CHILDHOOD
1839-1848
“_De l’amour et de l’indignation furent les aliments dont on
nourrit notre jeune cœur._”—Juliette Adam, Preface to her
_Souvenirs_, I. v.
Despite his intense desire to have his adored child in his own home,
Dr. Lambert constrained himself to permit Juliette to remain with
her grandparents until she was three. But on his daughter’s fourth
anniversary her father put in his paternal claim.
Looking back over more than three score years and ten Mme. Adam still
sees that day as the first which stands out clearly in her memory. She
remembers it for several reasons—because of the new white frock she
wore, embroidered by her grandmother; because the _bonne_ Arthémise
on that day called her “Mademoiselle” for the first time; because
her grown-up friend Charles, professor at the boys’ school opposite,
embraced her; because when her parents arrived late as usual from
Blérancourt, on account of the bad roads, her father took her up in
his arms, kissed her, and with tears in his eyes said, “Juliette, how
you have grown, it is so long since I have seen you—three months.”
But above all that day stands engraved on Juliette’s recollection
because in the midst of the birthday feast, there fell like a
bombshell descending on the hitherto harmonious family party, her
father’s words: “This time we shall take Juliette home with us.”
Then there ensued one of those impassioned family scenes which were
so frequent in Juliette’s childhood. Mme. Seron refused to give up
her granddaughter, Dr. Lambert protested vehemently that he would
have his child. The little girl, hardly out of babyhood, was herself
appealed to: whom did she love most—her parents or her grandparents?
Where would she like to live—at Chauny or at Blérancourt? But in the
end Mme. Seron won the day, as she usually did, and probably for the
excellent reason that it was she who held the family purse-strings.
There was, however, in this vehement, romantic, impulsive lady a
strain of consistency and logic. Because during that dinner-table
wrangle with her son-in-law she had based her claim to Juliette’s
remaining with her on the fact that there were better educational
facilities at Chauny than at Blérancourt, she felt compelled to act on
that assertion. Consequently, she lost no time in sending Juliette,
tiny as she was, to school.
But this important crisis in Juliette’s career could not pass without
yet another _drame de famille_. To send so young a child to the
_pension_, to “prison,” as they called it, seemed to the easygoing Dr.
Seron and to the _bonne_ Arthémise, who doted on her little charge,
as nothing short of cruelty. Like a servant out of one of Molière’s
comedies, Arthémise rated her mistress soundly, whereupon she received
an entirely disregarded notice to pack up her baggage and be off.
Of this scene the little victim was herself a spectator. And it was as
a captive, therefore, that she regarded herself, when her grandmother
led her off and delivered her up to her schoolmistress, the grim,
moustached Mme. Dufey, who, with what appeared to Juliette a veritable
turnkey’s smile, received her with the announcement: “I had the
mother, now I have the daughter.”
Then followed a hurricane of a day. Cries, sobs and physical
protestations landed the new pupil in the school garret, wherefrom she
was extricated in the afternoon by Arthémise, who had come to take her
home. But home to her cruel grandmother this wilful child absolutely
refused to go. No sooner was she outside the school gates than she
set off running in the direction of the village where Arthémise
lived. There Arthémise weakly followed her. And it was only late in
the evening that the runaway, having been put to sleep in another and
pleasanter garret, was driven back to Chauny by her grandfather in his
gig.
Juliette felt that she had won a victory. Her grandmother had
certainly learnt a lesson. She now realised that her granddaughter
was the kind of child she herself had been—one of those who must be
led and not driven. Henceforth Juliette was brought up on what we
now call the Montessori system. And the time came when she herself
elected to go with one of her playmates to that same school, which she
now found quite amusing.
Indeed, considering the strongly pronounced and utterly divergent
opinions held as to her upbringing by the four persons who desired to
control her, the only possible course was for the child, as soon as
she was able, to train herself as far as possible.
But there were certain questions which even this head-strong little
girl found settled without her participation. There was notably
the religious question. Dr. Lambert, as we have seen, was a bitter
anti-clerical, an aggressive agnostic of the old-fashioned Voltairean
stamp. Mme. Lambert, Dr. and Mme. Seron were all catholics. And there
gnawed at Mme. Lambert’s heart the painful secret that Juliette
was still a little heathen, for, as the result of her father’s
anti-clericalism, she had never been baptized. To remedy this
omission, without confessing it to her parents, Juliette’s mother
devised a clever and effectual stratagem. Under the pretext of being
present at the wedding of one of her mother’s friends, the little
girl was brought over to Blérancourt by her grandfather. Then at the
end of the wedding ceremony, she was hurried into one corner of the
church and held over what seemed to her a yawning gulf of a basin,
where, amidst her violent protestations, she was transformed, as her
grandfather afterwards told her, from “a poor little unbaptized girl”
into “a big, happy baptized girl.” But this blessed conversion she was
carefully enjoined not to mention to her father, because he did not
like churches.
Whether the youthful convert would have kept the secret is doubtful.
