong, Sir Grandfather,” I
answered, “I humbly beg pardon, I repeat. I collapse!”
I imitated grandfather’s tone so perfectly that even my mother smiled.
When my parents had left, grandmother instead of questioning me as I
had expected, said kindly:
“Go and rest, darling, Arthémise will put you to bed, while we have our
game of _Imperiale_. To-morrow, and the following days, you shall tell
us all you have said, all you have done and seen.”
And so it was, for days and days I talked of nothing but Chivres.
Grandmother was quite surprised that I should have so enjoyed myself in
a place where she would have been bored to death.
During the last remaining month of my holidays I was much oftener
in our large garden than in the drawing-room reading stories with
grandmother.
A gardener was in the habit of coming three times a week, and, guided
by Arthémise, he arranged the garden as he pleased. It was I now who
looked after all the crops, and from that time he obeyed my orders. I
had some autumn sowing done, and I began to read books telling about
the culture of vegetables and the raising of fruit. The garden was
admirably stocked with both. I chose one of the empty rooms for a
fruit-store and had some shelves put up by the carpenter. Grandmother
took no interest in these things; so she let me do as I chose with the
gardener and Arthémise. During the whole of that winter we had ripe
fruit on the table every day, and my grandparents were much pleased.
I suffered greatly in not having a room to myself and being obliged to
share grandmother’s. I tried to keep it neat and clean, but grandmother
upset it as soon as it was tidy. She cared nothing for the elegance of
the frame, although she was so particular about the portrait, that is,
herself.
When I was kept indoors by rain or bad weather, I tried to put a
little order into the arrangement of the house. I ransacked certain
drawers and cupboards, and left them more orderly than they had ever
been before. To the rag-bag with all the rubbish! to the poor all that
we could no longer use! Neither grandfather nor grandmother made any
objections, for they were convinced that my active life at Chivres had
benefited me much, and that, provided I could create for myself a field
of physical activity, they could all the better, and with scarcely any
danger, set my head to work.
My grandparents’ house underwent a complete change in a fortnight.
Fresh air, which was never allowed to enter the hermetically closed
rooms, now blew in abundantly, and even broke a few windows. Arthémise
and I scrubbed and rubbed and beat from top to bottom. I discovered in
the garret some old vases and china, rather soiled by our dear pigeons,
which I filled with prettily arranged flowers, and placed about the
rooms.
Grandmother at last took some interest in the beautifying of our house.
She would sometimes help us--not to clean, for that would have spoiled
her beautiful hands, but to arrange.
She opened a cupboard for me on the first floor, and we found it full
of beautiful gowns of dead grandmothers. Out of these I made table and
bureau covers, to which grandmother added embroidery.
Grandfather enjoyed this luxury. The house seemed much more attractive
to him. I owed it to his influence that grandmother allowed me to
have a room to myself on the first floor, next to Arthémise. A
communicating door was made between the two rooms.
I selected from the garret, which was full of furniture, the pieces
that I liked. I stole from grandfather a pretty Louis XV. chiffonier,
in which I had always kept my dolls and their clothes. So far as I was
able, I copied the arrangement of aunt Sophie’s room.
I discovered a large table on which I set out my school books and
papers, and many times grandmother left her beloved drawing-room and
brought her embroidery to my room while she gave me my lesson.
I would sometimes send her away, saying, “Grandmother, I want to
collect my thoughts.”
This made her smile and she would sometimes tease me by staying; at
other times she would go, saying to herself that, after all, for a
child to think, even of nothing as it were, was still thinking, and
that in my father’s mind and her own, their chief desire, as they
had said when I was away, was to create in me an individuality, even
supposing that individuality might be contrary to their own ideals.
These desires of thinking out my thoughts seldom occurred, however, and
I was at that time so active and full of play that grandmother was not
at all distressed at my occasional love of solitude.
My dreams were explained later on when I began to write poetry.
Thus my dual character was formed. I have always remained very full of
life when with other people; yet at times I am eager for solitude.
XVII
I BEGIN TO MANAGE MY FAMILY
I endeavoured most seriously to put into practice what I had once told
my grandfather, who had laughed at me, namely: to make my grandfather’s
ideas concerning me agree with my grandmother’s. I fancied myself born
to conciliate. I talked of grandmother to my father, and still oftener
of my father to grandmother, having more opportunities for so doing. I
sought in every way to make them more indulgent and loving towards one
another, and I perceived how a word said at the proper time, and thrown
into ground already prepared, could bring forth a good harvest.
I determinedly stood between them in their quarrels. I forbade any
“talking at” each other and greeted such speeches with blame and
derision. I forced any misunderstanding between my beloved grandparents
to be explained away instantly, and I would not allow ill-humour. I
proved on the spot what had caused either the misunderstanding or the
rancour. I pleaded a double cause and won it.
“You surely could not mean that, grandmother? You have not understood,
grandfather. It is very wrong of you to imagine such an unkind meaning!
Say you are wrong. You know very well that....” With these few
sentences, interrogative or affirmative, which I repeated one after
the other, very quickly, and also through tenderness and entreaties,
I managed to smooth over the quarrels, and by this means we all three
kept sadness at bay for a few days.
Whenever I had cleared away all the black clouds, I fancied the sky
would always remain serene.
You can imagine how important I felt myself, and how I persevered in my
peace-makings. My reflections were certainly absurdly profound in the
circumstances, but they taught me to study my grandparents’ characters
with kindness, and by that means to turn my arguments to good account.
I noted certain words spoken when one or the other was absent, and
I noticed that whenever I could add to my wish of convincing them
favourably: “She or he told me so the other day,” my triumph was
complete. At times and according to circumstances, I ventured some
slight embellishments, but I do not think any one could blame me, when
the feeling which dictated my little exaggerations was so praiseworthy.
I learned that no matter how young we may be, we can be kind and useful
to those we love. I was born with such a cheerful disposition, I was so
naturally happy, that I might easily have become selfish, had I not,
from my childhood, thought a great deal about the happiness and peace
of those belonging to me, and especially because of their tendency to
make themselves miserable, and to disturb their lives by scenes of
violence. I formed in my heart an intense desire to care always for the
peace and welfare of others.
At nine years of age my character was formed, and I have since then
perceived no essential change in my intercourse with others. My first
interest in life was centred in my relatives, later, in the people of
mark with whom I lived; and I have developed my own personality only so
far as it could serve my ardent wish to love, to admire, and to devote
myself to others, or to be useful to any cause I espouse and uphold, so
long as I deemed it worthy to be fought for and upheld.
My real vocation, in fact, would have been that of an apostle preaching
the “good word” and reconciling men among themselves. I was much more
ardent in play hours than in study, because I was busy amusing my
schoolmates or settling their quarrels. I hated anything clannish, and
I especially sought after those girls who stood apart from my group.
I led in everything, but I was never captain. When it so happened that
there were two camps, I called myself the chief staff officer of the
two commanders, and I rode from one to the other giving advice to each.
I was much fonder of being guide than captain, and it was usually owing
to me that there were never any defeats, and that neither side got
the better of the other. What unmixed joy I used to feel when, after
some particular play hours in which I had given myself a great deal
of trouble, I was surrounded by a group of little girls saying to me:
“What fun you have made for us!”
On rainy days we were obliged to content ourselves in a barn, in which
no running about was possible, so I amused my young companions by
talking politics to them. I demanded absolute sworn secrecy concerning
the things I was going to tell them, and of which they had never heard
in their own families. Their ears were wide open to hear my stories
about King Louis Philippe. These were the stories my father never lost
an opportunity of relating to grandmother in order to make her angry.
At the time of which I speak so very few newspapers found their way
into the country, that politics and the government were topics rarely
discussed at table by grown people, so I acted as a newspaper, and
informed my little friends of what was going on in the world.
My father, whenever he saw me, gave me cuttings from the _Democratie
Pacifique_, and kept me so well posted that events often justified my
speeches, and I was asked for “the news.”
We all made up our minds that when we were grown up, we should have a
hand in government, and would state our opinions frankly, and that our
future husbands should be obliged to be interested in politics.
I read every book I could lay my hands on, and among them I found a
volume on the Fronde which delighted me, because the women of those
days played leading parts. I told my “disciples” about the book,
and, to my delight, they soon came around to all my ideas. I easily
persuaded them that we were all “Frondeuses.”
How proud we felt at having ideas of our own, and to belong to a
“secret society,” for we bound ourselves not to reveal to any one the
opinions we shared. And then, who knew? Things were going so badly
that perhaps one day France might have need of our devotion and our
capacities, and we loved France. We fancied ourselves to be “the
staves of this dais which covered the sacred reliquary of our country.”
One of the girls discovered this metaphor and was much applauded.
These childish things, at which one can but smile, made us very
patriotic little persons, however--ready, as we thought, at least, to
give our lives for France. We no longer learned history in our former
way. Everything in it interested us. We spoke of _our_ France, at such
and such an epoch, and we discussed at length the consequences of a
reign, a fact, a victory or a defeat.
If a professor had heard us, he would certainly have found in our
conversations--often very silly, to be sure--elements of emulation to
make young pupils love studies which usually bore them mortally.
However, after a time we grew tired of the Fronde; we should be obliged
to find something new. I promised to do so. The Easter vacations were
at hand, and I was to pass them at Blérancourt.
When I arrived there, it so happened that one of my father’s friends,
a Fourierite, came to visit him. I had heard of Fourier, of whom I
knew but little, while I had for a long time been familiar with Victor
Considérant and the _Democratie Pacifique_.
My father’s friend explained to him a complete plan for a phalanstery,
wishing to interest him in it, and I remembered what was necessary for
my purpose, in order to make use of this new idea with my schoolmates
during our future recreations, for we were always eager for new things.
After the departure of the Fourierite my father explained to me all
that I wished to learn, and I soon understood what a phalanstery was.
But my father said, and I agreed with him, that, being only nine and
a half years old, I was still incapable of understanding the depth of
Fourier’s theories, his social criticisms, and the elements of reform.
But he talked to me of Toussenel, and delighted me with stories taken
from his _L’Esprit des Bêtes_, a book that had just appeared, and about
which my father was enthusiastic. We had long conversations about my
pigeons, whose habits I had studied a little, but I knew nothing of
their intelligence and feelings. Ah! what interesting things my father,
through Toussenel, revealed to me concerning bees and ants. In our
walks, when we came upon an anthill, we would lie down flat, and I saw
and learned many things about the tiny workers, those that laid eggs
and the warriors. What my father objected to was that there should be a
queen among the bees and the ants.
“You can’t get over it, papa,” I said, “and though you may talk for
ages on ages, you cannot change the government of bees and ants.”
All these histories of animals were like fairy-tales, and I took the
greatest pleasure in them, saying: “Tell me more, more!”
However, my father found in the study of these creatures, despite
their royalism, proofs of the beauty of his own doctrines. Making
everything revert to his desire to induce me to love nature and detest
_bourgeoise_ society, he tried to persuade me that the associations,
the community of work and of fortune, as practised by the bees and the
ants, would be the means of adding more generous perfection to human
lives than mere selfish individualism.
“Besides,” he said, “at this epoch the chain which has enclosed man in
a middle-class position during a century is expanding, and will soon
break.”
My father was fond of their rather cabalistic formula. I used it on
all occasions, and I also thought I heard the breaking of the chain of
“middle-class positions,” and was glad.
When I returned to Chauny I spoke to grandmother of Fourier, of the
phalanstery, and of _L’Esprit des Bêtes_, of the royalism of the ants
and the bees, which was in sympathy with her ideas, but at the idea of
the communism of work and of fortune, which we approved, she laughed
merrily.
“Your father needed only that, poor fellow, to complete him! To receive
inspiration from insects, to take lessons in social organisation
from animals--it is really enough to make sensible people laugh,”
said grandmother. And she related to my grandfather and to my friend
Charles, with her mischievous wit, the news of Jean Louis Lambert’s
new social theories, developing them and putting them into action in
such a droll manner that, in spite of the effort I made to defend these
theories, I could not help bursting out laughing with the others.
“You see, my darling,” said grandmother to me one day, “I like
‘middle-class positions,’ and find it very pleasant to occupy one, and
do not wish at all that they should be broken, for I myself hold such a
position. The best trick I could play your father would be to give him
a ‘middle-class position’ as householder. The house in which he lives,
and which he likes very much, belongs to me, and I’ll wager he would
care for it a great deal more if I should give it to him. We should
see, then, if he would ask his gardener to come and share it with him!
I will make my son-in-law a householder before a week, and we shall
soon know if through him I have tightened by a link in his chain the
man of ‘middle-class position,’ the _bourgeois_.”
My grandmother did as she said, and my father declared that he was
delighted with his mother-in-law’s gracious gift, but he did not change
his ideas an iota on account of it.
My father, although a householder, proclaimed himself, as usual,
and with even more authority, a Proudhonian. I knew who Proudhon
was, because all French persons, even the youngest, had heard of
his famous saying: “Property is theft.” My father said he shared
Proudhon’s opinions concerning the principle of the rights of man and
of government. The pamphlet addressed by Proudhon to Blanqui, _Qu’est
que la propriété_, never left my father’s work-table. I had read it
over, on the sly, without much understanding, but I pretended to have
comprehended it, and I spoke of it, not in approval, but to say that,
after all, there was some truth in it.
How my father decided between the conflicting ideas of Proudhon
and Considérant--the latter having defended the right to possess
property--I do not know.
There were great discussions in my family on all the questions raised
apropos of the association of insects, and of their life in common; but
my father, full of gratitude for my grandmother’s generous gift, would
have found it difficult to speak of _bourgeoise_ selfishness, therefore
he let us joke about his “theories of animal socialism and his insects’
minds,” as grandmother said.
But my grandfather abhorred revolutionary ideas to such a degree that
he scarcely tolerated the mention of Proudhon, even in a joking way.
“Revolutionary speeches are pure gangrene,” he said. “They propagate
themselves in the social body and oblige us some fine day to cut off
a member of it. Who will give me back my Emperor to silence all these
agitating reformers? Oh! yes, to silence them, for they say even more
than they do.”
“My dear father-in-law,” my father answered, “one is often obliged to
say much more than he can do, for action follows words slowly. The
elements of resistance to progress are always powerful enough to hold
it back, at least half-way. It is like the two hundred thousand heads
Marat asked for, adding: ‘They will always diminish the number enough.’”
One simultaneous cry escaped us all:
“Oh! the horrible man!”
XVIII
I REVISIT CHIVRES
The phalanstery and _L’Esprit des Bêtes_ had a great success at my
school, and it may be imagined what were our attempts at social reform;
but our love of animals increased, and sometimes the observations of
many of my schoolmates about them were interesting.
The summer came, and with it my return to Chivres for the months of
July and August.
To say what was Marguerite’s delight at seeing me again, and Roussot’s
(whom they had made remember me by singing to him a daily song like
mine), to tell of the welcome of Marguerite’s old mother, and that of
the village children, who had grown a year’s size taller, would be
impossible.
Grandfather left me this time without sadness, being sure of the warm
welcome I should receive.
The journey seemed much shorter this time. I was delighted to find my
dear aunts again, and they were most happy at seeing me once more. They
said I looked like a young lady now, which flattered me extremely.
But they were far from congratulating me on my ideas of reform
according to those comprised in _L’Esprit des Bêtes_, or on my
interest in the Fronde, which they thought must have prevented my
studying seriously; neither did they approve of my father’s formula
concerning “middle-class positions which were about to break.”
There were explosions of indignation against my father, who would
injure my mind with such insanities, they declared.
My aunt Constance made fun of me in such a droll way--she much
resembled my grandmother in wit--that I lowered my arms before
her. The bees, the ants, _L’Esprit des Bêtes_, often mentioned in
our conversations, gave my merry great-aunt such opportunities for
comical criticisms, in which my father’s ideas, upheld by me, were so
ruthlessly pulled to pieces, that I gave them up.
As to my aunt Sophie, whom I took aside and endeavoured to convince
of the necessity of reforms, she made me the same answer, variously
expressed.
“I do not belong to this age; I find it preposterous,” she said.
“Everything that is happening comes from this cause: that people now
think only of rushing to cities, where they develop poverty. Believe
me, my dear little niece, happiness, peace, and true riches are found
only in the country.”
My revolutionary ideas were put away with my city clothes, and declared
good only for Chauny. Even Marguerite said to me one day:
“Your ideas, Mam’zelle Juliette, turn poor people’s heads. They
talk about them in villages. Workmen declare that their friend,
Monsieur Proudhon, says that the _bourgeoise_ have stolen property
from the nobility, and that poor people should now steal it from the
_bourgeoise_. It is pitiful to hear such things; those who have to work
should work and believe that it is only God who can give them an income
in Heaven.”
I knew my two hundred and fifty Latin words well. I had determined
to understand and remember aunt Sophie’s lessons, and thought in
consequence that I should soon be able to read Latin, which was my
dear teacher’s desire. I was very enthusiastic about it and made real
progress.
During our work in the fields, which began monotonously again and took
much time, aunt Sophie would tell me the Latin names of everything
about us.
When I found an analogy between the Picardy _patois_--which I had
acquired the habit of speaking with my maid Arthémise--and Latin, it
pleased me so much, that aunt Sophie asked one of our relatives, a
Raincourt of Saint-Quentin, to send her an almanac in the Picardy
tongue, called _The Plowman_. She then devoted herself to a veritable
monk’s work in adding to my stock all the Latin words to be found in
Picardy _patois_. _The Plowman_, in speaking of work in the fields,
enabled me to step over a new frontier in my comprehension of the
bucolics.
My aunt Sophie’s marvellous aptitude for teaching made her derive
profit from everything, and one could really say of her that she taught
by amusing.
There was only one new thing in our order of life: My aunt Constance,
who suffered from anæmia, had need of cold douches, and the doctor
ordered her to go and take them by the side of the mill-wheel. Cold
baths were excellent for me, and I took one every day in the pretty
wash-house of the close, so my aunt Constance took me with her every
afternoon. She was as gay and as much of a child as I, and we would
amuse ourselves so much that we laughed till we cried. The bathing hour
at the mill became a regular frolic, and aunt Anastasie, seduced by
my descriptions of it, came with us once or twice and finally always
accompanied us. Soon the miller’s wife joined our party, and then
Marguerite. Aunt Sophie alone resisted. She had not left the house or
the close for twenty years. Great-grandmother moved with difficulty
from her arm-chair, so there was no hope of bringing her, and, besides,
one of her daughters was always obliged to stay with her.
Roussot, therefore, alone remained to be asked to join us, and I
invited him one day after breakfast, when he had his daily bread, by a
well-turned speech intermingled with songs.
While we were laughing, Roussot answered, if not my speech at least my
song, and we concluded he had accepted the invitation.
That afternoon Marguerite led him by the bridle into the little river.
I was mounted on him and was going to take my plunge from his back; but
the bath made him so merry that he threw me off disrespectfully into
the water. He even dared to kick about and splashed us all over so much
that we could not see clearly enough to drive him out of the water.
We laughed more that day than on any other, but we did not propose,
however, to try again the experience of a bath in company with Roussot
the next day, for he was really too free and easy in his manners.
The two months spent with my aunts seemed like two weeks. I had never
until then fully realised how rapidly time can pass.
But my annual visit to Chivres was so dear to me, it had become such
a joy in my life, that I should have thought myself wrong to have
sorrowed over its short duration.
XIX
I BEGIN MY LITERARY WORK
I do not know whether it was from my aunt Sophie’s influence, or my
contact with nature, living amid it, or whether it was the slow,
clever training of my mind by my father, that made my brain swarm with
poetical, mythological, and classical images. I dreamed in turn of
Homer and of Virgil, whom I called his great-nephew, in order to give
him the same degree of relationship to Homer as that which I possessed
towards aunt Sophie.
In September and October of that year, after I had returned to Chauny,
I thought I had become a poet. I wrote rhymes about everything I saw:
the sun, the moon, the heavens, birds, flowers, fruit, and even about
the vegetables in my large garden at Chauny, in which I lived all day
during the last months of my vacation.
I confided with trembling my first “poem” to grandmother, and she
criticised it with deep emotion. I criticised it myself later with
extreme humiliation and contrition. I was already a well-instructed
girl, and I might have done far better, but my grandparents found this
poetry so beautiful that they read and re-read it to all comers, and
grandfather took it with him to his club.
The idea of writing some day most certainly came to me at this time,
for I did not cease to cover paper with verses and prose from that day.
I said to myself what was a curious thing for a girl of my age to
think: that one must feel deep emotion in order to write and to move
others, and I sought all manner of pretexts to arouse my emotions.
There was at the end of our large garden, at the foot of a very high
wall, a plot of currant-bushes, too much in the shade to yield much
fruit; so they were allowed to grow at will, mixed with raspberry
bushes and brambles.
I had a circular place made for me in this underwood. I carried some
garden chairs and a table to it, and I called this corner “my temple
of verdure.” No one but myself was allowed to enjoy it. I lived there,
during my vacations, from breakfast to dinner-time, dreaming, when the
weather permitted, and, above all, telling myself stories in which I
took extreme delight.
I put so much emotion into my voice that it made my heart ache. I
would often cry bitterly over the unhappiness, the sufferings, the
vicissitudes of the misery I invented.
I can hear myself even to-day, and see myself sitting amongst my
brambles, with the shadow of the high wall falling upon me, and
beginning my story in this wise:
“There was once upon a time a poor little boy,”--or little girl, or
a poor animal, chosen from among those I loved the best, whom I made
most unhappy on account of this or that, and my sorrow for them always
increased, for I had no pity, either for my own feelings or for those
of my heroes. Their sufferings became so poignant that I sobbed.
How many victims I invented! The distant noise of the garden gate,
announcing Arthémise coming to call me to dinner, alone decided me to
make my victims happy, especially if they had been obliged to suffer
privations. I could not have gone to the table and carried with me the
anguish of letting them die of hunger!
After some days of this sorrowful exercise, I selected the story which
seemed to me the most touching and dramatic; I put it into rhyme or
wrote it in prose on a large sheet of paper in my best handwriting to
read to grandmother.
On Sundays, as soon as vespers were over, I shut myself up in my
room and composed a review of the week’s events. This composition
was a bargain between my grandparents and myself. They gave me a
cake made of puff-paste called frangipane, which I loved, and which
grandfather went to get himself at the confectioner’s at dinner-time,
so as to have it hot, and cooked to the right degree. I regaled my
dear “ancestors”--this was the new name I bestowed upon them--with my
writings, and they regaled me with frangipane, cut into three parts.
Ah! if I had never had other hearers and readers save my grandparents,
how much criticism would have been spared me, and how much enthusiastic
success I would have had! No public, no admirers were ever so convinced
as they that they were listening to _chefs d’œuvres_.
My friend Charles, the professor, often invited to our table on
Sundays, was obliged to proffer his share of praise. He did so most
willingly, for his affection for me blinded him. How many times did I
hear him say:
“There is something of worth in what that child writes; she will make
her mark.”
My grandmother drank in my praise as if it were the nectar of the gods.
Was my friend Charles half sincere? I believed so, but another person,
a newcomer, who soon took possession of all our hearts, was surely and
entirely so.
His name was Monsieur Blondeau. He was a State Recorder, and had taken
an apartment on the ground floor of our house, on the opposite side
of the hall from us, which looked out on our blossoming courtyard and
the street at once. His apartment comprised an office, a drawing-room,
bedroom, and kitchen, and on the first story a room for his old
servant, who served him as maid-of-all-work.
Blondeau--I never called him Monsieur from the first week after his
arrival--was an old bachelor, very ugly, his face all seamed and
scarred, because when he was a child this same old servant had let him
fall out of a high window on a heap of stones; but his kindness, his
constant desire to devote himself to others and to be useful to them,
to love them, and to make himself beloved, made him adorable.
I soon gave him the title of friend, and, as he was tired of _table
d’hôte_ life, and, as his old servant, whom he had brought with him
from Lons-le-Saulnier, was capable only of cooking his breakfast
passably well, I obtained grandmother’s permission to have him dine
with us every evening, knowing it was his dream and ambition. He was
another one fanatically devoted to me--rather let me say, one of my
slaves.
Although he had much work to do, having no clerk, I enlisted him to
aid me in doing my arithmetic exercises and in copying out my week’s
compositions. He read admirably, far better than grandmother, and he
became my habitual reader.
It would not have been strange had I been persuaded by all these
flattering opinions that my talents, which Blondeau said “grew as fast
as grass,” surpassed those of all known prodigies.
Even my father, who was a lettered man, and whose good taste should
have enlightened him concerning his daughter’s lucubrations, considered
my writings marvellous.
But my mother, with her usual lack of indulgence, rendered me the
service of sobering me regarding all this praise. She put things in
their proper place, even exaggerating them in a contrary sense. She
declared that what I wrote was inept, and that they would make me a
mediocre person by fostering in me a phenomenal pride.
I alone was not vexed with her. She helped me to criticise myself,
although sometimes I thought her criticisms as excessive as the
admiration of my flatterers was exaggerated.
Having a sufficient company at home on Sundays, my friend Charles
included, I determined to put my weekly reviews into dialogues. Each
one of us read his personal pages in turn, or we replied to one
another.
When I think of all I made my grandparents and Blondeau read and say, I
am abashed. Moreover, everyone kept the name I had given him, and the
character of the rôle assigned to him, throughout the evening. They
allowed themselves to be questioned by me, and answered “attentively,”
as my friend Charles said. Had they at least been amused with this
child’s play, it would have been tolerable, but on the contrary, they
were obliged to rediscuss the weekly discussions, the wherefores of the
most subtle questions I had laid before myself, which must often have
been rare nonsense and silliness.
My heart is full of gratitude and tenderness for my four sufferers,
and, as these recollections bring them before me, perhaps I love them
to-day even more than I did at that time.
