FIRST MARRIAGE AND PARIS
1849-1858
“_Je vais devenir quelqu’un. J’irai à Paris._”—Mme. Adam, _Roman
de mon Enfance_.
It will be seen from the events recorded in the last chapter that
Juliette at thirteen was both mentally and morally much more developed
than a young English girl of eighteen or even twenty. Children in
France, largely because they associate constantly with their elders
instead of being relegated to the nursery, grow up more quickly than
in England. A little French girl often is quite a little woman. She
will go with her mother to pay calls, and at home help her mother to
entertain visitors. The system in vogue in Juliette’s childhood of
marrying girls at fifteen or sixteen naturally favoured their early
development. The early marriage was the outcome of the _mariage de
convenance_, which was more general in Juliette’s youth than now. When
marriages were arranged by the family it was unnecessary to wait until
the young people, the bride at any rate, was old enough to choose
wisely for herself. Though it would not have been admitted that girls
were married against their will, though their consent to the marriage
was generally asked, not by the aspirant, usually, but by the girls’
parents, it was a mere matter of form, everything having been settled
beforehand. Moreover, the girl in question, when appealed to in this
perfunctory manner, was not encouraged to consult her heart. Indeed,
that very uncertain and awkward factor is not supposed to intervene
in what is known as the real French marriage. It is essentially a
business affair, a matter of social position and of pounds, shillings
and pence. We shall find, for instance, that in arranging a marriage
for her granddaughter, Mme. Seron’s chief concern was that Juliette
should have an establishment in Paris. This, in the first place,
would give her an opportunity of displaying to full advantage her many
gifts, and, secondly, would enable her fond grandmother to shine in
metropolitan circles, for Mme. Seron hoped to make some arrangement
whereby she could for a considerable part of the year reside with her
granddaughter.
Juliette was not married until she was sixteen. But, as we have
seen, no sooner had she entered her teens than her grandmother and
father began—in divergent directions, of course—to make plans for her
alliance.
It was about this time, that the parents of young X——, a youth of
seventeen, proposed to Mme. Seron that in a few years he should marry
Juliette. The following year brought a renewal of this proposal and
also a second offer of marriage from another quarter. Dr. Lambert
refused to listen to either of these requests for his daughter’s
hand. His persistence in his idea of a working-class marriage for his
daughter drove his mother-in-law into a frenzy and produced another
_drame de famille_. Mme. Seron threatened her son-in-law with the
gendarmes if he attempted to carry out his nefarious scheme. Dr.
Lambert threatened to take Juliette abroad out of her grandmother’s
reach. But in the end Mme. Seron conquered, and Dr. Lambert went off
in a towering rage. For several months he ceased to visit Chauny.
Juliette, who had now grown into a handsome girl, had already
attracted considerable attention at Chauny. Those who are privileged
to know her now, in her declining years, can see how lovely she must
have been in her youth. “She has had that singular good fortune ...,”
writes one of her friends to-day, “to have been adorably beautiful
(_adorablement belle_).”[26] The delicately moulded features, the
animated expression, the satirical glance, the dignified bearing,
the vivacious manner, which at eighty never fail to charm, must have
indeed been dazzling in her far-off girlhood. In a word, Juliette
Lambert was as gifted physically as mentally. No wonder that when,
wearing a pretty blonde cap with pink roses, and escorted by her
grandfather and an old friend, Blondeau, who lived in the same house,
she made her first appearance at the Chauny theatre, there was quite a
sensation, although when she returned her grandmother had to scold her
for having marred her beauty by weeping over the play.
The quarrel between Mme. Seron and her son-in-law having died down,
Juliette was permitted to spend the Christmas of 1850, and to stay on
into the New Year, at Blérancourt.
