Juliette Adam

“ 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?” ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 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 [156] us near to superhuman truths,” she said. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. [376] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [103] 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”