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diff --git a/70563-0.txt b/70563-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..af68a7f --- /dev/null +++ b/70563-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,9988 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook of The romance of my childhood and youth,
+by Juliette Adam
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The romance of my childhood and youth
+
+Author: Juliette Adam
+
+Release Date: April 16, 2023 [eBook #70563]
+
+Language: English
+
+Produced by: Fay Dunn, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed
+ Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+ produced from images generously made available by The
+ Internet Archive)
+
+*** 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.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF MY CHILDHOOD AND
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+<p style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The romance of my childhood and youth, by Juliette Adam</p>
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+<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: The romance of my childhood and youth</p>
+<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Juliette Adam</p>
+<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: April 16, 2023 [eBook #70563]</p>
+<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</p>
+ <p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; text-align:left'>Produced by: Fay Dunn, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)</p>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF MY CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH ***</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter hide"><img src="images/coversmall.jpg" width="450" alt=""></div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<h1>THE ROMANCE OF MY<br>
+CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH</h1>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_frontis.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<p class="caption"><i>Léopold Flameng sc</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_title.jpg" alt=""></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="titlepage">
+<p><span class="xxlarge">THE<br>
+ROMANCE<br>
+OF MY<br>
+CHILDHOOD<br>
+AND YOUTH</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="large">MME·EDMOND ADAM</span><br>
+(JVLIETTE LAMBER)</p>
+
+<p>1902<br>
+D·APPLETON & CO·<br>
+NEW YORK</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1902, by</span><br>
+D. APPLETON AND COMPANY<br>
+<br>
+Published, November, 1902</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_vii">[vii]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">PREFACE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap2">AT <i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>To-day it is quite the contrary. A new book<span class="pagenum" id="Page_viii">[viii]</span>
+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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_ix">[ix]</span><i>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?</i></p>
+
+<p><i>It requires time to discover the master thought
+of any work of real worth, in order to disclose its
+high morality, its art tendencies.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.”</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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!</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_x">[x]</span>
+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.”</i></p>
+
+<p><i>“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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xi">[xi]</span><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The Bible, the socialism of Christ, and examples
+of sublimity of character taken from Greece and
+Rome, became the strange mixture that was the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xii">[xii]</span>
+guiding spirit of our fathers’ action, and inspired
+our primal ideas.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>People of reason, who possessed solid common-sense,
+the Bourgeois, were, naturally, to a much
+overrated degree, our enemies.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>We are, in all our primal impulses, the children
+of the men of 1848; our very reaction was born
+of their action.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>“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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xiii">[xiii]</span>
+society, of its affiliations, of its necessary average
+existence, or of its “badly cut coats,” so to
+speak.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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></p>
+
+<p><i>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xiv">[xiv]</span>
+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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Juliette Adam.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_xv">[xv]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CONTENTS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<table>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr" colspan="3"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">I.</td><td> <span class="smcap">My Grandmother</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1"> 1</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">II.</td><td> <span class="smcap">When the Allies were at the Gates of Paris</span>   </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_26"> 26</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">III.</td><td> <span class="smcap">The Marriage of my Father and Mother</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_35"> 35</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">IV.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Born in an Inn</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_46"> 46</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">V.</td><td> <span class="smcap">My Early Childhood</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_57"> 57</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">VI.</td><td> <span class="smcap">First Day at School</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_68"> 68</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">VII.</td><td> <span class="smcap">I Go to a Wedding</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_81"> 81</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">VIII.</td><td> “<span class="smcap">Family Dramas</span>”</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_92"> 92</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">IX.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Learning to be Brave</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_101"> 101</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">X.</td><td> <span class="smcap">A Three Weeks’ Visit</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_108"> 108</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XI.</td><td> <span class="smcap">A Painful Return Home</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_121"> 121</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XII.</td><td> <span class="smcap">A Visit to my Great-aunts</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_129"> 129</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XIII.</td><td> <span class="smcap">I Make New Friends</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_140"> 140</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XIV.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Some New Impressions Gained</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_152"> 152</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XV.</td><td> <span class="smcap">The End of my Holiday</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_159"> 159</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XVI.</td><td> <span class="smcap">At Home Again</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_165"> 165</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XVII.</td><td> <span class="smcap">I Begin to Manage my Family</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_174"> 174</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XVIII.</td><td> <span class="smcap">I Revisit Chivres</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_185"> 185</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XIX.</td><td> <span class="smcap">I Begin my Literary Work</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_191"> 191</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xvi">[xvi]</span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XX.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Louis Napoleon’s Flight from Prison</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_198"> 198</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXI.</td><td> <span class="smcap">My First Great Sorrow</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_207"> 207</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXII.</td><td> <span class="smcap">My First Railway Journey</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_219"> 219</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXIII.</td><td> <span class="smcap">My First Glimpse of the Sea</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_225"> 225</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXIV.</td><td> <span class="smcap">I Receive a Handsome Gift</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_233"> 233</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXV.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Our Homeward Journey</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_240"> 240</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXVI.</td><td> <span class="smcap">My First Communion</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_249"> 249</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXVII.</td><td> <span class="smcap">We Discuss French Literature</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_260"> 260</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXVIII.</td><td> <span class="smcap">We Talk About Politics</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_271"> 271</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXIX.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Talks about Nature</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_279"> 279</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXX.</td><td> <span class="smcap">A Serious Accident</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_286"> 286</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXXI.</td><td> “<span class="smcap">Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity</span>”</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_291"> 291</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXXII.</td><td> “<span class="smcap">Vive la République!</span>”</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_299"> 299</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXXIII.</td><td> “<span class="smcap">Other Times, Other Manners</span>”</td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_312"> 312</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXXIV.</td><td> <span class="smcap">I Go to Boarding-school</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_319"> 319</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXXV.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Dark Days for the Republic</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_333"> 333</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXXVI.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Another Visit at Chivres</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_344"> 344</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXXVII.</td><td> <span class="smcap">I Begin to Study Housekeeping</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_350"> 350</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXXVIII.</td><td> <span class="smcap">An Exciting Incident</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_357"> 357</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_xvii">[xvii]</span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XXXIX.</td><td> <span class="smcap">An Offer of Marriage</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_366"> 366</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XL.</td><td> <span class="smcap">The “Family Drama” Again</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_382"> 382</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="tdr">XLI.</td><td> <span class="smcap">My Marriage and its Results</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_393"> 393</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[1]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<p class="ph2">THE ROMANCE OF MY CHILDHOOD<br>
+AND YOUTH</p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">I<br>
+
+<small>MY GRANDMOTHER</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap2">AS I advance in years, one of the things which
+astonishes me most is the singular vividness
+of my memories of my childhood.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[2]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Her affection for me was so absorbing that I<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[3]</span>
+monopolised her life, as it were, from the moment
+when she consecrated it to me.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[4]</span>
+their image, so dissimilar one from the other, was
+the very precocious consciousness I had of the
+precious advantages of possessing personal will.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>In the ceaseless struggle between my father and
+grandmother, myself being the coveted prize, there
+were three of us.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>She possessed the pride of her merchant and
+<i>bourgeoise</i> caste. I learned through her many<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[5]</span>
+obscure things in the history of the struggles of
+French royalty against the great feudal lords, the
+internationalists of that time.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>dot</i>,
+the relatives of Noyon, less well off, did not disdain
+the offer made to their son.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[6]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[7]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[8]</span>
+as long as possible for the benefit of the three
+daughters born of his second marriage.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But one fine day a young surgeon arrived at
+Chauny in quest of practice.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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 <i>bourgeoise</i>
+family,” and her grandmother assumed an air of
+authority, at which the young girl laughed
+heartily.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span>The young surgeon’s name was Pierre Seron,
+and he could not have been better born in the
+<i>bourgeoise</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>“Of good family!” Pélagie and her grandmother
+repeated in chorus. “If only he has not
+had too commonplace an existence,” thought
+Pélagie.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>à la</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>He was never seen except in a dress coat and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>
+white cravat. In a word, well-built, of fine presence,
+Pierre Seron had a distinguished air and was
+really a very handsome man.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He was the second son of a father who hated
+him from the day of his birth. Doctor Seron loved<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>
+only his elder son, his pride, he who should have
+been an “only child.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Poor little fellow! except for a rare kiss, a
+furtive caress from his mother, he was a victim to
+his family’s dislike.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He lay in front of the door when it was closed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>Instinctively he turned towards a farm, where
+every morning at dawn, and in all weathers, his
+father’s servants sent him to get milk.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>He entered the farmhouse, where the farmers
+were at supper, and, sitting down beside them, he
+burst into tears. He could not speak.</p>
+
+<p>“Have they driven you from your home?”
+asked the farmer’s wife. He made a sign: “Yes.”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“So much the better,” replied his father, harshly,
+“it is probably the only work that he will ever
+be able to do.”</p>
+
+<p>These words, repeated to Pierre, instead of discouraging
+him, settled his fate.</p>
+
+<p>“I will also be a Doctor Seron one day,” he
+swore to himself.</p>
+
+<p>His mother had taught him to read Latin-French<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“My brother is dead,” replied he.</p>
+
+<p>“You will find him before many years very
+much alive in Paris, sir!” answered Pierre.</p>
+
+<p>On hearing of this incident there was much talk
+at Compiègne over the half-forgotten story of the
+exiled and abandoned child.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>How many times have I, myself, made my
+grandfather tell me of this epoch of his life, which
+he recalled with pride.</p>
+
+<p>Pélagie continued her story to her grandmother,
+who listened open-mouthed, touched to tears.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>During the day he followed the lectures with
+such zeal, such application, such passionate ardour,
+that he was soon remarked by his professors.</p>
+
+<p>His name struck them; they questioned him,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“I told you that your brother, the cowherd,
+would find you again in Paris,” he said, letting
+him fall rather heavily on the floor.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly,” replied her grandmother, “I love
+him, brave heart! already, but he must fall in love
+with you.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>Pélagie had never thought of that.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“She is a handsome girl,” he replied, “but I
+detest red-haired women.”</p>
+
+<p>It can be imagined what Pélagie felt when her
+grandmother, with infinite precautions, told her
+his answer, for she had always thought herself
+irresistible.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Pélagie lavished the most affectionate care on
+her beloved grandmother, who was suffering
+through her fault. She was haughty, almost insolent<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Pierre, who was very poor and in no wise insensible<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>
+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 <i>dot</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>“I will double,” said the latter, “what I intended
+to give Pélagie, if her father bargains over
+my beloved grandchild’s happiness.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The agreement was concluded and the wedding
+day fixed.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He learned by a letter from his friend the herbalist,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>After proceeding some miles, little used to walking,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>
+exhausted, she sat down on a heap of stones,
+her head in her hands, weeping aloud in despair.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Come, come,” said he, “it is high time you
+should have a master. You deserve to be
+whipped.”</p>
+
+<p>“But,” she replied, made merry with the romantic
+adventure; “I am not going to be married in
+a night-cap.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not? It is a penance you deserve, and
+you have great need of absolution. You can dress<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span>
+yourself as a bride when you have become one, at
+the end of the wedding.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The white pink and the night-cap became family
+relics. I have seen and held them in my hand,
+knowing their history.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">II<br>
+
+<small>WHEN THE ALLIES WERE AT THE GATES OF PARIS</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>dot</i> was diminishing too fast, and he was obliged
+to think of future <i>dots</i> for his daughters. He left
+them with a breaking heart.</p>
+
+<p>Pélagie’s grandmother went to live with her,
+because it was impossible to leave the young<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>
+apprised that if they did not pay within twenty-four
+hours an enormous war indemnity they would
+all be put to the sword.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The inhabitants lost their heads, they fled and
+hid themselves in the woods, where the enemy, they
+said, would not venture.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>On the way Madame Seron saw a convoy of
+mules returning unladen from the town whither<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Never,” said she afterward, “did I suffer such
+torture.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>
+them in their arms while the mother and nurse
+washed their poor little faces and applied court-plaster
+to the wounds.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>
+a simple, touching manner that she sadly took up
+life again.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Pierre’s conjugal fidelity, lost during his campaigns,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>
+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!</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>
+his excesses even, when they would not have
+pardoned them in others.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">III<br>
+
+<small>THE MARRIAGE OF MY FATHER AND MOTHER</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>However, the husband and wife, so much disunited,
+were proud of their daughter’s beauty.
