Winifred Stephens Whale

“ When the Revolution had subsided, the Comte de Flavigny brought his wife and his daughter, Marie, back to France. Marie soon grew into an intelligent and beautiful girl of Germanic type—tall, golden-haired and blue-eyed. Having set her heart upon a man who married some one else, she refused offer after offer until well on in what was then regarded as spinsterhood. At the age of twenty-two she submitted to a mariage de convenance with the Comte d’Agoult. In a loveless life she found consolation in that joy of every clever Parisienne’s heart, the creation of a salon. ”

“ Lambert was a firm believer in the right of all men to work, and to insist on receiving for that work a just wage. “Juliette,” he would say, “I rejoice to see you talking to a working-man ... as if he were your brother. I want you to be an apostle of human happiness and universal good. I love the weak and helpless more than myself. To see struggle and suffering tortures me. To those who have nothing one must give oneself up entirely, keeping nothing back.” ”

“ But she has never for a moment doubted that when the struggle came la patrie would be triumphant. With Gambetta she has always believed that, however dark might be la patrie’s horizon, the spirit of France could not be overcast for ever. For this apostle of l’idée française has never failed to read aright the history of her noble land, to behold in it the country of reawakenings and resurrections.
There is hardly a family in France to which the war has not brought the sorrow of bereavement. Mme. Adam’s family is no exception. ”

“ What an all-important event was Juliette’s first evening in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon may easily be imagined. She found the Countess, like many other distinguished Frenchwomen, anticipating her age, for although she was only fifty-three, she wore over her silver hair a light black lace mantilla. At the first glance she gave Juliette the impression of strength, almost virile, and yet of femininity. “J’ai atteint l’âge d’homme,” she used to say, echoing Catherine of Russia’s sentiment when she welcomed Diderot with the words: “As man to man we can discuss anything.” ”

“ For how many is not such a crisis presented by the present war! In the religious world such a revolution is described as conversion. This crisis came to Mme. Adam through national humiliation and the civil strife which followed the catastrophe of 1870. La patrie’s defeat had planted deep in her nature an antagonism which will doubtless endure to the end. Henceforth we shall find accentuated more and more strongly in her character and disposition the irreconcilable note. She had always been emphatic. She was born to be as fervent a hater as she was an ardent lover. ”

“ Adam returned to Paris, to a Paris desolated by two bombardments, by ferocious street-fighting and by the madness of a defeated mob, raging throughout the days and nights of a hideous week of explosions and incendiarism. Mme. Adam returned to find the blackened ruins of the Tuileries, the smoking ashes of the Hôtel de Ville, a heap of stones in the square where the Vendôme Column had stood.
In the lives of many strong personalities there comes a crisis, a parting of the ways, when in a convulsion of the whole being character and disposition receive a new orientation. ”

“ Adam’s circle embraced the policy of la Revanche, there were some who, like George Sand and Arlès Dufour, turned their hatred not so much against Germany as against war as a whole, and who found their internationalist principles strengthened by defeat. With such ideas Mme. Adam had not a particle of sympathy. They sundered her from many of her friends. They caused her to turn with more enthusiasm than ever to the one man who seemed capable of realising her hopes, to Gambetta, l’Homme de la Revanche. ”

“ Then it is easy to see how it came about; how at that moment the sight of Adam’s poor scarred face, recalling how he had been on the brink of death, would make his wife furious to think of his disregard of her entreaties and his persistence in undertaking that disastrous journey.
“How could you have gone off like that, leaving me the sole guardian of our fortune?” she cried. “Why must you insist on pursuing this visionary Nice candidature, risking failure in Paris, where, but for me and Rochefort, you would never have been elected?” Fortunately Adam thoroughly understood his wife. ”

“ With the great Jean Jacques he held society, not nature, responsible for all the evils which have [Pg 17] befallen mankind. His “great negation,” as his daughter was later to call it, consisted in the denial that the finite can ever be capable of comprehending the infinite. Nature, he held, was rich enough and vast enough to satisfy all man’s craving for knowledge, sociability and love. “If you must worship something,” he would say to Juliette, “then worship the sun which lightens and warms you, in whose rays all things germinate, breathe and blossom.” ”