XX
LOUIS NAPOLEON’S FLIGHT FROM PRISON
My godmother Camille, of whom I was very fond, and whom I used to
visit every Thursday at the glass manufactory at Saint-Gobain--not
to amuse myself, but to talk with her, for she conversed with me on
serious subjects--had left Chauny two years previously, but she came
every two or three months to pass a week with us. She lived at Ham,
where my godfather was the manager of a sugar-refinery. She was very
intimate with Prince Louis Napoleon, and my grandfather joked with her
frequently about the honour of having inspired a Napoleon--and, he
doubted not, a future Emperor--with “a sentiment” for her, and he went,
moreover, himself to assure the Pretender about his hope of seeing him
an Emperor some day.
It annoyed my grandfather to hear that this Bonaparte was called a
socialist. But he declared that it could not be--it was a calumny.
My godmother repeated to my grandfather something that the “Prince” had
said to her before he wrote it, and which she thought admirable:
“With the name I bear, I must have either the gloom of a prison-cell,
or the light of power.”
“We shall have him one day for Emperor,” said my grandfather. It
was from his lips that I heard for the first time: “We shall have
Napoleon,” which was so often repeated later.
“But the Republic is his ideal,” said my godmother, who knew by heart
everything that Louis Napoleon wrote. “He does not know whether France
is ‘republican or not, but he will aid the people, if he is called to
power, to find a governmental form embodying the principles of the
Revolution.’ Those are his exact words,” said my godmother. She added:
“He formulates his ambition thus:
“‘I wish to group around my name the partisans of the People’s
Sovereignty.’”
“You are crazy about your Prince, Camille,” answered my grandmother,
“and you see him with the prestige of all you feel for his
misfortunes--as a prisoner, coupled with the greatness of his name. But
was there ever a more ridiculous pretender? Remember his rash attempt
at Boulogne, with his three-cornered hat, the sword of Austerlitz, and
the tamed eagle. He is grotesque.”
If my father came while Camille was with us he was much amused at my
grandfather’s exasperation when he and Camille would declare that
Louis Napoleon was more of a socialist than themselves, for had he not
written:
“What I wish is to give to thirty-five millions of Frenchmen the
education, the moral training, the competency which, until now, has
been the appanage only of the minority.”
“The proof that he is a socialist,” added my father, “is that one of
our party, Elie Sorin, swears by him; he is always saying to me: ‘Louis
Napoleon is not a Pretender in our eyes, but a member of our party, a
soldier under our flag. The Napoleon of to-day, a captive, personifies
the grief of the people, in irons like himself.’”
Sometimes my grandfather, after having been angry, laughed at this kind
of talk.
“He is a sly fellow,” he replied. “He is making fools of you all. A
Bonaparte is made to be an Emperor, you will see, and we shall have
Napoleon!”
My godmother adored my grandmother, and she should have been her
daughter instead of my mother. They wrote to each other every week and
sympathised on all subjects. My grandmother, apropos of Camille, put on
mysterious airs even in my presence. They were constantly whispering
secrets together, especially since my godmother lived at Ham.
One day I unintentionally surprised them with a boot placed on
grandmother’s work-table, at which they were gazing with tender eyes.
They looked so droll contemplating this boot that I could not help
asking to what fairy prince this precious thing had belonged?
My godmother answered:
“To Prince Louis.”
“Did you steal it from him, godmother, to keep as a relic?”
“He gave it to me.”
“His boot?”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
“For a bouquet-holder.”
I burst out laughing.
“But look, dear scoffer, how small it is. Can you not understand that
he is vain of it?”
“Ah! no, to send a bouquet in his boot is not good manners. Has he worn
it, or is it new?”
“He has worn it, of course. If he had not, it would be a boot like any
other boot. But he has worn it, Juliette, he has worn it!”
And my godmother reassumed the admiring air she had worn when I entered
the drawing-room.
“Really, godmother, I must tell you that you seem to me to be a little
crazy!”
One day our Camille arrived suddenly from Ham in a state of
extraordinary agitation.
She threw herself on grandmother’s neck, where she remained a long
while, sobbing. She whispered in her friend’s ear, who uttered many
exclamations, many “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” intermingled with: “Camille, how
happy you must be!” alternating with “Camille, how unhappy you are!”
Blondeau and I were present at this scene, of which, of course, we
understood absolutely nothing.
My grandfather arrived. There were the same whisperings in his ear, the
same exclamations, the same embraces, and again: “Camille, how happy
you must be! Camille, how unhappy you are!”
“May the Supreme Being be blessed!” suddenly exclaimed my grandfather,
in a solemn tone, for he never invoked the Supreme Being except on
stormy days, when the thunder recalled the noise of cannon.
Something phenomenal was certainly happening. Not being curious, I had
great respect for secrets, especially as my family kept few from me. I
did not try to discover this secret, therefore, but I could not help
thinking that some important person had been saved after great peril,
and, strangely, that my godmother was at once happy and unhappy about
it.
After dinner I said to Blondeau:
“Does this mystery interest you? Are you trying to understand something
about it?”
“I understand it perfectly,” he replied.
“What is it?”
“_Parbleu!_ it is that the Prince, who is cracked about your crazy
godmother” (Blondeau was an Orléanist, of my grandfather’s way of
thinking), “has escaped from prison. I think she has helped him in his
flight, and that, as she adores him and is now separated from him,
she must feel, as your grandparents say, at once very happy and very
unhappy; that is all the mystery.”
The next morning at breakfast they foolishly continued to keep up their
mysterious airs before me; so I said to my godmother, Blondeau not
being present:
“Why do you try to hide what everyone knows,--that Prince Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte has escaped from his prison at Ham?”
“How can it be known already? When was it discovered?” exclaimed my
godmother. “He had just escaped when I left yesterday afternoon, and
they could not have known it before evening.”
“Tell me the beginning of the story, godmother,” said I, “since I know
the end.”
She hesitated.
My grandmother, happy at having a chance to relate an adventure, asked
Camille if she would allow her to tell it to me.
Godmother made a sign of assent.
“Well, imagine that Prince Louis pretended to be ill, and to have need
of taking a purge, and shut himself up in his room.”
“Oh! grandmother, that is not poetical,” I interrupted.
“Be quiet! you must think of the end pursued and achieved. Well, then,
as some workmen for several days had been going in and coming out of
the citadel making repairs, he cut his beard and disguised himself as a
carpenter, and passed out before the guard with a plank of wood on his
shoulder.”
“Grandmother, don’t you think it rather commonplace for a prince to
disguise himself as a carpenter?”
“I think it very clever of him to have got the better of his jailers,
in spite of all their surveillance. Doctor Conneau, who had been set
free several months previously, arranged and prepared it all, aided by
Camille. Yesterday he drove out of the town in a tilbury with your
godmother, who got out and hid herself at a certain point, and gave
her place to the prince, who had doffed his workman’s clothes; and
with well-prepared relays, Doctor Conneau and the Prince reached the
frontier. Meanwhile your godmother came to us in a carriage she had
hired at a village, after having walked a long way.”
Was the Prince saved? No one knew as yet, since no one except Blondeau,
who knew nothing about it, had spoken of it. However, at dinner,
Blondeau absolved me of my untruth, by announcing that he had heard
that morning of the Prince’s successful escape.
“All the same,” he added, as I had previously said, “to disguise one’s
self as a carpenter is not irreproachable good form.”
“A Napoleon elevates every one of his acts. A Bonaparte could not
remain the prisoner of an Orléans,” replied my grandfather. “He has
escaped. That is everything.”
“The romantic part of it,” added my grandmother, “lies in the fact that
he has escaped from his jailers, that his prison doors, so strongly
barred, have been opened by a stratagem that no one foresaw nor
discovered. It is those who imprisoned him--I regret to say it--who
have been tricked and made ridiculous. I love King Louis Philippe,
as Camille knows, more than this Bonaparte, who seems to me in his
character of pretender a plotter and an intriguer. But as a man, from
all Camille has told me of him, I confess he is charming; and as he was
her friend, I think she did right in aiding him in his flight. If I had
been in her place I would not have hesitated either.”
My godmother remained with us for a fortnight, but was not consoled for
the absence of her Prince, for I saw her weeping more than once.
XXI
MY FIRST GREAT SORROW
Nothing in particular happened to occupy or disturb my life until the
winter of 1847. Things repeated themselves monotonously. The collisions
between my relatives were multiplied, the divergence between their
reciprocal opinions became more and more intensified. My grandmother
became somewhat embittered, and occasionally blamed her dear King Louis
Philippe; my grandfather declared himself more certain of the future
triumph of his Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. He was a member of
several Bonapartist committees. My father thought he was nearer to his
democratic-socialist republic; my aunts mourned more and more over the
imbecility of the people in believing in those who deceived them; over
political immorality, and the madness of all parties.
I had at that time one of the most violent, most despairing revolts,
and one of the most inconsolable sorrows of my life.
The winter was particularly cold. My large garden was filled with snow,
but I had discovered that it still possessed beauty. My grandmother,
who felt the cold severely, did not move from her room, which opened
into the drawing-room, or from the drawing-room itself. She kept up a
large wood fire in it, which she excelled in making.
Grandfather often said to her that she proved the untruth of the
proverb which said that “one must be in love or be a philosopher to
know how to make a good fire.” “Now, you are neither the one nor the
other,” he added one day.
Grandmother replied:
“I am a philosopher because I bear with you, and am not angry with you
in spite of all you have made me endure. I am no longer in love with
you, but is it not because my passion for my husband was destroyed at a
very early hour that I remain in love with love, and that I console or
distract myself in reading of the romantic happiness or unhappiness of
others?”
Blondeau loved the snow as much as I. Well-shod with Strasburg woollen
socks and thick _sabots_, we would go after breakfast to make enormous
heaps of snow in which we would dig galleries, or else we would mould
figures with it. The trees, the plants, the borderings of box, the
walled-fruit, were prettier one than the other, under their snowy
garments.
Along the high wall, overtopping the trees of my temple of verdure,
at the end of the garden, whose branches were all powdered with
brilliant hoar-frost shining on a carpet looking like white wool, huge
stalactites hung, superb and glittering. It was a fairy scene when at
sunset these stalactites would light up, shining under the last rays
of the sun, when drops like diamonds would hang on the extreme end of
their delicate points.
“Blondeau, my dear Blondeau, look at this, look at that, how pretty,
how beautiful, how splendid and brilliant it is!” I would cry.
My admiration was inexhaustible as was Blondeau’s pleasure at listening
to me and seeing me so delighted, so merrily happy.
But one day in this same snowy and fairy-like garden, where everything
was so dear and precious to me, Blondeau seized me by the hand and
began to walk rapidly. Although I asked him what it meant, he did not
answer me.
“Let us walk around the garden,” he replied to all my questions.
“Walk around it, Blondeau! We have already done so four times, and
you want to begin again. Ah! no, indeed! you must tell me what is the
matter with you.”
He was so agitated I was afraid he had become mad, and I was worried
more than can be imagined. My heart stood still to see him like this
and I could neither breathe nor walk. I drew my hand suddenly from his,
and, planting myself before him, I said:
“Speak to me, Blondeau, for I think you are crazy.”
“I wish I were,” he replied, despairingly, “so as not to make
you suffer the dreadful sorrow I am going to cause you. Ah! your
grandmother has given me a nice errand to perform. I was too stupid,
truly, to take upon myself the duty of telling you such news. I wish I
were a hundred feet underground.”
“Well, what is it, Blondeau? You are killing me!”
He seized my hand again and went around the garden almost running, then
he stopped suddenly, having at last found the courage to say to me:
“Juliette, my darling child, you know that Madame Dufey has sold her
boarding-school to the Demoiselles André, your mother’s friends, who
knew them in the hamlet that was burned down in the first days of your
parents’ marriage--the hamlet where your grandfather’s uncle lived.”
“Yes, I know, and those ladies are very nice. I have seen them. They
told me they cherished a very dear memory of my mother, and would be
happy to extend their faithful affection to her daughter. I thought the
phrase very pretty and have remembered it. What sorrow do you think I
can feel from them?”
Instructed by my grandmother, Blondeau had certainly prepared a long
speech, but, carried away by haste after all his hesitations, he said
to me in a brutal way:
“Well, your grandmother has sold the garden to the Demoiselles André to
build a boarding-school in it.”
“What garden?”
“This one, ours, hers, yours!”
“You are telling an untruth!”
“Alas, I am not. Your grandmother did not dare to tell you until the
contract was signed; she knew that you would beg her not to do it,
and would prevent her; now the thing is irrevocable. Everything was
finished this morning.”
“It is abominable. I wish to keep my trees, my temple of verdure,
my brambles. I don’t want--I don’t want them to be taken from me!
Blondeau, buy back my garden, you have money. We will make a house in
it for our two selves; you, at least, cannot abandon me.”
And I threw myself in his arms, weeping.
It seemed to me that all my trees raised their branches heavenward, and
that they wept with me under the sunshine.
What! my vines, with their bunches of muscat grapes, of which I was so
fond; what! my immense apricot tree, which I had had measured and which
was the largest one in Chauny, and which people came to see, with its
five yards of breadth and ten yards of height; what! my box, which I
had cut myself into balls and borders; was all this to be pulled up,
cut, destroyed?
“Blondeau, why has grandmother caused me this great grief, for which I
shall never be consoled?”
“Because she could never find such a chance again, and it is for your
_dot_.”
Then I burst forth.
“Oh! yes, again for money--that money which makes the misery of my
life. It is like the inheritance for which mamma would have let me die!
Grandmother is going to kill me that I may have a _dot_!”
This time it was I who provoked the “family drama,” and what a drama
it was! I showed myself on this occasion the passionate child of
my violent-tempered father. My anger and my hardness towards my
grandmother made her suffer terribly.
I shut myself up in my room for more than a fortnight. Arthémise
brought me my meals. I would open my door only to her. Neither
Blondeau, grandfather, nor my friend Charles were allowed to enter. My
grandmother did not even dare to come upstairs. I wrote her every day a
letter filled with cruel reproaches, to which she had not the courage
to reply.
Her great fear was that my father would arrive and that I would wish
to leave her forever. However, to tranquillize her on that score,
there was a serious quarrel pending between herself and my father at
that time, the latter having wished to borrow money from her to pay
the debts of his soldier-brother, who led a wild life; and as she had
refused, they had not seen each other for two months.
I thought of Blérancourt, where the garden was small, to be sure, but
was separated from other gardens only by hedges, where I should have my
father, who I certainly loved as much as grandmother; but my mother’s
coldness, compared with grandfather’s exuberance and gaiety, frightened
me. And then at Blérancourt there was no Blondeau nor friend Charles.
Besides, I knew very well that, although my mother was jealous of
grandfather’s affection for me, she would blame me for abandoning
her, would say I was ungrateful, and, moreover, I could not think of
explaining to her grandmother’s reason for selling the garden and her
anxiety regarding my _dot_.
These reflections following one another in my mind, at times made
me indulgent toward grandmother, but, as soon as I thought of the
destruction of my garden, I suffered so acutely that I listened no
longer to justice.
I thought also of asking my aunts to take me, of writing to Marguerite
to come with Roussot some night, when I would give her _rendezvous_ in
the little street _des Juifs_ on which our garden opened, so that she
could steal me away; but I had the secret instinct that if my aunts
were very happy to have me two months in the year, at the time when
they lived out of doors, my turbulence, my superabundance of gaiety,
of life, my passion for movement, would tire them during a whole year
through.
After all, there were only my grandparents, Blondeau, my friend
Charles, and Arthémise to love and really understand me, and--I added
to myself--to put up with me.
I had missed going to school for two weeks.
Grandmother said I was ill and it was believed, because no one saw me
about.
However, grandmother finally invoked the aid of the dean, whom I liked
very much, because he wished me to make my first communion when I was
ten and a half years old, and not to wait another year. He feared my
father’s influence over me, which fact, of course, they did not tell
me, so I was very flattered to be the youngest and the most remarked in
the catechism class. I was as tall as the tallest girls in it.
Grandmother told the dean the truth about my passionate love of my
garden, of my extreme delight in nature, and of her sudden resolve to
sell the garden on account of the exceptional price she received, and
for the benefit of my _dot_, etc., etc.
The dean came and knocked at my door, but I did not open it, in spite
of the touching appeal he made to me. I heard grandmother sobbing
outside. From that moment my heart was softened and my rancour fled,
but a bad feeling of pride prevented me from calling them back. I
repented, however, and when Arthémise came to bring me some ink for
which I had asked, I opened my door and found myself face to face with
the dean.
The moment for an amiable solution had come, but in order to save my
dignity I pretended to let myself be overcome by the dean’s arguments,
and to be influenced by his threats not to receive me any longer at the
catechism class and to delay my first communion until the following
year, in 1848.
“Come,” he said to me, “and ask your grandmother’s pardon.”
“No, your reverence, do not exact that I should ask pardon. I cannot do
it. I am too unhappy to think that my grandmother has sold my garden,
and that I have lost it forever. Besides, it is not necessary. You will
see that my grandmother will be only too glad to kiss me.”
Grandmother was waiting for me in the drawing-room, knowing that the
dean had gone into my room and having learned from Arthémise that I had
listened to him and had yielded.
That night, at dinner, they had a festival in my honour without saying
anything to me about my misbehaviour. It was not the time to scold me.
I was not at all consoled for the loss of my garden, for my flowers and
fruit, for all its greenery, or even for its snow.
I did not see the first flowers blossom, I did not gather them for
grandmother’s table, nor for the little white vase in which I was wont
to arrange artistically the first Bengal roses.
As soon as the fine weather came, and during all that spring, the
workmen were pulling down the rampart behind the high garden-wall, and
everything fell in together. They cut a new street, on which the large
principal door of the school was to open. The buildings were to be
raised only twenty yards from our courtyard; the green wooden lattice
was at once replaced by an ugly wall.
All the noise of the demolition of the garden broke my heart. During
the night, the moaning of the wind made me think that I heard the
death-sighs of my trees.
One Thursday afternoon, when I was playing sadly in the courtyard, I
heard a sharp cry, a whistling, and a sort of tearing apart. Something
was certainly being torn up and was resisting and groaning with all
its power. I felt it must be the death-torture of my apricot tree.
Formerly, at this time of the year the sap would rise to the smallest
twigs on its branches, and I could see its first buds. Now they were
torturing it.
This uprooting of my apricot tree revived all my sorrow. Behind that
odious wall its agony was taking place.
I imagined that I could see devastation ending its cruel work. They
were digging up the last vestiges of the life of my trees--their
roots--and they were levelling the ground. I suffered from it all so
much that I was nearly ill.
XXII
MY FIRST RAILWAY JOURNEY
The reconciliation between my father and my grandmother was brought
about by a friend of my uncle Amédée (an uncle whom none of us at
Chauny knew, because he never left Africa). This friend had paid my
uncle’s debts in time to prevent his being obliged to resign his
commission as an officer.
It was my grandfather’s opinion that uncle Amédée was much too fond
of amusement, although very brave and intelligent. In saying this,
however, he hastened to add:
“Campaign life impairs the most rigid private virtue.”
“As it impaired yours,” said grandmother.
And Blondeau ended the conversation by saying:
“Peace be with those who are no more!”
One day when we were not expecting him, my father arrived, looking very
happy, and said to grandmother before me:
“Will you give me Juliette? I wish to take her on a long journey.”
“From Chauny to Blérancourt?”
“No, no, much farther.”
“Where, dear Jean Louis?”
“To Amiens, Abbeville, and Verton. I will show her the sea, which I
wish to behold myself, for I have never seen it. And better still, we
shall travel to it on the railway.”
“Ah, no! Not in the railway coaches!” cried my grandmother. “I am
afraid of those monstrosities, for they say that every day, every time
people get into them, there are accidents--persons killed and wounded.
Juliette is not yet old enough to guarantee herself from danger by
making her will. But how has this great plan come about?”
“You remember, dear mother, that young workman, Liénard, who was so
wonderfully intelligent, in whom I was so interested, and whom I had
educated to be an engineer?”
“Yes, yes, and that was one of your good works. To elevate a poor man
from a low position, is meritorious and useful, in a different manner
from that of torturing one’s mind to discover a way to ruin the middle
classes, and to make poverty universal.”
“Do you hear that, Jean Louis?” said my father, laughing.
“Well,” he continued, “Liénard has made his way brilliantly. He is now
the head of a division of the Boulogne-sur-Mer railway. He has six
hundred employés and workmen under him to-day, and he wishes me to
see him in the exercise of a function of which he is proud, and which
he owes to me. He has invited me to pass a fortnight, together with
Juliette, at Verton. Madame Liénard is devoted to our daughter, whom
she always comes to see when she knows she is at Blérancourt, doesn’t
she, Juliette?”
“Grandmother,” I replied, “if you will permit it, I should be delighted
to take a long journey with papa. It is my dream to travel. I am very
fond of Madame Liénard.” And stooping down to her ear, I added: “And
besides, grandmother, it will distract me from my great sorrow.”
“Yes, Juliette, I think so, too,” she answered. “Your father must leave
you with me for two weeks to prepare your wardrobe, for I wish you to
have everything you may need, and then you shall go to see the sea.”
When my father had left, grandmother said to me: “I must obtain a
dispensation from the curé so that you may leave the catechism class
without having your first communion delayed in consequence. But I think
there will be no difficulty about it.”
The entire town of Chauny was interested in this journey. My
grandfather told how it had come about to all who wished to hear it.
At school I was much questioned, and in the same degree that I had
been humiliated at having the girls say to me: “It seems that your
grandmother has sold your famous garden which you thought as fine as a
kingdom,” just so proud was I in thinking of all the interesting things
that I should have to relate to my little friends on my return.
The journey from Paris to Amiens was, of course, by diligence.
We stopped an entire day at Saint-Quentin to see my relatives, the
Raincourts, to whom I talked of my dear aunts and my grandmother, and
who were happy to know that their cousins were reconciled.
At Amiens we stopped again to see other Raincourts. I visited the
cathedral, and the impression I received of its power and grandeur
remains with me still. My cousins took us to the opera. They played
_Charles VI_. I was somewhat bewildered at the immensity of the
amphitheatre, but I remember the scenes represented, the ballet, and,
above all, the extraordinary noise of the mad applause of the entire
audience when they sang the air, “No, no, never in France, never shall
England reign!”
Like all good Picardines, I detested the English, and I clapped my
hands with as much enthusiasm as the other spectators, at the three
repetitions of “No, no, never in France!”
I had a headache for three days from the effects of that evening. The
sound of the orchestra had bruised my temples.
I saw a railway for the first time at Amiens. Young people of eleven
of the present day cannot imagine what it was then to a girl ten and a
half years old, to hear the ear-splitting whistle, the groaning of the
machine, to get into high, fragile-looking boxes, to see the smoke,
the blackness of the machinist and his aid, looking, I thought, like
devils. I was very much frightened.
Liénard came to meet us at Amiens, and, thanks to him, we had a coach
to ourselves. My father was obliged to scold me, for I became very pale
as the train started. Contrary to my usual habit, I was silent for a
long time, not curious and asking no questions.
I held on with both hands to the seat, so little did I feel secure
with the odd movement. But after a time I grew bolder, and kneeling on
the seat I tried to look out of the window to see the houses and trees
flying behind us so quickly.
“Juliette!” Liénard cried to me, “don’t lean out in that way. This
morning, under the tunnel which we are going to enter, a lady did what
you were doing and she had her head cut off by a cross train.”
I threw myself back in the seat, and when we entered the tunnel a great
chill shook me. I thought I saw the body of the headless lady thrown
into the coach!
Decidedly, I preferred diligences to railways.
XXIII
MY FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE SEA
At Abbeville we found another relative, the daughter of our cousin at
Amiens. In ten minutes I was the best of friends with her two children,
and I would have liked to continue playing with them there, or to take
them with me to Verton, to the house of Madame Liénard, who had no
children.
The railway between Abbeville and Verton was not yet completed. At
Verton was the branch that our friend Liénard was finishing. I said
good-bye to my cousins, very sadly, as I got into the carriage, but I
forgot them immediately, as my mind was distracted by the route over
which we were travelling. I breathed for the first time the tonic air
of the sea, and it intoxicated me. My father was in ecstasies over
everything, and I took a noisy share in his delight.
Verton, the object of our great journey, had been described to us by
our friend Liénard.
“Verton is situated,” he said, “between Montreuil, built on an
eminence, and the hamlet of Berck, which is on the downs quite near
the seashore, and it is the prettiest village in Pas-de-Calais. Along
its straight, well-laid-out, sloping streets, which the rain cannot
soak into, are dainty houses, rivalling one another in cleanliness
and brightness. Berck is a miserable place, inhabited solely by poor
fisher folk, but I am sure the railway will make it eventually a
popular seaside resort, and I have bought land there which certainly
will become very valuable. You should buy some, Lambert, for Juliette’s
_dot_.”
“Good Heavens! With what could I buy land?” said father, laughing.
“Why, your mother-in-law has just sold----”
“Be quiet, Liénard,” I cried, “don’t speak of my _dot_, you make me
unhappy. Let me forget it.”
My father and Liénard, puzzled at my words, wished to know what they
meant. They obtained only this answer:
“I don’t want any _dot_! I don’t want any!”
“You have commendable principles,” said father. “A girl should not be
forced to give money in order to be married.”
Suddenly Liénard exclaimed:
“There is the sea!”
Papa and I looked, holding each other’s hands. It was a superb day, but
a high wind came from the sea, which seemed borne in by the rising
tide.
The seemingly endless, swelling flood we gazed upon advanced towards
us, the waves looking like swaying monsters, ever growing larger. The
foam alone reached us; the sea was held back by the immovable shore.
“I made you take this great journey so that you should see this as
soon as possible,” said Liénard, delighted at our wonderment. “Well,
Juliette, you, who are astonished at nothing, what do you say of it?”
I had no desire to speak. Enormous waves, with movements like serpents,
broke into snowy foam on the beach, at first with a colossal crash,
striking the pebbles, then with a soft roaring of the water as it
rushed over the round stones.
The sea was so immense, it extended so far beneath the sky, that I
asked myself how it was that all that mass of heavy water did not
capsize the earth; but I realised that it was infantile to think this,
and that I must not say it aloud, because then I should probably
receive a very simple answer which would prove my stupidity or my
ignorance. I had never thought of the sea as a phenomenal thing. I
had not imagined it very large, but now it appeared to me immense and
limitless. I was lost in contemplating it, dominated by it to such a
degree that I could not express the astonishment I felt.