+Her father would often say: “She deserves a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>
+prince,” while her mother would reply: “A shepherd
+would please her better.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The desired romance had, after all, been written.
+How many finalities of marriage resembled hers!
+The important thing was to have loved. Her Don<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“He has a very romantic history.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell us about him.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>
+theological science, and they soon endowed him
+with the minor orders.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>This was sufficient to inflame Olympe’s mother’s
+imagination. A romance was within her<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“As badly?” asked her husband, laughing, to
+whom she at once confided her plans.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>protégé</i>,
+whom she already called to herself her “dear
+child,” experienced one of the sweetest joys of
+her life.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>dot</i>, would provide for all expenses until he
+should have passed his examinations.</p>
+
+<p>He would study doubly hard, and, as soon as he
+should have obtained his degrees, he would return<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>
+and marry Olympe, whom, meanwhile, her mother
+would influence favourably towards the match.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>This latter adjective he rolled out with great
+emphasis, which much amused Olympe’s mother
+every time he pronounced it.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>A renewal of good feeling flourished between
+the husband and wife. Every letter from their<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>Ah! that phrase, what a rôle it played in the
+disputes between the Lambert and Seron families,
+so frequent in later years.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">IV<br>
+
+<small>BORN IN AN INN</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor and Madame Seron congratulated themselves
+daily for the happy choice they had made
+in their daughter’s husband.</p>
+
+<p>But misfortunes came, one after another, to the
+young couple. Their great-uncle died suddenly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>dot</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Olympe wrote to her mother that her sorrow was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>
+life, and pulling wool over people’s eyes; it was
+said he was a swindler.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>dot</i> into
+Doctor Bernhardt’s crucible, which was like that
+of the philosopher’s stone.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>My grandmother did not cease weeping and
+my grandfather shed tears with her.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>“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?</p>
+
+<p>They wrote again several times, but received
+only one answer as curt as it was short:</p>
+
+<p>“The mother and child are well.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>On the commercial traveller’s return my grandmother<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>
+had all the details she desired, some of
+which were lamentable, others consoling.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Again, my grandmother wished to leave to come
+to us, but her husband calmed her with his oft-repeated
+words:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>Hour by hour, day by day, week by week, the
+nine months, sadly counted, passed at last. At<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as this letter was communicated to my
+grandparents there was no longer any hesitation,
+and my grandmother left for Verberie.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Where you have tied the goat she must
+browse,” she replied.</p>
+
+<p>My grandmother, exasperated at these words,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>
+exclaimed: “Your husband doesn’t even give you
+grass to browse on.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“But, if you are turned out of doors with your
+daughter, where will you go?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>It was therefore in order to prove her husband’s
+wrong-doing that she suffered abandonment and
+privations.</p>
+
+<p>My grandmother said nothing more; but she
+arranged in her mind a plan for carrying me off.</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p>“Willingly.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, about how much do you think you
+owe?”</p>
+
+<p>My mother named a sum.</p>
+
+<p>“I am going to unpack my bag, have my dinner<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>
+served, and send you some wood, and I will
+return with the money you need to pay your debt.”</p>
+
+<p>My grandmother often told me afterwards that
+she did not look at me, nor kiss me, so as not to
+betray her emotion.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>coupé</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My grandmother returned to her daughter’s
+room, now well warmed. All was ready in her<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>
+own room for departure—a nursing-bottle full of
+warm milk and a large shawl in which to wrap me.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Go,” said my grandmother in an indifferent
+tone. “I will take care of the child.”</p>
+
+<p>Everything succeeded marvellously well, and I
+was carried off at the rather young age of nine
+months old, and weaned in a diligence.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">V<br>
+
+<small>MY EARLY CHILDHOOD</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Finally my mother decided one day to take the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>
+diligence and come to us, after having borrowed
+a sum strictly necessary for her voyage.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Return and browse,” said my grandfather to
+his daughter, laughing, as he put a well-filled purse
+in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>I remained, of course, with my grandparents.
+Neither my father nor mother would have dared
+at that epoch to question my staying.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The effort made by a matured mind to recall its
+early impressions is most curious. We evoke them,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>How many things more interesting than those
+we remember do we doubtless forget!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“It is your birthday, the fourth of October, and
+you are three years old,” said my grandmother.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>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 id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a> who called me his
+“little wife.”</p>
+
+<p>I told him with a dignified air that now, being<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>One should hear this story in Picard <i>patois</i>,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>I ran about a great deal, I even fell once, to
+Arthémise’s great alarm, who feared I should spoil
+my pretty gown.</p>
+
+<p>At last my parents arrived from Blérancourt.</p>
+
+<p>They told a long story which I have forgotten.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[63]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My father said suddenly:</p>
+
+<p>“This time we will take Juliette home with us!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“No, I shall keep her,” replied grandmother.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[64]</span>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is not our affair, but yours, to give her a
+brother or sister,” my grandfather replied, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“You must give Juliette back to us,” my father
+repeated. “I want her.”</p>
+
+<p>“Never!” cried grandfather and grandmother
+at once. “She belongs to us; you abandoned
+her.”</p>
+
+<p>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?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[65]</span>I would answer sobbing, not realising my cruelty
+to my father, who adored me:</p>
+
+<p>“I want Arthémise, my grandmother and
+grandfather.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My father said a hundred times to me: “You
+love your papa, don’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes, yes!”</p>
+
+<p>And it was true. I loved my papa, but not as
+I loved grandmother.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>The next morning they woke me very early. I
+was sleepy and rebelled. What grandfather called
+“the family drama” had fatigued me. Arthémise<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[66]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“Above all, be good at school,” said my mother
+to me as she left.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[67]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[68]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">VI<br>
+
+<small>FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">INSTEAD of one of my numerous pretty
+gowns, grandmother dressed me in a green
+frock which I did not like.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Poor, dear little woman!”</p>
+
+<p>I burst into tears without knowing why.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>My grandfather said he thought they might
+very well wait until the winter was over before
+shutting me up in a prison.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[69]</span>“A murder! a murder!” repeated grandmother
+in anger. “That woman must be mad,” she said
+to grandfather, who in his turn called Arthémise
+“insolent.”</p>
+
+<p>Here was another “family drama”; but they
+did not “make up” with each other after being
+angry, as they did with my parents.</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Ta, ta, ta!” replied my grandfather, whose
+resistance always ended with those three syllables.</p>
+
+<p>My grandmother took me to the school. I realised
+that it was an extraordinary event to which
+I was obliged to submit.</p>
+
+<p>My friend the grocer was at his door. He<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[70]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“You want to make her a learned lady,” he
+replied.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I wanted more and more to cry again.</p>
+
+<p>The large door of the school, of the prison,
+opened and shut behind us with a noise like thunder.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“I had the mother, I have the daughter now.
+I am delighted,” she said. But her voice seemed
+to roar.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[71]</span>“You don’t love your grandchild any more!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Be obedient,” she said to me, “or you shall
+remain here and not return home any more.”</p>
+
+<p>I revolted and answered: “I will go to my
+parents at Blérancourt.”</p>
+
+<p>Madame Dufey intervened.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>She carried me off in her arms, and my grandmother
+went away.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I had a fit of despair; I cried as loud as I could.
+I called for Arthémise and my grandfather.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[72]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Will you hush?” said the under-mistress to me,
+striking me roughly. “Will you be good?”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“You shall obey.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[73]</span>
+door. I have never found people so implacable
+as they were to me that day.</p>
+
+<p>From crying, screaming, and knocking against
+the door I fell down on the floor exhausted and
+went to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“They don’t love you any more, they don’t love
+you any more!”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Arthémise, do you love me?”</p>
+
+<p>“My little one, do I love you!” she exclaimed,
+hugging me.</p>
+
+<p>“Then Juliette wants to go to Caumenchon
+and you must obey her.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Juliette will go to Caumenchon, then, all
+alone, at once,” I replied, and, as we left the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[74]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, a murder,” said Arthémise, “and they
+will see what they’ll see!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I was very, very hungry, and I thought myself
+a very unhappy, cruelly abandoned, but very courageous
+little girl.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[75]</span>
+older than my grandmother and grandfather, but
+I did not dare to say so.</p>
+
+<p>They were eating their soup and they rose,
+frightened at seeing me.</p>
+
+<p>“Why have you brought the young lady
+here?” they exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>“They were making her unhappy.”</p>
+
+<p>“Who?” said the father.</p>
+
+<p>“The masters.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are crazy. It is not your business, it’s
+not your business,” repeated her mother.</p>
+
+<p>“I am hungry; will you give me a little soup?”
+I asked, taking on the tone of a poor little beggar
+girl.</p>
+
+<p>The good people both served me.</p>
+
+<p>“Eat, mam’zelle, all that you want,” said the
+mother to me.</p>
+
+<p>This Caumenchon soup seemed delicious.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[76]</span>
+like a little friend with whom I played and who
+screamed when she saw one, even in the garden, on
+the trees.</p>
+
+<p>In the room there were bars of wood through
+which the small heads of rabbits popped out and in.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“My good rabbits, I have a grandmother who
+doesn’t love me.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Aided by Arthémise, he tried to dress me, but he
+trembled.</p>
+
+<p>“Bad little girl, your grandmother is nearly
+wild with grief.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>The old peasants both said to me with rather a
+severe air:</p>
+
+<p>“Come, come, mam’zelle, be more reasonable.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[77]</span>My grandfather answered them:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“I want to return,” said Arthémise, “if Madame
+regrets having turned me out like a thief.”</p>
+
+<p>“She regrets it, Arthémise.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will go to Chauny, yes, but never again to
+the school,” I said to grandfather.</p>
+
+<p>“No, no, don’t worry about it.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[78]</span>
+my astonishment and the confused ideas I had
+about the great night-sun, so pale and so cold.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[79]</span>“Yes, madame.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, not furnish my head, not the school!” I
+cried.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>Grandmother turned quite white and became
+very gentle.</p>
+
+<p>“Arthémise, put her to bed,” she ordered in a
+calm voice. “You must tell me when she has
+gone to sleep.”</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[80]</span>
+that I would not relate my history to my parents
+at Blérancourt. Arthémise and grandmother together
+arranged about my going to school.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[81]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">VII<br>
+
+<small>I GO TO A WEDDING</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[82]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“He is his granddaughter’s slave,” would they
+say, and he would repeat: “Yes, I am my granddaughter’s
+slave.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>He could not contain himself with joy at going
+away quite alone with me.</p>
+
+<p>“It is my turn to carry her off,” said he on the
+day of our departure.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I can still remember my three white frocks with
+their coloured ribbon sashes, which had to be ironed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[83]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[84]</span>
+you to know and to love later,” said my father,
+“but remember his name now—Saint-Just.”</p>
+
+<p>“Saint-Just,” I repeated.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“How charming she is, how good she was, and
+how she talks!” he said.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[85]</span>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Look, look, it’s Monsieur Lambert’s little Juliette.
