AMONG THE UTOPIANS
1858-1864
“Often in the years that are darkening around me, I remember our
beautiful scheme of a noble and unselfish life and how fair in
that first summer appeared the prospect that it might endure for
generations.”—Nathaniel Hawthorne, _The Blithedale Romance_.
“_Moi qui ait vécu une partie de ma jeunesse avec des cabétiens,
des phalansteriens, des saint-simonians._”—Mme. Adam, _Souvenirs_.
Juliette’s energy was crowding her life with a variety of interests
and occupations: literary work, plays, parties, picture shows and two
distinct sets of acquaintances: Mme. d’Agoult’s rather aristocratic
and elegant republican friends, and a much less fashionable circle.
While Mme. d’Agoult and her associates concentrated on political
reform, coming more and more into prominence in Parisian society was
another group of reformers, the collectivists, who were followers
of Fourier and Saint-Simon. They, placing little faith in politics,
were working for a social revolution. With the latter’s schemes for
humanity’s regeneration, her father’s enthusiasm had already made
Juliette familiar. But we, too, if we would enter into her life at
this time, must take note of these somewhat Bohemian reformers and of
their Utopian aspirations, which, stimulating many of Juliette’s most
intimate friends, could not fail to affect her own mind and character.
After extreme individualism had permeated the thought of the first
half of the nineteenth century, a tendency towards solidarity began to
declare itself among certain bold thinkers. A feeling for association
was in the air. Association of whom and with whom was perhaps not
quite clear. But, however defined, association, or, as we should
to-day describe it, human solidarity, seemed in many enlightened
circles to offer the only possible remedy for the ills of society.
Even such an ardent idealist as George Sand had been converted to this
comparatively new point of view. “Are there not misfortunes that
call more urgently for relief than the boredom of this or the whims
of that individual?” she writes.[75] Louis Napoléon himself, before
he became Emperor, had shown in certain of those pamphlets, for which
he was famous, that he was not unaffected by this new current of
opinion. The feeling of solidarity had declared itself definitely in
the early months of the 1848 Revolution. But its germs must be sought
much earlier. We must go back fifty years to the time when the French
Revolution was shaking society to its foundations. Then there appeared
a man, who, standing apart, aloof from the great scuffle of parties,
entertained the daring thought of reconciling them all and making them
all pull together in a new system. That man was François Marie Charles
Fourier. Born at Besançon in 1772, the son of a tradesman from whom he
inherited a small fortune, Fourier became a commercial traveller in
the grocery line. Then he served for a while in Napoléon’s campaigns.
But, returning to his original occupation, he found employment in a
wholesale house at Marseilles. There his employers instructed him
secretly to throw into the sea a whole cargo of rice which that
firm, in order to send up the price, had stored until it had become
useless.[76] This commission opened Fourier’s eyes to the iniquitous
waste proceeding in modern industry. Henceforth one of the most wildly
imaginative minds that has ever existed outside a lunatic asylum was
concentrated on social problems. To the ideas that resulted Fourier
gave expression in a whole library of voluminous works, of which the
best known is his _Théorie des Quatre Mouvements_. In this welter of
elaborate theorising, wild schemes and absurd prophecies, such as
that the ocean may one day be replaced by a sea of lemonade, and that
humanity may once more develop a tail, it is possible to discover
certain sane and essentially practical suggestions for social reform.
It seems incredible that this commercial traveller, who on one side
of his brain was so completely unreasonable, should have produced
a scheme which has in many respects now come to be regarded as
fundamentally right. Fourierism, divested of its absurd extravagance,
contains the germ of much modern socialism. For Fourier was one
of the first to realise “that social organisation should rest on
a comprehensive conception of human nature.” The first task of a
reformer, he held, is to analyse human passions and to study their
combinations. But Fourier’s psychology, as one might expect, is
extremely fanciful. He discovered twelve major passions which can
be combined into eight hundred and ten characteristic types. No one
of these types can be fully himself, nor reap the greatest benefit
from his labour in a state of isolation or in the state of permanent
warfare, which we call competition. In our present inorganic
condition, legitimate desires clash and may often be called vices.