“Papa,” I said, as we were leaving the sea, “I seem to see the shaggy
manes of Neptune’s horses on the crests of the waves.”
“And I am thinking of Homer all the while,” father answered me.
We left the seashore, talking of it on our way, and at last we saw
Verton, with the old castle overlooking it. We entered the village,
where the people, curious at our coming, were on their doorsteps.
Liénard was the most important person of the place, excepting the owner
of the castle, who lived on the second story.
“The Comte de Lafontaine, my landlord,” Liénard said to my father, “is
a former cavalry officer. I do not know a more charming man. To be
sure, he is not a republican, like you and myself, my dear Lambert, but
with that exception, he is perfect.”
Liénard was my father’s devoted pupil, and followed his teaching in
everything.
The castle was reached by the principal street of Verton, as one came
from Abbeville--a street which ended directly at the park gates, the
largest one of which was surmounted with the heraldic escutcheon of
the Lafontaine family. The inscription on the escutcheon interested my
father so much, and was the subject of such a long discussion between
himself and Liénard that I found it in my notes of travel which I kept
for grandmother.
Oh! they were very succinct notes, of which I can give an example:
“Verton, on a hill--gay little houses--old castle overlooking it--two
stories--written above principal door in a circle--_Tel fiert qui ne
tue pas_. Very, very large park and a farm, where I amuse myself all
the time.”
With my memory to aid me, and the long, oft-repeated recitals of the
events of my journey, the impressions of that time were deeply engraved
in my mind, enabling me now to recall the details of this experience
with all the more facility because one of Liénard’s employés, placed
with him by my father, still lives, and, through him I have been able
to verify the accuracy of my recollections.
The park belonging to the castle seemed to me very large, and I amused
myself, with my different friends in the household, by walking and
playing in it for hours.
The castle of Verton is situated on the highest point of the park, and
fronts the sea. The view from the second story is admirable. At night
one can see the lighthouse of Berck. I never went to bed without
looking at the great lantern lighting up the sea.
Madame Liénard did everything to please me, and spoiled me as if I
belonged to her. The Comte de Lafontaine inspired me with sudden
affection, for he took me seriously and wished to be my friend. I made
several morning rendezvous with him in the park, and confided to him
the great secret of my life--my inconsolable sorrow at the loss of
my large garden. I talked to him of my trees with tears in my eyes;
he seemed touched, and I remember how grateful I was to him when he
answered:
“Love _my_ trees a little during your stay here, as if they were your
own.”
I had loved Monsieur Lafontaine’s trees before he said this. They were
the brothers of my own trees. When I shut my eyes in certain paths, I
seemed to see my lost ones. They grew warm and shone in the sun like
mine; they made the same noise in the wind. How very unhappy I was, to
be sure, to have my great garden no longer!
The cows, the sheep, the horses and dogs of the farm interested me
greatly. I wanted them all to grow fond of me, to know and love me. I
was, as a child, as desirous to please animals as people. There were
several donkeys, but they did not bray like Roussot, and they disdained
my advances, devoted as they were to the farm children.
Our first long excursion was to Berck. After having left the Abbeville
road and entered that of Berck, we saw scarcely any more cultivated
fields. It looked to me like the desert, as I imagined it. There
were hillocks of shifting sand, amid which were very small hamlets.
Berck came last, and was the most lamentable of all. The village was
composed of miserable huts, inhabited by poor sailor-fishermen, whom
Liénard called “primitive men,” and who lived solely by the product of
their fishing. These huts, spread out at distances, were in a forlorn
condition and falling to pieces.
One thing struck me at Berck: the market, like that at Blérancourt,
where the weavers of the neighbourhood brought for sale the rolls of
linen they had woven.
My father thought the beach of Berck magnificent, and he said that
hospital refuges could certainly be built there, for the gentle and
regular slope of the sands down to the sea would be an excellent place
for children to play.
“The people of the place, although very rude and ignorant, are good
and are hard workers,” Liénard said. “They are excellent workmen.
We are blessed and loved as benefactors in all the region--except
at Montreuil, because we bring more wealth here. They curse us,” he
continued, “at Montreuil, the principal town of the country, for the
making of the railway will deprive it of its animation. Crossed by
the Calais route, as it is now, all the traffic passes through it;
but before six months have passed, nothing will go that way, neither
travellers nor merchandise. Its triple line of fortifications alone
will remain, isolating it more than ever.”
XXIV
I RECEIVE A HANDSOME GIFT
“The end of your journey must not be Verton, my dear Lambert,” said
Liénard one morning to my father. “I wish you to inspect the whole
line. We will go to Boulogne-sur-Mer, and travel over a certain
portion of the route in trucks. Then you will have shown to Juliette,
Amiens--the most beautiful town of our Picardy--and Boulogne, one of
its finest sea-ports.”
My father made no objection. The thought of seeing big ships delighted
me. We were to return to Verton after visiting Boulogne and leave from
there for Chauny. The railway train, with its little coaches open
overhead, pleased me marvellously, but the large, locked-up coaches
from which one could not get out except at the employés’ will, seemed
like prisons to me, and I was honestly afraid of the tunnels, in which
heads were sometimes cut off.
All the great cities I have seen later in my numerous travels over
Europe have interested me in a different manner, and I have admired
them for a thousand complex reasons, but none has left in my memory a
more deeply engraved impression than Boulogne-sur-Mer.
We were Liénard’s guests, and he treated us like lords, in one of the
best hotels of the place. I saw the sea all day long, and I, who was so
fond of sleeping, would get up to look at it under the star-light. I
saw it one night by full moonlight.
“Drops of gold shrank and expanded, crackled, leapt in playful sparkles
on the water’s surface, as if to encircle, in a frame of moving gold,
Phœbe’s beautiful face as she looked at herself in the sea.”
I found these metaphors in one of my poems written at that time, and,
incredible as it may seem, I still remember these unformed verses,
which I did not dare to repeat to my father, and which I kept for the
enraptured admiration of my grandparents, Blondeau, and my friend
Charles.
The movement of the boats around the pier delighted me so much I
wished never to leave the place, and my father was obliged to scold me
sometimes and to drag me after him to the house.
I ate my first oyster at Boulogne. All my family were extremely fond
of the fat oysters that came from the North. In winter, when my mother
and father came to Chauny, they usually selected the day on which the
fish-wagon arrived. This wagon, driven at full speed, and which had
relays like the post-wagon, brought to Chauny, on Friday mornings, the
fish caught on the night of Wednesday to Thursday.
Every Friday during the oyster season, a basket containing twelve dozen
oysters was brought to my grandmother’s. My grandfather and father each
ate four dozen. My grandmother and mother would eat two dozen, and
Blondeau, when he was present, would take his dozen, here and there,
from the portions of the others. Was it because I saw them eat such
quantities that I could never swallow one? My reluctance absolutely
grieved my family.
Liénard and I went shopping while my father talked with some
democratic-socialist republicans whom he had discovered. I wanted to
take to all my friends many of those little souvenirs one finds at
seaside places, things utterly unknown at Chauny, and I had with me, in
order to gratify this wish, all the money given to me by grandparents
and Blondeau to spend on my journey. My purse, confided to Liénard’s
care, who bargained and paid for all my purchases, must, I thought,
after calculating the amount expended, be very nearly empty. So, when
my father promised me one morning a louis if I would eat an oyster, I
did my best to please him, and at the same time to earn four large
crowns. I swallowed one oyster, and afterwards others followed in great
numbers, for I grew to like them.
I picked up quantities of shells, and I would have liked to carry
many more away. I bought an immense covered basket, which I took with
me wherever I went, and never left it for a moment during my return
voyage, in spite of the supplication of my father, who tried every
persuasive means possible to rid himself of the trouble of looking
after it.
I went on the beach at Wimereux, where Prince Louis Napoleon landed in
such grotesque fashion. I saw the great Emperor’s column, and thought
of my grandfather and my godmother.
My father spoke to Liénard and to me of “the man of Strasburg and
Boulogne,” and of his ancestor, “the man of the Brumaire.” He was more
indulgent towards the nephew than towards the uncle, whom he thus
defined:
“The political juggler of the Revolution, whose final number of
conquests, after the sacrifice of millions of men, was inferior to the
conquests won by the fourteen armies of the Republic.”
Napoleon I. was my father’s special aversion. He spoke of him with
hatred, as of a criminal. I knew some scathing and virulent poems
written by my father on the “Modern Cæsar,” and when I recited them, I
ended by naming their author: Jean Louis Lambert.
My father had bought a tilbury as we passed through Amiens, the
carriage-makers of the capital of our province being “renowned,” as
they then expressed it.
What was his astonishment, as we left the railway station on our return
to Amiens, to see a very handsome horse harnessed to his tilbury,
instead of the hired one which was to take it to Chauny. Liénard had
accompanied us there.
“My dear friend,” he said to my father, accentuating these words with
feeling, “I beg of you to accept the little horse, as a small proof of
my eternal gratitude.”
My father, who delighted to give, but hated to accept things, refused
bluntly; but Liénard’s disappointment was so great, and I saw his eyes
so full of tears, that I sought for a way to make my father yield.
“Will you give _me_ your horse, Liénard?” I said. “I think it very
pretty and I will take it.”
Mutually embarrassed and grieved a moment before, my father and Liénard
were much amused at my intervention.
“Ah, yes! I will give it to you,” replied Liénard. “It is yours, and I
am not afraid now that your father will take it from you.”
I adored the feeling of being important. But to have overcome this
difficult situation did not suffice me.
“Now, since I have a horse and papa has a tilbury, I wish to return to
Chauny in it and not in the diligence,” I added.
“But it will take us three days instead of one,” said father.
“Oh! papa, shall you really find three days quite alone with your
daughter too long? You will tell me a lot of things, and I, also, will
tell you as many. It will be so amusing to travel in a carriage, like
gipsies.”
“Do as she wishes, dear Lambert,” said Liénard. “Come, get into your
carriage and start. I will send you your packages by the diligence.”
“Papa! papa! do, I beg of you, let us be off!”
“Has the horse eaten?” Liénard asked the groom.
“Yes, sir, he can go for five hours without needing anything more.”
“Be off! be off!” our friend cried gaily, as he lifted me into the
tilbury after kissing me.
My father and Liénard kissed each other, like the loving friends they
were, and father got into the carriage.
“Where is the state high-road?” he asked the groom.
Liénard replied:
“This boy will take one of the carriages at the station and accompany
you until nightfall, to see that Juliette’s horse behaves itself. I
will go to-morrow morning to his master’s, and will get news of you
there. Good-bye, good-bye; a pleasant journey!”
A small valise bought by my father at Boulogne, held our toilet
articles. My famous basket was at our feet, our luggage ticket given to
Liénard, and off we started.
XXV
OUR HOMEWARD JOURNEY
Every detail of that delightful journey is still present to me. It
seemed to me that I was undertaking something tremendous, which was
going to last for an indefinite time.
The young, spirited horse delighted my father and me. He took up all
our attention at first. We looked at nothing else. Ah! what was his
name?
The groom told us it was Coq or Cock. He didn’t know whether it was
“Coq” or the English name.
“‘No! no, never in France, never shall England reign!’” I cried,
recalling the air I had heard in _Charles VI._ “It shall be Coq.”
Coq almost flew along the road. After a while the groom left us,
telling us the names of the villages and the post-relays where we were
to stop during the day, or were to sleep at night.
My father and I recalled our longest drives around Blérancourt, but
they were not like this one--a real journey. He laughed at all my
observations and reflections, and said often to me: “Ah! you are,
indeed, my daughter. You resemble me more than any one else.”
We had left Amiens at eleven o’clock in the morning, and had not yet,
at five o’clock in the afternoon, thought of making our first halt. We
had brought some fruit and cakes, and so long as our handsome Coq was
not tired we determined to continue our way.
“Juliette,” said father to me, at a time when Coq was going slower,
“have you never asked yourself whether I could indefinitely submit to
our separation, if I could always bear the pain of seeing your mind
fashioned by others than myself? My greatest ambition is to make your
mind the offspring of my own. It will come some day; it must be so.”
I answered nothing. I said over to myself my father’s phrase: “Make
your mind the offspring of my own,” and I thought to myself that as I
was his daughter, my whole self should be his also; but then, being
grandchild of my grandmother, whom I adored, how could I be at once
all my grandmother’s and all my father’s? The feeling I had of the
difficulty brought about by my double love for my grandmother and my
father, the thought of sharing myself between them, filled me with
sadness, and my heart ached as I thought I should feel in the future,
more and more deeply, the sorrow I might cause each when I left either
of them, because each would feel when I returned that I would come
back with my heart and mind filled with the one whom I had left. I was
still angry at my grandmother for having sold my garden. The large
house at Chauny, which formerly pleased me more than the small one at
Blérancourt, seemed like a prison now. The yard, full of flowers, had
been gay only because it preceded the garden; cut off from it, it would
look, under the shadow of the great wall they were building, like a
little plot resembling those in the graveyards.
My father thought also of many sad things; our gaiety now ran away from
us, and we could not regain it. All my childhood spent in that beloved
garden came back to me: the springtime, with the rows of violets along
the walls at its end; the summer, with the baskets of strawberries that
I would run to pick myself, as we were sitting down at table; fruits of
all kinds, whose growth I watched with such interest, and which I kept
tasting--apples, pears, plums, cherries, and apricots, enjoying the
greatest delight a child can have--that of eating to its fill all kinds
of fruit throughout the whole year.
“Papa, do you approve grandmother’s having sold her garden?” I asked
him suddenly, determined all at once to confide my sorrow to him,
without speaking of the _dot_.
“Why, yes, because she received a good price for it.”
“So, in your opinion she has done well?”
“Without doubt--she would never have found such a good chance again.
Perhaps, besides the question of money, she decided to do it a little
for your sake.”
“Oh! that is too much!”
“Why? You will have only a few steps to take to go to your school. She
will even be able to see you play from a wing she wishes to build.”
“Then grandmother is going to make the little yard still smaller? Well,
papa, I cannot tell you the pain all this gives me. They have taken
away the paths where I used to walk and play, my trees, all that I
loved in immaterial things; they have deprived me of the happiness of
looking at growing leaves, of studying how plants bud, how blossoms
become fruit; they have prevented me from listening to the stirring
and putting forth of all that has life in it, and from hearing the
sigh, followed by cold silence, of that which dies. To me, papa, the
sun is a divine being to whom I speak and who answers me in written
signs, which I see in the rays of its light. I will make you half
close your eyes at mid-day, and will show you the shining signs, the
golden writing. The moon follows me as I walk, and I feel that it is a
friend. I assure you, papa, I have heard the earth burst with a little
sound above the asparagus heads, or when the seeds that have been sown
sprout forth. I do not know how to express all this to you, or how to
explain these things, but if I love to read, if books instruct me so
greatly--above all, if travels make the world larger to me--I think,
papa, I have learned a great deal in my garden about all small things.”
My father listened to me, his eyes fixed on mine; he held the reins
so loosely in his hands that suddenly, feeling gay, or perhaps made
nervous by fatigue, Coq began to behave badly for the first time. A
stroke of the whip calmed him.
“This Coq,” said my father, “is unworthy of too much confidence.” Then
he added:
“Go on talking, Juliette, dear, go on. You do not know the pleasure
you give me. You love nature as I love it; you feel it, you poetise it
as I do. Ah! old Homer is giving back to me to-day what I gave to him
in teaching you to love him. It is he who has given you the love of
immaterial things. You will be a heathen some day, I am certain of it.”
“Oh, papa! what an abominable thing to say! Don’t repeat it, especially
before grandmother--it would give her too much pain, and, besides, it
isn’t true; it was not the dryads, the nymphs, the homodryads, that I
saw and listened to in my garden; it was really the trees, the plants,
and the fruits.”
“Well, well,” said father, “I have promised your grandmother and your
mother to let you make your first communion as they desire. They have
taken your childhood from me, let them keep it; but your youth shall
belong to me, and we will talk again about all this. I have now, to
calm me and to make me wait patiently, the anticipation of the happy
days that I foresee, and the result of all that you, my dear Juliette,
have just been saying to me.”
“Having my garden no longer, I must forget all that I loved and learned
in it, so as not to suffer too much in having lost it,” I replied. “I
have so many dead things to weep over,” I continued, “I have heard so
many trees sigh and utter their last cry when they were cut down, that
in thinking of it, I seem to hear them again and my heart aches, for
it is dreadful to have destroyed so many of those old companions that
gave us such delicious fruit to make us love them, and it is a crime to
have covered with gravel the good earth which would always have brought
forth the seeds planted in it and borne harvests.”
On the evening of that day my father stopped at a post-relay at a
large, clean, and bright-looking inn, where I went to see a dozen
chickens roasted on a spit in the kitchen. The travellers by diligence
dined there.
When my father put me to sleep in one of the huge beds in our room, I
was feverish, and talked all night of my garden. He prevented me from
speaking of it the next day, and told me some lovely stories of Greece
which he had not yet related to me.
Our journey ended without further incident, and I found grandmother
wildly happy at seeing me again; but as we had arrived late at night,
and as I was tired, they put me to bed at once. Grandmother wished
that I should sleep near her that night, as my father had spoken of
my fever, and the door having been left open, I heard him say to my
grandparents:
“I don’t think she can ever be consoled for having lost her garden.”
“As it is clear that she will marry a country gentleman,” said
grandfather, laughing, “and, as the education she is receiving from her
aunts will probably incline her to marry some perfect Roussot, she will
be able after her honeymoon to treat herself to some trees and grounds,
so we need not pity her present unhappiness in an exaggerated manner.”
My grandparents had quarrelled, as usual, during my absence. I had the
proof of it in grandmother’s answer. The “they” and “one” which I had
nearly banished, had returned to their conversation.
“_One_ is always joking,” she said, “even about what touches me the
most--Juliette’s sorrow. Since I have seen how much she suffers from
being deprived of her garden, I reproach myself bitterly for having
taken it from her. _One_ should understand that, and not laugh,
when _one_ knows that I would not have run the risk of giving pain
to Juliette without having been moved by a feeling which was in her
interest, but which I cannot express to everybody.”
“Well, well,” grandfather replied, “_one_ has no need of a lesson;
_one_ loves _one’s_ grandchild as much as mother and father and
grandmother. _One_ only jokes about Juliette’s sorrow, and _one_ will
continue to do so for the simple reason that _one_ thinks it will be
the best way to console her.”
My grandmother’s regrets calmed my grief, but my poor grandfather was
snubbed many times for his way of “consoling” me.
XXVI
MY FIRST COMMUNION
It is impossible to imagine to-day the importance of a railway journey
in the time of my childhood. All Chauny talked of it when I started;
all Chauny questioned me concerning it on my return. When I went out
with grandfather, people stopped me in the street to ask me if a
railway journey was very frightful.
Truth to tell, the horrible whistles, the deafening threatening noise
of the locomotives, the tunnels (oh, those tunnels!), the frightful
black smoke that made one look like a coal-man in a few hours, had
filled me with apprehension, and everything connected with it seemed to
me like something coming straight from hell.
“It splits your ears, it blinds you if you put your nose out of the
window, it shakes you so that you tremble, it is ugly and makes you
ugly,” I replied to everyone who questioned me.
At school I had a great success. All the big girls asked me about it,
to satisfy their own curiosity and that of their families. All the
little girls wished to know the entire history of the railway journey,
and all about the sea and the ships.
My large basket of shells was emptied in a few days. The numberless
presents I had brought disappeared quickly. A week after my return I
had nothing left. “Those,” I said, speaking of my shells, “were not
bought. I picked them up myself by the sea, the real sea!”
These words produced an immense sensation. At recreations I held forth,
surrounded by numerous listeners with eager eyes and open mouths.
Questions came from all sides. They never tired of hearing my stories
told over and over again. The history of the woman beheaded in the
tunnel made them all tremble.
“Why did she look out of the window?” asked the big girls. “One should
take great care in travelling, for there is always great risk. One has
only to read about it to know it.”
The little girls asked especially whether the beheaded woman had
children and whether they were with her. When I answered, “yes,” there
was a general panic, and the whole brood scattered, with frightened
“ohs!”
If a schoolgirl of to-day had passed the winter at the North Pole, and
should relate to her schoolmates that she had seen a mother crushed
to death by an iceberg before her children’s eyes, she would not
produce a greater sensation than I did with my story of the railway
and the unfortunate woman in the tunnel. They were beginning to build
the railway from Paris to Saint-Quentin, which was to pass through
Chauny, and everyone was wildly excited over the matter. I had, with
great art, planned a course of entertainment to be given at home. Every
evening, after dinner, I related to my grandparents, to Blondeau, and
to my friend Charles--who would not have missed it for anything in the
world--the history of one of my days of travel--never more and never
less than one; and the number of my stories just covered the number of
days of the journey.
I had missed a whole month of the catechism class, but the vicar was
indulgent. He was, himself, much interested in my excursion, and asked
me, like everyone else, to give him my impressions about the railroad
and the sea.
My reflections pleased him, and he spoke of them to the dean, who
also questioned me. I told him that the railroad was an abominable,
whistling invention--it seemed like hell, with its fire and its
diabolical blackness.
This journey gave me a decided pre-eminence. On account of it, I was
considered at Chauny superior to the other young girls of my age. As
the time for first communion approached, the dean interested himself
especially in me. He selected me to pronounce the baptismal vows, and
to head one of the files of communicants to the Holy Table. The Bishop
of Soissons came that year, as he did every two years, to administer
confirmation, and I was selected to make him the complimentary speech
of welcome at the parsonage.
I was the youngest and the tallest of the communicants. My
grandparents, Blondeau, and my friend Charles, when the history of my
journey was finished, busied themselves exclusively about my first
communion. Grandmother had ordered the finest muslin for my gown and
veil. They said white was very becoming to me, and that I should be
the prettiest girl of all. My friend Charles taught me how to say my
baptismal vows and my complimentary speech to the Bishop, in a manner
rather more theatrical than pious.
I had then as an intimate friend a strange girl of my own age, as small
as I was tall, witty, sharp-tongued, and mischievous, whose influence
over me was anything but good. Whenever she saw me enthusiastic or
admiring anything, she did her best to spoil what I admired. Her name
was Maribert.[C] We had been friends for four years, but we had had
very serious quarrels and reconciliations, which interested the whole
school.
Maribert was to make her first communion at the same time as myself.
She was a boarder at the school and was very strictly watched because
she criticised the catechism in a way which shocked the least devout.
She often argued with the vicar, contending with him in discussing the
articles of faith he was explaining to us.
“You will be cast out of the church if you do not submit,” the vicar
said to her one day. “You have a renegade’s mind.”
And she dared to reply:
“I am a philosopher, I am strong-minded!”
I went to board at school during the month preceding my first
communion, the dean, finding I was not preparing myself well for the
ceremony at my grandparents’, induced them to let me absent myself
from home until the great day. Maribert had succeeded in having me for
neighbour in the dormitory, and she kept by me at recreations. During
class hours, by the means of little notes, which she would slip into my
hands, she tried to influence my mind to unbelief. She endeavoured to
prove to me that the dean was in no wise evangelical; that the vicar,
who instructed us, preferred a good dinner to a good mass; that the
Mlles. André, our mistresses, were much more interested in not losing
their pupils than in teaching and improving them.
“Now, as to myself,” she said, “they should send me away; they know
very well that I change all the ideas I wish to change; that I am a
disturber; that I shall not make my first communion seriously; that
I will prevent others--you, first of all--from making it with the
necessary unction and devotion; and yet they keep me here--me, the
black sheep of the flock!”
I was badly influenced by Maribert, and they would have done better to
have me with grandmother, who, although at this time too occupied with
the things of this world to give me great spiritual help, would have
done all she could to increase my faith.
The morning of the day of my first communion I was sad, discontented, I
did not feel as I should have felt, and I envied the happiness of those
who, having had the strength to resist Maribert’s diabolical influence,
wore on their faces an expression of beatitude. As we were leaving for
the church, Maribert slipped a piece of chocolate into my hand, saying,
with her shining, demoniacal eyes looking at me: “Eat it!”
And, at the same time, I heard her crunching the half of the piece she
had given to me.
I threw the chocolate in her face. Ah, no! that was too much! I, too,
wanted to be strong-minded, but I did not wish to commit a sacrilege,
to lie, to receive communion after having eaten.
I suddenly realised my friend’s evil-doing, and I struggled instantly
to wrench out from my mind the ideas she had implanted in it; they
were not numerous, however, for we possessed but few tastes in common.
However, a great sadness took possession of me; had I not broken with
a confidante, a friend of four years’ standing? (Years are so long in
childhood!)
Maribert, alas! had made me lose enthusiasm for prayer, and that
enthusiasm alone, on such a day as this, could have consoled me for the
heartache I suffered. I was overcome to such a degree that my tears
fell without my knowing it.
“You are sillier than the silliest,” Maribert said to me. “I will never
speak to you again as long as I live.”
“You are more wicked than the wickedest,” I replied, “and I shall
reproach myself as long as I exist for having loved one so accursed as
you.”
The hour came for leaving for the church. Our mothers were waiting for
us in the drawing-room. My mother and my grandmother were there. I
threw myself in their arms and kissed them fervently. They were much
edified in seeing my pallor and my red eyes. My grandmother wore a
white woollen gown, a black bonnet, and a black silk scarf trimmed
with fringe. I thought her very well dressed. My mother looked very
handsome, although her toilette was extremely simple. She wore a large
Leghorn straw bonnet, tied with black velvet ribbons, a puce-coloured
silk gown with a train, and on her shoulders a scarf beautifully
embroidered by herself, fastened with turquoise pins. I could not cease
from admiring her.
“How beautiful mamma is,” I said in a low tone to grandmother. “Just
look at her.”
“Yes,” grandmother replied aloud, “and it would be well if she would
take pleasure in her beauty, if she would be grateful to God for it;
but, alas! I am sure she imagines people look at her maliciously.”
My mother shrugged her shoulders.