+How prettily she is dressed.”</p>
+
+<p>Some one added:</p>
+
+<p>“Monsieur Lambert is not here. He never goes
+to churches.”</p>
+
+<p>I asked mamma why they said that. She
+drew me brusquely towards her and did not
+answer.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“You will amuse yourself a great deal more
+here than at the church, my darling,” she said to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[86]</span>
+me; “see the lovely garden and the beautiful flowers,
+they are all for you.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Quick, quick, come!” she said to me.</p>
+
+<p>“To the wedding, mamma?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, to the wedding.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The curé was near the vase, the bride and groom
+approached, my mother took me in her arms.</p>
+
+<p>“Mamma, what are they going to do to me?”
+I asked, rather frightened.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[87]</span>“Be good, my Juliette, be very good, I beseech
+of you,” she replied in a very troubled voice, “they
+are going to baptise you.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, no, not baptise me,” I cried in tears.</p>
+
+<p>The bride said smiling to me: “You are going
+to cease being a vile heretic and enter the Catholic
+Church.”</p>
+
+<p>I saw my grandfather and I cried out to him,
+thinking the vase full of water was the Catholic
+Church.</p>
+
+<p>“Grandfather, come and prevent them from
+throwing me into the Catholic Church.”</p>
+
+<p>My grandfather not only remained insensible to
+my appeal, but looked at me very severely.</p>
+
+<p>“Be still,” said the curé to me, “or I will open
+your head and put the oil and salt in it.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[88]</span>“Yes, grandfather, I heard people say so just
+now.”</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>Papa looked pleased. They danced to the music
+of a large orchestra, and I danced also, turning<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[89]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“Why do you call her Camille Ambrosine?”
+asked my father. “Her name is Juliette.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My mother wept, grandfather did not say a
+word, my father kept repeating:</p>
+
+<p>“You wish that my daughter should not be my
+daughter.”</p>
+
+<p>A poor woman entered.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[90]</span>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>My father and grandfather left suddenly together.</p>
+
+<p>My mother undressed me, made up the packages
+and sewed them together, and put me to bed very
+early.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Grandmother was astonished to see us returning
+so soon.</p>
+
+<p>“What is the matter? what is the matter?” she
+cried.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[91]</span>Grandfather related all the story to her, and I
+can hear now her exclamations:</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[92]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">VIII<br>
+
+<small>“FAMILY DRAMAS”</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[93]</span>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 <i>red</i> verses!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[94]</span>
+as the others would always protect me from her
+severity.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>desired</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[95]</span>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!”</p>
+
+<p>When by chance grandfather blamed any act
+of grandmother’s he never addressed himself directly
+to her. The pronouns <i>they</i> or <i>one</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever my grandparents were angry with
+each other these pronouns, <i>they</i> or <i>one</i>, were of
+the greatest use. They spoke <i>at</i>, not <i>to</i>, 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:</p>
+
+<p>Grandmother: “Will <i>one</i> be at home at such an
+hour?”</p>
+
+<p>Grandfather: “<i>One</i> will do <i>one’s</i> best to accomplish
+it.”</p>
+
+<p>At table: “Does any one wish for some beef?”</p>
+
+<p>At play: <i>One</i> has this or that.</p>
+
+<p>While I, much annoyed at all this, would say
+<i>one</i> to both of them.</p>
+
+<p>Then, suddenly, without any one knowing why,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[96]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Heavens! how dramatic, and, in turn, how
+funny were my dear grandparents.</p>
+
+<p>As I have already said, each member of the
+family tried to convert me to his or her own ideas.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[97]</span>For these opinions, expressed at school, I was
+often severely remonstrated with by the teachers,
+and looked upon with indignation by my companions.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[98]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[99]</span>
+my father), but had conquered the sovereigns of
+Europe as far as Africa and Asia.</p>
+
+<p>How often I heard this speech! But, unfortunately
+for grandfather, it used to convulse grandmother
+and me with laughter.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Take care, grandfather, not to upset your fine
+phrase.”</p>
+
+<p>He would begin it, and, invariably being<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[100]</span>
+troubled by my interruption, would end it in an
+emphatic manner impossible to describe, and with
+an outburst of inimitable pride:</p>
+
+<p>“And when Larrey needed me no longer, I
+fought on my own account, joining the Grenadiers’
+Guards, and I was always the <i>last</i> to fight
+and the <i>first</i> to run.”</p>
+
+<p>Then I would clap my hands and cry: “Bravo,
+grandfather!” and he would understand by that
+that he had made a mistake.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[101]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">IX<br>
+
+<small>LEARNING TO BE BRAVE</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[102]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Grandmother could not look at a drop of blood.
+Had she been obliged to witness a simple bleeding,
+she would have fainted.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[103]</span>
+of blood. The only thing she needs now is to love
+war, renown, and the Emperor.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In the little school-world, and even in the town,
+some traits of my courage were told; among others
+this rather ghastly one:</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[104]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>When at last I told him where the money was,
+I deducted, according to the sum, a small percentage
+for my sugar-plums.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” I replied, “with grandfather I earn it.”
+And I really thought I had earned the money by
+all the trouble I had taken.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[105]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Shall I go?” I asked her in a low tone.
+“They will be frightened—they do not know what
+the ‘notary’ is.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, go,” she said, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>I went up to the garret to fetch the “notary.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[106]</span>
+“Oh! what a horrible thing! It is frightful!
+Monsieur Seron, take it away!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We found this out afterwards, because Arthémise,
+coming into the room which I shared with
+grandmother, when we had gone to bed, cried out:</p>
+
+<p>“Madame, Mam’zelle, the ‘notary’ has got
+downstairs alone. He is at the foot of the staircase!”</p>
+
+<p>Grandfather was obliged to get up and put it
+back in the garret, but he made Arthémise go with
+him carrying a light.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[107]</span>
+cooing delighted me, and seemed like music.
+When we moved, they followed us with their pretty,
+mincing steps.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I scolded grandmother, who asked me if I would
+rather have eaten them myself.</p>
+
+<p>“Most certainly not!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[108]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">X<br>
+
+<small>A THREE WEEKS’ VISIT</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[109]</span>
+drawing me to him, and taking me from grandmother,
+than absence itself.</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>We were starting. My father answered,
+laughing:</p>
+
+<p>“I do not promise any such thing.”</p>
+
+<p>I heard grandmother cry out:</p>
+
+<p>“Juliette, stay!”</p>
+
+<p>A strong cut of the whip started the horse.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He kissed me violently, repeating: “My daughter,
+my child, my own—at last, at last!”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“It would seem as if your child were a divinity
+on earth,” she said to him one day before me.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[110]</span>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>thou</i>.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Monsieur Lamber, your speech is in very
+bad taste,” she answered.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Am I not the daughter of Olympus?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I told him of my studies in history, and of
+grandmother’s opinions, which I shared.</p>
+
+<p>“See, child,” he said to me, “you and your<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[111]</span>
+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
+<i>vis-à-vis</i> 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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! papa, I shall never be, like you, the friend
+of that dreadful Saint-Just, or that horrible
+Robespierre—never!”</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[112]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, papa, I am for the middle place—the
+middle, above all. Like grandmother, I hate extremes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Juliette, you are not serious?”</p>
+
+<p>“But, papa, you began while smiling in your
+talk about the swing.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I am sorry, and I wish to tell you, once
+for all, that the great Revolution itself has not
+done sufficient work.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! papa, for shame!”</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[113]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>“That will be a magnificent time, papa, but will
+it ever come to pass?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[114]</span>
+political life resembling those which she fostered
+about individual life.</p>
+
+<p>However, some of his conceptions seemed sublime
+to me in my childhood.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[115]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>He answered:</p>
+
+<p>“Action changes a man’s nature; you must
+judge Saint-Just from his intentions.”</p>
+
+<p>“Hell is paved with them, papa,” I said.</p>
+
+<p>I had discovered what I wished to know.</p>
+
+<p>“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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[116]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>He had told me about the leaves of the sensitive
+plant, and, when he said something which displeased
+me, I would reply:</p>
+
+<p>“Enough, papa, I fold myself up!” Then he
+would call me sensitive, and we would cease talking.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t listen to you any longer. I feel ill.”</p>
+
+<p>My father took a great journal, <i>La Democratie
+Pacifique</i> 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 <i>Gazettes</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[117]</span>
+father and grandmother strove alternately to force
+between them. I felt these “walls” tremble at
+times and threaten to fall in.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In her large drawing-room, furnished with Louis<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[118]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[119]</span>“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.’”</p>
+
+<p>The “necessary blood” remained in my mind
+after I heard the Chevalier use the phrase.</p>
+
+<p>I spoke to grandmother about it on my return
+to Chauny, and she was not as indignant as I
+supposed she would be.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[120]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[121]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XI<br>
+
+<small>A PAINFUL RETURN HOME</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My father loved her passionately for her beauty,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[122]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[123]</span>
+She talked as she walked along, while I, very proud,
+held the reins and did not wish to think of anything
+else.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Mamma, I beg of you, leave me alone; you
+torment me more than the priest at confession.”</p>
+
+<p>“Has your grandmother ever told you she would
+find a husband for you and give you a great deal
+of money—a <i>dot</i>?” she asked me suddenly after
+a silence.</p>
+
+<p>Having got up early, with my head drowsy,
+and having been tormented for half an hour, I
+answered unfortunately:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, grandmother will give me as large a <i>dot</i>
+as she can. Are you satisfied?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[124]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I did not cease sobbing, and the people who met
+us could not understand my evident despair nor
+my mother’s impassibility.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[125]</span>
+overcome with grief. She could not kiss me,
+there was so much clotted blood on my face.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>“So,” said my mother, “you have promised to
+give Juliette as large a <i>dot</i> 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.”</p>
+
+<p>When I think of my distress during those not-to-be-forgotten
+minutes, I still feel the effect of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[126]</span>
+it, so convulsed was I in all my being, and so keenly
+did I realise my mother’s cruel jealousy.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[127]</span>
+upon me, frightened. Grandfather pushed
+them aside, and put me in Arthémise’s arms, who
+again began her song: “It is murder!”</p>
+
+<p>This phrase made me remember, with singular
+clearness, my adventure at school, and I cried out
+to grandmother:</p>
+
+<p>“This time I will never forgive you!” My
+lips trembled, my throat was on fire, and I was
+shivering.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>And as my mother, in excusing herself, began
+again to accuse me——</p>
+
+<p>“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!<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[128]</span>
+If you go on like this, I will make you kneel and
+ask your daughter’s pardon.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are breaking my wrists,” she said, “let
+go of me. I have the right——”</p>
+
+<p>I thought then that grandfather was going to
+beat her. His voice became so terrible that I saw
+my grandmother tremble.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you repent of the wrong you have done
+to your daughter?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[129]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XII<br>
+
+<small>A VISIT TO MY GREAT-AUNTS</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">I  WAS ailing all winter. I had attacks of
+intermittent fever, followed by the measles,
+with delirium.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My father, talking one day at my bedside to
+grandmother, who was accusing her daughter of
+being responsible for my illness, said:</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[130]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Since their father’s death they had, no one knew<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[131]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I had taken no interest in money affairs until
+then, except for the purchase of my sugar-plums.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[132]</span>
+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 <i>apropos</i> of these aunts for whom my grandparents
+cared so little, and of whom they thought
+so ill.</p>
+
+<p>This money, which had made my mother so cruel
+to me, was now going to make my grandparents
+more kind to my great-aunts.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[133]</span>
+my mother’s <i>dot</i>, 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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[134]</span>
+very small, I had often played the part of arbiter.