It was during this visit that she made the acquaintance of the man
who was to be her first husband. She was told one day that her father
expected a friend to lunch, that the guest was an advanced republican
and a Comtist to boot. This was the first time that Juliette had heard
that name of Comte, which she was to learn to know only too well
later. The guest came. He was a barrister (_avocat_) at the Paris
Court of Appeal. But he lived at Soissons, where he was conducting a
series of law-suits on behalf of an aunt. His name was Lamessine. He
was of the south Italian type, with dark eyes, olive skin and shining
black hair, for his grandfather had been a Sicilian who had settled
in France and been naturalised during the Revolution. Dr. Lambert’s
visitor was reputed a man of talent. His brilliant conversation
pleased Juliette; but she detested the scepticism which led him to
maintain that good is merely the necessary balance to evil, and
that society must grow increasingly corrupt until it produces a new
“vegetation.” Against such doctrines Juliette could not refrain from
protesting. There was an animated discussion between the Sicilian,
who believed in nothing, and his host’s idealist daughter, who was
ready to believe in everything that was good. The guest departed
with the words, “And I hope you bear me no grudge, Mademoiselle _la
Batailleuse_.” “I only pray,” she replied, “that Heaven may reveal to
you some knowledge, however slight, of the good and the beautiful.”[27]
In the spring, while Juliette was visiting her aunts, M. Lamessine
came to Chivres. There, though he found _La Batailleuse_ more charming
than ever in her peasant’s costume, which by clever contrivances and
adaptations she had learnt to make extremely becoming, he met with
a cold welcome from the aunts and was not encouraged to return. In
June, however, while Juliette was at Blérancourt, he came to see her
again. Political affairs were moving towards Napoléon’s December
_coup d’état_ and the empire which Dr. Seron had so persistently
prophesied. There was a mysterious meeting at Dr. Lambert’s. And the
next day Juliette’s father said to her, “The crisis is grave; but we
have with us a man in whose veins flows the blood of the carbonari. He
will do something.” That man was M. Lamessine.
In December the barrister came to plead at Chauny. He presented
a letter of introduction to Dr. and Mme. Seron. They, unlike the
aunts, received him most cordially. Having been invited to dinner, he
told Juliette that, influenced by her arguments he had become less
sceptical. She did not believe him. She was vaguely conscious of some
ulterior motive in his words. She felt ill at ease and left the salon
early. On the morrow her grandmother announced that M. Lamessine had
asked for her hand in marriage, that his treatment of the important
matter of settlements was satisfactory, and that he was willing for
Mme. Seron to spend every winter with her granddaughter and her
husband when they should go to live in Paris.
But Juliette was not the kind of young person thus to be married out
of hand and merely to please her grandmother. She was thunderstruck
at such an announcement. She would not dream, she protested, of
marrying a man who was twice her age. In vain did Mme. Seron plead
that M. Lamessine was _très bien_, that his coming was providential,
that resembling feature for feature one of the heroes of her
favourite novelist Balzac, he could not fail to be the most suitable
of husbands. “You must admit that I am right, Juliette,” she said,
and forthwith she took down the volume in question and read the
description. But even this striking likeness failed to reconcile
her recalcitrant granddaughter to the match. Juliette appealed to
her grandfather and to her old friend Blondeau, to save her from so
uncongenial a mating, but to no purpose, for Mme. Seron had already
won them over to her side. There was, however, one member of the
family who would be less easy to convince. And Juliette, as was her
custom, called in Blérancourt to redress the balance at Chauny.
Dr. Lambert, knowing more about the proposed bridegroom than his
mother-in-law, was horrified at the idea of his marrying his daughter.
A few days later when he and his wife came over to Chauny, he was
aghast to find how far things had gone. He would, he declared, never
give his consent to the marriage.