“Juliette,” added grandmother, “this is a happy day for you, my little
girl; may it govern your whole life; may you understand its religious
significance. I shall pray to God with my whole soul that it may be
so.”
We left the school, I at the head of the procession, my schoolmates
following me one by one. We formed a file and walked through the
streets to the church. The organ ushered us in with a peal of gladness.
My heart beat so hard it hurt me. But by degrees a great calmness came
over me. I abjured evil; I banished Maribert from my heart. I saw her
farther down in the file, her face made ugly by a wicked smile. I
looked at her coldly and proudly, and I raised my eyes to Heaven to
prove to her that I was no longer under the influence of her wicked
teaching. I felt as it was proper I should feel in the holy place and
in view of the ceremony in which I was to take part.
I recited my baptismal vows simply, in a loud voice, feeling sincerely
what I said. I thought of grandmother, who was listening to me and
to whom I would that very night confess all that I had hidden from
her about Maribert. I made my communion in peace, I returned to
grandmother’s house happy in being at home again, freed from Maribert,
whom I felt I would never miss again when absent from her.
The next day I was to recite my complimentary speech to the bishop at
the parsonage. Grandfather had said that Monseigneur de Garsignies had
been a former cavalry officer, and grandmother had added that he had
had a very adventurous, romantic life. My grandparents’ remarks about
him at table took away all my fear of him.
I repeated my address, smiling and looking at him unembarrassed. He
smiled, too, and kissed me.
At the church, during the ceremony of confirmation, when I kissed the
paten and Monseigneur approached his fingers to my face, Maribert’s
influence suddenly took possession of me again, and I said, without
being conscious of the words I pronounced, words which froze with
horror my schoolmates, kneeling near me, and which made Maribert laugh:
“Lightly, Monseigneur, I beg of you!”
He tapped my cheek harder than he tapped those of my schoolmates.
Why did I say it? I do not know, but I felt that I had resisted a
diabolical desire to say something worse. The sacred gesture suddenly
seemed to me like a slap in my face. Maribert was kneeling at a short
distance from me. Was it her wicked spirit which had inspired me with
this act of revolt?
The dean called me to the sacristy after the confirmation, and scolded
me in a severe but fatherly manner, and gave me a penance to perform.
A few years afterwards, at an evening party given at Soissons, where I
had arrived as a young bride, Monseigneur de Garsignies, as I entered
the room and bowed to him, exclaimed:
“The little girl whom I confirmed!”
XXVII
WE DISCUSS FRENCH LITERATURE
The school-house in our old garden had been built during the summer
months. It was now being finished with all possible haste. The school
was to be reopened in October in the new building. One could see the
odious structure above the high wall, for which I felt a violent
hatred. In the evening large fires were lit in it, which I could see
from the hall leading to my room on the first story, and they looked to
me like the mouth of the infernal regions.
I continually declared that I would never, never, go to that school,
and it was in vain that grandmother and my mother, at the family dinner
given on the day of my first communion, endeavoured to make me promise
I would go to the new school in October. My father was not present
at the dinner, for he disapproved of, although he submitted to, what
he called the continuation of my baptism. I literally lost my head
when I thought that I might be obliged to repeat my lessons over the
destroyed ground of my garden, or play over the place where my “temple
of verdure” had been. Grandmother was distressed at my obstinacy,
and perhaps was even more irritated by it. Our affection suffered
from all this, and we hurt each other’s feelings often in spite of
the deep love we bore each other. I took no more interest in my dear
grandparents’ happiness; I stood between them no longer; I kept silence
when a discussion arose; the impersonal pronouns were frequently used
again. Blondeau was sad over my grief, and I was all the more unhappy
because Maribert excited ill-feeling against me at school, keeping up a
relentless fight. There were two hostile camps. The girls were either
on her side or on mine. Her party was full of activity, tormenting us,
playing us all manner of bad tricks; mine resisted indolently, because
I, their head, was discouraged, and worked no longer. I was constantly
scolded and punished. I became ill-tempered, I, whom my companions had
loved until then especially on account of my good-humour. I could no
longer, as formerly, bring them fruit from my garden. The sugar-plums
were a thing of the past; in a word, I was undone and did not care for
anything.
My visit to my aunts at Chivres, where I recovered a little serenity,
was shorter than usual that year. My vacation was to be no longer than
that given by the school, and my father claimed his share of it. I had
hardly finished the story of my journey, day by day, to my aunts, I had
scarcely told all about my first communion, when I should have been
obliged to leave, had I not obtained a prolongation of my stay for a
month more, by writing to my father imploring him to keep me when the
school opened in October, and to spare me the grief of going into the
new building at that time.
Aunt Sophie scolded me a great deal for my laziness and negligence
regarding the study of Latin. But she accepted my excuses, and I began
again to work with good will.
I found my aunts much excited over politics. They read _Le National_,
and all three, as well as my great-grandmother, were Liberals. They
talked continually of Odilon Barrot, and with the greatest respect for
him. They had their individual opinions about each member of the royal
family. They mourned the death of the Duke of Orléans; loved the Duke
d’Aumale and the Prince de Joinville; esteemed Queen Amélie, but judged
King Louis Philippe severely, and raised their arms to heaven when
speaking of the corruption of the times. If they had been less afraid
of the revolution, they would have dethroned the King, proclaimed the
Duchess of Orléans as the Regent, and prepared the reign of the little
Count of Paris, with Odilon Barrot as President of the Council.
My aunts considered Odilon Barrot “the model representative.” They were
enthusiastic about the reformist banquets, of which he was at once the
promoter and the hero.
But they were irritated over the “doings” of Ledru-Rollin, Louis
Blanc, and others, who altered the nature and changed the object
of the reformist banquets; they were anxious about Pierre Leroux’s
revolutionary ideas concerning work, and Proudhon’s insane theories
about property. Apropos of these two individuals and their opinions
they would exclaim:
“It is the end of the world!”
When my aunts were discussing these matters, they declared themselves
faithful to “immortal principles.” They were enemies of Napoleon I.,
less, however, than of Jacobites and Socialists, but they could not
forgive him for the entrance of the allies into France, nor for the
terrors of the invasion.
They taught me Auguste Barbier’s famous iambic: “_O Corse à cheveux
plats, que la France étoit belle_,” so that I might repeat it to
grandfather.
“Bonaparte,” my great-grandmother at Chivres said, as my father had
also said, “gave us back France smaller than he took it.”
They were not fond of Béranger, and when I sang his songs which
grandfather had taught me they listened, but made protestations against
the poet and the song. M. Thiers seemed dangerous to them, with his
worship of Napoleon, who Bonapartised the _bourgeoisie_, while Béranger
Bonapartised the people.
“And,” said aunt Sophie, “whatever may be the form of government we
shall have after this of Louis Philippe, authoritative ideas, I am
afraid, will triumph. Liberalism, which can alone save France, which
can give her her political existence, and make her benefit by the
intelligence of her race, seems to exist only in Odilon Barrot’s mind
and in de Lamartine’s writings.”
They read and re-read his _Les Girondins_, and the manner in which they
spoke of it remains ineffaceably in my memory.
“The old provincialism of France must be reawakened, the country must
be governed by a great number of administrative seats; there must be
decentralisation; France must return to the Girondist programme and
struggle against the exclusive influence of the capital, against the
autocracy of new ideas, more oppressing, more tyrannical than the
tyrants themselves”--this was my aunts’ and my great-grandmother’s
political programme, which they made me write out in order to
communicate it to my parents and grandparents.
“You will keep it, Juliette,” aunt Sophie said to me one day, “for
there will come a moment in your life, I am certain, when, after
Jacobite and Bonapartist experiences, after probable revolutions, you
will remember how wise and truly French and nationalist were your old
aunts’ ideas. France should act from her centres of action, and not
revolve like a top, in her capital.”
My aunts had never talked politics together before me so much as during
my vacation in 1847.
“You are wearying that child,” great-grandmother would say, to which
one or the other of her daughters would reply: “She is old enough to
listen and to understand.”
“It will not be useless to you should you have to listen--not with your
ears, but with your mouth yawning--to know what such persons of high
competency as your aunts think of public affairs,” said aunt Constance,
with her habitual mockery. “So listen, Juliette, listen!”
I listened without yawning, for my mind was open to all political
and literary things. My aunts were the personification of that
_bourgeoise_ class, of whom my father spoke, who admitted only
the medium way in social experiments, who cared only for average
impressions--“natures insupportably equibalanced,” he would say.
My aunts found Victor Hugo too sonorous, too resounding for their
calm minds. Aunt Sophie said he was “not sufficiently bucolic.” They
detested Quasimodo’s ugliness, criticised the _Ode à la Colonne
Napoleon II._, which seemed to make Victor Hugo a Bonapartist; they
found his plays too intense, too pompously improbable, too wordily
humanitarian. _Lucrèce Borgia_, _Marie Tudor_, _Les Burgraves_, _Ruy
Blas_, put them out of patience. Their classicalism was revolted. They
blamed his political conduct, too oscillating and too diverse. Aunt
Anastasie implored grace for his _Les Rayons et les Ombres_, in which
she delighted.
They spoke of Mme. George Sand with reserve. I heard more exclamations
than approbation about her novel, _Lélia_, whose pretty name I
remembered, as I had seen the book in grandmother’s hands. But they
liked many of Mme. George Sand’s writings, especially those on peasant
life. _La Petite Fadette_ they considered a chef-d’œuvre.
“We are very _bourgeoise_,” said aunt Sophie, when speaking of Mme.
George Sand, “although our minds are emancipated by liberalism more
than by education, and from regarding public acts more than private
actions. Juliette, remember the name of this writer, George Sand,” she
added. “She will have a great influence on your generation, and you
will certainly be enthusiastic about her when you are of age. No matter
what is said of her, Mme. George Sand has remained very womanly, and
she will never really be understood except by women; but the greater
part of the things she has written, outside of her stories of peasant
life, are suited to younger minds than ours, which she must delight,
and which she certainly reflects. It is easier for us to understand
Mme. de Staël and her _Corinne_.” And my aunts initiated me in the
beauty, so dissimilar, of Mme. de Staël’s _Corinne_ and Mme. George
Sand’s _La Petite Fadette_. I found, to their delight, the two books
equally admirable, though in a different way. It is true they read them
aloud to me, pointing out what I should admire; but my aunts, in spite
of my affection for them, and the great confidence I felt in their
intelligence, would never have made me enthusiastic about them if I had
not myself felt their power.
My grandmother, who adored Balzac, used frequently to read to me long
extracts from his works, which I found tedious. She had finally
renounced trying to make me like her dear, her great, her unique
novel-writer. I sometimes vexed her by saying:
“He is neither Homeric nor Virgilian enough.”
My aunts detested Balzac.
“He is a creator of unwholesome characters,” said aunt Anastasie; “the
heroes of Monsieur de Balzac can easily enter into one’s life and lead
one to live in the same manner in which they live themselves. They
are so real that you think you have known them; they take possession
of me when I read one of his novels. I cannot free my mind of people
whom I do not like, whose acts I blame, and who impose themselves on
my judgment, as an ugly fashion is sometimes imposed on well-dressed
women. I am convinced that Balzac will form even more characters than
those he has painted. I fear that my sister Pélagie acts under his
influence oftener than she is aware. If you let yourself be captured by
that man’s power, he possesses you, and he is an ill-doer who leads you
to doubt, to be sceptical about people and things.”
“Take care, my niece, of Monsieur de Balzac, later in life,” added aunt
Constance, “he is the most dangerous of all writers of the present
day. He will create contemporaries for you, whom I do not envy you;
egoists, people athirst for position. Remember what your old aunt has
said to you--even write it down: Balzac will engender brains, but
never consciences nor hearts. To Balzac, virtue is an imbecility.
_Eugénie Grandet_ and _Le Père Gariot_ revolt me. I do not even make an
exception of the _Lys dans la Vallée_.”
Ah! if grandmother, who was a fanatic about him, had been there, what
passion she would have thrown into those discussions about Monsieur
de Balzac with her sisters. I told my aunts that when I left Chauny
grandmother was reading _Les deux Jeunes Mariées_ for the fifth time.
Aunt Sophie dictated to me a criticism of de Balzac’s works, which I
read to grandmother on my return. She became angry and made me reply
to her sister in her name. I had thus two contradictory lessons on de
Balzac and I remember them both.
De Balzac was a whole world to grandmother. Through him, and with
him, one could exclude the banality of social intercourse from one’s
existence. One lived with his heroes as if they were friends; they were
flesh and blood. One talked with them, saw them; they peopled one’s
existence, they came and visited one.
I wrote pages on pages to aunt Sophie about de Balzac. She replied to
grandmother, and then began a correspondence between the two sisters
on the literature of the day, which was communicated to me whenever it
could be, and which instructed me about many works of the time that
were vibrating with interest.
My aunt and grandmother agreed in disapproving of the writings of
Eugène Suë, who taught the people to hate priests by his portrayal of
the character of Rodin.
Grandmother sought distraction in her readings; aunt Sophie sought
reflection. The one was interested only in lovers’ adventures, the
other in the elegant forms in which thought was clad, in descriptions
of nature, in the philosophy of life. They never understood each other
nor agreed about any work whatever.
XXVIII
WE TALK ABOUT POLITICS
Having reached my eleventh year, I was quite convinced that I had
become a young lady. Many persons thought me older than I really was on
account of my height and my serious demeanour. My ideas at this time
were very pronounced, but not always matured; my imagination ran wild;
I was as simple as a child and I reasoned like a young woman. Nearly
all of those who heretofore had treated me like a child, now called
me “Mademoiselle,” and grandmother, desirous to justify the name,
lengthened my skirts considerably, and I wore them almost quite long.
I stayed with grandmother nearly a week between my return from Chivres
and my sojourn with my father, and my head was full of the literature
of the day, and I now had my own opinions on Mme. de Staël, Mme.
George Sand, Victor Hugo, de Balzac, and Eugène Suë. I had a book
full of interrogative notes for my father, who had talked to me only
of the ancient or “democratic and social authors,” as he called them.
While I was at Chauny I put all these notes in order, and they were
interesting from the fact that the greater part of them had been
gathered from my aunts’ conversation.
I wondered whether my father would consent to discuss the literature
of the day with me. My knowledge would assuredly surprise him, but did
he even know the authors about whom I wished to talk with him? But as
aunt Sophie, in spite of her love for Virgil and the Latin writers, was
still much interested in the celebrities of the day, I thought that my
father, too, might perhaps unite a taste for literature with his love
of politics.
As soon as I arrived at Blérancourt I bombarded him with questions.
What did he think of Mme. de Staël, of Mme. George Sand, of Victor
Hugo, of de Lamartine, of de Balzac? My mother thought it scandalous
that I should be allowed to read and criticise authors of whom she
knew scarcely anything. Really, our family was quite crazy; even my
aunts, whom she had always heard spoken of as sensible women, were more
old-fashioned than modernised. My mother used to say that if she had
brought me up she would have made a simple housewife of me, educated to
live in her circle and to think like other people, and not a pedantic,
unbearable child, already thrown out of her sphere by the training
of her mind, and with her intelligence overheated at an age when it
should have been set on calm foundations.
My father quite looked down on the literature of his own day. He
answered my questions with commonplaces. Lamartine alone excited him,
in the way of blame, not in his character of poet, but as a historian,
and he declared that _Les Girondins_ was the work of a “malefactor.”
His admiration of Eugène Suë was so exaggerated that it would have
made aunt Sophie repeat one of her favourite sayings: “There are some
opinions which are crimes.”
“Eugène Suë,” said my father, “is a genius; he will deliver France from
all the Rodins; a new epoch will begin from his influence, an epoch
when our country will at last be delivered from the church; Eugène Suë
has moulded the soft clay of which the people are still made; some
other man will obtain hard marble from this same people on which to
sculpture his ideas. Events in our day move rapidly forward. The great
renovators have prepared all which they intend to renovate, definite
freedom.” He added solemnly: “We are at last at liberty to speak of
things of which you are as yet ignorant, and which I can now disclose
to you. No one now can hinder me from forming your understanding on
the same pattern as my own. You have been instructed concerning the
religion of your grandmother and your mother; I can now talk to you
of mine without hindrance; teach you and show you from whence comes
light to the minds and hearts of men. It comes from nature; it is
real because we can see it; it is ideal from the vast expanse it
illuminates.”
The next day my father began to teach me what he called my new
catechism, and gave me in dictation the principal articles. Here are a
few of the pages which I have kept:
“The worship of nature, which we have received from the Greeks, the
only people who ever penetrated the depths of its mystery--a worship
transmitted to us through uninterrupted centuries, which Jean Jacques
Rousseau has taught us in his admirable language to understand, and of
which Bernardin de Saint-Pierre has given us the sentimentality--is the
only true worship.
“Nature, Science, Humanity, are the three terms of initiation. First
comes nature, which rules everything; then the revelations of nature,
revelations which mean science--that is to say, phenomena made clear
in themselves and observed by man; and lastly, the appropriation of
phenomena for useful social purposes.
“The times are moving fast, the dawn is becoming light. Nature reveals
herself more and more to us; the future is bright. A general spirit of
fraternity prevails. Nature, which Christianity calls our enemy, gives
herself wholly to man to aid him in his efforts to traverse the world
by steam, to question the stars, and to discover intact the vestiges of
by-gone times, which she has preserved for him.
“If Christianity has endeavoured to break the bonds between man and
nature, Jesus, the immortal Christ, has drawn men together. He said to
them: ‘You are brethren; there is no caste, no race, no religion, no
history, no art, no morals, that are not the universal patrimony of
humanity.’
“It seems to me,” said my father, “when I think of the beauty of
things, of the harmony one can discover, where blinded persons see
only antagonism, that my enjoyment of life is increased five-fold. One
single epoch can alone be compared to our time,--that of the birth of
Christianity. Christ, who brought with Him the republican formulas of
equality and fraternity, preached the ‘good word’ to the people as
we preach it. Soon we too shall become apostles. Jesus freed what He
called souls; we shall free the social person by adding liberty to
equality and fraternity.
“A Ledru-Rollin, a Louis Blanc, are the continuators of Christianity.
The poor man who has won his rights by the great revolution, must be
the one to impose duty on the higher classes; the worker must have a
right to his work, and the rich man must be bound to furnish him with
work.
“The right to work is the most absolute of all rights, but by no means
the only one. The most miserable creature, because he is a man, has a
right to education and to his share of government. There is no error in
nature, no perversity in man; evil comes only from society, which piles
up errors and wicked sophisms. The renovating forces of the future will
therefore attack society and the middle class, which governs society
for its own exclusive benefit. Juliette! Juliette! I intend to make you
an ardent advocate for the general good and happiness of humanity. I
cannot tell why, but I fancy that your heart, like my own, will be able
to desire passionately the elevation of the masses; for even now you
speak to a workman, to a peasant, or to a poor man, as if he were your
equal.
“I, you see, love the humble, those who are on the lower steps of
life, more than I do myself; the sight of those who suffer, those who
struggle, and are overcome by everything, simply tortures my heart. We
must give all of ourselves to those who have nothing. If many people
felt in this way, there would be far fewer ills to comfort and less
misery to be helped. The poor have only the vice of their poverty, the
inferiority of their social standing.
“A rich and superior man who has defects is culpable, and those who are
vicious are monsters; whereas the destitute who are faulty and vicious,
have every excuse and every right to be absolved.
“Real piety consists in giving one’s indulgences, one’s help, and one’s
love to the wretched, not in limited charity, circumscribed to material
relief, but with a broad humanity.”
My heart melted at these words, and, as my father’s acts were always
in accordance with what he said, he moved every fibre of sensibility I
possessed.
“A republic alone can give to men the greatest of all precious things:
the liberty of their rights and their duties,” said my father,
“allowing them the free expansion of their faculties for human
benefaction. It alone can distribute instruction unreservedly and
impose education by example.
“Socialist-republican principles endow every man, every citizen,
with a dogma of pride which assures his moral value. If a man be a
socialist-republican, he finds within himself the exact level of
his scope of faculties, which in no wise oppress the scope of other
person’s faculties.”
And then came endless preaching. My father’s conviction, sincere
faith, and absolute certainty of the truth of his ideas, gave him such
persuasive eloquence that no child of eleven could resist, especially
one whom he treated as a beloved disciple.
One evening my father solemnly gave me a small guide entitled, “Twenty-one
short precepts on the duties of a sincere Socialist-republican,” which
Saint Paul would not have disavowed. He had composed it for me and for
his peasant and workingmen proselytes.
XXIX
TALKS ABOUT NATURE
I was very fond of play, but, as I took my rôle of socialist-republican
disciple so much in earnest, I seized every opportunity, like my
father, of preaching its doctrines.
In the evenings, after dinner, which we took rather early, the children
of the neighbourhood used to gather under the lime trees, in the large
square, which was situated near our house. Our elders sat and chatted
with one another, while the boys and girls, myself at the head, played
at revolution. The sons and daughters of the parents whom my father
had “converted” were all on my side, while the lukewarm, or ignorant,
usually received chastisement, or finally came over to our party.
While my father crammed my mind with politics, he did not forget to
foster my passion for nature, the smallest manifestations of which he
deified. He delighted in proving to me that it was useless for man
to seek beyond nature for unattainable chimeras, for the infinite
which our finite conception was unable to understand, and for the
immaterial, which our materiality can never satisfactorily explain.
He laid particular stress on this point; he unveiled to me all the
great and small laws of life and movement, both those which rule the
motion of the universe so splendidly, and those which govern the world
of ants, whose ways and manners he had already taught me. But the
great demonstrations furnished by ants, however much they impressed
my mind, always made me laugh, for this reason: An old neighbour of
ours, Madame Viet, seemed to have but one occupation in life, that of
destroying ants, and but one subject of conversation, the “frumions”
(as she called them, in _patois_) which she had scalded during the
day, and whose dead bodies she kept, whenever she could, to count
them at night, either in imagination or in reality. As soon as she
would appear outside her door, after a very curt “good-morning” to her
neighbours, she would start a long conversation about the ants. In all
the neighbourhood and at home we all joked about Madame Viet and the
quantity of ants she destroyed.
Her granddaughter, whose father was a large farmer in the adjacent
country, was one of my schoolmates at Chauny; she spent a few days of
each week during the holidays with her grandmother, and was the first
to laugh about the ants. Whenever I went to see Saint-Just’s sister,
Madame Decaisne and the Chevalier, I was always asked for news of our
friend and her “frumions.” The more she killed the more they reappeared
in greater numbers; it really seemed as if they were brought by some
one during the night into her courtyard.
We had some beehives, and I delighted in watching their daily,
never-varying work, about which my old Homer had sung thousands of
years before. My father, desiring to convince me that men and animals
are what we make them by kindness and education, taught me, little by
little, how to tame my bees. I used to take them sugar and flowers, and
they never stung me.
“It is because you love them,” said my father, “and they know it well.”
I was as fond of my Blérancourt bees as of my Chauny pigeons, and came
to know their ways, their work, their tastes, and their organisation. I
used to talk to them, and they understood me as well as did my pigeons.
“You see,” said my father, “nature amply suffices for the need of
observation, of sociability and love which exists in man. He is,
himself, the conscious reflection of the whole life of the universe.
If you wish to worship something, worship the sun, the God that gives
you life, that surrounds you with heat, that illuminates all things,
and, under whose rays, everything grows, everything comes to life and
palpitates.”
Under the powerful and incessant pressure of my father’s mind, I
gradually came to see everything from his point of view. Anyone
mentioning the words “apostleship” or “holiness,” would at once have
made me think of my father, whose charity and kindness were without
bounds.
I was unwilling to return to Chauny and to the school, now occupying
the place of my beloved lost garden. I begged my father to delay my
departure from Blérancourt, under pretext of my studying with him.
He had begun with me a course of Greek history which he desired to
finish. He was perfecting me as a “poetess,” and the verses I sent to
grandmother, who was very fond of poetry, were considered much superior
to my first attempts, both by Blondeau and my friend Charles. In this
way I reached Christmas, and the impress of both republicanism and
paganism became more and more developed in my mind. My father’s ideas
fell into ground already prepared for them by heredity. And then, who
could have resisted so much warmth of heart, such a passionate love of
the beautiful and the good?
Winter set in very severely at the end of October, and we met so many
poorly clad people on the roads that my father and I felt ashamed of
our warm clothing, and it often happened that we returned home without
wraps or shoes. My mother, who was also charitable, but in a sensible
way, gave away only warm clothing; and she would abuse my father and
scold me for being as foolish as he was.
Liénard had given back to me my large travelling-purse, and begged to
be allowed to offer me the little things we had bought together at
Boulogne-sur-Mer. This money was of the greatest use to us for our
poor, but it was soon exhausted.
My father would have spent millions had he possessed them. He could not
be trusted with money, for he gave it instantly away.
My mother, who had carefully saved up the money for the tilbury, sent
it to Liénard, knowing well that if she confided it to my father he
would without fail give it to the poor, and not replace his worn-out
carriage. He was, however, most desirous of having a new one, the old
carriage being much too heavy when the wheels were covered with mud,
which was the case eight months out of the year, on the badly kept
roads around Blérancourt at that time.
My mother never allowed my father any loose money; but if his patients’
bills were small at Decaisne’s, the chemist, a nephew of Saint-Just,
when the end of each month came, there were painful surprises for my
mother’s slender purse, when the butcher, the baker, and grocer had to
be paid. Added to this, my father often found that people were too poor
to pay for his visits. If he did not grow rich, he at least grew in
influence, and his republican proselytes numbered hundreds. Blérancourt
was now becoming a centre of violent agitation. The most revolutionary
pamphlets were read there; a large fair was held in the town every
month, and my father’s ideas reached all the surrounding villages;
the propaganda became more and more active. Nothing was talked of
but reforms, progress, the lowering of the census, the accession to
political life, not only of the educated class, but also of the lower
classes.
In my letters to grandmother I told her, of course, as cleverly as I
could, of my new opinions, but only of those of republican tendency and
touching upon nature. Without discussing them, she answered that she
was anxious about me, that, becoming republican first, I would surely
become a socialist, and, from being a worshipper of nature, turn pagan
and atheist, like my father; that it was the logical outcome of such an
education, and that there was no escaping it. She added that my father
was disloyal to her in destroying in my mind what she had implanted
there.