+I gave my personal opinion on all matters and in
+all discussions.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My father, also, submitted to this course of
+action on my part, but it exasperated my mother,
+who would always say:</p>
+
+<p>“I will never admit that a joke should get the
+better of a grief.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“My sisters cannot be dull,” grandmother said
+to me. “Having remained unmarried, they certainly
+must have kept their original characters.”</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[135]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I had been much sermonised by grandmother before
+I left, and on our way grandfather continually
+joked me about my “mission <i>à la Talleyrand</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“Your old aunts must die of ennui,” he said to
+me; “you will amuse them, and they won’t return<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[136]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My heart was a little heavy at this sudden separation,
+but my stomach was very empty, and I<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[137]</span>
+ate with a good appetite for the first time in many
+weeks.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>patois</i> accent.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Why is it that you don’t say first that we<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[138]</span>
+should love our mother and father?” asked one of
+the little peasants.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! that’s as you like,” I answered, thinking
+it would require too many explanations to be understood.</p>
+
+<p>Marguerite, who took a fancy to me at once,
+had her share in my success. The “young Miss”
+already belonged to her.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Roussot found me a light weight. He trotted
+along briskly, while Marguerite, holding the bridle,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[139]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[140]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XIII<br>
+
+<small>I MAKE NEW FRIENDS</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I went indoors, while Roussot was led off to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[141]</span>
+stable, braying loudly, I accompanying his song,
+which sent my aunts into fits of laughter.</p>
+
+<p>The ice was broken; I had my supper, I chattered,
+and then fell asleep. It was about eleven
+o’clock at night.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Marguerite appeared, a parcel of clothes in her
+arms, and said to me:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[142]</span>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 “<i>à la quatre-six-deux</i>,”
+as she would say.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“I will look droll as much as you like, dear,
+adorably rustic aunts, but not hunchback,” said I.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[143]</span>Monsieur de Talleyrand had found his equal,
+and I thought how in my turn I could chaff grandfather.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[144]</span>
+Day, and was admired by the whole country-side.
+The large gate was opened wide only on that day.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[145]</span>
+with field-flowers, so artistically arranged that I
+at once said to aunt Sophie:</p>
+
+<p>“You will teach me, won’t you, how to make
+these lovely bouquets of field-flowers?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I thought of grandfather’s speech:</p>
+
+<p>“Your aunt Sophie will teach you Latin, which
+you can afterwards translate to Marguerite, to the
+donkey,” etc.</p>
+
+<p>“Is it true, auntie, that you read Latin books?”
+I asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Does it amuse you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Very much.”</p>
+
+<p>“I would like to see one.”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[146]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Sophie kissed me.</p>
+
+<p>“Why! do you know Homer? Do you love him,
+and like to talk of him?”</p>
+
+<p>“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——”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, aunt Sophie, I am not so ignorant as you<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[147]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“To work!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>They made me wear my cap more forward, and
+I overheard my aunts, who were already dear to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[148]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>So, while cutting away at my clover, I thought
+what true ladies, clever and cultivated, were my<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[149]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“We are boring this child; she is cutting the
+clover as hard as she can so as not to fall asleep,”
+said Anastasie.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“You are a young lady like few others, I must
+confess,” said aunt Constance, suddenly laying
+her sickle down by her side.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[150]</span>
+by side in the shade, I answered aunt Constance
+in the same tone she had taken:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean by that?” asked aunt
+Sophie.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Are you going to be a celebrity, dear?” asked
+aunt Sophie.</p>
+
+<p>“How long a time do you propose to take before
+you render your family illustrious?” asked
+aunt Constance.</p>
+
+<p>“Forty years,” I replied.</p>
+
+<p>Aunt Constance and aunt Anastasie burst out
+laughing at my answer.</p>
+
+<p>Marguerite, leaning on her little cart, was listening,
+open-mouthed. “It is just possible that it
+may be,” she said.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[151]</span>“Well, Juliette, I promise you I will live
+to see it,” said aunt Sophie, solemnly and
+seriously.<a id="FNanchor_2" href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[B]</a></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[152]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XIV<br>
+
+<small>SOME NEW IMPRESSIONS GAINED</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most enjoyable hours in the day was
+the hour when aunt Sophie would give me a lesson
+in her room.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[153]</span>
+lesson, she would say: “Sum up in a few words
+what you have just heard.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[154]</span>
+with a little hammer she would play the strangest
+airs.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>Ah! the fairy-like, well-remembered hours I
+spent every morning with my aunt!</p>
+
+<p>I was talking to her one day about the wind
+and she said: “I do not like it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[155]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>When Roussot and I sang our duet we were
+really having a musical discourse.</p>
+
+<p>I could not stay indoors. The rain-drops, big
+and little, called me out.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>All that grandmother believed in on this earth
+was love. “The passion of loving alone brings<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[156]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[157]</span>
+a great deal more for the welfare of poor miserable
+wretches?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I kept this little book, written in small handwriting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[158]</span>
+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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[159]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XV<br>
+
+<small>THE END OF MY HOLIDAY</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[160]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>Ah! if only grandmother and my father were
+living at Chivres with my aunts and great-grandmother
+and Marguerite, not forgetting Roussot,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[161]</span>
+the cow and the calf, etc., etc., I should then be
+perfectly happy!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Neither my aunts nor myself dreamt of prolonging
+my stay. We felt that it might compromise
+the possibility of any future visits.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[162]</span>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The day I showed my father the exercises prepared
+for me by my aunt, he exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>“Why! this is a bright thought! Your seven<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[163]</span>
+words put together have a general meaning. They
+form a little story, and each word is necessary in
+daily life.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I tried to console Marguerite by talking fast,
+but did not succeed.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>I again found myself in full popularity on
+entering Marguerite’s village. The whole band
+of children was waiting for me.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! I had no more sugar-plums. Why, yes, I
+had! my dear grandfather had brought me a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[164]</span>
+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:</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps, after all, you do love us as much as
+we love you.”</p>
+
+<p>And she added, turning to my grandfather:
+“you will take great care of her, Monsieur?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[165]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XVI<br>
+
+<small>AT HOME AGAIN</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">“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?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“But do you think they realised what a wonderful
+niece we sent them?”</p>
+
+<p>I remained unembarrassed, being accustomed
+from my earliest days to the broadest compliments.
+I answered simply:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, grandfather, they found your granddaughter
+wonderful.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“And dreamed?” I asked. “What an effort
+of memory I shall have to make!”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[166]</span>“We have been so lonely. Your father came
+once a week to talk you over with your grandmother.”</p>
+
+<p>“And did the usual ‘family drama’ happen
+every time?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“Nonsense!” said he, moving so suddenly that
+he dropped the reins. When he had picked them
+up, I grew angry.</p>
+
+<p>“Who reconciled my aunts and my grandmother,
+if you please? Was it not I?”</p>
+
+<p>“Beg pardon, my Emperor!” answered grandfather
+cracking his whip, “I forgot that we are all
+only simple soldiers.”</p>
+
+<p>Then a rain of amusing jokes began. I was
+seized with grandfather’s contagious gaiety. He
+laughed so heartily and unaffectedly at his own<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[167]</span>
+jests, that no one could help laughing with
+him.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The story of my transformation into a peasant
+the day after my arrival at Chivres, of the way my<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[168]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>Just then I made a most unlucky speech which
+very nearly provoked the inevitable “drama.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[169]</span>
+are still suffering. Go to bed, my child, go to
+bed.”</p>
+
+<p>You should have heard grandfather say all this
+in his shrill, lisping voice. He was perfectly serious
+and solemn, and irresistibly funny.</p>
+
+<p>“I was wrong, I was wrong, a hundred times
+wrong, Sir Grandfather,” I answered, “I humbly
+beg pardon, I repeat. I collapse!”</p>
+
+<p>I imitated grandfather’s tone so perfectly that
+even my mother smiled.</p>
+
+<p>When my parents had left, grandmother instead
+of questioning me as I had expected, said kindly:</p>
+
+<p>“Go and rest, darling, Arthémise will put you
+to bed, while we have our game of <i>Imperiale</i>. To-morrow,
+and the following days, you shall tell us
+all you have said, all you have done and seen.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>A gardener was in the habit of coming three
+times a week, and, guided by Arthémise, he arranged<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[170]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[171]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[172]</span>
+Arthémise. A communicating door was made
+between the two rooms.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I would sometimes send her away, saying,
+“Grandmother, I want to collect my thoughts.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[173]</span>
+not at all distressed at my occasional love of
+solitude.</p>
+
+<p>My dreams were explained later on when I began
+to write poetry.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[174]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XVII<br>
+
+<small>I BEGIN TO MANAGE MY FAMILY</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“You surely could not mean that, grandmother?<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[175]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever I had cleared away all the black
+clouds, I fancied the sky would always remain
+serene.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[176]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[177]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>At the time of which I speak so very few newspapers
+found their way into the country, that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[178]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>My father, whenever he saw me, gave me cuttings
+from the <i>Democratie Pacifique</i>, and kept me
+so well posted that events often justified my
+speeches, and I was asked for “the news.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[179]</span>
+staves of this dais which covered the sacred
+reliquary of our country.” One of the girls discovered
+this metaphor and was much applauded.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>our</i> France, at such and such an
+epoch, and we discussed at length the consequences
+of a reign, a fact, a victory or a defeat.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Democratie
+Pacifique</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[180]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But he talked to me of Toussenel, and delighted
+me with stories taken from his <i>L’Esprit des Bêtes</i>,
+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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[181]</span>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>All these histories of animals were like fairy-tales,
+and I took the greatest pleasure in them, saying:
+“Tell me more, more!”</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>bourgeoise</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>When I returned to Chauny I spoke to grandmother
+of Fourier, of the phalanstery, and of
+<i>L’Esprit des Bêtes</i>, of the royalism of the ants and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[182]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[183]</span>
+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
+<i>bourgeois</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>Qu’est que la propriété</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There were great discussions in my family on all<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[184]</span>
+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
+<i>bourgeoise</i> selfishness, therefore he let us joke
+about his “theories of animal socialism and his insects’
+minds,” as grandmother said.</p>
+
+<p>But my grandfather abhorred revolutionary
+ideas to such a degree that he scarcely tolerated the
+mention of Proudhon, even in a joking way.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.’”</p>
+
+<p>One simultaneous cry escaped us all:</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! the horrible man!”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[185]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XVIII<br>
+
+<small>I REVISIT CHIVRES</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">THE phalanstery and <i>L’Esprit des Bêtes</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The summer came, and with it my return to
+Chivres for the months of July and August.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Grandfather left me this time without sadness,
+being sure of the warm welcome I should receive.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But they were far from congratulating me on
+my ideas of reform according to those comprised<span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[186]</span>
+in <i>L’Esprit des Bêtes</i>, 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.”</p>
+
+<p>There were explosions of indignation against
+my father, who would injure my mind with such
+insanities, they declared.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>L’Esprit des Bêtes</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[187]</span>My revolutionary ideas were put away with my
+city clothes, and declared good only for Chauny.