Throughout the succeeding months there followed a long-drawn-out war
of words, enlivened by perpetual _drames de famille_. At one time
Juliette was forcibly carried off by her father to Blérancourt, then
brought back to Chauny by her mother, who desired the match and kept
her at Chauny out of her father’s influence. He, unhappy man, worn out
by domestic grief and political disappointment, fell ill, and during
his illness once again narrowly escaped arrest. Finally, his wife and
mother-in-law broke down his resistance. By their importunity they had
rendered his life unbearable. In a moment of passion he seems to have
said: “Very well, do what you will,” then to have given his formal
consent, without which they could do nothing, and to have signed the
fatal document which sealed Juliette’s unhappiness. Almost immediately
Dr. Lambert repented; but it was too late, and all he could do was to
signify his disapproval by absenting himself from the wedding.
The unhappy subject of so much dissension had been reduced almost to
welcome marriage even with so uncongenial a mate as M. Lamessine as
one way of escape from perpetual family quarrels.
But alas! experience proved that Dr. Lambert’s objections to the union
had been only too well founded. “The man whom they have chosen for
your husband,” her father had written to her, “is not one whom you can
ever love or who will ever love you.”
With a delicate hand and in a few poignant phrases Mme. Adam in her
_Souvenirs_ passes lightly over her married misery. Until after her
daughter was born, in September 1854, she kept her sufferings to
herself, dreading the anguish which a revelation of them would inflict
on her loved ones. It was during her confinement at Blérancourt that
Dr. Lambert discovered her unhappiness. Some months later, while she
was visiting her granddaughter, it was borne in on Mme. Seron that she
had committed the gravest of blunders in marrying Juliette against her
will. Now that the last instalment of his wife’s dowry had been paid,
M. Lamessine shamelessly avowed that he had never intended to keep his
promise of receiving his wife’s grandmother as an inmate of his home
every winter.
“You imagine Juliette happy,” he said. “She is not. Our
misunderstandings are perpetual. If we had you as a third, what would
they be like?”
“Is it true, Juliette, that you are unhappy?”
“Yes,” she replied, “as unhappy as it is possible to be.”
Mme. Seron rose. She leant against a piece of furniture to avoid
falling, for she shook like a tree which has been uprooted.
She reminded her son-in-law of his promises. “They were only
necessary,” he remarked cynically, “as long as you had not completely
fulfilled yours.”
Mme. Seron left the house abruptly. Juliette never saw her again. She
went home to Chauny to die. In eleven months she was followed by her
husband, Dr. Seron, for, as he said, he could not live without “his
dear scold” (_sa chère grondeuse_).
* * * * *
During the first three years of their married life the Lamessines
resided at Soissons. 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. Look it in the face, this Paris.
One of two things will happen: either you will make your name there,
as your poor grandmother desired, and then the trials of your unhappy
marriage will not have been in vain; or you will break your bonds and
come back to your father. With us you will lead a life, if not happy,
at least free from those marital responsibilities which fill me with
fear for your future.”[28]
The Paris which Juliette visited in 1855 was Paris of the early Second
Empire, “still in the freshness of its hopes and enthusiasm.” It was
Paris of the first universal exhibition, which was visited by Queen
Victoria and Prince Albert, Paris at the close of the Crimean War.
This Paris fully came up to Juliette’s expectations. Never had she
been so impressed save when as a little girl she had caught her first
glimpse of the sea at Boulogne.[29]
“It is impossible,” she writes, “to imagine the complete amazement of
a young provincial beholding Paris for the first time, overwhelmed by
myriads of sights never dreamed of.” From that moment Juliette adored
Paris with all the enthusiasm of her passionate soul. At a closer
acquaintance, during a residence in the heart of Paris extending
through several decades, it has never loosened its hold on her vivid
imagination. We shall find her friend, Gambetta, in future years,
speaking to her of _votre_ Paris.
After a fortnight spent with her husband in an hotel on the Place
Louvois, she still found herself, “uninitiated into the hundredth
part of what she wanted to know.”[30] Herein lies the secret of the
overpowering impression which Paris made upon her: “What she wanted
to know!” Paris was to her the master-key to all knowledge. In Paris
lived the great leaders of thought, with whose ideas her father had
made her familiar, the idealist politicians, whose Utopian dreams she
had made her own. In the streets of Paris had ebbed and flowed the
tide of that wonderful revolution which had found an echo in Chauny
streets, and even in Mlle. André’s _pension_. In Paris might be seen
those exquisite masterpieces of Greek art, the living symbols of her
divine Homer.