XXX
A SERIOUS ACCIDENT
During the first days of December an excited correspondence about
me began between my father and my grandmother, which increased in
violence. She declared she would not consent to my staying away until
Christmas; that she had been deprived of my presence too long; that I
was her sole reason for living, and that she insisted on my returning
to her at the end of the week we had just begun.
“If you do not send her back to me,” wrote grandmother, “I shall alter
my will; you will have nothing, and Juliette can wait for the _dot_ you
will save up for her.”
This was my father’s answer:
“I am preparing her to marry a workman!”
When my father told me his answer, I said to him:
“That is a joke, is it not?”
“No,” he answered, “it is my dearest wish.”
“It is not mine!” I answered curtly. “I would give up my life for our
cause, but I have no taste for the slow torture of married life out of
my own sphere.”
“Juliette!”
“It is true, papa, and I will never, never marry a man who is my
inferior.”
“Well, where is your theory of equality?”
“Equality of rights--yes, papa, I believe in that with all my heart,
but equality in manners and ways of life--no, never!”
My father was angry and I was sulky.
During the day a cartload of wood was brought to the door, and, fearing
a fall of snow, my father, my mother, and myself helped to carry in the
logs. As I stooped to pick some up in my arms, my father, taking up one
of the logs, gave me such a blow that I screamed with pain. I stood up
and found the blood flowing from my temple and left eye. My father,
under the impression that he had destroyed my eye, had one of his fits
of madness. His only fault was his extreme violence of temper. In one
of his rages he had killed a dog of whom he was very fond. In another,
because his brother-in-law, a man as tall and as strong as himself, had
somewhat roughly treated his wife, my father’s sister, he would have
killed him also, if they had not been separated.
He brandished his log of wood furiously, and cried out:
“I would rather see my daughter dead than living with only one eye! I
shall kill her and myself afterwards!”
My mother tried in vain to hold him back. The gardener endeavoured to
wrest the log from him. I suffered intensely. I was half blinded, and
I, too, thought my eye was gone. I was not afraid of death; I was only
afraid that my father would commit the crime of killing himself and me.
It was a horrible moment. I was paralysed, but, seeing that my father
was on the point of escaping from my mother and the gardener, I
rushed into the house, and with all my might held the door shut which
separated my father from the crime he was about to commit.
My mother kept crying out to him that he would end on the scaffold and
dishonour his family. Blattier, the gardener, besought him, saying:
“Monsieur Lambert, as good as you are, you are surely not going to do
such a dreadful thing!”
I mastered myself, and said to my father in calm tones, through the
door:
“Very well, papa, you mean to kill me, but let me first go upstairs for
a minute to wash my eye and see whether it is really gone.”
I let go the door--it did not open. My father, who was struggling
against their terrified supplications, was dumfounded at the sound
of my calm voice. He let fall his log of wood, and leaned against the
wall, and, from my little room, where I was bathing my eye, I could
hear his sobs and cries of grief.
My heart stood still when I turned up my eyelid. My eyebrow was cut
open, but I could see. I folded a wet handkerchief over the wound with
one hand, and ran to my father. I looked angrily at him. I was furious
with him for not knowing how to master his violent temper, and I felt
that but for my calmness, the presence of mind of a mere child, he
would have killed me.
“You see,” I said, coldly, “my eye is not put out. It would have
been useless to kill me. Only my eyebrow is cut, and I am going to
Decaisne’s to have it dressed.”
“Juliette!” cried both of my parents. I did not heed them, but ran
to Decaisne. I told him I had hurt myself and that my father was so
nervous about it he was unable to treat the wound.
Grandmother arrived next day to take me away. I had not spoken a single
word to my father, or answered any of his questions, for I thought that
he deserved severe blame.
Grandmother never guessed anything of the truth about this lamentable
event, but she thought me feverish. I told her quite naturally before
my father, how I had hurt myself, and she never gave a second thought
to such a simple fact as the sudden shutting of a door on me, which was
the version I gave her. My father winced under my protecting lies. I
think he would have much preferred a scene of violent reproach to my
calm indulgence.
I kissed him coldly as I left. Tears ran down his face, which induced
grandmother to give him a passionate embrace.
“Come, my son,” she said, “we will divide her, and each take half, for
she belongs solely to us.”
My mother at these words grew angry with me.
“You are clever enough to make yourself beloved,” she said in my ear,
kissing me coldly, “but I do not see what you gain by the exaggerated
love you inspire. Remember the log of wood!”
Grandmother got into the carriage. My father heard my mother’s last
words, and was about to give way once more to his violent temper, but
calmed himself, and said to me, kissing me with all his heart:
“Juliette, my darling child, forgive me!”
XXXI
“LIBERTY, EQUALITY, AND FRATERNITY”
When I stayed with my father I missed my grandmother--her liveliness,
her fancies, her caprices, her gracious tenderness, and her maternal
feeling. Grandfather’s wit amused and rested me, and to be without
Blondeau’s devotion and my friend Charles’s admiration was a great
deprivation. But as soon as I returned to grandmother I felt myself an
orphan. I was nervous, my mind was empty, I was stupefied, and became
more childlike, more enervated, less fit for “the struggle for life,”
a phrase which grandfather indulged in too frequently and used on all
occasions.
These allusions to the “struggle for life” sometimes came up in such a
droll manner in conversation that they made us all laugh, but I often
thought that these same struggles did really exist, and were anything
but droll. Had I not already experienced them? The memory of that scene
of my father’s violence rose so tragically in my mind that it seemed to
impress me much more when I invoked it than at the time when I endured
the pain. Then, too, my father’s strange, insane idea of marrying me
to a workman never left my mind.
I had sometimes dreamed of a cottage or a farm, with a gentleman
for a husband, but never of a “lodging,” with a weaver’s loom or a
carpenter’s block in the centre of the room, waiting for “my man” to
return from taking his work home, having “finished his day.”
I could have no doubts about my deep and growing love for the people--a
love which in my days of enthusiasm seemed capable of enabling me to
sacrifice my very life for their cause; I wished to help them and
to serve them, but to form a part of them,--I, whom generations of
ancestors had elevated above them--that I could never do.
I recalled Saint-Just’s words, which his sister often repeated to me in
speaking of the elegance of the young Jacobite, “the people’s friend.”
He said:
“I wish to raise the people up to me, and desire to see them one day
dressed as I am myself, but I will never lower myself to them nor wear
their blue blouse.”
My father, on the contrary, delighted to wear the _sayon_ of the Gauls,
the peasant’s blouse, and workman’s smock-frock. He failed, however,
to induce my mother to dress herself as a woman of the people.
To be sure, when I stayed with my aunts I gladly wore the peasant
costume, which they had worn for years, but then they saw no one--they
had retired from the world but had always remained gentlewomen. They
had not chosen that mode of dress to become one of the lower class.
Their ways, their conversation, their lives, showed the refinement of
their caste. The contrast between their refinement and the peasant
garb pleased them, because it was rustic and made them think of
Trianon; whereas the contrast sought by my father would have made one
think rather of the women who sat and knitted by the guillotine, the
“tricoteuses” of the Revolution.
One day I had a discussion with my father on this subject, and told him
I would much rather see the “white caps” (the name given in Picardy to
the peasant women) wearing hats like mine--although at that time such a
thing was not dreamed of, though doubtless they would have been pleased
to don them--than I should care to wear their caps.
Notwithstanding reservations of this kind, or rather in spite of our
different ways of interpreting the idea of equality, which I wished to
be elevating and not lowering, I agreed entirely with my father as to
the forms of republican principles and as to the social and democratic
programme which I had accepted. I neither laid aside nor disowned my
little book, wherein were inscribed the twenty-one principles of the
future.
My mother and grandmother both reproached my father for forcing my
young mind and causing it to ripen too soon, to which he replied:
“She can think what she pleases later. Either what I have taught her
will satisfy her, as it satisfies me--and I think it will, for she
resembles me more than any other member of the family--or she will
throw off my ideas, as I threw off, in one night, the teachings of the
seminary.”
The end of 1847 fixed in my mind the political convictions which I
have kept, without modification, for more than thirty-five years.
My father’s great abilities, his immense goodness, his love of the
people, his disinterestedness, all of which filled up the void in his
conceptions, made me for many years his disciple.
He believed, and made others believe, that the people possessed, in a
latent degree, all the virtues, and that it would be necessary only to
put them in possession of all their social and political rights for
them to be worthy of both.
In my father’s enthusiasm for “the masses” there was both the
affirmation of a strong ideal and also a great deal of ingenuousness. I
see it now, alas! Our sentimentality was not made of false sentiment,
but of a valiant faith in the necessity of justice and in a proper
proportion of social benefits. For us of the “middle class” to
contribute to the happiness of the people involved a certain sacrifice
which was not lacking in generosity or grandeur.
The belief in universal fraternity, the hope that each nation might
participate in the freedom of other nations, developed the finest of
all qualities--abnegation and heroism in the men who filled prominent
rôles in 1848.
It could not be truthfully said, however, that practical, feasible
ideas possessed the minds of the revolutionists of 1847, since a young
girl, eleven and a half years old, as I was at that time, could be
initiated into all the revolutionary plans, could understand them, be
enthusiastic about them, and strive for their accomplishment. These
plans were undoubtedly somewhat infantile.
Grandmother, to whom I had talked a great deal, was quite taken with
the sentimentality of the idea of regeneration and with the honest
appearance of character of the Liberals and the Republicans, at that
time united. She began to think that the “hirelings of royalty” were
corrupted, and that Louis Philippe was too unyielding to reform and to
progress. Little by little she was being brought around to my father’s
way of thinking. Blondeau, although an office-holder, thought as I did.
Grandfather had received orders from his Bonapartist committee not to
fear socialism, but, on the contrary, to encourage it, and he approved
and supported my most eccentric ideas.
My father, to my great surprise, was not pleased with grandmother’s
half conversion. I had thought he would rejoice in it.
“If the middle class, who yesterday were still royalists, become
republicans, why, then, when we do have a republic they will spoil the
country and turn it royalist. We shall do much better to go slowly
and to form new generations according to our principles than to rally
elements which will create a selfish and middle-class republic instead
of a democratic-socialist--otherwise, generous--republic. I see
already,” my father added, “all the harm that Odilon Barrot is doing.”
He expressed ideas entirely opposite to those of my aunts, who accused
Ledru-Rollin of misleading the campaign of the reformists, while he
accused Odilon Barrot of turning this campaign aside from its end.
My father became every day more fanatical in his ideas. His opinions
became more and more intolerant. Was this the reason of the violence of
his character? Whenever he spoke, either to friends or to myself, of
the future, he always spoke of the rising tide which it would soon be
impossible to stem.
“Our principles clash, all things are as yet in conflict; we ourselves
are powerless to be logical, and our country is bringing forth
monstrous things,” said my father. “Everything is abnormal, because
too many things are being elaborated at the same time. There is such a
thirst for reform that when the first one is made others will follow
which will overstep all we have ever imagined. That is the reason why
King Louis Philippe, very sensibly, for the sake of his own security,
will have none. As to myself,” added my father, “would an electoral
reform satisfy me, would the combination of other intellects satisfy
me, either? What do I desire? To undermine everything, according to
my master, Proudhon, in his ‘Economical Contradictions,’ or to renew
everything, according to my other master, Victor Considérant, as he
teaches in his ‘Principles of Socialism: A Manifesto of Democracy in
the Twentieth Century’? What I do desire with all my heart, and that
which is absolutely necessary, and without which we shall lose our
heads, and exact from the revolution reforms on which no thought has
been bestowed, and which are neither ripened nor likely to live--what I
do desire is to make somewhere, anywhere, an experiment of socialism,
of association, and of life in common, a phalanstery. Then, indeed, the
possibilities of a social change might be proved.”
XXXII
“VIVE LA RÉPUBLIQUE!”
I returned to school, in spite of the pain it gave me. Happily for
me, Maribert had not come back. By degrees I regained my influence.
Stirring political events were following each other in quick
succession, and drew the attention of my young friends whom I had
interested in the importance of what was going on.
Even in the provinces public opinion was irritated by the obstinacy of
King Louis Philippe and of Monsieur Guizot, and by the insufficiency of
a servile House, whose majority was bought. Everyone said--and we also,
the young female politicians of the Mesdemoiselles André’s school,
especially, declared--that “the hour for reforms had sounded!”
It was affirmed that King Louis Philippe pretended to fear nothing and
to laugh at Odilon Barrot and Ledru-Rollin.
Much was said concerning a banquet about to take place in the First
Arrondissement of Paris, and of seditious cries already heard. We
called them “cries of deliverance.” When we shook hands with one
another every morning we murmured, in low tones: “Long live Reform!
Down with Guizot!”
We knew, and kept saying among ourselves, that the people, the great
people, “were stirring in their deep masses.”
And, lo! one day we heard that many of these inoffensive people had
been massacred for making a purely legal demonstration; that King
Louis Philippe, after trying twice to form a ministry, and that the
Duchess of Orléans, after a semblance of regency, were in flight; then
we heard, in quick succession, that the people had erected barricades,
that the National Guard had behaved like heroes, and that the Republic
was proclaimed!
The Republic! and what a grand Republic! My father’s and mine, one that
began by recognizing the people and their right to work!
The Republic had just ratified this privilege, and the people’s
delegates had said, in words worthy of ancient Greece:
“The people have three months of misery to give to the service of the
Republic.”
“The people,” said the _Democratie Pacifique_, “have behaved admirably
and have shown themselves worthy of every liberty. They have proved
their moral maturity. Not a single robbery, nor a single attack on
private property has been committed.” The ragged poor who guarded the
Palace of the Tuileries had put placards along the corridors, reading:
“Death to all thieves!” They had also protected the bank treasure.
France once again was at the head of nations, and gave a new example of
her national grandeur.
My father arrived on the 26th of February. He could not stay quiet at
Blérancourt, and felt that he must share his joy with me.
Grandmother did not appear over-anxious about the revolution.
Grandfather raged. He had thought that the overthrowing of the Orléans
dynasty could be but to the sole advantage of Louis Napoleon. He fell
upon the first triumphant Republican,--his son-in-law,--who came under
his hands, and also upon his stupidly democratic Republic, and none of
us could force him to beat a retreat. My father laughed, grandmother
smiled, and I said:
“Ah! poor grandfather, with our Republic I am afraid your Bonaparte is
in a bad way, however socialistic he may have pretended to be.”
I can remember that at the end of dinner on that 26th of February,
grandfather, who, to console himself for his disappointment, had added
a few bottles of his old Mâcon wine to his usual allowance, said to
us, with eyes rounder than ever:
“Well, I can see as clear as daylight into the future.”
“Grandfather, it is eight o’clock in the evening.”
“I see your Republic--do you hear, Lambert? do you hear,
Juliette?--thrown to the ground by my Bonaparte. I repeat it, so that
you may hear: revolutions always end in empires.”
Grandmother, Blondeau, and especially my father and I, laughed heartily
at him.
At school, how excited and curious and frightened they all were! Half
the pupils were missing and were shut up at home, as it was thought
the revolution might spread in the provinces. The workmen of the glass
manufactory were all for the Republic. They would doubtless proclaim it
at Chauny, make a revolution on their own account, and perhaps commit
pillage.
Mademoiselle André and her younger sister sent for me as soon as I
arrived at school. They had long known of my father’s opinions and
guessed at mine. They wished to put themselves under our protection.
“Well, Juliette, how pleased your father must be at the news, as he has
always been a republican. Have you seen him?”
“Yes, Mademoiselle, he came yesterday, and he is overjoyed. He says
that France is now, at last, worthy of her history; that she will
govern herself; that all the European nations will admire us, and
perhaps imitate us; that it is now the coming to power of the people,
of the real people, not the corrupted middle class, and that----”
“That will do,” said the elder Mademoiselle André, sharply. “Please
keep to yourself these beautiful opinions of your father. I forbid you
to speak of them here.”
“In the class-room, Mademoiselle?”
“In the class-room or at recreation.”
I looked Mademoiselle André straight in the face. I was nearly as tall
as she was. I answered:
“I cannot promise that, Mademoiselle, for we number a good many
republicans in school. And no one can forbid us to speak of, and to
love, the Republic.”
“But France has not accepted your Republic,” said Mademoiselle Sophie.
“She will accept it, Mademoiselle, for now the people can vote.”
The Mesdemoiselles André were torn by conflicting feelings--the
imperative desire to hush me, which I perfectly understood from the
tone in which Mademoiselle Sophie said: “Ah! Juliette, how sad it is
to be divided between being obliged to be harsh to the daughter of a
friend and the fear of irritating republican sentiments. When you next
see your father, Juliette, you can tell him from us how sincerely we
hope that his Republic will calm France instead of disturbing her.”
I made my curtsey and went into the class-room. Curious glances
followed me. I answered by signs that an important affair had happened.
All my schoolmates were aware of my having been called into the
drawing-room by “Mesdemoiselles.”
I had a tri-coloured cockade pinned inside my bodice. I took it out and
held it in the palm of my hand, under the half-raised cover of my desk.
I showed it to my neighbour, and slipped it into her hand; she did the
same to her neighbour. In an instant my cockade went the round of our
long table, unperceived by our governess. My friends knew then that
“Mesdemoiselles” had spoken to me about the Republic!
The class became highly excited; we were all restless and inattentive.
Not one of us had learned her lessons or written her exercises, and
there seemed to be but one answer:
“Mademoiselle, I have had no time for my lessons on account of the
Republic.”
“Mademoiselle, I have had no time to study, on account of the Republic!”
“I wonder what interest the Republic can have for you?” said our
governess, in a most disdainful tone, and shrugging her shoulders.
A voice was heard to answer, amid general silence. It was mine:
“Why, Mademoiselle, the Republic is most exciting to us!”
An approving murmur upheld me. Mademoiselle was silent, and looked
amazed at me, and I saw it struck her that if I had dared to answer her
as I had, it was because I thought I had the right to do so.
The exit of the class was something like a small riot.
It was our Republic, and we, the _Frondeuses_, owned it! The King in
exile, republicans and democrats in power, it was simply a triumph!
Surrounded and questioned, I did not know which of my friends to answer
first.
“What did Mesdemoiselles say to you?” was the general query.
I told them what had passed, and, if it had been possible, they would
have crowned me with laurels. “That was right! That is what I call
brave and firm; that was just the thing to say; your true republican
answer was what it should have been!” was the approving comment on my
action.
I repeated for my friends’ benefit every word my father had said:
“The Republic was marvellous; we were to have complete liberty and no
authority.” Doubtless, and especially now, in the beginning of things,
we were not to be impertinent to our governesses, but we should very
soon be able to make them feel that, although younger and less clever
than they, the Republic considered us their equals!
What discussions, what plans, what different ways of understanding
Government there were! “I would do this! I would act thus!” we said.
We each of us wanted so many different things, that it was agreed at
last that we, the initiated, the _Frondeuses_, should each make out
a programme, which should be read in recess next day, and that which
seemed to us the best form of government should be decided upon by
vote. Our young minds were filled with the current words of the day.
The uniting of “abilities” was decidedly quite insufficient as a
reform; on that point everyone agreed; everybody must vote, men,
women, and especially schoolgirls. We had conceived in our minds a
foreshadowing of true universal suffrage, and later we were firmly
convinced that we had invented it.
The opening of national workshops pleased my father greatly. He wrote
to me that at last the people were to be happy; that one hundred
thousand citizens were fed by the State and worked for it. He thought
at that time, with many others, that Louis Blanc was secretly at the
head of the founding and organizing of the national workshops, and his
confidence in them grew thereby.
“All other nations admire us, and all will later imitate us,” added my
father at the end of his long letter. “The Republic is to arm every
Frenchman, so that all shall be prepared to join in delivering other
nations.”
My father came to see us again in March. Alas! he seemed already very
uneasy. The national assembly was full of reactionists. The Montagne
had no authority. True, the establishing of the Republic had taken
everyone by surprise. Nothing was ready; certain reforms had been
pushed through, certain measures had been too hurried, but the feelings
of all the republicans were so noble, so proud, so disinterested, there
was such a belief among them in right, in justice, in the divine voice
of the people, that it was better not to be disquieted with their
indecision, nor to be too hard on mistakes already committed.
In my father’s opinion, the worst of it was the fact that the whole
world had its eyes upon us, and that the dream of a Republic and
universal fraternity could be realised only by the Republic of France
giving definitely, and at once, the example she owed to the world.
My father had just been elected Mayor of Blérancourt. His friends and
disciples would never have allowed another to hold power there, however
small that power might be, nor that he should not be able to possess
the possibility of realising all that his enthusiasm and generosity
promised for the Republic.
Grandmother and I went to Blérancourt to see them plant the tree of
Liberty, but it displeased us to behold my father attending this
ceremony dressed in a blue blouse. His tri-coloured scarf was tied so
as to show the red only. Already my father declared: “Of the three
colours, we like only the red.” White seemed to him too Legitimist, and
blue too Orléanist.
“Juliette,” asked grandmother, in my ear, as we were starting for the
ceremony, “do you like that blouse? does it not shock your taste?”
“It is partly blue, at any rate, grandmother,” I answered, laughing;
“and, with papa’s ideas, it might have been all red!”
A young poplar tree was brought and planted in a large hole prepared
for it in the market-place.
My father, since the Republic had been declared in the name of liberty,
had become reconciled with the priest, who now blessed the tree of
Liberty.
In his speech the priest declared that if the Republic realized the
evangelical ideals of its programme, incarnated in the names of
liberty, equality, and fraternity, it would be the finest form of
government existing; but, in order to accomplish this, it was necessary
that all republicans should be as sincere, as generous, and, he
cleverly added, as Christian in heart, if not in form, and as devoted
to the poor as the new Mayor.
In a speech full of ardour, which carried me away, and with a fiery
eloquence which fascinated grandmother, my father answered the
priest that no one could deny that the Republic, and its principles
of liberty, equality, and fraternity, was born from the Gospel;
that Christ was the first of all socialists and republicans; that a
true republican should possess all the Christian virtues, and that
Christianity was the finest human formula ever conceived.
I was amazed. My father added: “All that has reference to the
temporal power of the Church is admirable. It is more advanced than we
socialists in the understanding and the practice of association. We
have a great deal to learn from her, but it is time that she herself
should learn from us the worship of nature, and allow herself to be
penetrated by the truth of science!”
“My dear Mayor,” said the vicar to my father after the ceremony, “you
would accept the Christian religion with your eyes shut under the
condition that it should be heathenish.”
“In return,” said my father, laughingly, to the vicar, “accept my
heathen religion, springing from the love of nature, under the
condition that it inspires Christian virtues.”
“Never! never!” replied the vicar, smiling. “You have said that we
are in advance of you in the conception of association and of life in
common; we are also in advance of you from a religious point of view.
Christianity represents the present and the future!” And he added,
mockingly: “Paganism will continue to be more and more a thing of the
past.”
“So be it!” the Mayor replied, gaily, leading off the vicar, who came
to breakfast with us.
“I believe,” said my father, in the manner of one proposing a toast,
at the end of the repast, “in an absolute, undeniable way, that
the Republic is the consecration of liberty, of conscience, and
of tolerance, and I, as Mayor, will prove to you, reverend vicar,
with what largeness, what elevation of ideas, with what grandeur we
democratic-socialist republicans understand liberty!”
XXXIII
“OTHER TIMES, OTHER MANNERS”
My progress as a student suffered considerably from my serious
political preoccupation.
My father came to see us every week, most anxious to keep me well
advised of all passing events. He gave me cuttings, selected and
cleverly classified, from the _Democratie Pacifique_, and brought me
books, pamphlets, and proclamations. One would have thought that it
was very necessary that I should be instructed about the acts of the
members of the Provisionary Government and with the writings of those
who showed themselves the most ardent among the reformers. The study
of the French language, of history, geography, and literature, were
secondary things to the author of my being.
Besides, in truth, who knew whether the French tongue might not become
universal; whether the history of kings would be able to keep its
footing amid the events of the great revolutionary outburst; whether
the geography of our planet was not going to be changed in such a way
by the fraternity of peoples that it would be almost useless to learn
it under the form given to it by the odious past?
The future meant progress, light, new things! All the old forms were to
be banished. But, by a strange contradiction, which, however, seemed to
strike no one, this progress, this light, these new things continued to
be based on the evangelical principles of liberty, equality, and on the
morality of Christ, “the Precursor,” the first Socialist.
In the jargon of the epoch, the Republic of Pericles, of Socrates, of
Plato, mingled its history with that of the great French Revolution.
The beauty of Athenian art alternated with the porridge of Sparta; the
naked feet, or the _sabots_, of the soldiers of the fourteen armies
with the magnificence of the festivals of the Goddess of Reason.
There was no escaping the qualifications given to all men and to all
things--what we call “saws” to-day. The integrity of Saint-Just’s
character, Robespierre’s austerity, Danton’s power, Ledru-Rollin’s
love of the people, Proudhon’s overwhelming courage, the sublime
social theories of Pierre Leroux, of Cabet, of Louis Blanc, woman’s
superiority as shown by Tousseuel in his _Esprit des Bêtes_, and by
Fourier in his _Phalanstère_, and by George Sand--all this kind of talk
studded the speeches of orators in small towns and villages to such a
degree that many orations were almost identical, no matter what subject
was treated. To improvise was easy; the speakers simply wove phrases
together, and the sonority of the words lulled their listeners as a
well-known air will do.
The oratorical art of the Republic of 1848 in the provinces was
analogous to the music of the hand-organs which delighted the whole
land at that time.
When grandmother or grandfather begged my father to lay aside his fine
phraseology and do them the honour of initiating them into the details
of such of his governmental conceptions as could possibly be realised,
he answered:
“Anything is better than what existed before! we are about to take a
plunge into the unknown; no matter what happens, we shall at least come
out of the ruts in which the chariot of State has stuck in the mud for
centuries. The French Revolution made a grand effort to urge the horses
of the chariot to gallop, but Bonaparte bestrode them and drove them
back. It is for us to drive them forward again.”