+Even Marguerite said to me one day:</p>
+
+<p>“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 <i>bourgeoise</i> have stolen
+property from the nobility, and that poor people
+should now steal it from the <i>bourgeoise</i>. 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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>When I found an analogy between the Picardy
+<i>patois</i>—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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[188]</span>
+send her an almanac in the Picardy tongue, called
+<i>The Plowman</i>. She then devoted herself to a veritable
+monk’s work in adding to my stock all the
+Latin words to be found in Picardy <i>patois</i>. <i>The
+Plowman</i>, in speaking of work in the fields,
+enabled me to step over a new frontier in my comprehension
+of the bucolics.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[189]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>While we were laughing, Roussot answered, if
+not my speech at least my song, and we concluded
+he had accepted the invitation.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The two months spent with my aunts seemed like
+two weeks. I had never until then fully realised
+how rapidly time can pass.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[190]</span>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[191]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XIX<br>
+
+<small>I BEGIN MY LITERARY WORK</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[192]</span>
+that they read and re-read it to all comers, and
+grandfather took it with him to his club.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[193]</span>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[194]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>chefs d’œuvres</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“There is something of worth in what that child
+writes; she will make her mark.”</p>
+
+<p>My grandmother drank in my praise as if it
+were the nectar of the gods.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[195]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I soon gave him the title of friend, and, as he
+was tired of <i>table d’hôte</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[196]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Having a sufficient company at home on Sundays,
+my friend Charles included, I determined to
+put my weekly reviews into dialogues. Each one<span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[197]</span>
+of us read his personal pages in turn, or we replied
+to one another.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[198]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XX<br>
+
+<small>LOUIS NAPOLEON’S FLIGHT FROM PRISON</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My godmother repeated to my grandfather
+something that the “Prince” had said to her before
+he wrote it, and which she thought admirable:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[199]</span>“With the name I bear, I must have either the
+gloom of a prison-cell, or the light of power.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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:</p>
+
+<p>“‘I wish to group around my name the partisans
+of the People’s Sovereignty.’”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>If my father came while Camille was with us he
+was much amused at my grandfather’s exasperation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[200]</span>
+when he and Camille would declare that Louis
+Napoleon was more of a socialist than themselves,
+for had he not written:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.’”</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes my grandfather, after having been
+angry, laughed at this kind of talk.</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[201]</span>
+secrets together, especially since my godmother
+lived at Ham.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>My godmother answered:</p>
+
+<p>“To Prince Louis.”</p>
+
+<p>“Did you steal it from him, godmother, to keep
+as a relic?”</p>
+
+<p>“He gave it to me.”</p>
+
+<p>“His boot?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.”</p>
+
+<p>“For what?”</p>
+
+<p>“For a bouquet-holder.”</p>
+
+<p>I burst out laughing.</p>
+
+<p>“But look, dear scoffer, how small it is. Can
+you not understand that he is vain of it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! no, to send a bouquet in his boot is not
+good manners. Has he worn it, or is it new?”</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>And my godmother reassumed the admiring air
+she had worn when I entered the drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[202]</span>“Really, godmother, I must tell you that you
+seem to me to be a little crazy!”</p>
+
+<p>One day our Camille arrived suddenly from Ham
+in a state of extraordinary agitation.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>Blondeau and I were present at this scene, of
+which, of course, we understood absolutely nothing.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[203]</span>
+person had been saved after great peril, and,
+strangely, that my godmother was at once happy
+and unhappy about it.</p>
+
+<p>After dinner I said to Blondeau:</p>
+
+<p>“Does this mystery interest you? Are you trying
+to understand something about it?”</p>
+
+<p>“I understand it perfectly,” he replied.</p>
+
+<p>“What is it?”</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Parbleu!</i> 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.”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Why do you try to hide what everyone knows,—that
+Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte has escaped
+from his prison at Ham?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[204]</span>“Tell me the beginning of the story, godmother,”
+said I, “since I know the end.”</p>
+
+<p>She hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>My grandmother, happy at having a chance to
+relate an adventure, asked Camille if she would
+allow her to tell it to me.</p>
+
+<p>Godmother made a sign of assent.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, imagine that Prince Louis pretended to
+be ill, and to have need of taking a purge, and
+shut himself up in his room.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! grandmother, that is not poetical,” I interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Grandmother, don’t you think it rather commonplace
+for a prince to disguise himself as a carpenter?”</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[205]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“All the same,” he added, as I had previously
+said, “to disguise one’s self as a carpenter is not
+irreproachable good form.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[206]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[207]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXI<br>
+
+<small>MY FIRST GREAT SORROW</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>I had at that time one of the most violent, most
+despairing revolts, and one of the most inconsolable
+sorrows of my life.</p>
+
+<p>The winter was particularly cold. My large
+garden was filled with snow, but I had discovered<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[208]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Grandmother replied:</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p>Blondeau loved the snow as much as I. Well-shod
+with Strasburg woollen socks and thick <i>sabots</i>,
+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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[209]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Blondeau, my dear Blondeau, look at this,
+look at that, how pretty, how beautiful, how splendid
+and brilliant it is!” I would cry.</p>
+
+<p>My admiration was inexhaustible as was Blondeau’s
+pleasure at listening to me and seeing me
+so delighted, so merrily happy.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Let us walk around the garden,” he replied to
+all my questions.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>He was so agitated I was afraid he had become<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[210]</span>
+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:</p>
+
+<p>“Speak to me, Blondeau, for I think you are
+crazy.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, what is it, Blondeau? You are killing
+me!”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I know, and those ladies are very nice. I<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[211]</span>
+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?”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Well, your grandmother has sold the garden
+to the Demoiselles André to build a boarding-school
+in it.”</p>
+
+<p>“What garden?”</p>
+
+<p>“This one, ours, hers, yours!”</p>
+
+<p>“You are telling an untruth!”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[212]</span>And I threw myself in his arms, weeping.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to me that all my trees raised their
+branches heavenward, and that they wept with me
+under the sunshine.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>“Blondeau, why has grandmother caused me
+this great grief, for which I shall never be consoled?”</p>
+
+<p>“Because she could never find such a chance
+again, and it is for your <i>dot</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>Then I burst forth.</p>
+
+<p>“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 <i>dot</i>!”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[213]</span>
+towards my grandmother made her suffer terribly.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[214]</span>
+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 <i>dot</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>rendezvous</i> in
+the little street <i>des Juifs</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I had missed going to school for two weeks.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[215]</span>Grandmother said I was ill and it was believed,
+because no one saw me about.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>dot</i>, etc., etc.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The moment for an amiable solution had come,
+but in order to save my dignity I pretended to let<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[216]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“Come,” he said to me, “and ask your grandmother’s
+pardon.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[217]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>This uprooting of my apricot tree revived all
+my sorrow. Behind that odious wall its agony was
+taking place.</p>
+
+<p>I imagined that I could see devastation ending<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[218]</span>
+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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[219]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXII<br>
+
+<small>MY FIRST RAILWAY JOURNEY</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Campaign life impairs the most rigid private
+virtue.”</p>
+
+<p>“As it impaired yours,” said grandmother.</p>
+
+<p>And Blondeau ended the conversation by saying:</p>
+
+<p>“Peace be with those who are no more!”</p>
+
+<p>One day when we were not expecting him, my
+father arrived, looking very happy, and said to
+grandmother before me:</p>
+
+<p>“Will you give me Juliette? I wish to take her
+on a long journey.”</p>
+
+<p>“From Chauny to Blérancourt?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[220]</span>“No, no, much farther.”</p>
+
+<p>“Where, dear Jean Louis?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you hear that, Jean Louis?” said my
+father, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[221]</span>
+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?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>The entire town of Chauny was interested in
+this journey. My grandfather told how it had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[222]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The journey from Paris to Amiens was, of
+course, by diligence.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Charles VI</i>. 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!”</p>
+
+<p>Like all good Picardines, I detested the English,
+and I clapped my hands with as much enthusiasm<span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[223]</span>
+as the other spectators, at the three repetitions of
+“No, no, never in France!”</p>
+
+<p>I had a headache for three days from the effects
+of that evening. The sound of the orchestra had
+bruised my temples.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[224]</span>
+were doing and she had her head cut off by a cross
+train.”</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>Decidedly, I preferred diligences to railways.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[225]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXIII<br>
+
+<small>MY FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE SEA</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap2">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Verton, the object of our great journey, had
+been described to us by our friend Liénard.</p>
+
+<p>“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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[226]</span>
+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 <i>dot</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good Heavens! With what could I buy
+land?” said father, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, your mother-in-law has just sold——”</p>
+
+<p>“Be quiet, Liénard,” I cried, “don’t speak of
+my <i>dot</i>, you make me unhappy. Let me forget
+it.”</p>
+
+<p>My father and Liénard, puzzled at my words,
+wished to know what they meant. They obtained
+only this answer:</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t want any <i>dot</i>! I don’t want any!”</p>
+
+<p>“You have commendable principles,” said father.
+“A girl should not be forced to give money
+in order to be married.”</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Liénard exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>“There is the sea!”</p>
+
+<p>Papa and I looked, holding each other’s hands.
+It was a superb day, but a high wind came from<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[227]</span>
+the sea, which seemed borne in by the rising
+tide.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[228]</span>
+lost in contemplating it, dominated by it to such a
+degree that I could not express the astonishment
+I felt.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“And I am thinking of Homer all the while,”
+father answered me.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>Liénard was my father’s devoted pupil, and followed
+his teaching in everything.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[229]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Oh! they were very succinct notes, of which I
+can give an example:</p>
+
+<p>“Verton, on a hill—gay little houses—old castle
+overlooking it—two stories—written above principal
+door in a circle—<i>Tel fiert qui ne tue pas</i>. Very,
+very large park and a farm, where I amuse myself
+all the time.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">[230]</span>
+can see the lighthouse of Berck. I never went to
+bed without looking at the great lantern lighting
+up the sea.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Love <i>my</i> trees a little during your stay here,
+as if they were your own.”</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[231]</span>
+There were several donkeys, but they did not bray
+like Roussot, and they disdained my advances, devoted
+as they were to the farm children.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“The people of the place, although very rude
+and ignorant, are good and are hard workers,”
+Liénard said. “They are excellent workmen. We<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[232]</span>
+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.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[233]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXIV<br>
+
+<small>I RECEIVE A HANDSOME GIFT</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[234]</span>
+memory a more deeply engraved impression than
+Boulogne-sur-Mer.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">[235]</span>
+like the post-wagon, brought to Chauny, on Friday
+mornings, the fish caught on the night of
+Wednesday to Thursday.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">[236]</span>
+earn four large crowns. I swallowed one oyster,
+and afterwards others followed in great numbers,
+for I grew to like them.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[237]</span>
+my father on the “Modern Cæsar,” and when I
+recited them, I ended by naming their author:
+Jean Louis Lambert.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Will you give <i>me</i> your horse, Liénard?” I said.
+“I think it very pretty and I will take it.”</p>
+
+<p>Mutually embarrassed and grieved a moment
+before, my father and Liénard were much amused
+at my intervention.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, yes! I will give it to you,” replied Liénard.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[238]</span>
+“It is yours, and I am not afraid now that
+your father will take it from you.”</p>
+
+<p>I adored the feeling of being important. But
+to have overcome this difficult situation did not
+suffice me.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“But it will take us three days instead of one,”
+said father.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do as she wishes, dear Lambert,” said Liénard.