Nevertheless a shadow fell even over the radiant exultation of those
first weeks in Paris. From infancy to old age Juliette Adam has always
been ambitious. It was no mere obscure existence in the great city
that she had pictured in her youthful dreams. Hers was to be no diary
of a nobody. Encouraged by her grandmother, she longed for fame. But
alas! her hopes were dashed when she found herself lost in the vast
crowds which thronged the boulevards, when she regarded the miles of
well-filled shelves in the immense halls of the Imperial Library. It
seemed as if the only homage Paris would ever render her would be
the admiring glances of street arabs, who distinguished her as they
had done another Juliette. The young Mme. Lamessine despaired of
ever emerging from the mass, of ever carving for herself even the
tiniest niche in the temple of literary renown. For it was to be a
distinguished writer that she aspired. Already she had quite a hoard
of youthful scribblings, infantile verses which her grandparents
thought wonderful, romances over whose patriotic incidents the
youthful authoress had wept bitter tears, a prize essay, written in
competition with the pupils of the boys’ school opposite her Chauny
home.
During her life at Soissons, it was in study and in literary
composition that Juliette had sought distraction from domestic
unhappiness. Some of her verses, a poem entitled _Myosotis_, had
actually been published and set to music by the cathedral organist.
But it was after her return from Paris that she achieved a success
which encouraged her to hope that, perhaps, after all she might not
pass her life unnoticed.
The popular novelist, Alphonse Karr, was then contributing to the
_Siècle_ weekly articles on social subjects, entitled “Buzzings”
(_Bourdonnements_). A girl friend of Juliette’s, Pauline Barbereux,
used to bring her the _Siècle_ and together they read Karr’s articles.
One of these was on the crinoline, then at the height of its vogue.
After having thoroughly enjoyed himself at the expense of all its
absurdities, Karr declared that there was not a single young and
pretty woman in France with sufficient independence of mind not to
wear it. “There is I,” cried Juliette. “And what if I wrote and told
him so?” For though affecting the full skirt, pretty Mme. Lamessine
had always stopped short of the crinoline. Pauline was delighted with
the idea. So together they set to work to concoct the letter, which
should, of course, be anonymous. The writer, therefore, was able to
enlarge on the charms of this independent young female who refused to
answer to the beck and call of fashion.
“Yes, sir,” wrote Juliette, “there is a pretty woman of twenty who
does not wear the crinoline, who has never worn it, there is one in
France, in the provinces, and that one is I, Juliette.”[31]
Mme. Adam, throughout her long life, has ever been a fervent feminist,
passionately interested in woman’s rôle and position in society. In
her childhood’s desultory reading she had eagerly devoured a volume
on the Fronde. It interested her because women played the principal
part in it. And she was thinking of those _frondeuses_ when she led
her schoolfellows round the playground behind the banner of the social
democratic handkerchief.
It was not unnatural, therefore, that Juliette should insinuate into
this, her first contribution to the press, her own views on feminism,
though they were expressed as far as possible in the style of Alphonse
Karr. To the accompaniment of little Alice’s baby gurglings, she read
the rough draft to Pauline, who, having declared it superb, dictated
it solemnly while Juliette copied it on to magnificent paper. Then the
wonderful document, “_the_ article,” as Pauline christened it, was
re-read, folded carefully, put into an imposing envelope, signed with
a beautiful seal, which was engraved with the writer’s Christian name.
Thereupon, writes Juliette, we _repaired_ (no word less ceremonious
could express such an act) with our precious packet to the post.