In spite of his increasing reservation of opinion on certain men whom
he began to suspect of being lukewarm, my father’s optimism was as
sincere as my own. Illusions, the love of the unforeseen, of the
romantic, the absolute ignorance of the possibility of the realisation
of an idea, the most infantile simplicity held sway in my father’s mind
as it possessed the minds of the greater number of the men of 1848
whom I have known; but what a passion of devotedness moved them, what
thirst for sacrifices to be made for the holy cause of the people, what
generosity, what loyal abandonment of the privileges of their caste,
what sincere fraternity, what conviction that “the humble class” was
ripe for equality, what indignation against the appetite for enjoyment,
against egotism, against Guizot’s celebrated formula, “Grow rich!”
The men of 1848 were apostles and saints. At no other epoch has there
been more honesty, more virtue, more noble simplicity. They were not
political men, they were souls in love with the ideal. They were all
as sincere as my father; all have a right to absolute respect, and no
one could have lived beside them without honouring and cherishing their
memory.
They were old-fashioned, if you like. All parties become old-fashioned
in time, but how few men, before and since 1848, have possessed their
youthful hearts, their high inspirations, their love of devotedness and
of sacrifice!
My memory preserves their noble faces crowned with laurels, while the
lucky, the rich, opportunists, men of business and of politics, whose
aim was personal gain, those who, victorious, said to one another:
“It is our turn to enjoy!” who repeated among themselves: “The most
important attribute of power is the spoils”--such men are as vile in my
mind as is the vileness of their disciples.
Not one among the republicans of 1848 thought of obtaining a better
position from his passage to power, not one grew richer. If they did
not accomplish what they dreamed for the people, it was not because
they threw their principles overboard when they obtained possession
of the great city of Paris; it was because their conception of social
and human happiness was too beautiful to be realised, and because the
people, first of all, refused to make a trial of their theories.
Later, I knew the greater part of these “imbeciles,” as Ernest Picard
called them. They resembled my father. Their doubts--and they had
many!--were of too recent date to have dried up their souls; they no
longer believed in a divine Christ; they still believed in a human one.
They worshipped that mysterious Science which replaced for them the
supernatural, and which had not then brought all its brutality to light
in crushing man under machinery.
They were internationalists, not foregoing by so being their legitimate
pride of race, not accepting without resistance being conquered by an
enemy, not admitting or imitating the utilitarian ideas of national
groupings morally inferior to themselves, but in order to infuse into
other nations their principles of love and of regeneration.
My father said to me, towards the end of April, that he saw the
distance grow wider every day between his hopes and the actual events
taking place.
“I am afraid,” he added, “that our Republic will be only a rose-water
Republic, of the kind which some day will be dyed with blood. The
‘yellow gloves’ of the _National_ are the masters, and are delivering
the Republic over to ambitious men.”
My grandmother, on the contrary, declared herself quite satisfied with
the Republic, which she found in no wise frightful, as she had feared
it would be.
“Jean Louis, I am getting on very well with your Republic!” she would
say to my father.
At first my father answered: “Wait a little, mother;” later he replied:
“You are more satisfied than I am.” One day he burst forth: “By Heaven!
if the Republic suits you, it is because it is made for your benefit!
The Orléanists might as well return; they will have nothing to change
in favour of the middle class.”
My father became soon, in the most bitter sense of the word, a
malcontent. Of course I became a malcontent also.
XXXIV
I GO TO BOARDING-SCHOOL
I was a very aggressive malcontent moreover. My discussions with
grandmother became so violent that grandfather several times was angry
with me, and even Blondeau blamed me. My friend Charles, who would
probably have upheld me--for he was a revolutionist, as well as my
father and myself--had left Chauny to become the secretary of one of
his boyhood friends, a high functionary of the Republic, at Paris.
My father soon became greatly excited. “They are lying to us, they
are deceiving us, they are trying to put us to sleep,” he said, much
grieved, feeling his Christian-heathen-socialist-scientific Republic
escaping him.
My grandmother felt more and more secure. “Order is maintained, and
therefore the form of government matters little, after all,” she said.
Grandfather, when my father and I became more hopeless, said:
“Come, come, things are going very well for the Empire.”
But I made my grandparents very unhappy with my sorrow, my
recriminations, my imprecations. Life became insupportable,
intolerable, to all of us. It must have been the same, at that time, in
every family where there were idealists and sincere Republicans, those
who believed they could bring down the moon for the people, worthy, as
they thought them, of all miraculous gifts.
The national workshops, which had interested me so much, now made
me despair. Alas! they were going wrong. What! that admirable
conception--the State creating workshops to give employment to those
who needed it, to feed those who were dying of hunger; that benevolent,
protecting institution, a social safeguard against poverty, an
admirable example held up to all nations--was it to be dissolved?
Émile Thomas, who was at the head of these workshops, did not follow
Louis Blanc’s ideas, although he often said to the contrary. They
were beginning to suspect him of being the agent of “the man of the
Strasbourg and Boulogne riots.” Instead of organising the national
workshops, he disorganised them.
“The reactionists,” said my father to me, “endeavour to make it
believed that Émile Thomas is acting according to Louis Blanc’s ideas,
when, on the contrary, he is the worst enemy of those ideas. They wish
to render pure socialism guilty of the crimes they are committing in
its name. Trélat, the Minister of Public Instruction, cannot suffer the
national workshops; the Executive Committee abhors them, the middle
class has a horror of them, because it is afraid of them. What will
happen if, as the National Assembly, composed of reactionists, desires,
they abolish the workshops? A hundred thousand men thrown suddenly out
of work, on the streets of Paris, will cause terrible riots; there will
be a bloody revolution, in which reforms will be drowned, and that is
their aim.”
Ah! those hundred thousand men threatened with being turned into the
streets! I saw them unhappy, wandering about, without work, despairing,
while their wives and children were dying of hunger at home. I wept
over them. My heart was full of an immense pity for them, and, day by
day, I felt obliged to be kept informed of all that was taking place.
My grandmother, who had recently subscribed to the _National_, wished
to prevent my reading it, but I insisted on seeing it, and, while I
was revolted at the hatred of the “yellow gloves” for _my_ national
workshops, I kept myself informed about events until my father’s visits.
When I learned that Monsieur de Falloux was commissioned by the
National Assembly to furnish a plan of dissolution of the national
workshops, I knew that everything was falling to pieces.
My father said to me: “They are organising butchery; they wish to
dissolve the national workshops from one day to another. Trélat himself
sees the danger. He proposes to replace the workmen successively,
little by little. He has destituted Émile Thomas, seeing at last the
disorganising work he was accomplishing; he has given his son-in-law,
Lalanne, the place, and Lalanne is reorganising the workmen, but it is
too late, for the wolves of the National Assembly wish carnage.”
This nearly killed me. The people, the good people, so patient, so
generous, who had behaved so admirably in the fateful days of February,
were being urged to yield to the evil instincts of plunder from the
poverty imposed upon them.
I was so unhappy at all I felt, and my suffering came so much into
contradiction with my grandparents’ and Blondeau’s excessive hardness
of heart, who said: “Let them finish at once with the beggars!” that I
begged grandmother to allow me to return to Blérancourt with my father
on his next visit.
“You can do as you please,” she said. “But I warn you, my poor
Juliette, that in your present state of aberration of mind, the little
good sense remaining to you will be imperilled if you live with your
father. He will destroy it, and your marriage with a workman will be
an appropriate ending to your follies. Now, I must confide to you
that young X. has already expressed great admiration for you. He is
seventeen years old, and his father, half seriously, half laughingly,
on account of your youth, has made overtures to me regarding a possible
alliance, a few years hence, between our two families. Certainly, this
is not what I had hoped for you, for I should like you to be married in
Paris, where I would go and live part of the year with you, in order
to direct your steps in the path of that destiny which, until lately,
I had foreseen for you. But you have such insane notions that perhaps
a good middle-class marriage in the country would be better for you
than all I had desired for my only grandchild. Here is what I propose:
Will you go to school as a boarder? The school is so near that I shall
feel you still with me. You can lecture your schoolmates as much as you
please, and then your grandfather and I and Blondeau, having to bear
with you only once a week, will be better able to endure your outbursts
of passion. But if we must see you weep or be angry, either suffering
or in a rage every day because this good Republic does not suit you,
why, then, my darling grandchild, the situation will be untenable.”
I realised then, from this proposition, the amount of annoyance I had
caused my grandparents. Could it be possible that grandmother, who
until lately had found the hours I spent at school too long, and our
separation, while I was at Chivres or Blérancourt, unbearable--could
she wish that I should go to boarding-school? I was stunned; however,
my foolish pride prevented me from throwing myself on grandmother’s
neck and asking pardon for my folly, for I realised at that moment
how absurd I had been; and then, what she had told me of X., a
handsome young man, whom I found charming and witty, raised me in my
own estimation so much that I thought a young person like myself,
nearly twelve years old, could not ask pardon like a little girl, so I
replied, although with an aching heart:
“Very well, grandmother, it is agreed; I will go to boarding-school as
soon as you wish.”
“To-morrow,” she replied.
I nearly burst into tears, but it was class-hour, and I left for
school, saying to myself it would be the last day that I would have
my own room all to myself, where, from morning until night, I was
surrounded by evidences of my grandmother’s passionate tenderness and
my grandfather’s gay affection. I could see only from afar my pigeons
fly down, cooing and pecking in the courtyard. I should miss the
friendship of Blondeau, to whom I could no longer confide my sorrows,
or experiment upon with my father’s startling theories, which I had
fully adopted, but which he accepted only with certain modifications.
* * * * *
The next day I went as a boarder to the Mlles. André’s school. My
grandfather accompanied me there, and it needed all my courage, when I
bade him good-bye, not to beg him to allow me to return home at night.
I breakfasted and dined with my schoolmates. At class, at recreations,
and all the day long, I saw no one but them. The absolute silence
at table was a veritable torture. When I had gone to bed, I was so
unhappy and wept so much that I could not sleep, and this was the
first sleepless night I had ever passed in my life. I was frightened
to think of the next night, for this had seemed to me as terrible as
the infernal regions, and I imagined I could never sleep again; this
caused me great anxiety, but of course I did not confide it to any of
my friends, the most intimate of whom were boarders like myself.
One of my political enemies who knew me well, said to herself that
some disaster, some great quarrel between my grandmother and myself,
could alone have caused our separation, and she amused herself
maliciously by passing to and fro before me, sneering, as she spread
about a fantastic story concerning my coming as a boarder. My red eyes,
my discomposed face, gave credence to her tale, which was circulated
about during the mid-day recreation. They said that my grandmother
loved me no longer, that she did not wish to see me any more, that I
had done all manner of disobedient things; and, of course, I was at
once informed of all this gossip.
At the afternoon recreation several of my schoolmates suddenly ran to
me and said:
“Your grandmother is on the top of the wall in the back courtyard. She
wishes you to go and say good-night to her.”
Being aware of the stories spread about me by my political enemy, I
went to the foot of the wall, which I would not otherwise have done,
most certainly, for I was so angry with grandmother that I did not wish
to answer her summons.
“How are you, my grandchild?” she asked, perched on the top of a
ladder, her head alone appearing above the wall. “Have you slept well?”
“No, grandmother, I have not slept at all, and most surely I shall
never sleep again. But what does that matter to you? You are happy,
you sleep well; that is all that is necessary. Say good-night to
grandfather and to Blondeau for me. Good-night, grandmother, but let me
warn you that, if you call for me again to-morrow from the top of that
horrid wall, I won’t come!” and I ran away.
The following days I worked only by fits and starts, when my pride was
at stake, or when I wished to surpass a political adversary. Being the
head of my party, I could not allow myself to be conquered.
My heart was saddened by the sorrow of living no longer under my
beloved grandmother’s wing, and I continued to feel grievous distress
of mind in connection with my fears concerning the workmen of the
national workshops.
To understand rightly the sum of love contained in the words, “The
poor people,” or to comprehend to what a degree those who were sincere
socialist-republicans believed themselves its friends, one must go back
to quite another epoch.
We socialist-republicans had no longer the courage to play at
recreations. The National Assembly was treating our workmen of the
memorable February days, those who had written on the walls of the
Tuileries, “Death to thieves!” as if they were bandits and plunderers!
How we suffered with the poor people! It was all over with them. We
knew it was only a question of days and hours before one hundred
thousand men would be given over to hunger and want. Not one of my
schoolmates had allowed herself for a long time to spend one cent
on delicacies or sweets. We counted up our resources constantly. By
combining them we should be able to feed one man of the national
workshops, but no more. I decided that we would write a touching
letter to the Minister Trélat, whom we detested, who, according to
our thinking, was the cause of all the trouble, proposing to him
that we should take charge of one workman of the national workshops.
Certainly, one was not much out of a hundred thousand, but if in every
boarding-school they would do as much, there would be, at all hazards,
a certain number saved.
The planning of this letter was most difficult, and took a great deal
of time. Each separate group, having made out its draught, communicated
it to the other groups. We numbered eleven groups, secretly bound
together, each one of which had its partisans, and all our partisans
wished to share in the drawing up of the letter. At last the final
result, compiled from all the other draughts, received the approbation
of the united groups, and the important letter was despatched. I
addressed it to my friend Charles, in Paris, for him to take and
deliver it from us to the Minister in person.
At that same moment the National Assembly cruelly decided that
the workmen from seventeen to twenty-five years of age should be
incorporated in different regiments, and also to send to the department
of Sologne--a country desolated by fever, and whose climate was
deadly--a certain number of workmen of the national workshops; and that
the remainder should be distributed in the provinces, to build roads
and do other work, which should be planned by the municipalities.
Thinking that our “national workman” would be sent to us some day, not
only did we stop eating cakes, and economise in every possible way, but
we begged and collected everything we could from our relatives under
all sorts of pretexts. One girl had obtained a suit of clothes from one
of her brothers, and had cleaned and mended it with care. No one was
to be allowed even to suspect our plot, for we knew that we should be
excommunicated by all our families if they should imagine that we were
thinking of protecting one of the “monsters” of the national workshops.
So we had specified in our letter to Minister Trélat that our national
workman was to present himself at the boarding-school of the Mlles.
André of Chauny as a pensioner of Juliette Lambert!
My father had written to me that things were worse than had been
reported; that the authorities occupied themselves no longer to find
any sort of place for the workmen; that the National Assembly was
odious, criminal; that it wished to dissolve the national workshops
immediately, without caring what became of the hundred thousand men
turned adrift. “There will be great misfortunes,” he added.
I went for a vacation the next day, a Sunday, to grandmother’s; and
Blondeau talked politics before me without my saying a word, for I had
determined, since my entrance at the boarding-school, not to speak of
anything but commonplaces when I went to visit my grandparents.
Blondeau related what seemed incredible--that Trélat, the Minister
of Public Instruction, had asked that some pity should be shown to
the bandits of the national workshops, and had begged the National
Assembly, with trembling voice, not to throw a hundred thousand men on
the streets, and to allow him to discover some way of finding places
for them; that he had proposed incorporation, sending them to the
department of Sologne, road-building, and other work to be decided upon
by the municipalities.
“Your news is a week old, Blondeau,” I could not help saying to him.
“And you can add that the National Assembly laughed at Trélat’s tardy
outbursts of feeling, and that it decided....”
I related the decision, and there was silence.
My grandfather, provoked, and scarcely able to control his anger, asked
me:
“Are you for the insurgents?”
“I am, grandfather, for the hundred thousand wretched men, to whom,
perhaps imprudently, they promised to give work, and whom, suddenly,
without pity, they wish to deprive of it.”
“But they are assassins!”
“Whom have they assassinated?”
“They are thieves!”
“From whom have they stolen?”
“They terrify the country.”
“Oh! yes, they make them out bugbears. They say they are madmen, in
order to kill them; perhaps, finally, they will, indeed, make them
terrifying, grandfather.”
Blondeau and grandmother looked at each other bewildered. Neither the
one nor the other breathed a word.
“It is time that Prince Louis should occupy himself with it,” replied
grandfather, “or else such ideas as yours, Juliette, will drive us all
crazy.”
“Alas! your Prince Louis occupies himself too much with it. It is he,
through Émile Thomas, who has made the national workshops fail.”
“Prince Louis could never occupy himself too much with the affairs
of France, do you hear, little insurgent? He must save us by a good
Empire, securely founded, and which must last, at least, until my
death.”
XXXV
DARK DAYS FOR THE REPUBLIC
One of our schoolmates brought us the next day a clipping from a
newspaper containing an article applauding the measures taken by the
Government after the following facts had occurred.
Under the threat, voted by the National Assembly, of an immediate
disbanding, the workmen had sent delegates to the Luxembourg, who had
begged Monsieur Marie, a man high in the Government, to delay the
Assembly’s decision.
Monsieur Marie had answered, so said the newspaper, “as a Cæsar might
have done”:
“If the workmen will not leave, we will make them do so by force; do
you understand?”
That night armed bands had gone through the streets of Paris, singing:
“_On n’part pas! on n’part pas!_” to the tune of the _Lampions_. Groups
of workmen had been heard to say: “We have been betrayed, and we must
begin the revolution of February over again.” Other groups had cried
out: “We must have Napoleon!” and they had been the most clamorous of
all. The workmen were indignant with de Lamartine, Garnier-Pagès and
Arago, who had failed in all their promises.
The poor people were in revolt. There was danger of a massacre. The
anger of the wretched had burst forth.
It seemed to us that petitions might prevent all this. Was it possible
to understand, we said, that the members of the Government, or
others, had not placed themselves at the head of a manifestation for
conciliation? How could it be that they had driven a hundred thousand
men, all bearing the arms of the National Guards, to desperation? Did
they wish to bring about the end of the Republic?
We thought of nothing but these terrible things. At the least allusion
to similar events in our lessons of history, we exchanged sorrowful
notes with one another during class hours.
What was taking place? What was going to happen?
I received a letter from my friend Charles, addressed to Blondeau,
commissioning him to give it to me. I should not have received it
until a week later, when I was to leave school for my day at home, if
Blondeau had not come at the mid-day recreation and asked to see me in
the parlour. He said to me:
“Here is a letter from Charles, and I come to tell you at the same
time that since the day before yesterday, the 23d of June, the
insurrection has broken out in Paris; that they are killing one another
by thousands, and that blood is flowing like water. Are you contented,
dreadful little revolutionist?”
“Blondeau!” I said, crying, “that was what I feared. They have
exasperated those poor, wretched men beyond endurance at last.”
“Now you are beginning again! But open your letter from Charles. You
see I have not unsealed it; Charles has told me, doubtless, the same
thing that he has written to you.”
This was what I read:
“At last, my dear Juliette, the Government has seen that it must defend
society energetically against the miserable creatures in whom you are
interested. All the partisans of order, from the Monarchical party of
the Rue de Poitiers to my friend and patron, Flocon, have united to
crush those who have been brought over here and hired by foreigners.
“I kiss you good-bye, Juliette, until we meet again. Your friend,
Charles.”
I held out the dreadful missive to Blondeau.
“He is perfectly right. He says what is true!” exclaimed Blondeau,
giving the letter back to me after having read it.
I left him without even saying good-bye, and ran to my schoolmates and
partisans, who were gathered together, and anxious about the visit I
had received.
“The revolution has broken out again,” I said, and I read to them my
ex-friend Charles’s letter. I emphasised the _ex_, for I had already
torn him from my heart.
I was in such a state of excitement that I felt as if I were
intoxicated. My faithful friends, after a half-hour of unanimous
expressions of indignation, thought as I did.
“I am of the opinion,” I said to them, “that we should do something.
We cannot remain inert while they are massacring innocent people in
Paris. I have hidden at the bottom of a little bag, in my linen-closet,
a large handkerchief which my father gave me, in the centre of which is
printed: ‘Long live the Democratic and Socialistic Republic!’ Find me a
long stick in the wood-house, a ribbon or a string, and we will arrange
a flag out of it, and will make a manifestation. Will you follow me?”
“We will!” they cried.
“If we could add a few recruits, some partisans, to our united groups,
so that our manifestation would be more imposing, don’t you think it
would be better?”
“We will all try to get some,” said my comrades.
We then dispersed. I soon returned with my large blue, white, and red
handkerchief, and I fastened it to a long stick in such a manner that
the words, “Long live the Democratic and Socialist Republic” should be
plainly visible.
With my heart ready for battle, I placed myself at the head of my
battalion, crying: “Long live the Democratic-Socialist Republic! Long
live the insurgents! ‘_On n’part pas! on n’part pas!_’”
A certain number of my schoolmates followed us; the others looked
at us, terrified. The Mlles. André came running, and snatched my
handkerchief-flag out of my hands. I defended it heroically. Several
of my schoolmates supported me. But a troop commanded by my political
enemy came up, crying: “Down with the Democratic-Socialist Republic!”
and, lending aid to the Mlles. André and the under-governess, got the
better of us. I received some well-directed blows, and I suffered at
once from physical pain and from the humiliation of defeat. I was
dragged to the drawing-room, held by both arms, and much jostled about.
My valiant comrades followed me.
The Mlles. André sat down in their two largest arm-chairs to give me
trial. Mlle. Sophie, the younger, questioned my partisans and allies.
“It was Juliette Lambert, was it not, who incited you to this act of
scandalous folly?” she asked them.
Alas! out of twenty-two, seventeen answered:
“Yes, mademoiselle.”
The five others clung close to one another. Mlle. Sophie could drag
nothing from them but one and the same answer:
“Both she and ourselves wished to make a manifestation!”
“Oh! yes, you are brave and faithful friends,” Mlle. Sophie replied,
who did not really wish to punish any one but me. “It is a noble
sentiment, for which I give you praise. Was it one of you--now, don’t
lie--who furnished the handkerchief?”
“No, mademoiselle.”
“You see, the premeditation came alone from Juliette Lambert.”
I had not said a word, nor made a gesture, wishing to keep up my
dignity, though accused, and to force my judges, my faithful friends,
and even the traitors, to admire me.
“Do you deny what you have done?” Mlle. Sophie asked me.
“No, mademoiselle, I am an insurgent, but--”
At this moment the mother of one of my faithful friends entered,
exclaiming:
“My daughter--I wish my daughter--where is she? The insurgents are
marching on Chauny!”
There was a general panic. They allowed my friend and her mother to
depart, and they barricaded the front door.
“Don’t be frightened!” I cried, going from one to another of my
schoolmates, making no discrimination between friends and enemies, “I
will protect you. They are my friends, and we will go and mount guard.”
We picked up our unfortunate and much damaged flag, and my corporal, my
four “insurgents” and I, went and placed ourselves by the barricaded
front door. We heard a battalion of the National Guard passing by,
crying: “Down with the insurgents! Death to them!”
Frightened people in the streets talked together, saying:
“The Guards have gone to bar the way to the insurgents.”
The Mlles. André closed all the doors and shutters of the house, and
they left us where we were from half-past one o’clock in the afternoon
until nightfall. One of us tried to open a door at dinner-time. It was
impossible, and we were obliged to remain there very hungry.
We were boarders, all five of us, and could not think of returning to
our families. Besides, the padlocked door and the high walls prevented
any hope of flight. We said to one another:
“After all, those who are fighting suffer much more than we. They also
are hungry; they are wounded, they are dying for their cause, and what
are our sufferings compared with theirs?”
Finally, after what seemed interminable hours, they came to fetch us,
and sent us to bed without supper. We were too proud to ask for any;
but the traitors had kept a little of their bread for us, and, with
some chocolate they gave us, by slipping it under our sheets, we were
able to satisfy our hunger a little, which sleep finally pacified.
The next day, in the morning, I was again called to the drawing-room,
but this time alone. My faithful friends, cleverly influenced, had
agreed to beg pardon, and had made their submission.
The elder Mlle. André asked me whether I repented.
I tried to prove to her that I had not acted like a child; that I was
convinced of my right to have my own opinions, and that I had defended
ideas about which I had seriously reflected.
“Disturbing, dangerous, and wicked ideas!” replied the elder Mlle.
André.
“They are ideas of conciliation, of peace, and of justice,
mademoiselle, but they are not understood by those who find present
things excellent, or by those who are afraid of all reform.”
“This is my sentence,” said Mlle. André, curtly. “You will take
breakfast in the refectory, and I shall announce at the end of the meal
that I am going to send you home to your parents. Such scandals cannot
end without an example being made.”
I breakfasted with good appetite, and when I heard the sentence
delivered I was neither ashamed nor remorseful. My only fear was that I
might be severely blamed by my grandmother.
I said to myself that in any case I would have recourse to my father,
who could but uphold me for having defended our common cause, and for
having suffered for our opinions.
I rose proudly and replied, at least with apparent calmness, for in
reality my heart was almost strangling me, so fast did it beat:
“I am delighted to leave; I stifle under oppression, and I am going to
be free at last!”
I said good-bye to no one. I went and put on my hat and waited for
Mlle. Sophie, who was to take me back to grandmother.
My friends considered me an heroic victim to my cause, but were not
sorry, so one of them told me later, to be relieved from the excitement
I caused them.
My grandmother was at first disturbed on hearing the story of my
escapade; but, seeing my resolute attitude, she thought more of winning
me back than of scolding me, for, during her last days of fright,
fearing the insurgents would come, she was all the more unhappy at not
having me with her in the danger threatening the town. She had thought
continually of sending for me. Since I had returned, why should she be
angry? So, with quickly recovered calmness, she replied to Mlle. Sophie:
“As you consider Juliette’s action an act of insubordination toward
you, you are quite right to bring her back to me. But, permit me to
tell you that I think her conduct unusual. It shows me Juliette as
I love to see her--giving proof of a strong will and a courage that
everyone does not possess. Although the child returns to me without
my having sent for her, neither she nor I will suffer from it, and,
mademoiselle, I have a greater desire to thank you for having brought
her back to me than to ask pardon for her.”
I threw myself into grandmother’s arms, and all trace of ill-feeling
between us disappeared.