+“Come, get into your carriage and start. I will
+send you your packages by the diligence.”</p>
+
+<p>“Papa! papa! do, I beg of you, let us be
+off!”</p>
+
+<p>“Has the horse eaten?” Liénard asked the
+groom.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir, he can go for five hours without needing
+anything more.”</p>
+
+<p>“Be off! be off!” our friend cried gaily, as he
+lifted me into the tilbury after kissing me.</p>
+
+<p>My father and Liénard kissed each other, like<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[239]</span>
+the loving friends they were, and father got into
+the carriage.</p>
+
+<p>“Where is the state high-road?” he asked the
+groom.</p>
+
+<p>Liénard replied:</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[240]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXV<br>
+
+<small>OUR HOMEWARD JOURNEY</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>The groom told us it was Coq or Cock. He
+didn’t know whether it was “Coq” or the English
+name.</p>
+
+<p>“‘No! no, never in France, never shall England
+reign!’” I cried, recalling the air I had heard in
+<i>Charles VI.</i> “It shall be Coq.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">[241]</span>
+you are, indeed, my daughter. You resemble me
+more than any one else.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">[242]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[243]</span>“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 <i>dot</i>.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, yes, because she received a good price
+for it.”</p>
+
+<p>“So, in your opinion she has done well?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! that is too much!”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[244]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“This Coq,” said my father, “is unworthy of
+too much confidence.” Then he added:</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">[245]</span>
+he who has given you the love of immaterial things.
+You will be a heathen some day, I am certain of
+it.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">[246]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t think she can ever be consoled for having
+lost her garden.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[247]</span>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>One</i> 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. <i>One</i> should understand
+that, and not laugh, when <i>one</i> 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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, well,” grandfather replied, “<i>one</i> has no
+need of a lesson; <i>one</i> loves <i>one’s</i> grandchild as
+much as mother and father and grandmother. <i>One</i>
+only jokes about Juliette’s sorrow, and <i>one</i> will<span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">[248]</span>
+continue to do so for the simple reason that <i>one</i>
+thinks it will be the best way to console her.”</p>
+
+<p>My grandmother’s regrets calmed my grief, but
+my poor grandfather was snubbed many times for
+his way of “consoling” me.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">[249]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXVI<br>
+
+<small>MY FIRST COMMUNION</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">[250]</span>
+wished to know the entire history of the railway
+journey, and all about the sea and the ships.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[251]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>This journey gave me a decided pre-eminence.
+On account of it, I was considered at Chauny superior<span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[252]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a id="FNanchor_3" href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">[C]</a>
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[253]</span>We had been friends for four years, but we had
+had very serious quarrels and reconciliations, which
+interested the whole school.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>And she dared to reply:</p>
+
+<p>“I am a philosopher, I am strong-minded!”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[254]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">[255]</span>And, at the same time, I heard her crunching
+the half of the piece she had given to me.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!)</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“You are sillier than the silliest,” Maribert said
+to me. “I will never speak to you again as long
+as I live.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>The hour came for leaving for the church. Our
+mothers were waiting for us in the drawing-room.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">[256]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“How beautiful mamma is,” I said in a low tone
+to grandmother. “Just look at her.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>My mother shrugged her shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[257]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[258]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>I repeated my address, smiling and looking at
+him unembarrassed. He smiled, too, and kissed
+me.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Lightly, Monseigneur, I beg of you!”</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[259]</span>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:</p>
+
+<p>“The little girl whom I confirmed!”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">[260]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXVII<br>
+
+<small>WE DISCUSS FRENCH LITERATURE</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">[261]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">[262]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I found my aunts much excited over politics.
+They read <i>Le National</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">[263]</span>
+prepared the reign of the little Count of Paris,
+with Odilon Barrot as President of the Council.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“It is the end of the world!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>They taught me Auguste Barbier’s famous iambic:
+“<i>O Corse à cheveux plats, que la France
+étoit belle</i>,” so that I might repeat it to grandfather.</p>
+
+<p>“Bonaparte,” my great-grandmother at Chivres<span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">[264]</span>
+said, as my father had also said, “gave us back
+France smaller than he took it.”</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>bourgeoisie</i>, while Béranger Bonapartised
+the people.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>They read and re-read his <i>Les Girondins</i>, and
+the manner in which they spoke of it remains ineffaceably
+in my memory.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">[265]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>My aunts had never talked politics together before
+me so much as during my vacation in 1847.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>I listened without yawning, for my mind was
+open to all political and literary things. My
+aunts were the personification of that <i>bourgeoise</i><span class="pagenum" id="Page_266">[266]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Ode
+à la Colonne Napoleon II.</i>, which seemed to
+make Victor Hugo a Bonapartist; they found his
+plays too intense, too pompously improbable, too
+wordily humanitarian. <i>Lucrèce Borgia</i>, <i>Marie
+Tudor</i>, <i>Les Burgraves</i>, <i>Ruy Blas</i>, 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 <i>Les Rayons et les Ombres</i>, in which she delighted.</p>
+
+<p>They spoke of Mme. George Sand with reserve.
+I heard more exclamations than approbation about
+her novel, <i>Lélia</i>, 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. <i>La Petite
+Fadette</i> they considered a chef-d’œuvre.</p>
+
+<p>“We are very <i>bourgeoise</i>,” said aunt Sophie,
+when speaking of Mme. George Sand, “although<span class="pagenum" id="Page_267">[267]</span>
+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 <i>Corinne</i>.” And my aunts initiated me in the
+beauty, so dissimilar, of Mme. de Staël’s <i>Corinne</i>
+and Mme. George Sand’s <i>La Petite Fadette</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>My grandmother, who adored Balzac, used frequently
+to read to me long extracts from his works,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_268">[268]</span>
+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:</p>
+
+<p>“He is neither Homeric nor Virgilian enough.”</p>
+
+<p>My aunts detested Balzac.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">[269]</span>
+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. <i>Eugénie Grandet</i> and <i>Le Père Gariot</i>
+revolt me. I do not even make an exception of
+the <i>Lys dans la Vallée</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Les
+deux Jeunes Mariées</i> for the fifth time.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I wrote pages on pages to aunt Sophie about de<span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">[270]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">[271]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXVIII<br>
+
+<small>WE TALK ABOUT POLITICS</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_272">[272]</span>
+were interesting from the fact that the greater
+part of them had been gathered from my aunts’
+conversation.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_273">[273]</span>
+overheated at an age when it should have
+been set on calm foundations.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Les Girondins</i>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_274">[274]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“The times are moving fast, the dawn is becoming<span class="pagenum" id="Page_275">[275]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.’</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_276">[276]</span>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_277">[277]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_278">[278]</span>
+he finds within himself the exact level
+of his scope of faculties, which in no wise oppress
+the scope of other person’s faculties.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_279">[279]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXIX<br>
+
+<small>TALKS ABOUT NATURE</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_280">[280]</span>
+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 <i>patois</i>) 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_281">[281]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“It is because you love them,” said my father,
+“and they know it well.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_282">[282]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_283">[283]</span>
+resisted so much warmth of heart, such a passionate
+love of the beautiful and the good?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My father would have spent millions had he possessed
+them. He could not be trusted with money,
+for he gave it instantly away.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_284">[284]</span>
+out of the year, on the badly kept roads around
+Blérancourt at that time.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_285">[285]</span>
+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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_286">[286]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXX<br>
+
+<small>A SERIOUS ACCIDENT</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>“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 <i>dot</i> you will
+save up for her.”</p>
+
+<p>This was my father’s answer:</p>
+
+<p>“I am preparing her to marry a workman!”</p>
+
+<p>When my father told me his answer, I said to
+him:</p>
+
+<p>“That is a joke, is it not?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” he answered, “it is my dearest wish.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_287">[287]</span>“Juliette!”</p>
+
+<p>“It is true, papa, and I will never, never marry
+a man who is my inferior.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, where is your theory of equality?”</p>
+
+<p>“Equality of rights—yes, papa, I believe in
+that with all my heart, but equality in manners
+and ways of life—no, never!”</p>
+
+<p>My father was angry and I was sulky.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He brandished his log of wood furiously, and
+cried out:</p>
+
+<p>“I would rather see my daughter dead than living<span class="pagenum" id="Page_288">[288]</span>
+with only one eye! I shall kill her and myself
+afterwards!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>I mastered myself, and said to my father in
+calm tones, through the door:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>I let go the door—it did not open. My father,
+who was struggling against their terrified supplications,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_289">[289]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Grandmother never guessed anything of the
+truth about this lamentable event, but she thought<span class="pagenum" id="Page_290">[290]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>I kissed him coldly as I left. Tears ran down
+his face, which induced grandmother to give him
+a passionate embrace.</p>
+
+<p>“Come, my son,” she said, “we will divide her,
+and each take half, for she belongs solely to us.”</p>
+
+<p>My mother at these words grew angry with me.</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Juliette, my darling child, forgive me!”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_291">[291]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXXI<br>
+
+<small>“LIBERTY, EQUALITY, AND FRATERNITY”</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_292">[292]</span>
+idea of marrying me to a workman never left my
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>My father, on the contrary, delighted to wear
+the <i>sayon</i> of the Gauls, the peasant’s blouse, and
+workman’s smock-frock. He failed, however, to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_293">[293]</span>
+induce my mother to dress herself as a woman of
+the people.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding reservations of this kind, or
+rather in spite of our different ways of interpreting
+the idea of equality, which I wished to be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_294">[294]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>My mother and grandmother both reproached
+my father for forcing my young mind and causing
+it to ripen too soon, to which he replied:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_295">[295]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_296">[296]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My father, to my great surprise, was not pleased
+with grandmother’s half conversion. I had thought
+he would rejoice in it.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>He expressed ideas entirely opposite to those of
+my aunts, who accused Ledru-Rollin of misleading
+the campaign of the reformists, while he accused<span class="pagenum" id="Page_297">[297]</span>
+Odilon Barrot of turning this campaign aside from
+its end.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_298">[298]</span>
+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.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_299">[299]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXXII<br>
+
+<small>“VIVE LA RÉPUBLIQUE!”</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>It was affirmed that King Louis Philippe pretended
+to fear nothing and to laugh at Odilon
+Barrot and Ledru-Rollin.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_300">[300]</span>
+shook hands with one another every morning we
+murmured, in low tones: “Long live Reform!
+Down with Guizot!”</p>
+
+<p>We knew, and kept saying among ourselves, that
+the people, the great people, “were stirring in their
+deep masses.”</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>The Republic! and what a grand Republic!
+My father’s and mine, one that began by recognizing
+the people and their right to work!</p>
+
+<p>The Republic had just ratified this privilege,
+and the people’s delegates had said, in words worthy
+of ancient Greece:</p>
+
+<p>“The people have three months of misery to
+give to the service of the Republic.”</p>
+
+<p>“The people,” said the <i>Democratie Pacifique</i>,
+“have behaved admirably and have shown themselves
+worthy of every liberty. They have proved
+their moral maturity. Not a single robbery, nor<span class="pagenum" id="Page_301">[301]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>France once again was at the head of nations,
+and gave a new example of her national grandeur.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Grandmother did not appear over-anxious about
+the revolution.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! poor grandfather, with our Republic
+I am afraid your Bonaparte is in a bad way,
+however socialistic he may have pretended to
+be.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_302">[302]</span>
+bottles of his old Mâcon wine to his usual allowance,
+said to us, with eyes rounder than ever:</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I can see as clear as daylight into the
+future.”</p>
+
+<p>“Grandfather, it is eight o’clock in the evening.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>Grandmother, Blondeau, and especially my father
+and I, laughed heartily at him.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, Juliette, how pleased your father must
+be at the news, as he has always been a republican.