Oh, that week, how interminable it seemed! Could it be possible that
Alphonse Karr would reply to the letter? On the night before the
_Siècle’s_ appearance Juliette dreamed of her poem, _Myosotis_. She
interpreted that dream as a good sign. The 20th of February, 1856,
dawned. Would Paris read that letter signed Juliette?... Pauline comes
in breathless, pale with excitement. The _Siècle_ flutters in her
hand. “Juliette,” she cries, “it is all there.” “All.” “And then,”
writes Juliette,[32] “we take two chairs and we draw them close to one
another. We unfold the paper, and each holding one corner, we read.
Yes, the whole of my letter is there. I read it. Pauline reads it.
Not a word has been changed. I burst into tears. Pauline weeps too.
Baby Alice, playing on the carpet, when she sees us crying, begins to
howl. Her godmother, Pauline, soothes and consoles her. I think of my
grandmother ... and I cry: ‛Grandmother, I shall be a writer.’
“I send father my article and tell him how I came to write it.”
This somewhat severe critic replied at length, and for the first time,
it appeared, discerned in his daughter a promise of literary talent.
For the rest of her time at Soissons Juliette read voraciously,
desiring to prepare herself for Paris. Whirled suddenly into the great
vortex of metropolitan life, as she expected to be, she could not hope
to have any time for study. She must, therefore, work hard to fill
up the gaps in her desultory education and to equip herself for the
brilliant career awaiting her.
Finally her hopes were realised. She found herself the mistress of a
flat in Paris in the Rue de Rivoli, with a balcony looking on to the
Louvre and close to the Museum of Antiquities, the temple of her gods.
Her grandmother’s faith in her seemed to be justified.
But alas! as the weeks went on, Juliette herself suffered
disappointment. The society in which she moved was utterly
uncongenial. Her husband’s friends bored and revolted her; they talked
of nothing but business; and her husband himself, when not discussing
affairs, was for ever extolling the doctrines of Auguste Comte, whose
positivism seemed to Juliette the negation of all her idealism. This
disappointment, and the unhappiness of her home life, brought on an
attack of neuralgia. She consulted the doctor of her _quartier_, a
certain Dr. Bonnard, who had already corresponded with her father
about a medical pamphlet, of which Dr. Lambert was the author. The
doctor was quick to see that what Juliette needed was the physic of
congenial society. He himself fortunately was in touch with literary
people. He introduced her to two circles, one poetical, the other
philosophical, where his young patient speedily felt herself at home.
It was through Dr. Bonnard that the charming young Mme. Lamessine
became a member of _L’Union des Poètes_. And it was a member of the
Union, who, on a certain memorable day, took Juliette to see her first
great Paris celebrity. This was the aged Béranger, a poet, whose name
had been one of the household words of her childhood, whose songs
exalting his adored Emperor her grandfather had known by heart.
Never had Juliette seen “a simpler, more charming, more paternal, more
kindly satirical old man.”[33] The poet had read some of his young
visitor’s compositions. And the verdict he passed on them was frank
and somewhat brutal.
“My child,” he said, “you will never be a poet, but you may one day be
a writer.”
Juliette’s reception of this crushing dictum, while showing her
sensitiveness to criticism, proves that her reason had not been warped
by all the extravagant adulation she had received in childhood. For
she bore the veteran poet no grudge for his disappointment of her
hopes. But, from that day, she ceased to write poetry and withdrew
from the Poet’s Union.
As she was leaving, Béranger said to her, “Good-bye, my child. You
will soon forgive me.”
“Good-bye?” said Juliette, “why not _au revoir_? Don’t you like me?
Don’t you wish ever to see me again?”
Shrugging his shoulders and looking through the open windows, he
said, “I think that I shall soon be going up there to see the
_Dieu des bonnes gens_.” He died shortly afterwards at the age of
seven-and-seventy, in July 1857.