Panic was on the increase during the following days. They said that
the insurgents, driven out of Paris, were coming to sack the town; the
National Guard went to bar the way against the plunderers. Grandmother,
in spite of my reassuring words, was terrified. She hid at night, in
a large hole which grandfather dug in our courtyard, her silver, her
jewels, all the valuable things she possessed. Blondeau also buried his
money-box in the hole, which they covered with earth and gravel.
My father, to whom grandmother had written, sent me a letter of
congratulation at having left a school where they taught nothing but
inane middle-class ideas.
XXXVI
ANOTHER VISIT AT CHIVRES
I then had a long vacation, which began the 1st of July and did not
finish until the 1st of October.
I remained three months with my aunts at Chivres, to their great
delight.
I took intense pleasure in the study of Latin, and made real progress
in the reading and translating of the “bucolics.”
My aunts, however, sermonised me severely on the reason for my having
been sent away from school. The _National_ had inspired them with a
holy horror of the plunderers, of those who had been “bought up by the
foreigner,” and the twelve thousand men who had been killed in the June
riots. The twenty thousand prisoners and exiles did not soften their
hearts for a moment. My harangues interested them as ill-sustained
paradoxes, but did not convince them in any way.
The citizen Louis Blanc, with his project of a conciliatory
proclamation; the citizen Caussidière, with his extraordinary motion to
have the Deputies go into the streets, to send them to the barricades
and to the insurgents with a flag of truce, had exasperated them. They
were merciless. The stories of the cruelties of the National Guards
in the provinces, and of the Mobile Guard firing on the insurgent
prisoners through the vent-holes of cellars, did not revolt them. It
was necessary to kill as many as possible of those “mad dogs,” they
said. And it was gentle Frenchwomen, faithful Liberals--or believing
themselves such--who spoke thus! Marguerite knew nothing of the truth
concerning it. To her the insurgents were savages, devils, etc.; and I
could not make any feeling of clemency, any pity, enter into the minds
or hearts of Marguerite or my aunts. They had all been too frightened.
While my father was alarmed, and cried out against the abomination of
seeing men who for long years had defended liberty, who had called
themselves its soldiers, condemn and persecute the people to whom
they had made public and solemn promises to act for their good, and
who had only asked them to keep those promises within the measure of
possibility, my aunts spoke of Pascal Duprat, a Democratic-Republican,
as a sublime man, who, while pretending to wish to save the Republic,
had been the first man to demand a Dictatorship.
The death of General Bréa, killed by two acknowledged Bonapartists, Luc
and Lhar; that of Archbishop Affre, due to an accident and not to an
assassination, were, to my aunts, premeditated crimes, whose expiation
demanded the death of thousands of men belonging to “the most ignoble
and abject populace.”
My aunt Constance still trembled as she told me of her emotion when
she had read the words of the President of the Chambers, mounting the
tribune to say: “All is finished!”
It would have been folly to endeavour to convert my aunts to a more
enlightened feeling of humanity. I gave up trying to do it. I read the
_National_ in secret, Marguerite giving it to me after my aunts and
great-grandmother had read it in turn, and I suffered every day with
renewed sorrow at the violence of the reaction, the sentences of the
Council of War, at the persecutions, the denunciations, the state of
the public mind, which my father wrote to me had become so Cæsarian
that it would throw us into the arms of Napoleon, who had been too
delicately brought up by England to subdue us.
The night session, when the prosecution of Louis Blanc and Caussidière
was voted, delighted my aunts. They would not even read Louis Blanc’s
justification, much changed though it was in the _National_, for I
compared it later with the text of the _Democratie Pacifique_, which my
father sent to me. In my aunts’ opinion, and in that of all the middle
class, Louis Blanc was “the founder, the responsible author of the
monstrous national workshops.”
Now, Louis Blanc proved in court, what his partisans had known for a
long time, that the national workshops had been established not only
without his participation, but against his will, and that he had not
visited them even once.
The obstinacy of holding to a preconceived opinion against absolute
proof, admitting no discussion, seemed to me at that time the most
extraordinary thing in the world. I endeavoured several times to read
Louis Blanc’s protestation to my aunts; they would not listen to it,
not wishing to hear it, or to be convinced by it, and they continued to
call him the “sinister man of the national workshops.”
I confess that this obstinacy irritated me, and that my affection for
my dear aunts suffered from it.
Louis Napoleon was elected in five departments at the supplementary
elections. The terms he used in thanking his electors, for different
reasons, provoked both my father and my grandmother, and my aunts as
well, whose disgust for “Badinguet” increased daily.
“The Democratic-Republic shall be my religion,” said Louis Napoleon,
“and I will be its priest.”
My grandfather would certainly have made a wry face at this speech,
had he not always had the habit of saying, concerning all the
manifestations of him whom he called his “beloved Pretender”:
“He is admirable, in the way he scoffs at the republican birds.”
They talked of nothing but “Badinguet” at my aunts’ all through
September and October--of his oath of gratitude and devotion to the
National Assembly, of the repeal of the law of 1832, which gave the
Bonapartes liberty to live in France. I heard my aunts continually
discussing the good faith of pretenders.
“Certain republicans are absurdly simple when they believe that an
oath cannot be violated,” said aunt Sophie. “One must know one’s Roman
history very little not to see that ‘Badinguet’ is playing the eternal
game of the Cæsars.”
“When once they have voted to have a President of the Republic, and
have chosen ‘a man of the Brumaire,’ when men of moderate opinions
uphold this proceeding, what can possibly enlighten them? How can de
Lamartine uphold such aberration of mind with his authority? Unless he
deceives himself to the extent of thinking he will be named President
of the Republic, his conduct is inexplicable,” said aunt Constance.
Politics still interested me a little in conversation, but when I did
not talk of them, I thought no more about them.
“Men are worth nothing, nothing at all,” said aunt Anastasie one day;
“I do not know a single man who has a just mind.”
“You know so many!” replied aunt Constance, with her habitual scoffing.
“I never knew you to have but three masculine friends: the miller, his
mill-keeper, and Roussot!”
I worked happily with aunt Sophie, who found me very desirous to learn
Latin, and less occupied with explaining or contradicting everything.
I no longer sought for eccentricities in ideas or opinions. I studied
methodically, realising how much time I had lost.
I felt for the first time in my life, perhaps, that I had only a very
youthful mind; that I had for a long while really learned but little,
but, like a parrot, had remembered a good deal. I condemned myself as
pretentious, insupportable, and I resolved that I would begin to be
quite a different person, desirous solely to learn, and to be very
studious and proper.
XXXVII
I BEGIN TO STUDY HOUSEKEEPING
When I returned to Chauny my grandmother, whom I found more
affectionate, more lovable than ever, said to me:
“Now, my dear Juliette, you shall do what you choose; you shall learn
only what pleases you, or nothing at all, if you prefer it; but I ask
you to take an interest in housekeeping. You shall have entire charge
of ours for six months. You shall order, you shall spend as if you were
absolute mistress. I reserve for myself only the right of giving you
advice. As you love order, to arrange things, and to ornament a house,
it will be easy for you to do all this with taste. If you desire to
have lessons in cooking, you have only to tell me. I should like you to
realise how much an art embellishes life--that of music especially. The
new organist is a remarkably good professor. I know you do not care for
the piano, but I should like you to cultivate your voice, and I should
be glad if you would try the violin; but, I repeat, you shall do just
as you choose in everything.”
“I shall be delighted to keep house, grandmother, it will amuse me a
great deal; and I will try the violin, it is original; I will cultivate
my voice also, and, since you leave me absolutely free to do as I
please with regard to my ordinary studies, that will give me time,
grandmother, to reflect about the little I know of elementary things.”
I reflected so seriously that, after a few days, I told grandmother
that I would ask my father to draw me up a plan of study, so that while
becoming the prospective mistress of a house--which idea fascinated me
more and more--I could improve myself somewhat in spelling, arithmetic,
geography, and French literature, of which I knew but little.
I suggested to grandmother an idea that pleased her--to have M.
Tavernier, the master of the school where my father had been professor,
give me lessons, as he was particularly clever, it was said, in
inspiring his pupils with a love of study.
My father approved all my plans, especially that of having chosen for
my professor a man whose merits he had heard praised.
He began by telling me I must copy five pages of Racine every day, and
he read to me the first five pages, pointing out to me the beauty of
the phrases, the musical sonority of the words. It was curious that my
father, with his exaggerated, ardent political opinions, should be
purely classical in his literary tastes, having an admiration only for
the literature of the ancient Greeks and their imitators.
What admirable lessons I received from him during the few hours he
spent at Chauny! We both worked in my pretty, well-ordered room,
always full of flowers, whose old furniture he disliked, calling it
“trumpery,” but where he was happy, all the same.
“Literature is the great consolation,” my father said to me;
“everything else fails us, that alone remains. At Epidaurus the doctors
of ancient times declared that the last traces of an illness did not
disappear until the convalescent person had felt his mind enlarge with
admiration on listening to the verses of Sophocles and of Euripides.”
My father’s dearest dream was to travel in Greece. “No one would enjoy
it more than I,” he said, and added: “Be a Greek, Juliette, if you
wish to live a privileged life in the worship of what is eternally
beautiful, of that which elevates man above his epoch.”
Always deeply distressed about politics, execrating General Cavaignac,
who had, he said, more than any one else, opposed all attempts at
conciliation “in order to plant his banner in ground sodden with
blood,” my father, alarmed at the progress Bonapartism was making in
the country, and who until now had talked to me only of public events,
scarcely ever mentioned them any more.
One day, when I asked him the reason for this silence, he said to
me: “Since the love of politics is the most grievous of all passions
when one is sincere, the most deceptive when one is loyal, the most
despairing when one loves justice, leave politics alone. Perhaps better
days will be born from our present sufferings. Await them. We, the old,
enlisted combatants, cannot leave the field of battle, but why should
you enter it?”
The proclamation of Louis Napoleon: “If I am made President, I promise
to leave to my successor, at the end of four years, strengthened power,
liberty intact, and real progress accomplished”--this shameless lie
alone reawakened my political indignation. Grandfather, who read it to
us, burst out laughing. The five million votes which had elected Louis
Napoleon President of the Republic seemed to me an insane act of the
French people. From having heard grandfather say that all Bonapartists
made game of Republican riff-raff, I believed it, and was not surprised
when he said to us one day:
“My Pretender has sworn to be unfaithful to the democratic Republic,
and not to defend the Constitution. The fools believe he has pledged
his faith to the contrary! Well! I’ll wager my life that Louis Napoleon
Bonaparte, simple Prince Louis, a simple Bonaparte, will be, before the
expiration of his Presidency, the Emperor Napoleon III.”
“Alas! he is right,” said my father, who was listening to
grandfather, and when talking to me one day later of his sadness, his
heart-sickness, reproaching himself for having preached his beloved
doctrines so earnestly to me, for having initiated me too young in the
disillusions of life, he said: “I implore you, Juliette, banish from
your memory this lamentable year. Your youth must not be fed on doubt,
your faith in the future must not be shadowed by death. I have weighed
men, and I despise and hate them. As to the principles in which I
believed, they have received so many blows that I no longer know what
I wish or what I do not wish. The Liberals are no sooner in power than
they become cynically authoritative. The Republicans have scarcely left
the ranks of the governed, to become governors themselves, before a
touch of madness seems to enter their minds, and they become Cæsarian.
All my beautiful edifice has fallen down, stone by stone. I am crushed
beneath it. If, for a short moment, I knew the joy of building it, its
ruin has soon followed. I would not at any price impose upon your young
life the pain of living amid its destruction. I will not speak to you
again of politics, I will not write to you about them. You must take
note only of facts, and feel compassion that each one will be a fresh
torture to your father.”
My grandmother felt much pity for her son-in-law’s sorrows and
disillusions. “He exaggerates, but he is sincere,” she said, “and he
has a heart of gold.”
My father’s only consolation was to occupy himself a great deal with
me. He advised that, as I had not studied primary branches, I should
go back to the sources of our literature. He read me numerous passages
from Homer in the text, to familiarise me with the admirable sonorities
of our “initiative tongue,” as he called it. He dictated to me, word by
word, entire chapters from the Iliad and from the Odyssey, those which
he thought the most beautiful, saying to me that we had years before
us, and that he would take charge of my instruction in Greek.
“You shall learn with me the history of that nation in which nature
incarnated herself to such a degree that she made it supernatural.
Your aunt Sophie will teach you as much Latin as is necessary for a
cultivated woman to know. She loves and understands Roman literature,
and I do not fear that she will reap for Rome’s benefit the admiration
I shall have sown in your mind for Athens. At Chauny you will have an
exceptionally good professor of literature, who will teach you many
things you will never forget, and who will interest your grandmother
in your studies, which will take her somewhat away from her novels.
All this seems excellent to me, and I do not doubt that, if you desire
it, you will succeed in knowing more than all the schoolmates you left
behind in your monotonous boarding-school!”
XXXVIII
AN EXCITING INCIDENT
Some months of 1849 passed, during which I acquired much serious
elementary knowledge; but all my ardour was spent on the study of
Grecian, Latin, foreign, and French literature. I identified myself
with the characters of certain works, and acted their parts. My
grandparents and Blondeau lived happily, occupied with me, interested
in all that I did, amused by the superabundance of vitality which I
put into everything, and lent themselves to taking part, as they had
previously done, in my most fantastic caprices. When a book pleased me,
they were obliged to assume the characters of the principal personages
of the book, to speak their language, to discuss their acts, and to
take part in imaginary conversations which these persons might have
held among themselves. I began to write poetry again--perhaps rather
better than my first attempts--and poems naturally were my chief
delight, those of Homer above all. When I was at Blérancourt, my father
would consent to be called Ulysses, and my mother Penelope, although
she sometimes rebelled against the rôle I gave her.
I was Nausicaa. I had a passion for washing, and dabbled in water
with delight. My father found me many times before a tub filled with
soap-suds, and would address me as “Nausicaa with white arms.” He would
recite to me the words of the seventh canto of the Odyssey:
“‘It seems to me best to implore you by caressing words, keeping afar
from you, for fear of irritating your heart;’” and he would add:
“‘I compare you in height and in presence to Diana, daughter of great
Jupiter; but if you are a mortal, inhabiting earth, thrice happy are
your father and mother. I am seized with admiration on seeing you.
So did I see one day at Delos near Apollo’s altar a young sprig of a
growing palm-tree!’”
And he would continue, going from one verse to another, as it pleased
him to select them, and I would answer him, for I knew he loved the
poems, so many times repeated by heart.
During my visit to him that summer, my father had a great sorrow, in
which I took part and from which he suffered so deeply that it touched
even my mother’s heart. His last hopes were cruelly taken from him.
On the 15th of June, he informed me that Ledru-Rollin had, on the 13th,
asked the new Assembly, which had just been elected, and whose majority
was reactionary, for a bill of indictment against the Prince-President
and his Ministers, who were found guilty of having violated the
Constitution. Under the false pretext of saving Italian liberty, our
intervention had culminated by the entrance of French troops into Rome,
re-establishing the Pope.
What overwhelmed my father, and made him despair the most, was not
so much the failure of their motion, as the hesitating, ridiculous
part played by the last two champions of his opinions--Ledru-Rollin
and Victor Considérant--in their attempted appeal to the people with
what was called “the affair of the Arts and Trades,” and their rather
pitiable flight through the back doors of the school. Were they also
worth nothing as heads of the opposition party? Had they no courage?
In July all the trees of liberty were dug up, and my father, who had
accepted the function of Mayor in order to plant one of these trees,
resigned his office on the day the tree was thrown down.
He then began to condemn, in equal measure, the monarchists and the
reactionary republicans.
He was destined to suffer blow after blow.
Since the insurrection of June, 1848, secret societies had been formed,
some of which were to fight against reaction, others to prepare the
Empire, as the insurrection of the 10th of December had done, and
all these societies kept watch upon one another. The Bonapartists
denounced, above all, those called “Marianne.”
Perquisitions took place, and were called “domiciliary visits.” The
reactionists affirmed that the object of certain of these societies was
to overthrow the Republic, which was only a pretext for hunting down
Republicans.
The pleasure I had taken in searching for my grandfather’s
hiding-places for his money had caused me to remark my father’s goings
and comings to the garret, which I concluded must arise from his
hiding something there. So I determined to find out what it was, and I
discovered a hole between two rafters, which held a large package of
papers, lists of names, proofs of the organisation of a society, the
members of which had taken oath to fight against the tyrants, to answer
the first call to insurrection, etc.
One day my mother said to my father: “You should burn the papers of the
‘Marianne,’ which are so compromising to many persons. Since you do not
dare to meet any longer, it would be better to rid yourself of the
official reports and the lists, which seem to me dangerous to keep.”
“I have thought about it,” my father replied, “and I will begin
to-morrow to convoke our brothers and friends, two by two, to ask their
consent to destroy our archives.”
That same evening I made myself a large pocket attached to a string
which I could tie around my waist, and which I put on the next morning.
It was time! My father had not gathered together ten of the associated
members of the “Marianne” (were there traitors among “the brothers and
friends” convoked separately?) before an agent of the Republic, at the
head of a commission, came to our house one morning at breakfast-time,
and, showing his papers of authority, he began to ransack in my
father’s writing-desk, aided by two policemen. My father was
overwhelmed; my heart seemed turned into stone. I watched our visitors
doing their work, concocting the while a plan in my mind. I even helped
them by pointing out things in an amiable way, and I went so far as to
say, laughingly, to the agent of the Republic:
“What you are doing is not very nice, Monsieur; it might even be called
indiscreet.”
The agent and his colleagues were amused at my conversation.
Then I said suddenly to my mother:
“Mamma, will you let me go and tell Blatier (the gardener, who was
looking, frightened, through the window) to place some cider to cool,
so that you can offer some to these gentlemen? It is so hot!”
My mother made a sign of assent. She had wished a moment before to
go into another room, but one of the policemen had stopped her. They
allowed me to go out, however. I told Blatier to draw some water from
the well, and I went with him, feeling myself followed by the eyes of a
policeman, who was looking out of the window. While the gardener drew
the water, I went down into the cellar, and came up with some bottles,
which I placed in the pail of cold water. Then I dallied over several
things, went down in the cellar again, looked for another pail for more
bottles, which I brought up, and I then pretended to enter the house
slowly. Then I flew with a bound to the garret-door, and with another
bound entered it, after having taken off my shoes, so as not to be
heard, for the house had but one story. I put the papers in my pocket,
slid down the staircase and entered my parents’ room tranquilly, where
the police were rummaging into everything.
My mother, trembling, gave them the keys of the drawers. My father,
seated, did not move. I prepared a tray myself, and went outside to
have the water in the pails changed. I soon returned and offered some
cold cider to our visitors, who were delighted.
They ransacked the stable, the carriage-house, the cellar, and the
garret.
When my father heard them go upstairs, he rose, his face convulsed, and
I saw from my mother’s expression that she was saying to herself: “The
papers must be up there--we are lost!”
I took a glassful of cider and approached my father, always watched by
the policeman. He pushed my glass away. I leaned over him as if urging
him to drink, and whispered these words to him:
“Don’t let your face change. I have the papers!”
I kissed him, which seemed to touch the policeman’s heart, and my
father clasped me in his arms.
Thanks to me, these men had discovered nothing of any importance.
The agent of the Republic said to me: “Mademoiselle, I am glad to
announce to you that we have found nothing compromising to your father.
It would have been serious for him if we had been obliged to state
certain facts which we had been informed existed, for your father’s
name figures on the list for arrest, and he might have been imprisoned,
even exiled. He has the reputation of being a dangerous revolutionist,
and, besides, he is accused of making proselytes.”
“Thank you, Monsieur,” I replied. “You must have a daughter yourself,
to act in such fatherly fashion to me.”
The agent smiled, but did not answer me. He bowed to my mother and
father, and left.
I accompanied him to the door, and I watched “the domiciliary
commission” for some minutes; then I bolted the door, locked it, and
went into the dining-room, where I found my father prostrated.
“From the expression of your face,” said my mother to him, “it is lucky
they did not find the papers, which must be in the garret.”
My father answered:
“Juliette has them!”
“How did she get them?”
I raised my skirt, and cried, victoriously:
“This is how one can fool those who make perquisitions!”
I told my parents that I had learned the importance of the papers from
what my mother had said, and of my fondness for finding hiding-places.
My father recovered from his emotion, and felt great indignation.
“Such a republic,” he said one day, soon after the famous visit, “is
more odious to me than the monarchy has ever been. May I see before
long those who pretend to serve this Republic of lies, and who, really,
only try to persecute Republicans, grovel before one and the same
tyrant, and all be crushed together under his heel!”
XXXIX
AN OFFER OF MARRIAGE
I pitied my father for all he was suffering from the bottom of my
heart, but had not, in truth, his own Utopian ideas brought about what
he called “the lawless reaction”? Grandmother said to me: “Juliette,
how can you expect a country to consent to be guided politically by
good people as mad as your father? They make public opinion fly to the
extreme opposite of their quixotic ideas.” And I agreed with her at
last.
During all the latter part of that year and the beginning of the
next, I studied very hard, and I recall with pleasure one of my first
literary successes. My professor, Monsieur Tavernier, the master of
the boys’ school situated opposite to our house, in order to create a
double emulation among his pupils, proposed for me to compete with them
for a prize.
The entire town was talking at that time of a terrible storm that had
occurred in April, and had made several victims, and of which the quiet
people of Chauny could not yet speak without fright.
My professor gave the narration of the events of this storm to his
pupils and to me as our theme for competition. I had followed and
observed every detail of the storm, and had even noted down my
observations at the time: the fright of the birds, the trembling of the
leaves, the moaning of the trees, shaken by the blast; the terror of
the people who passed by, the disturbed heavens, the near or distant
sonority of the claps of thunder, the jagged streaks of lightning, the
terrible noise of a thunderbolt which I thought had nearly killed me.
Thinking the storm over, and stifling with heat, I had sat down in a
current of air between two open windows, opposite to each other. The
deafening thunderbolt burst and traversed the two windows, throwing me
off my chair on to the floor. I described all this with much feeling.
Among the pupils at the school were a good many young men whom I knew,
brothers or relatives of my former schoolmates. They were all aware of
the cause of my having been sent away from the Mlles. André’s school,
and admired me as a “valiant” young girl, an expression frequently used
in my behalf in my family, and with which grandmother always endowed me.
I copied and recopied my composition. I devoted myself to it with such
intense interest that it gave me a fever, and I was proclaimed the
winner by my rivals themselves. One of them came to bring me the news
and to congratulate me. I was about to kiss him, when grandmother made
me an imperious sign, so I simply thanked him, with warm gratitude.
“What!” grandmother said to me afterward, “were you going to kiss that
boy? Why, look at yourself, you are a young girl; you are no longer a
child.”
“But, grandmother, I shall not be fourteen before six months.”
“Everyone takes you for sixteen,” she said.
Grandmother sent my father, my aunts, and my father’s family, copies
of my famous composition, which she wrote out herself, keeping the
original, which I found twenty years after.
From that moment I thought of nothing but literature, and my
imagination became intensely excited.
A chiromancer came to Chauny at that time, and my grandmother greatly
desired that he should read my hand. He declared that he distinctly saw
“the star of celebrity near Jupiter” in my hand, and he added: “I shall
see that hand again some day;” and he did, in fact, recognise it twenty
years afterward one day on the Riviera, when it was not possible for
him to suspect who I was. From that day my grandmother never doubted
about my future destiny.
At that time I made my family act the parts of Camoën’s _Lusiades_.
Each one of us had his or her rôle; and, for more than a year, my
grandparents, Blondeau, even my father, who had become “Mousshino
d’Albuquerque,” preserved the character of the heroic personages we had
chosen. We intermingled, to our great amusement, fiction with daily
life, and laughed heartily when commonplace events compromised the
dignity of “Vasco da Gama,” whom I represented.
My grandfather, the “giant Adamastor,” called his pigeons by reciting a
passage of the _Lusiades_ to them. We knew the admirable poem literally
by heart. And how amusing it was when a cart passing in the street
would shake our house, which had become our vessel! What sorrowful
reflections we had on the dangers we were running! My _dramatis
personæ_ revolted against my demands sometimes, especially at table,
where we were all gathered together. I would, on such occasions, quiet
my rebels by draping my napkin around my body to recall the flag scene.
The mixture of our admiration for the poem and the absurdities of our
interpretations was so amusing that it was difficult for us to lay
aside the _Lusiades_ to take up Walter Scott’s _Ivanhoe_, with which I
was delighted.
My father, just then, thought of leaving Blérancourt. Grandmother’s
entreaties and mine prevented him from accomplishing another folly
which would have caused him to lose the position he had acquired.
He wished to join the phalanstery at Condé-sur-Vesgres. The deputy,
Baudet Dulary, having given a large portion of his fortune to Victor
Considérant, to make an experiment of Fourier’s doctrines, my father
desired to take part in this trial, which later failed lamentably, but
to which one of his friends, of whom I have spoken, lent his active aid.
During the spring of 1850 a theatrical troupe came to Chauny. I had
never been to the theatre, except to hear the opera of _Charles VI._
at Amiens, at the time of my first railway journey. I had read a great
many plays of all kinds, for I devoured books like my grandmother, but
I had never seen a play acted in reality.
Blondeau decided that he would take me to see the drama, _Marie-Jeanne,
ou, La Fille du Peuple_. Grandmother disliked so much to go out that
grandfather accompanied Blondeau and me.
The wife of my grandfather’s barber, Lafosse, who came to shave him
every day, and who lived in the Chaussée quarter, was a milliner.
Grandmother commissioned Mme. Lafosse to make me a pretty blond lace
cap, trimmed with narrow pink ribbon. They wore bonnets when they went
to the theatre at Chauny, but a pretty cap was more elegant than a
bonnet.
People looked at me a great deal, and grandfather and Blondeau
kept whispering together, and I knew they were talking of me, but
_Marie-Jeanne_ interested me more than my own appearance.
I heard people say several times: “How old is she?”
The young men looked at me more boldly at the theatre than in the
street, and I saw they were talking together about me, and I soon knew
they were not making fun of my cap with narrow pink ribbons, which I
feared they might do before I went to the theatre.