+Have you seen him?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_303">[303]</span>“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——”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“In the class-room, Mademoiselle?”</p>
+
+<p>“In the class-room or at recreation.”</p>
+
+<p>I looked Mademoiselle André straight in the
+face. I was nearly as tall as she was. I answered:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“But France has not accepted your Republic,”
+said Mademoiselle Sophie.</p>
+
+<p>“She will accept it, Mademoiselle, for now the
+people can vote.”</p>
+
+<p>The Mesdemoiselles André were torn by conflicting
+feelings—the imperative desire to hush me,
+which I perfectly understood from the tone in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_304">[304]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Mademoiselle, I have had no time for my lessons
+on account of the Republic.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_305">[305]</span>“Mademoiselle, I have had no time to study, on
+account of the Republic!”</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder what interest the Republic can have
+for you?” said our governess, in a most disdainful
+tone, and shrugging her shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>A voice was heard to answer, amid general
+silence. It was mine:</p>
+
+<p>“Why, Mademoiselle, the Republic is most exciting
+to us!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The exit of the class was something like a small
+riot.</p>
+
+<p>It was our Republic, and we, the <i>Frondeuses</i>,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“What did Mesdemoiselles say to you?” was
+the general query.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_306">[306]</span>
+republican answer was what it should have been!”
+was the approving comment on my action.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Frondeuses</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_307">[307]</span>
+and later we were firmly convinced that we had
+invented it.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_308">[308]</span>
+not to be disquieted with their indecision, nor to be
+too hard on mistakes already committed.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Juliette,” asked grandmother, in my ear, as
+we were starting for the ceremony, “do you like
+that blouse? does it not shock your taste?”</p>
+
+<p>“It is partly blue, at any rate, grandmother,”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_309">[309]</span>
+I answered, laughing; “and, with papa’s ideas, it
+might have been all red!”</p>
+
+<p>A young poplar tree was brought and planted
+in a large hole prepared for it in the market-place.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I was amazed. My father added: “All that has<span class="pagenum" id="Page_310">[310]</span>
+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!”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“So be it!” the Mayor replied, gaily, leading
+off the vicar, who came to breakfast with us.</p>
+
+<p>“I believe,” said my father, in the manner of
+one proposing a toast, at the end of the repast,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_311">[311]</span>
+“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!”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_312">[312]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXXIII<br>
+
+<small>“OTHER TIMES, OTHER MANNERS”</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">MY progress as a student suffered considerably
+from my serious political preoccupation.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Democratie Pacifique</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_313">[313]</span>
+to learn it under the form given to it by the odious
+past?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>sabots</i>, of
+the soldiers of the fourteen armies with the magnificence
+of the festivals of the Goddess of Reason.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Esprit des
+Bêtes</i>, and by Fourier in his <i>Phalanstère</i>, and by
+George Sand—all this kind of talk studded the
+speeches of orators in small towns and villages to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_314">[314]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_315">[315]</span>
+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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>My memory preserves their noble faces crowned<span class="pagenum" id="Page_316">[316]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_317">[317]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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 <i>National</i> are the masters,
+and are delivering the Republic over to ambitious
+men.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Jean Louis, I am getting on very well with
+your Republic!” she would say to my father.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_318">[318]</span>
+well return; they will have nothing to change in
+favour of the middle class.”</p>
+
+<p>My father became soon, in the most bitter sense
+of the word, a malcontent. Of course I became a
+malcontent also.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_319">[319]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXXIV<br>
+
+<small>I GO TO BOARDING-SCHOOL</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Come, come, things are going very well for
+the Empire.”</p>
+
+<p>But I made my grandparents very unhappy with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_320">[320]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_321">[321]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>National</i>, 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 <i>my</i> national workshops, I kept myself
+informed about events until my father’s visits.</p>
+
+<p>When I learned that Monsieur de Falloux was
+commissioned by the National Assembly to furnish<span class="pagenum" id="Page_322">[322]</span>
+a plan of dissolution of the national workshops, I
+knew that everything was falling to pieces.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_323">[323]</span>
+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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_324">[324]</span>
+then, my darling grandchild, the situation will be
+untenable.”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Very well, grandmother, it is agreed; I will
+go to boarding-school as soon as you wish.”</p>
+
+<p>“To-morrow,” she replied.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_325">[325]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>One of my political enemies who knew me well,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_326">[326]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>At the afternoon recreation several of my
+schoolmates suddenly ran to me and said:</p>
+
+<p>“Your grandmother is on the top of the wall
+in the back courtyard. She wishes you to go and
+say good-night to her.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, grandmother, I have not slept at all, and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_327">[327]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_328">[328]</span>
+of the Tuileries, “Death to thieves!” as if they
+were bandits and plunderers!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_329">[329]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_330">[330]</span>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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_331">[331]</span>
+them to the department of Sologne, road-building,
+and other work to be decided upon by the municipalities.</p>
+
+<p>“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....”</p>
+
+<p>I related the decision, and there was silence.</p>
+
+<p>My grandfather, provoked, and scarcely able to
+control his anger, asked me:</p>
+
+<p>“Are you for the insurgents?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“But they are assassins!”</p>
+
+<p>“Whom have they assassinated?”</p>
+
+<p>“They are thieves!”</p>
+
+<p>“From whom have they stolen?”</p>
+
+<p>“They terrify the country.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>Blondeau and grandmother looked at each other
+bewildered. Neither the one nor the other breathed
+a word.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_332">[332]</span>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Alas! your Prince Louis occupies himself too
+much with it. It is he, through Émile Thomas,
+who has made the national workshops fail.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_333">[333]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXXV<br>
+
+<small>DARK DAYS FOR THE REPUBLIC</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Monsieur Marie had answered, so said the newspaper,
+“as a Cæsar might have done”:</p>
+
+<p>“If the workmen will not leave, we will make
+them do so by force; do you understand?”</p>
+
+<p>That night armed bands had gone through the
+streets of Paris, singing: “<i>On n’part pas! on
+n’part pas!</i>” to the tune of the <i>Lampions</i>.
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_334">[334]</span>
+workmen were indignant with de Lamartine, Garnier-Pagès
+and Arago, who had failed in all their
+promises.</p>
+
+<p>The poor people were in revolt. There was danger
+of a massacre. The anger of the wretched
+had burst forth.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>What was taking place? What was going to
+happen?</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_335">[335]</span>“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?”</p>
+
+<p>“Blondeau!” I said, crying, “that was what I
+feared. They have exasperated those poor,
+wretched men beyond endurance at last.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>This was what I read:</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“I kiss you good-bye, Juliette, until we meet
+again. Your friend, Charles.”</p>
+
+<p>I held out the dreadful missive to Blondeau.</p>
+
+<p>“He is perfectly right. He says what is true!”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_336">[336]</span>
+exclaimed Blondeau, giving the letter back to me
+after having read it.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“The revolution has broken out again,” I said,
+and I read to them my ex-friend Charles’s letter.
+I emphasised the <i>ex</i>, for I had already torn him
+from my heart.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p>“We will!” they cried.</p>
+
+<p>“If we could add a few recruits, some partisans,
+to our united groups, so that our manifestation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_337">[337]</span>
+would be more imposing, don’t you think it would
+be better?”</p>
+
+<p>“We will all try to get some,” said my comrades.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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! ‘<i>On n’part pas! on n’part pas!</i>’”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The Mlles. André sat down in their two largest<span class="pagenum" id="Page_338">[338]</span>
+arm-chairs to give me trial. Mlle. Sophie, the
+younger, questioned my partisans and allies.</p>
+
+<p>“It was Juliette Lambert, was it not, who incited
+you to this act of scandalous folly?” she
+asked them.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! out of twenty-two, seventeen answered:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, mademoiselle.”</p>
+
+<p>The five others clung close to one another. Mlle.
+Sophie could drag nothing from them but one and
+the same answer:</p>
+
+<p>“Both she and ourselves wished to make a manifestation!”</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, mademoiselle.”</p>
+
+<p>“You see, the premeditation came alone from
+Juliette Lambert.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you deny what you have done?” Mlle.
+Sophie asked me.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_339">[339]</span>“No, mademoiselle, I am an insurgent,
+but—”</p>
+
+<p>At this moment the mother of one of my faithful
+friends entered, exclaiming:</p>
+
+<p>“My daughter—I wish my daughter—where
+is she? The insurgents are marching on
+Chauny!”</p>
+
+<p>There was a general panic. They allowed my
+friend and her mother to depart, and they barricaded
+the front door.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>Frightened people in the streets talked together,
+saying:</p>
+
+<p>“The Guards have gone to bar the way to the
+insurgents.”</p>
+
+<p>The Mlles. André closed all the doors and shutters
+of the house, and they left us where we were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_340">[340]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The elder Mlle. André asked me whether I repented.</p>
+
+<p>I tried to prove to her that I had not acted like
+a child; that I was convinced of my right to have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_341">[341]</span>
+my own opinions, and that I had defended ideas
+about which I had seriously reflected.</p>
+
+<p>“Disturbing, dangerous, and wicked ideas!”