But the opportunity of doing so was reft from her by one of her
playmates, who during the wedding festivities called her, in her
father’s presence, by her baptismal names of “Camille Ambrosine.” This
led to inquiries and to a disclosure, followed, of course, by the
inevitable _drame de famille_. Fortunately for the conspirators an
accident to one of Dr. Lambert’s patients put an end to this extremely
unpleasant situation. And while the Blérancourt doctor was at the
injured man’s bedside his father-in-law seized the occasion to drive
the “little bone of contention” back to Chauny.
Juliette, having been once captured by her catholic relatives, Dr.
Lambert agreed to surrender her mind to their keeping until she had
taken her first communion. And he must have been pleased that Mme.
Seron, with her usual ambitious desire to force the pace in Juliette’s
education, persuaded the Dean to admit her clever little granddaughter
into the Church one year earlier than was customary, at ten instead of
eleven.
“We must furnish the little brain,” was Mme. Seron’s favourite
expression. She herself had never acquired much book learning. But, in
order to educate her grandchild, she for a while put on one side her
adored novels and studied French history, of which she was most eager
that Juliette should take a correct view. That correct view was, of
course, Mme. Seron’s own, and was the contradiction of her husband’s
and son-in-law’s opinions. Juliette’s grandmother taught her to regard
the French middle-class, the _bourgeoisie_, as the salt of the earth,
and the government of Louis Philippe as the only possible government,
infinitely superior to the Buonapartism which Dr. Seron and to the
Jacobinism which Dr. Lambert would have liked to restore.
So Juliette, surrounded by piles of lesson-books, was kept hard at
work till late in the evening, while her grandfather laughed at her
for being a blue-stocking, and dubbed her “Mlle. Phénomène.”
But even the jocular Dr. Seron could sometimes be serious: and he
gravely warned his wife that if she continued thus to press the little
girl beyond her years misfortune would follow.
His warning being unheeded, the prognostication came true. Its
fulfilment was hastened by three weeks at Blérancourt, where Dr.
Lambert talked to his little daughter as if she were grown up, and
by a tempestuous journey home with her mother, followed by an even
stormier _drame de famille_ on her arrival at Chauny.
Juliette fell seriously ill. On her recovery, Dr. Seron, who seems to
have been the only member of the family endowed with common sense,
insisted on his granddaughter being removed from the atmosphere of
school-books and _drames de famille_ to a serener and healthier air.
The child was sent to visit her grandmother’s three step-sisters,
three maiden ladies who lived with their mother, in the heart of the
country, at a village called Chivres, not far from Soissons.
“My aunts! Ah! you must love my aunts!” exclaimed Mme. Adam, as one
day, in the salon at Gif, we talked of these delectable virgins.
And indeed one could not help loving the charming, though eccentric
ladies, _les demoiselles_ Sophie, Constance and Anastasie Raincourt.
They represent a type totally unknown in Great Britain, though I
suspect it might not at that time have been altogether impossible to
discover their counterparts in other French country districts, or
perhaps in remote corners of New England.
The aunts were a bundle of contradictions and surprises. In their
short gathered print skirts, aprons and kerchiefs, they looked like
peasant women, and they worked like peasant women too, at hay-making,
poultry-keeping and fruit-farming. But so distinguished was their
bearing that in their humble attire they had the air of great ladies
in disguise, while their discussion during hay-making of Sismondi’s
_Italian Republics_ showed them to be veritable _femmes savantes_.
Though living in the heart of the country, these original spinsters
took a deep interest in all the literary and political movements of
the town. Though, with their step-sister, Mme. Seron, they were firmly
convinced that a constitutional monarchy was the only ideal form of
government, they did not altogether share Mme. Seron’s admiration
for Louis Philippe. They criticised his policy and approved of the
opposition led by M. Odillon Barot.
In almost every respect Juliette’s life at Chivres was a complete
contrast to her life at Chauny or Blérancourt. Instead of, as at
Chauny, sitting up late over her books and then going to bed in her
grandmother’s stuffy chamber, with the windows tightly closed and the
atmosphere infested by the midnight oil burnt to enable Mme. Seron to
read her romances, Juliette at Chivres, after a day spent in healthy
open-air exercise, lay down with the lamb and rose with the lark,
having slept by herself in a large airy room with the windows wide
open.
Whereas at Chauny no interest was taken in house arrangement, while
picturesque old family heirlooms were regarded as lumber and relegated
to the attic, and any artistic feeling found its only expression in
personal adornment, at Chivres it was just the opposite: Juliette’s
fine clothes were all folded away, and she was dressed like her
aunts in peasant costume; but her natural love of the beautiful
was gratified by the daintiness and artistry of all the household
arrangements, by the handsome old chests and commodes, the embroidered
draperies, the nosegays of fresh wild flowers, and the beautifully
bound books ranged trimly on their shelves.
The intellectual atmosphere of Chivres was likewise entirely different
from that of Chauny and Blérancourt. Dr. Lambert’s heroes, Louis Blanc
and Proudhon, were anathema to such worshippers of the established
order as the aunts. In the light of her aunts’ wide interest in all
manifestations of nature, her grandmother’s concentration on the
merely human aspect of life suddenly appeared to Juliette as intensely
narrow. It was at Chivres that Juliette first acquired that passionate
love of nature which she was later to express so eloquently in her
books. It was at Chivres that Juliette learnt to take an interest in
birds and beasts and flowers, and also in inanimate things, to find—
“... tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in everything.”