I cried so much over _Marie-Jeanne_ that I returned home with my
eyelids swollen. Grandmother, who was waiting for me, said I was very
silly to have disfigured my eyes in that way. But grandfather and
Blondeau calmed her by whispering to her as they had whispered to each
other.
All grandmother’s friends, men and women, came to see her during the
week following the representation of _Marie-Jeanne_, and told her I had
made a “sensation.”
Grandmother could not contain her joy, and she committed the error of
writing about it to my father, who also came to see her, very angry.
The “family drama” assumed tragical proportions on this occasion. My
father spoke of his rights, and said it was his place to watch over me
and preserve me from my grandmother’s follies.
Was it possible that she had sent me to the theatre with a comparative
stranger and with grandfather, whose eccentric habits, to speak mildly
of them, forbade his assuming the rôle of chaperon? Was it not the most
ridiculous absurdity to dress up a child not yet fourteen in a young
woman’s cap? All the town must pity me and ridicule grandmother, he
said, and if she acted in this manner I should never find a husband!
“You are mistaken, my dear Jean Louis, in this as in everything else,”
grandmother replied angrily; “for not only has the demand of Juliette’s
hand in marriage, that was made to me a year ago, been renewed, but
just now, before you arrived, I received another.”
“You cannot say from whom?”
Grandmother showed my father a letter, and mentioned a person’s name.
“One and one make two,” she said.
My father was silent for an instant, and then replied in a vexed tone:
“So you wish to marry Juliette as you were married yourself, and as you
married your daughter?”
“No,” she answered, cruelly; “I do not wish to make my grandson-in-law’s
position for him. He must have one himself.”
“I shall take Juliette home with me; she belongs to me!” cried my
father, in anger.
“I shall keep the child you abandoned, and whom I rescued from the
poverty in which you had thrown her!”
“I will send policemen for her!”
“Try it! I will leave you all, and take Juliette off to a foreign
country.”
Then followed terribly sad days for me. Assailed by letters from my
father, who did not come to grandmother’s any more; by the visits of my
mother, who always found a way of irritating me against my father and
my grandmother, my life became insupportable.
I did not see my father for several months. All the family blamed him.
During the time I passed with my aunts, they, who never had written
to him, sent him a letter approving grandmother’s actions, and telling
him he had no right to influence my mind with his eccentric ideas; that
the majority of those who loved me possessed certain rights from the
affection they felt for me.
In one of my letters to grandmother I spoke of this letter my aunts had
written to my father, and she was deeply grateful to them for it.
Strangely, their intervention calmed her, and she began from that time
to speak less bitterly of my father.
By degrees the quarrel was again patched up. I wished to see my father
again. I suffered from my separation from him in my heart, and in the
development of my mind. Becoming more and more attached to my studies
on Greece, I needed a guide, and no one could replace my father. I told
my grandmother how much I missed him, how my progress in the study of
literature was arrested, and I laughingly added that she was hindering
my future career as a writer by her spite.
One day in the autumn grandmother told me that she would permit me to
pass Christmas and a part of January at Blérancourt.
My father’s sorrow was to be consoled, and mine also. I rejoiced at
it with all my heart, and it was with transports of joy that we met
again. My father evinced so much love for me, he was so tender, so
occupied with everything that could please, amuse, or instruct me, that
my mother, overcome by one of her outbursts of morbid jealousy, became
openly hostile to my father, and continually tortured me.
I was flattered by everyone at grandmother’s; I was humiliated
unceasingly at my mother’s. If my father spoke of my intelligence, or
my beauty, my mother said I was as stupid as I was ugly.
It seemed to me at that time that I was overestimated in both ways by
them, and I began to criticise myself, as I have always since done--not
with extreme indulgence nor with determined malice. I am grateful
to my mother, after all, for having kept me from acquiring too much
self-complacency.
I began my study on Greece again, with delight. My father was not only
a professor, he was a poet.
“How can you be such a red republican, with such a love for Marmorean
Greece?” I asked him.
“With the Greeks, marble was only the skeleton of architecture
and sculpture,” my father replied, “and in Grecian colours red
predominates. Besides, there is no question of art in republican
conceptions, but only of politics. Art is eternal; politics is the
science of an impulse toward progress. I may be classical in my taste
in art, and worship what is antique. In politics I desire only new
things. When the people shall have heard the vivifying good word,
they will understand beauty and art as we understand it. They already
appreciate them better than the middle class.”
I cannot describe how my father spoke of the people; the very word was
pronounced by him with fervour, almost religiously.
“Papa,” I replied, “I want a white republic, an Athenian republic, with
an aristocracy which shall arise from out the masses and which shall be
the best portion of those masses. I wish a superior caste, which shall
govern, instruct, and enlighten.”
“And I wish only the people, nothing but the people, in which we
shall be mingled and melted as if in a powerful crucible,” said my
father. “The mass of the people has sap which is exhausted in us; it
has a vitality which we no longer possess. The humble class is not
responsible for any of its faults, which no one ever endeavoured to
correct usefully and intelligently during its youth. How admirable it
is in its natural qualities, which so many elements strive to mislead!
Why are the upper classes so vicious? Why have they not given the
people some elementary instruction before they tried to educate them?
They would not then have allowed themselves to be speculated with by
wicked and ambitious men.”
The President, Prince Louis Napoleon, passed reviews; made proselyting
journeys; the “Orléans,” as they then said, intrigued at Clermont,
the Legitimists at Wiesbaden; what remained of the republican form of
government suffered assault on all sides.
My father said: “We still have the people with us!” But his conviction
disagreed with the proof, constantly made more evident, that the
government was eliminating the people by all possible means from taking
part in national questions. The patriotic workmen were influenced by
those who said they had suffered from the diminished part played by
France in Europe under King Louis Philippe, and who did not cease to
recall the glorious epoch of Napoleon I.
When I was with my father I was obliged to hear politics spoken of,
willingly or not; as I no longer took any personal interest in them,
as I looked upon political events with indifference, I did not allow
myself to be carried away by them, nor did I enter into discussions,
and our life might have been peaceful, or nearly so, but for my
mother’s embittered nature, and my father’s frequent outbursts of anger.
The same interminable disputes took place, though differing in
character from those between my grandparents. I do not know whether
similar disputes occurred in all households at the time of my youth.
But I believe people were then more sensitive, more susceptible, more
dramatic than they are to-day.
Many years later my life was again mingled with my mother’s and
father’s, and it seemed to me that in the reconciliations following
these perpetual disputes there entered a sort of excitement of the
senses. To weep, to be angry, to accuse each other, even to hate for a
moment, and then to grow calm, to pardon, to be reconciled, to embrace
and love each other--this all seemed to be a need in their lives and to
animate their existence.
My father could not master his terrible paroxysms of anger; he would be
in despair every time after he had given way to them, and then would
yield to them again whenever he was irritated.
My mother would provoke these paroxysms by cold comments or
criticisms, ironical and stinging, such as these, for example:
“Monsieur Lambert’s temper is going to be stormy. We shall not be
spared the dancing of the plates and glass at breakfast or dinner.” Or:
“The republican gentleman sees things with a bad eye to-day; we shall
be in danger,” etc., etc.
As my character so much resembled my father’s, I often felt anger
rising within me; but the example of my father, who was naturally so
good and so tender, but who when blinded by passion became bad, even
cruel, taught me to hold myself in check, and I never, in my long life,
have allowed myself to give way to violent temper, except in moments
of indignation and strong hatred against wicked people, or against my
country’s enemies.
The proverb: “An avaricious father, a prodigal son,” or the contrary,
is often used, and there is truth in it; for children, witnessing their
parents’ example, take note of their daily actions, which are engraved
and imprinted on their young minds, never to be forgotten, and forcing
them to criticise and to condemn those dearest to them.
From hearing my father and his numerous “friends and brothers” talk
violent, “advanced” politics, as they then expressed it, I had become
entirely moderate in my opinions. How many plans for “Republican
Defense” were formed in my presence! Some men wished to assassinate
the Prince-President; others to blow up the Chamber of Deputies; still
others to make the people rise up against the traitors.
There came one day to breakfast with my father a very “advanced”
republican, who was, moreover, a “Comtist,” a name that my father was
obliged to explain to me, for it was the first time I had ever heard of
Auguste Comte. Our guest was a lawyer of the Court of Appeals at Paris,
but lived at Soissons for the time being, taking charge of a series of
very important lawsuits of a relative. His name was Monsieur Lamessine,
and he had the reputation of being a man of talent. His brilliant
conversation pleased me, but his scepticism displeased me. He said
that right had no other interest than that of being the counterpart of
wrong; that morality appeared to him as only forming the counterpoise
to immorality. He endeavoured to persuade my father that society must
become more corrupted than it was in order that a new growth should
spring from it. He was of the type of an Italian of the South, with
very sombre eyes, a pallid complexion, lustrous blue-black, curling
hair. His grandfather, who came from Sicily, was named de la Messine;
he had naturalized himself as a Frenchman at the time of the great
Revolution and simplified his name.
As usual, I took part in the discussions, and grew excited over them.
Monsieur Lamessine did the same, and our joust was amusing. He believed
in nothing. I believed in everything. When I would hesitate, my father
furnished me with arguments, sometimes contrary to his own ideas; but
he wished to see me come off victorious against an unbeliever.
Monsieur Lamessine left us laughing, and said to me:
“Don’t bear me malice, Mademoiselle the fighter.”
I replied:
“My best wishes, Monsieur, that Heaven may shed upon you a little
knowledge of what is right and what is beautiful.”
XL
THE “FAMILY DRAMA” AGAIN
My great-grandmother at Chivres, who was very ill in March, thought her
end approaching, and wished to see me. Happily, it was only an alarm,
and our joy was soon complete at seeing her entirely recovered.
Under the pretext that he was called by business to Condé, Monsieur
Lamessine, who lived at Soissons, came to visit my aunts, as my
father’s friend, while I was staying with them. He was rather badly
received, and he saw me in my peasant’s costume, which I had improved
a little, however, as grandmother would not permit me to be badly
dressed, even when away from her.
Attired in gingham, with a printed cotton kerchief, and a Bordeaux cap,
I was not uglier in this than in other costumes. Monsieur Lamessine
complimented me on my picturesque peasant dress. But the coolness of
his reception prevented him from coming again.
Aunt Constance teased me about my suitor, but I grew angry, and told
her I had other suitors younger than he, and begged her to leave me
alone.
Two months later I saw Monsieur Lamessine again at my father’s. It
was in June, 1851. The republicans were plotting a great deal. The
President had just made a speech at Dijon, in which he had said that if
his government had not been able to realise all desired ameliorations,
it was the fault of the factions.
In Monsieur Lamessine’s mind and in my father’s this speech contained
the threat of a _coup d’état_.
They gathered together some friends in the evening to deliberate; I, of
course, was not present at these deliberations. My father only said to
me the next morning:
“The moment is serious; but we have a man with us who has the blood of
a ‘carbonaro’ in his veins. He will do something.” He meant Monsieur
Lamessine.
On the 1st of December M. Lamessine came to plead a cause at Chauny.
He brought a letter from my father to my grandmother, to whom he was
extremely courteous.
Asked to remain to dinner, he showed himself much less sceptical,
and pretended that my arguments and my wishes had produced a great
influence on his mind. I did not believe him. I thought this was simply
flattery, the motive for which I could not explain to myself, but it
seemed to me hypocritical. I felt a sort of uneasiness, an inexplicable
pain, that evening, and I left the drawing-room early.
The next day grandmother said to me triumphantly:
“Monsieur Lamessine has asked for your hand! He pledges his word to
live in Paris in three years’ time. My dream is realised. His aunt has
given him a certain sum of money to compensate him for having left
the capital, and for protecting her fortune, of which he has already
recovered a part; I, also, will give you a dowry; but I will not say
how much it will be, on account of your mother and her jealousy. It is
agreed that I shall spend every winter with you in Paris.”
I was stunned, bewildered, crazed.
“What? What? You are going to marry me in that way! You have promised
my hand to that man, who is double my age? I won’t have him, I won’t
have him!”
“Juliette, you are absurd. We shall never find another such opportunity
at Chauny, far from all Parisian acquaintances. He is sent to us by
Providence. Besides, he is very good-looking. He resembles one of my
heroes in Balzac, feature by feature. You shall see.”
And she went to get one of her favourite novels, which she knew nearly
by heart, and read me several passages from it, which I have always
remembered.
I took grandfather and Blondeau to witness the folly of my
grandmother’s plan. It was useless. It was already too late. Early in
the morning she had persuaded them, if not of the happiness I should
find in this marriage, at least of the possibility of my living in
Paris and “conquering celebrity” there.
My father and mother, who had been sent for, arrived a few days later.
My father was in an extraordinary state of excitement. The _coup
d’état_ which he had foreseen had taken place.
My mother at once declared that she shared grandmother’s views
regarding my marriage. My father flew into one of his rages. He said,
in a loud voice, that he would never consent to the union of his only
daughter with “an old man”--that was to say, a husband double the age
of his wife. He raved, he overstepped all bounds in his objections, and
finally left the drawing-room, swearing at and insulting everybody.
He reappeared a few moments later, and, half-opening the door, called
me, took me in his arms, after having wrapped me up in a shawl of my
mother’s, bore me to his carriage, standing outside, and, whipping his
horse, carried me off, while my mother and grandmother, screaming in
the street, ordered him to leave me.
He was literally mad, and spoke in violent terms against Monsieur
Lamessine, telling me things of which I had never heard about the life
of “an old bachelor.”
However, the evening I passed alone with my father at Blérancourt
touched my heart more than I can describe. He depicted the despair of
a father who adored his daughter, who had scarcely ever had her to
himself, and who was urged to give her, still a child, to an unworthy
man. Tears ran down his face. He told me how unhappy he was, and
related his whole life to me.
“The more I have loved, the more have I been crushed by what I loved,”
he said. “At first, crushed in my faith, then in my affection for my
wife, my first, my only love, crushed by friendship, deceived by my
best friend, Doctor Bernhardt, for whom I abandoned everything, my
small means, my happiness, and my child; am I now to be crushed in my
affection for my idolised daughter, just at the moment when my love for
the Republic and liberty is betrayed?”
Terror had reigned for several days. All the heads of the party of
liberty were exiled. Twenty-six thousand were sent out of the country;
the republican leaders were despatched to Noukahiva; their soldiers
could not reassemble.
Scarcely had Louis Napoleon Bonaparte assured the country of the purity
of his intentions, in November, before he took possession of France by
fraud.
“France has understood,” he said at that time, “that I infringed the
law only to enter into my rights.”
“All is over with the Republic, and through the fault of republicans
themselves,” my father said, despairingly. “I hate in the same way
those who have let themselves be conquered through weakness, and
those who have conquered by brutality. And now they wish to sacrifice
my daughter to I know not what idiotic dream of future celebrity.
Juliette, Juliette, my child!” he cried, “I will protect you. You are
my last refuge, my last hope--I cling to you!”
And my father wept like a child. I consoled him almost maternally, and
said to him:
“Father, calm yourself; they cannot marry me against my will.”
The next morning my mother, who had been left behind, and who never
knew how to hide a grievance, arrived, very angry, and had a quarrel
with my father, during which never-to-be-forgotten words were said,
wicked words, which my parents should never have used to each other
before me, for they suggested to me for the first time the desire to
escape from so much violence, and from the sight of so many cruel
wounds opened under my eyes.
“Nothing more--they have left me nothing more! I have lost everything!”
cried my father. “I am a shipwrecked man, struggling amid wreckage. I
would like to die! Do not let them take my daughter from me, for pity’s
sake!”
“Your daughter cannot remain here,” replied my mother; “her grandmother
is waiting for her, for it was she who brought me home; she is at the
Decaisne’s. Juliette will now be always tossed about between us; it is
she who will be the shipwrecked one. Besides, I do not want her! Her
grandmother has taken her, brought her up according to her ideas; let
her keep her, marry her, arrange her happiness according to her will;
it is not our place to meddle with it. The responsibility of it all
remains with you, who forgot your fatherly duty years ago.”
And my mother took me away, vanquished, feeling myself reduced to
powerlessness. And I was again wrapped up in the same shawl and
returned to Chauny, this time in a closed carriage, for the night was
dark and the rain fell in torrents.
My father wrote me a letter, which I had the misfortune to keep, and
which later occasioned one of the most sorrowful crises in my life,
which had already begun to number a good many.
“My beloved daughter,” wrote my father, “do not allow yourself to
be doomed to unhappiness. The man whom they wish you to marry is a
sceptic; he desires to unite the attraction of your person to his
own, to advance him in society, and to better a position to which he
aspires. He is not a man to love you, or whom you will ever love. They
cannot marry you without my consent, do not forget it. Should I be
obliged to lose forever what tranquillity remains to me, on account
of this, I will not sacrifice you. If you should let yourself be led
astray, and should ask my consent to this marriage, I should only have
to add the despair of my private experience to the hopelessness of my
public life.”
How shall I relate my struggles, which lasted for long months? They
can be imagined. My grandmother and my mother desired this marriage
for different, but equally selfish motives, which blinded their eyes.
The former wished not to lose me entirely, Monsieur Lamessine having
promised her that she should live with us during the winter, in Paris,
so soon as we should be settled there; my mother desired the match in
order to remove me from my father.
Poor father! He was often a prey to his wild fits of anger, and threw
himself again headlong into politics, making himself conspicuous,
compromising himself, thinking only of falling on some enemy, no matter
whom it might be, of giving battle, of fighting, and of escaping from
his present sufferings by other sufferings.
He succeeded, and his name soon figured at the head of a new list
of convicts to be sent from the Aisne department. When they came to
arrest him, in 1852, he was so seriously ill in bed that he could
not be removed. This delay gave my grandmother time to write to my
friend Charles, who, after having left Flocon, to rally himself to
Bonapartism, had become an influential man. He succeeded in having
my father’s name erased from the list of convicts, but implored my
grandmother to make him keep quiet, for he would not be able to save
him a second time, he wrote, “if his democratic-socialistic follies
pointed him out again as dangerous.”
Alas! when this letter reached grandmother my father had brain fever,
which endangered his life for a week. As soon as my grandfather heard
the news of his illness he hurried to Blérancourt, installed himself by
his son-in-law’s bedside, and by devoted care snatched him from death.
When my father was out of danger my mother and my grandmother dared not
refuse the poor convalescent his desire to see me again.
I went, but how sad we both were, and in what suspicion did we feel
ourselves held! Grandmother accompanied me there, and neither she nor
my mother would leave me alone with my father for a moment.
I said to him, before my two stern guardians: “Dear father, I think it
would be better, after all, for me to consent to this marriage, because
when I am married I shall be at liberty to ask you to come to me, and
to talk with you a little alone, heart to heart.”
“No, no!” he replied; “I would rather see you dead than delivered over
to certain unhappiness!”
And yet it was he who delivered me over to the unhappiness he foresaw.
In a moment of violent anger, which my mother had finally succeeded in
provoking, he signed a paper, which until then she had endeavoured in
vain to make him sign.
I felt myself abandoned even by my aunts, who, at the idea of having
me live for three years at Soissons, near to them, and then at Paris,
whence I should be glad to come to pass some months in the country,
told me that after having seen Monsieur Lamessine again, who had gone
several times to make them a visit, they approved of the marriage.
“Besides,” said aunt Constance, with her customary banter, “if you
should be unhappy and abandoned, my dear Juliette, Chivres is here to
give you asylum. If you should have a numerous family, Roussot alone
would become insufficient, and, to compensate you for your husband’s
absence, we would buy another donkey!”
XLI
MY MARRIAGE AND ITS RESULTS
I married Monsieur Lamessine. My father was not present at my wedding.
He confessed to me later that he was so unhappy on that day that he
wished to blow out his brains; but he thought, perhaps, I might have
need of his protection some day, and he resigned himself to living.
Alas! I ought to have claimed his protection from the very first hours
of my marriage, but I felt that if I spoke a word it would be a new
anguish for my father, whose fears it would have confirmed; to my
grandmother, whose scaffoldings of dreams it would have cast down, and
to my dear aunts, whose peace it would have disturbed. I did not say
a word until after my confinement, for which I went to Blérancourt,
and where I was, so to speak, forced to confidences by my father, who
divined all that I must have suffered.
When she knew herself a great-grandmother and that she could embrace
her granddaughter’s child, my grandmother hoped to extend the
agreement of living with me every winter at Paris to the house at
Soissons, which we were to inhabit for eighteen months longer.
One day, when she had come to see me, to complete the secret dowry, the
last installment of which she had engaged herself to pay only so soon
as we should be settled in Paris, but which she anticipated, she said
to my husband when breakfast was over:
“Do you know why I have brought such a large trunk?”
“Why, no, madame.”
“It is because I expect to pass the winter with you and Juliette.”
“Impossible, my dear madame.”
“What do you mean by impossible?”
“I made a mistake; I meant to say, you will never come.”
“Never, do you say?”
“You will never live in my house with your grandchild.”
“You are joking, monsieur.”
“No, I am speaking most seriously. You think Juliette is happy, she is
not; we agree in nothing, nor about anything. If you should be a third
party in our household, what would our unhappiness be then?”
“Is it true, my Juliette, that you are unhappy?” asked my grandmother.
“Yes,” I answered, choking with sobs, “I am as unhappy as one can
possibly be.”
My grandmother rose from her seat suddenly, but she was obliged to lean
against a chair to keep from falling. She tottered like a tree that is
being uprooted.
“But your promises?” she said to my husband.
“They were necessary, my dear madame,” he replied, “only until you had
finished keeping yours integrally.”
My grandmother opened the dining-room door without saying a word, took
her cloak from the hall, and left our house. I went up to my room to
put on my bonnet, and followed her. I did not know where to look for
her. A man had come to get her trunk, which I saw put on the diligence.
I learned later that a lady had taken a place for herself in it; that
she had left the village in a carriage and was to take the diligence
outside of the town. She had done likewise when she carried me off from
Verberie.
I could not leave my daughter, whom I was nursing. I returned, and
implored my husband to take the diligence, to rejoin my grandmother,
and bring her back to me.
“Ah! no, indeed!” he said to me; “it has gone off too well! No drama,
no quarrel. I am delighted.”
I could do nothing but give the driver of the diligence a letter for
my poor grandmother, in which I told her all my sorrow. I added: “I am
‘tied’ in my turn, and I ‘browse’; but I shall untie myself as soon as
I possibly can.”
And so my grandmother’s last and dearest romance ended cruelly. On
returning to Chauny she starved herself to death. Knowing she had but a
few days more to live, she sent for my father and asked him to pardon
her for the harm she had done to him and to me, in marrying me against
his wishes and mine.
My father forgave her, and implored her to do all that she could to
live (alas! had she wished it, there was no longer time!), saying that
I had need of all those who loved me, more than ever now.
Knowing I was nursing my child, she had not let me suspect anything
about her tragical determination; on the contrary, in each one of her
letters she reassured me, saying she did not take my husband’s words
seriously. I did not even imagine that she was ill.
One night, about ten o’clock, I had just put my daughter in her crib,
had returned to bed, and was about to go to sleep, when, by the light
of a night lamp that was always burning, I saw my grandmother come into
my room.
“Ah! grandmother, is it you?” I cried.
With a slow gesture, she put her hand up to her eyes. The sockets were
empty! I jumped out of bed and went toward her--she had disappeared!
I rushed into my husband’s study, where he was writing.
“My grandmother, my grandmother, where is she? I have just seen her,
with empty eyes, in my room!”
“You are crazy,” Monsieur Lamessine said; “your grandmother cannot be
here. Your mother writes me that she is ill, and begs me, on account of
your nursing, not to inform you of it.”
The next day I heard that my grandmother had died at the very hour she
had appeared to me.
* * * * *
When I began to believe in religion again, this apparition of my
grandmother was to me one of the strongest proofs of a hereafter.
The movement of her hand carried up to her eyes, whose sockets were
empty, seemed to me to signify: “Blindness is death!”
I had remained blind too long, and always in my dreams I saw my
grandmother again with the frightful gesture of her hand raised to her
empty eyes.
I have never seen her again with this gesture since I wrote my _Rêve
sur le Divin_, which, with my reborn soul, I dedicated to the newly
born soul of my granddaughter, Juliette. It was a book written with
deep feeling, the inspiration of which I believe to have come from my
beloved grandmother.
* * * * *
The day after this strange apparition I left for Chauny with my
daughter.
My mother, profoundly moved by her mother’s death and by the causes
which had determined it, received me with tenderness and with tears of
repentance. When my grandmother was dying, and when she implored my
father’s forgiveness, she had exacted from her daughter a promise that
she would at the same time ask her husband’s pardon for the harm she
had done by her jealousy.
I passed some sad but peaceful weeks with my parents. My grandfather
obtained my father’s and mother’s consent to come and live with them.
“It will not be for long,” he said to them; “for I can never live
without my dear scolder, and you will bury me before this year is
over.” He died eleven months after my grandmother.
From the day my grandmother left us, my father’s one thought was to
replace her in my life, and he bestowed a double affection upon me. He
encouraged me to work, aided me with his advice, and said to me:
“When your married life becomes even more intolerable to you than it is
now, your mother and I will dedicate our lives to you. We will follow
wherever you may lead us. Work, work, and become known. There is no
other way by which a woman can gain her liberty than by affirming her
personality.”
I worked while nursing and bringing up my daughter. I completed my
education, very much developed in certain matters, very insufficient in
others.
Then, one day, after some insignificant literary attempts, revolted at
the insults Proudhon had thrown at Daniel Stern and George Sand in his
book, _La Justice dans la Révolution_, I wrote my _Anti-Proudhonian
Ideas_, and my real literary life began, with the record of which I
shall some day continue these memoirs.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] This friend Charles was a professor in the boys’ boarding-school
opposite my grandparents’ house.
[B] My three aunts all lived till past eighty years of age. Anastasie,
the youngest, said to me in her last illness: “My niece, pray do not
defend me from death. I do not like your epoch.”
[C] The final syllable only is correct.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
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