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.