Before her reluctant resignation from the Poet’s Union Juliette
had begun to frequent a philosophical circle to which Dr. Bonnard
introduced her. We have seen how from her tenderest childhood her
father had made her acquainted with most of the numerous philosophical
systems—the ideas of Cousin, Fourier, Comte, Proudhon, and
others—which were at that time revolutionising human thought. With her
natural quickness and keenness of intuition Juliette had comprehended
their main principles. Consequently she was not the least confused
by the learned discussions which took place in the salon of her new
friends, M. and Mme. Fauvety.
M. Charles Fauvety was founder and editor of a well-known publication,
_La Revue Philosophique_. Among the chief contributors to this erudite
magazine was the philosopher, M. Charles Renouvier, the author of a
learned work, _Essais de Critique Générale_, in four volumes, which he
was then preparing, and which was not completed until 1864.
M. Renouvier possessed that inestimable gift of lucid exposition,
which is so essentially French. Listening to, engaging in, and noting
down his conversations with his editor, Juliette continued and carried
to a point far advanced for one of her age and sex that philosophical
education which her father had begun. It had long been her habit to
keep a diary and to insert in it accounts of any discussion which
interested her. And it is to this habit that we owe the reproduction
in her _Souvenirs_ of those entrancing conversations which give us so
vivid a picture of the intellectual life of the period.
Throughout Juliette’s early womanhood and maturity there was no one
who exercised a greater influence on French thought than Hippolyte
Taine. His influence was at its zenith in the sixties; but already in
this year, 1857, those who like Fauvety and Renouvier were gifted with
prophetic insight could discern his coming greatness.
The publication of Taine’s _Essais de Critique et d’Histoire_ was a
great event in the circle of _La Revue Philosophique_.
“These young men[34] are admirable,” cried Renouvier.[35] “And seldom
has it been given to forerunners, such as I, to take so great a
delight in their disciples. For I, in a way, hatched Taine.”
“Taine,” said the editor of _La Revue Philosophique_, “will remain
the hope or the anxiety of every philosophical system. He has taken
a scourge in his hands. For the next half-century, he will enthrone
himself on the judgment seat, and he will scathe every idea which
wears out with use. I, as a philosopher, fear him and rely upon him
alone.”
Mme. Lamessine was not the only woman member of that erudite circle.
There was Mme. Fauvety, a clever woman, who had been an actress,
and for a time the rival of Rachel. She mingled intelligently in
the philosophical discussions of her husband and his friends. There
was also a certain Mme. Jenny d’Héricourt, the only member of the
circle whom Juliette disliked. She too contributed to _La Revue
Philosophique_; and she was tainted with that narrow bigotry and
dogmatism which were characteristic of the publication, but from
which the broad-minded Renouvier was entirely free. A blue-stocking
of the most objectionable type, _une vertu farouche_, as Juliette
called her, _la forte_ Jenny was conceited, censorious, pedantic and
an inveterate scandalmonger. Such a person would naturally refuse to
believe that any one so young and pretty as Juliette could have the
slightest comprehension of philosophy. Nevertheless, on one subject
at least the feminine Juliette and the Amazonian Jenny were agreed:
they both detested Proudhon. Jenny had attacked his doctrines in an
extremely able book, which Juliette had read and appreciated; for
the materialistic and purely economic ideas of the father of modern
syndicalism had never appealed to her, and she had fought many a
battle of words on that subject with Dr. Lambert, who admired him.
But, when Juliette ventured to discuss the economist with his female
critic, Mme. d’Héricourt was furious. “Would you believe it,” she
exclaimed to Fauvety, “that young lady actually dares to take upon
herself to underline Proudhon!” It was bold, doubtless, in one so
young and so charming. But Mme. Lamessine, nothing daunted by Jenny’s
gibes, was to be bolder still, as we shall see in the next chapter.