+replied the elder Mlle. André.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I rose proudly and replied, at least with apparent
+calmness, for in reality my heart was almost
+strangling me, so fast did it beat:</p>
+
+<p>“I am delighted to leave; I stifle under oppression,
+and I am going to be free at last!”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_342">[342]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_343">[343]</span>
+to thank you for having brought her back to me
+than to ask pardon for her.”</p>
+
+<p>I threw myself into grandmother’s arms, and all
+trace of ill-feeling between us disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_344">[344]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXXVI<br>
+
+<small>ANOTHER VISIT AT CHIVRES</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">I  THEN had a long vacation, which began the
+1st of July and did not finish until the 1st
+of October.</p>
+
+<p>I remained three months with my aunts at
+Chivres, to their great delight.</p>
+
+<p>I took intense pleasure in the study of Latin,
+and made real progress in the reading and translating
+of the “bucolics.”</p>
+
+<p>My aunts, however, sermonised me severely on
+the reason for my having been sent away from
+school. The <i>National</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_345">[345]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The death of General Bréa, killed by two acknowledged
+Bonapartists, Luc and Lhar; that of
+Archbishop Affre, due to an accident and not to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_346">[346]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>National</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>National</i>, for I compared it later with the text of
+the <i>Democratie Pacifique</i>, which my father sent to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_347">[347]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>I confess that this obstinacy irritated me, and
+that my affection for my dear aunts suffered from
+it.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_348">[348]</span>“The Democratic-Republic shall be my religion,”
+said Louis Napoleon, “and I will be its
+priest.”</p>
+
+<p>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”:</p>
+
+<p>“He is admirable, in the way he scoffs at the
+republican birds.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_349">[349]</span>
+himself to the extent of thinking he will be
+named President of the Republic, his conduct is
+inexplicable,” said aunt Constance.</p>
+
+<p>Politics still interested me a little in conversation,
+but when I did not talk of them, I thought
+no more about them.</p>
+
+<p>“Men are worth nothing, nothing at all,” said
+aunt Anastasie one day; “I do not know a single
+man who has a just mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_350">[350]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXXVII<br>
+
+<small>I BEGIN TO STUDY HOUSEKEEPING</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">WHEN I returned to Chauny my grandmother,
+whom I found more affectionate, more lovable
+than ever, said to me:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“I shall be delighted to keep house, grandmother,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_351">[351]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My father approved all my plans, especially
+that of having chosen for my professor a man
+whose merits he had heard praised.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_352">[352]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_353">[353]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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?”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“My Pretender has sworn to be unfaithful to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_354">[354]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_355">[355]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_356">[356]</span>
+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!”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_357">[357]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXXVIII<br>
+
+<small>AN EXCITING INCIDENT</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_358">[358]</span>
+although she sometimes rebelled against the rôle I
+gave her.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“‘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:</p>
+
+<p>“‘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!’”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_359">[359]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He then began to condemn, in equal measure, the
+monarchists and the reactionary republicans.</p>
+
+<p>He was destined to suffer blow after blow.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_360">[360]</span>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_361">[361]</span>
+to rid yourself of the official reports and the lists,
+which seem to me dangerous to keep.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“What you are doing is not very nice, Monsieur;
+it might even be called indiscreet.”</p>
+
+<p>The agent and his colleagues were amused at my
+conversation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_362">[362]</span>Then I said suddenly to my mother:</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My mother, trembling, gave them the keys of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_363">[363]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>They ransacked the stable, the carriage-house,
+the cellar, and the garret.</p>
+
+<p>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!”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t let your face change. I have the papers!”</p>
+
+<p>I kissed him, which seemed to touch the policeman’s
+heart, and my father clasped me in his
+arms.</p>
+
+<p>Thanks to me, these men had discovered nothing
+of any importance.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_364">[364]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, Monsieur,” I replied. “You
+must have a daughter yourself, to act in such fatherly
+fashion to me.”</p>
+
+<p>The agent smiled, but did not answer me. He
+bowed to my mother and father, and left.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>My father answered:</p>
+
+<p>“Juliette has them!”</p>
+
+<p>“How did she get them?”</p>
+
+<p>I raised my skirt, and cried, victoriously:</p>
+
+<p>“This is how one can fool those who make perquisitions!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_365">[365]</span>My father recovered from his emotion, and felt
+great indignation.</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_366">[366]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XXXIX<br>
+
+<small>AN OFFER OF MARRIAGE</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_367">[367]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I copied and recopied my composition. I devoted
+myself to it with such intense interest that it<span class="pagenum" id="Page_368">[368]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“But, grandmother, I shall not be fourteen before
+six months.”</p>
+
+<p>“Everyone takes you for sixteen,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>From that moment I thought of nothing but
+literature, and my imagination became intensely
+excited.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_369">[369]</span>
+was not possible for him to suspect who I was.
+From that day my grandmother never doubted
+about my future destiny.</p>
+
+<p>At that time I made my family act the parts of
+Camoën’s <i>Lusiades</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>My grandfather, the “giant Adamastor,” called
+his pigeons by reciting a passage of the <i>Lusiades</i>
+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
+<i>dramatis personæ</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_370">[370]</span>
+for us to lay aside the <i>Lusiades</i> to take up Walter
+Scott’s <i>Ivanhoe</i>, with which I was delighted.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>During the spring of 1850 a theatrical troupe
+came to Chauny. I had never been to the theatre,
+except to hear the opera of <i>Charles VI.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Blondeau decided that he would take me to see
+the drama, <i>Marie-Jeanne, ou, La Fille du Peuple</i>.
+Grandmother disliked so much to go out that
+grandfather accompanied Blondeau and me.</p>
+
+<p>The wife of my grandfather’s barber, Lafosse,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_371">[371]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>People looked at me a great deal, and grandfather
+and Blondeau kept whispering together,
+and I knew they were talking of me, but <i>Marie-Jeanne</i>
+interested me more than my own appearance.</p>
+
+<p>I heard people say several times: “How old is
+she?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I cried so much over <i>Marie-Jeanne</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_372">[372]</span>All grandmother’s friends, men and women, came
+to see her during the week following the representation
+of <i>Marie-Jeanne</i>, and told her I had made a
+“sensation.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“You cannot say from whom?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_373">[373]</span>Grandmother showed my father a letter, and
+mentioned a person’s name.</p>
+
+<p>“One and one make two,” she said.</p>
+
+<p>My father was silent for an instant, and then
+replied in a vexed tone:</p>
+
+<p>“So you wish to marry Juliette as you were
+married yourself, and as you married your daughter?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” she answered, cruelly; “I do not wish
+to make my grandson-in-law’s position for him.
+He must have one himself.”</p>
+
+<p>“I shall take Juliette home with me; she belongs
+to me!” cried my father, in anger.</p>
+
+<p>“I shall keep the child you abandoned, and
+whom I rescued from the poverty in which you had
+thrown her!”</p>
+
+<p>“I will send policemen for her!”</p>
+
+<p>“Try it! I will leave you all, and take Juliette
+off to a foreign country.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I did not see my father for several months. All
+the family blamed him. During the time I passed<span class="pagenum" id="Page_374">[374]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Strangely, their intervention calmed her, and
+she began from that time to speak less bitterly of
+my father.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>One day in the autumn grandmother told me
+that she would permit me to pass Christmas and a
+part of January at Blérancourt.</p>
+
+<p>My father’s sorrow was to be consoled, and mine<span class="pagenum" id="Page_375">[375]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I began my study on Greece again, with delight.
+My father was not only a professor, he was a
+poet.</p>
+
+<p>“How can you be such a red republican, with
+such a love for Marmorean Greece?” I asked him.</p>
+
+<p>“With the Greeks, marble was only the skeleton
+of architecture and sculpture,” my father replied,
+“and in Grecian colours red predominates.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_376">[376]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>I cannot describe how my father spoke of the
+people; the very word was pronounced by him with
+fervour, almost religiously.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_377">[377]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_378">[378]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My mother would provoke these paroxysms by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_379">[379]</span>
+cold comments or criticisms, ironical and stinging,
+such as these, for example:</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_380">[380]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_381">[381]</span>
+Messine; he had naturalized himself as a Frenchman
+at the time of the great Revolution and simplified
+his name.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Monsieur Lamessine left us laughing, and said
+to me:</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t bear me malice, Mademoiselle the
+fighter.”</p>
+
+<p>I replied:</p>
+
+<p>“My best wishes, Monsieur, that Heaven may
+shed upon you a little knowledge of what is right
+and what is beautiful.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_382">[382]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XL<br>
+
+<small>THE “FAMILY DRAMA” AGAIN</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_383">[383]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>In Monsieur Lamessine’s mind and in my
+father’s this speech contained the threat of a <i>coup
+d’état</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_384">[384]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The next day grandmother said to me triumphantly:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>I was stunned, bewildered, crazed.</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_385">[385]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My father and mother, who had been sent for,
+arrived a few days later. My father was in an
+extraordinary state of excitement. The <i>coup
+d’état</i> which he had foreseen had taken place.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_386">[386]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p>Terror had reigned for several days. All the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_387">[387]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely had Louis Napoleon Bonaparte assured
+the country of the purity of his intentions,
+in November, before he took possession of France
+by fraud.</p>
+
+<p>“France has understood,” he said at that time,
+“that I infringed the law only to enter into my
+rights.”</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>And my father wept like a child. I consoled
+him almost maternally, and said to him:</p>
+
+<p>“Father, calm yourself; they cannot marry me
+against my will.”</p>
+
+<p>The next morning my mother, who had been
+left behind, and who never knew how to hide a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_388">[388]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>And my mother took me away, vanquished, feeling
+myself reduced to powerlessness. And I was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_389">[389]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_390">[390]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>Alas! when this letter reached grandmother my<span class="pagenum" id="Page_391">[391]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>When my father was out of danger my mother
+and my grandmother dared not refuse the poor
+convalescent his desire to see me again.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, no!” he replied; “I would rather see you
+dead than delivered over to certain unhappiness!”</p>
+
+<p>And yet it was he who delivered me over to
+the unhappiness he foresaw.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_392">[392]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_393">[393]</span>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+<h2 class="nobreak">XLI<br>
+
+<small>MY MARRIAGE AND ITS RESULTS</small></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>When she knew herself a great-grandmother
+and that she could embrace her granddaughter’s
+child, my grandmother hoped to extend the agreement<span class="pagenum" id="Page_394">[394]</span>
+of living with me every winter at Paris to
+the house at Soissons, which we were to inhabit for
+eighteen months longer.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Do you know why I have brought such
+a large trunk?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why, no, madame.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is because I expect to pass the winter with
+you and Juliette.”</p>
+
+<p>“Impossible, my dear madame.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean by impossible?”</p>
+
+<p>“I made a mistake; I meant to say, you will
+never come.”</p>
+
+<p>“Never, do you say?”</p>
+
+<p>“You will never live in my house with your
+grandchild.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are joking, monsieur.”</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_395">[395]</span>“Is it true, my Juliette, that you are unhappy?”
+asked my grandmother.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” I answered, choking with sobs, “I am
+as unhappy as one can possibly be.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“But your promises?” she said to my husband.</p>
+
+<p>“They were necessary, my dear madame,” he
+replied, “only until you had finished keeping
+yours integrally.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_396">[396]</span>“Ah! no, indeed!” he said to me; “it has gone
+off too well! No drama, no quarrel. I am delighted.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>One night, about ten o’clock, I had just put my
+daughter in her crib, had returned to bed, and was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_397">[397]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! grandmother, is it you?” I cried.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>I rushed into my husband’s study, where he was
+writing.</p>
+
+<p>“My grandmother, my grandmother, where is
+she? I have just seen her, with empty eyes, in my
+room!”</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>The next day I heard that my grandmother had
+died at the very hour she had appeared to me.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>When I began to believe in religion again, this
+apparition of my grandmother was to me one of
+the strongest proofs of a hereafter.</p>
+
+<p>The movement of her hand carried up to her
+eyes, whose sockets were empty, seemed to me to
+signify: “Blindness is death!”</p>
+
+<p>I had remained blind too long, and always in
+my dreams I saw my grandmother again with the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_398">[398]</span>
+frightful gesture of her hand raised to her empty
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>I have never seen her again with this gesture
+since I wrote my <i>Rêve sur le Divin</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The day after this strange apparition I left for
+Chauny with my daughter.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_399">[399]</span>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:</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>I worked while nursing and bringing up my
+daughter. I completed my education, very much
+developed in certain matters, very insufficient in
+others.</p>
+
+<p>Then, one day, after some insignificant literary
+attempts, revolted at the insults Proudhon had
+thrown at Daniel Stern and George Sand in his
+book, <i>La Justice dans la Révolution</i>, I wrote my
+<i>Anti-Proudhonian Ideas</i>, and my real literary life
+began, with the record of which I shall some day
+continue these memoirs.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_deco.jpg" alt=""></div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="ph1">FOOTNOTES:</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="label">[A]</a> This friend Charles was a professor in the boys’ boarding-school
+opposite my grandparents’ house.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_2" href="#FNanchor_2" class="label">[B]</a> 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.”</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+<p><a id="Footnote_3" href="#FNanchor_3" class="label">[C]</a> The final syllable only is correct.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="transnote">
+<p class="ph1">TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:</p>
+
+<p>Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.</p>
+
+<p>Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.</p>
+
+<p>Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.</p>
+</div></div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF MY CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH ***</div>
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