In her aunts’ company the simplest actions of rural life acquired
for the little girl some deep significance: watering flowers in the
garden she seemed to be quenching their thirst, gathering fruit in the
orchard she was easing the burden of overladen trees, cutting clover
in the paddock she was receiving a gift from bountiful earth.
For Aunt Sophie even stones and metals had a voice or resonance. She
would place upon a crystal tray various substances differing in form,
some round, some flat, and with a little hammer would play upon them
curious melodies.
While Juliette’s father had brought her up on tales from the _Iliad_,
Aunt Sophie, who was an accomplished Latin scholar, told her stories
from the _Æneid_, which seemed to her strangely like an echo of her
beloved Homer. While her grandmother’s favourite novelist had been
Balzac, the aunts talked to her admiringly of George Sand’s peasant
romances, and vaguely hinted at longer novels by the same author,
which they did not altogether like, but which Juliette would read when
she grew up.
But the greatest contrast of all was the atmosphere of calm which
pervaded Chivres, the harmony in which the aunts and their mother
lived, so different from the perpetual wrangling of Chauny and
Blérancourt. No wonder that Juliette after two months of this
serenity returned to her grandmother a new creature, _in mens sana in
corpore sano_. No wonder that the perfect success of this first visit
caused it to be repeated annually throughout Juliette’s childhood.
Indeed, as time went on, as Juliette grew in years, as the feverish
intellectuality of Chauny and Blérancourt intensified, the summer
visit to Chivres became more and more necessary.
Having done his best to keep his word to his mother-in-law and to
permit her to dominate Juliette’s mind until her first communion, once
that event was consummated Dr. Lambert felt at liberty to educate
his little girl in his own way, in his own ideas, and to make her,
as he expressed it, “his daughter according to the spirit as well as
according to the flesh.”
In his earlier talks with Juliette he had endeavoured to impose
a certain reserve upon his expansive nature. Though finding it
impossible to exclude his beliefs, his hopes and enthusiasms
altogether from their conversation, he had but alluded to them
vaguely, saying, “when you are older I will explain to you such and
such, when you are older you will understand this or that.”
This seed, though sown in an almost infantile mind, had not fallen on
barren ground. Not one of these remarks had been lost on Juliette’s
precocious and naturally speculative intelligence. She was therefore
well prepared to receive with enthusiasm those hopeful doctrines
of liberty, fraternity and equality with which her father now set
seriously to work to inculcate his eleven-year-old little daughter.
On Juliette’s return from Chivres in the autumn of 1847, she paid a
visit to her parents at Blérancourt. And it was then that her father
said to her: “Now that you have discharged your obligations to your
grandmother’s religion, I can speak to you frankly of mine.”
The chief articles of Dr. Lambert’s creed were a belief in human
solidarity and a conviction in the inherent goodness of nature. With
the great Jean Jacques he held society, not nature, responsible for
all the evils which have 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.” While
for the Christian religion Dr. Lambert had little respect, its Founder
he held in the greatest veneration. While Christ came to obliterate
all distinctions of race and caste, Christianity seemed to Juliette’s
father ever raising barriers between man and man. “Christ,” he used to
say, “came to save what he called ‛souls,’ we [the social democrats]
come to save society (_la personne sociale_) by establishing equality,
fraternity, liberty.”
In days when trade unionism was beginning in Great Britain, and
when Proudhon’s teaching was laying the foundations of future
syndicalism in France, Dr. 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.”
At such words the little girl’s heart glowed within her. With all
her passionate little soul she responded to her father’s pity for
the unfortunate, with all the determination of her strong will she
resolved to spend her life helping them.
Though in years to come some of her father’s notions were to appear to
her quixotic, though even then she and her grandmother laughed at his
affecting the workman’s blouse, for example, though as time went on
his extravagance and lack of common sense were frequently to make her
tremble for his safety, she never—not even when intellectually they
had drifted apart—ceased to reverence the breadth of his knowledge,
the range of his charity and his unfailing good nature. The words
_apostle_ and _charity_ ever conjured up before her a vision of her
father. In spite of their perpetual disagreement, even Juliette’s
grandmother would say of her son-in-law: “He is a dreamer, but he is
sincere, and he has a heart of gold.”
Dr. Lambert was indeed one of those intellectual enthusiasts who were
largely responsible for the Revolution of 1848. For these men of 1848
Mme. Adam has always cherished the most profound respect. Though
in after life she came to regard them as childishly ingenuous and
heedless of the possibility of realising their dreams, she has ever
venerated their “passionate altruism,” their “craving to sacrifice
themselves in the people’s cause,” their revolt against that famous
formula ascribed to M. Guizot, “enrich yourselves.” “The men of 1848,”
writes Mme. Adam, “were apostles and saints. Never have there been
more honesty, more virtue, a nobler simplicity. They were no mere
politicians. They were souls in love with the ideal. All those whom
I have known were as sincere as my father ... and to have associated
with them is to honour and cherish their memory.”