We should convey a very wrong impression of Juliette’s early womanhood
if we represented her as entirely absorbed in abstruse studies and
frequenting only philosophers and blue-stockings. The lighter sides
of life have always appealed to her. As a schoolgirl she excelled
in games, and she has ever loved play as well as work. Now she was
eagerly grasping the opportunities of amusement which Paris of the
Empire knew so well how to offer, especially to one as attractive as
Mme. Lamessine.
Mme. Fauvety took her to the theatre—not to first nights, this wise
ex-actress preferred to wait until the players had perfected their
parts, and it was not until the last performances were announced that
she considered a play really worth seeing. Alexandre Dumas _fils_
was then at the height of his popularity. _La Dame aux Camélias_,
_Diane de Lys_, _La Question d’Argent_, were the talk of the town.
Though Juliette had ceased to write poetry, she had not ceased to
associate with poets. And it was a member of the Poet’s Union who
took her to her first fancy-dress ball, where her escort appeared as
Vercingetorix, and she herself was disguised as the Gallic Cassandra,
Vellèda. She wore a long white robe, confined by a golden girdle from
which hung a gilded scythe. Her arms were bare to the shoulder, and it
was for the first time in her life, she writes, “for even at dances
in those days we wore sleeves.” Her light brown hair with its gleam
of gold hung over her shoulders, crowned with a wreath of mistletoe.
Meyerbeer, the musical idol of the early Empire, happened to be
present. Vellèda made a great impression on this queer little old man.
“Why! she will make me forget my Selika!” (the composition on which
he was then engaged), he is said to have exclaimed. “I am too old to
fall in love with a new face,” and he left the ball-room abruptly.
For months afterwards every morning Juliette received a bunch of
violets with the words, _Souvenir ému à Vellèda_—and one day came a
ticket for a box for the first night of the _Pardon de Ploërmel_. But
she never saw her aged admirer again. Some years after his death,
on the occasion of the first performance of his _L’Africaine_,
Juliette received a ticket for a box in a little casket with a bunch
of violets, tied with a ribbon on which was written _le dernier_.
“She will come to the first night of _L’Africaine_ wherever she is,”
Meyerbeer had said.
Already the Lamessines were in the whirl of political life. On the
14th of January, 1858, the evening of Orsini’s attempted assassination
of the Emperor, while they were shopping in the Palais Royal, a
Sicilian friend, who was with them, was arrested. On the next morning
their flat was searched. But this time there were no compromising
documents for Juliette to conceal. M. Lamessine had no difficulty in
proving his friend’s innocence and obtaining his speedy release.
Those were the days when the long conflict between _sermentistes_ and
_abstentionistes_, which later was to rage high in Juliette’s salon,
was just beginning. The _sermentistes_ were those who consented to
take the oath of allegiance to the Empire, the _abstentionistes_ those
who held themselves completely aloof.
Juliette and her friends at Mme. Fauvety’s were all ardent
_abstentionistes_. They were disgusted when, in June 1857, the first
so-called republican, Émile Ollivier, took the oath, on his election
to the Corps Legislatif. Ollivier’s betrayal of the republican cause,
they regarded as all the more inexcusable because his father, one
of the stalwarts of 1848, was then in exile through his loyalty to
the principles his son had sacrificed. But Ollivier and many others,
who speedily followed his example, had on their side no less a
democrat than Proudhon. That unflinching advocate of the people’s
cause maintained that to take the oath to the Emperor was merely
to recognise the people’s sovereignty embodied in the chief of the
State. Such an argument did not raise Proudhon in the esteem of so
uncompromising a person as Juliette.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] Léon Daudet, _L’Entre-Deux-Guerres_, 235 (1915).
[27] _Souvenirs_, I. 353.
[28] _Souvenirs_, II. 13.
[29] _Souvenirs_, I. 214.
[30] _Ibid._, 16.
[31] _Souvenirs_, II. 25.
[32] _Souvenirs_, II. 26.
[33] _Souvenirs_, II. 30.
[34] Taine, born in 1828, was then twenty-nine.
[35] _Souvenirs_, II. 39.