“ How many of us have not perished body and soul!
“And those who would not be drowned, who struggled, who were thrown back on to the bank, they recovered their footing, they became like other people, through contact with the earth, and especially with the common sense of humble folk. How often have I not become myself again in the midst of peasants! How often has not Nohant cured me of and saved me from Paris!”
For George Sand, as for Joan of Arc four centuries ago, as for Anatole France to-day, the most adorable, the most salutary, the most indispensable of all human sentiments is pity. ”

“ Against such determinism Juliette revolted with all the fervour of her rebellious and romantic soul.
“I protest,” she said. “If I feel myself a mere atom of dust swept about by the wind and not an intelligence dominating matter, why should I make any effort?”
“Because action is the law of humanity.”
“Ah! but for me belief in man led by the spirit and nature by the divine is a necessity.” Here, in these words indicating so plainly the wish to believe, lies the key to Juliette’s whole mental and spiritual evolution. ”

“ Though she seldom goes to Paris now, Paris comes to her. And in her salon at Gif she keeps alive cette causerie française, which, alas! tends to disappear from the salons of the metropolis. In the hurly-burly of modern life that leisurely talk which alone, writes Mme. Adam, entretient les vitalités de notre esprit grows more and more impossible. Before the war conversation was already a lost art. “When I begin to talk in a modern drawing-room,” says Mme. Adam, “I am told to be silent because I am interrupting a game of bridge, or because some one is going to dance the tango.” ”

“ But during that time they paid a visit to Paris; and Juliette had her first unforgettable impression of that brilliant city which had figured so large in the dreams of herself and her grandmother.
When Lamessine first proposed to her that she should wean her baby, Alice, and come with him to Paris, she trembled. For in Paris, she felt, her lot would be cast. Paris held her destiny. Her grandmother’s spirit seemed to dominate hers as soon as Paris entered into her life.
“Bah,” said her father, when she told him of her hesitation. “Don’t be afraid of it. Set foot in it bravely. ”

“ Tall and superbly graceful, it seemed to Juliette that she had never seen a more complete great lady. When Mme. d’Agoult described herself as a Democrat, it was difficult to suppress a smile, so anomalous on her lips sounded such a word. Her bearing, the pose of her head, her features, the lines of her face which betrayed no trace of the tempestuous passion that had swept over her in youth; everything about Mme. d’Agoult was aristocratic. ”

“ Adam gives of these conversations, discern a difference of opinion, slight apparently, yet in reality fundamental, which, though at first a mere rift, was to widen into a chasm and finally to separate them. Mme. Adam even then began to see that the Republic of Gambetta’s dreams was not so Athenian as she thought. Between her aristocratic ideas and his radicalism there was a pronounced difference. She wanted to see the masses led by the élite. For Gambetta there was to be no élite: the masses were to be educated to guide and govern themselves. ”

“ Seron’s garden, in which Juliette had spent some of her most entrancing hours. On the occasion of the destruction of this her land of delight, her “temple of verdure,” as she called it, there had been a long and violent battle between this little devotee of nature and her grandmother. The excuse that the garden had been sold in order to provide Juliette with a dowry did not appeal to her in the least. Money had never loomed large in the child’s imagination. She loathed the mention of it; for it always seemed to her to lead to family quarrels. ”

“ It would be disgraceful to leave unanswered such abominable charges.”
“George Sand and Daniel Stern,” replied this vertu farouche, “have only what they deserve. I insist upon virtue and I practise it. Proudhon has not dared to insult me, I am certain of it, though I have not yet read his book.”
“Very well,” said Juliette. “I am nobody, it is true, although I am as virtuous as you, and I will reply to Proudhon. Women, they must be defended by women.” ”

“ Adam, “the loss of two of our organs is constantly destroying our equilibrium more and more.... Never shall we regain it until we have reconquered Alsace-Lorraine, as Italy has reconquered Lombardy and Venetia. Ah, my friend, how can I tell you my grief at suspecting you more and more implicated with Germany? You, our national defender—you, whose words, whose acts galvanised in her humiliation the France [Pg 202] to whom you promised a resurrection, you are false to your mission! You must forgive me, but the cruel words must be spoken: you betray your destiny. ”

“ Never will Bismarck raise you to that pinnacle of greatness on which you were placed by your fidelity to Alsace-Lorraine. But I wound you.”
It argues well for Gambetta’s magnanimity and also for his patriotism that he could hear such reproaches and still remain the friend of her who uttered them.
“You cannot wound me, my dear friend,” he replied. “For you speak to me as you must speak—you, an idealist, whom reality does not restrain from arriving at contradictory conclusions.... You follow the dictates of your heart, I of my reason. We must each go our road.” ”

“ Once again the Hôtel de Ville had become le Louvre superbe des révolutions. The last rays of the setting sun gilded that people’s palace, played upon its windows, causing them to sparkle with a brilliance far surpassing the glitter of all the diamonds in the imperial crown.”
The Revolution had passed without the shedding of a drop of blood, without a single deed of violent disorder. The forecast of a working man, whom Juliette had overheard that afternoon, had come true. ”

“ Juliette remembers that, towards the end of dinner on that fateful 26th of February, her grandfather, having, by way of consolation for his disappointment, drunk an extra bottle or so of his petit Macon, opening his eyes very wide, addressed his family, and said: “Well! I see the future as clear as day!... I see your Republic, do you hear me, Lambert? Do you hear me, Juliette? I see it trampled under foot by my Buonaparte. I tell you, I scream it at you: revolutions, don’t you know, always end in empires.” ”

“ Then like a defiance resounded the concluding ironical appeal to the Empire—
“Listen; for seventeen years you have been absolute masters, you have held France in your power.... Yet you have never dared to place among the national festivals that 2nd of December!... Well, we claim it, that anniversary of the 2nd of December. We claim it for ourselves. We shall never cease to celebrate it. Every year it will be the anniversary of our dead, until the day when the country, once more having become the master, shall exact from you the great expiation in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity.” ”

“ As soon as you refrained from sympathising with Russia at the beginning of the Russo-Turkish War, I concluded that you had abandoned the idea of la Revanche; for the only way to regain Alsace-Lorraine is by winning the hearts of nations whose interests like our own render them the enemies of Germany and of England. This we may do by displaying our sympathy with those nations in their hours of trial. ”

“ On the evening of the 3rd, when about six o’clock the terrible tidings began to spread like wild-fire through Paris, people came out into the streets, crowds thronged the boulevards, growing every hour. By ten o’clock, Paris between the Rue Montmartre and the Grand Opéra presented the appearance of one immense forum. Juliette went down and mingled with the people, listening to their conversation. ”

“ Soon Juliette’s invitation to the Countess’s evenings was extended to those smaller intimate parties, which met around the luncheon or the dinner-table. On these occasions the Hellenist, Louis de Ronchaud, was almost invariably her fellow-guest.
Mme. d’Agoult laughed at Juliette’s passion for antiquity. “My dear child,” she would say, “you must be of your time. At your age you ought not to be so antique.... I shall take you to the Opéra Bouffes” (the Italian theatre) . “That will modernise you a little.”
“For the love of Greece, remain Greek,” pleaded de Ronchaud. ”

“ They parted, and did not meet for several days. They were both miserable. Then that kind physician, the good Dr. Maure, Thiers’ friend, effected a reconciliation.
“Oh, you fools,” he cried, “at your age to lay down conditions and to be obstinate. When happiness runs to meet you, you turn away. Be reconciled at once.”
Adam holds out his arms. Juliette hesitates. Dr. Maure makes a grimace. “He will live at Bruyères. Embrace him. But it costs him dear. It is the greatest sacrifice he can make.” ”

“ Even with the enemy advancing to their gates Parisians breathed again, realising that henceforth it was for la patrie and not for a dynasty that they would fight.
Search as we will among the numerous records of those memorable hours, penned by those who lived through them, we shall find none describing more vividly than these forty pages of Mme. Adam’s Souvenirs, the talk, the incidents and the movements of that vast crowd, thronging the Paris streets, all swayed by the excitement of a revolution. ”