In the free and communistic _régime_ of the future they will all
be harmonised. Production will be increased a thousandfold by the
association of efforts. Labour will be no longer a curse, for it will
become attractive through the free choice and constant change of
occupation.
The part of Fourier’s scheme which most appealed to his contemporaries
was his ideal community, in which he hoped to embody his ideas in
concrete form. This community he called the Phalanstery.
Juliette well remembered how, when she was a child, a fervent
Fourierist had visited her father at Blérancourt. He had talked in
such glowing terms of this ideal community that she forthwith resolved
that on her return to Chauny she and her schoolfellows would lose no
time in establishing a phalanstery. She was, however, reluctantly
compelled to admit the justice of her father’s remark that at the
age of nine and a half she was rather young to launch out on so
complicated an experiment. For, indeed, simplicity was no part of the
root idea of the phalanstery. This may be seen from the following
enunciation of his principle by the master himself.
“Since there are only eight hundred and ten characters,” argued
Fourier, “a phalanx of that number (or rather one thousand eight
hundred with old men over one hundred and twenty and children under
four) will be sufficient to realise Harmony on about a square league
of ground. This phalanx would live in a handsome and comfortable
building—farm, workshop and palace combined—called the Phalanstery. In
this association capital and talent as well as labour would have their
proper reward.”
Few of the various attempts to establish phalansteries met with any
success. Fourier himself, aided by one of his most eminent disciples,
Victor Considérant, and financed by a French Député, endeavoured in
vain to apply his theories at Condé sur Vesgres.[77] After Fourier’s
death in 1837, another vain attempt at a phalanstery was made at
Citeaux.
But it was on the virgin soil of America, in the light of the New
World’s sanguine hopefulness and fervent enthusiasm for social
progress that the phalansterians were most confident of success. In
America Fourierism had aroused intense interest. There it had met with
its most ardent advocates and its bitterest opponents.[78] Victor
Considérant, who after Fourier’s death became the chief apostle of
Fourierism, had founded a newspaper _La Démocratie Pacifique_ for the
advocacy of his doctrines. In the columns of this paper in the year
1853, he sketched the outline of an ideal community, La Réunion, to be
founded in Texas on the banks of the Red River. Subscriptions to the
experiment flowed in from all parts of the world. The chief subscriber
was a rich American, Albert Brisbane. He had sat at Fourier’s feet
in Paris. Fascinated by this new gospel, he was spending his life
translating the reformer’s colossal and for the most part incoherent
works, vainly endeavouring to introduce into them something like order.
But, despite its brilliant prospects, La Réunion too was a failure.
Victor Considérant, though a clever organiser, possessed neither
legislative nor administrative gifts. He was an apostle, nothing
more. And when adherents from all parts of the world flocked to the
Red River, they found this anticipated ideal community, not, as they
had fondly hoped, the embodiment of perfect harmony, but a chaos of
hopeless confusion.
Warned by Brisbane’s experience and much to his disappointment, George
Ripley, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others, when they were organising the
comparatively successful socialist community of Brook Farm, at West
Roxbury (Mass.), carefully kept off phalansterian lines.[79]
Thus by the time Juliette came to live in Paris the Phalansterian
Movement had been tried and found wanting. Nevertheless it was
not dead. Its spirit still breathed in the numerous co-operative
experiments, which were being tried on every hand; and one of
these, the famous foundry at Guise, run on something approaching
phalansterian lines, met with considerable success, owing to the
organising genius of the founder, the Fourierist Godin. It endured
until shortly before the Great War.
Fourier’s disciples, when in 1858 Juliette first came into personal
contact with them, had grouped themselves into what was called l’École
Sociétaire, which numbered some four thousand adherents. The school
had its headquarters in the Rue de Beaune, in a shop for the sale of
Fourierist literature, kept by a certain Mlle. Aimé Beuque.
It was to this shop that Juliette, soon after the publication of
_Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes_, was taken by her good friend Dr. Bonnard.
She found Mlle. Beuque an odd creature. A quaint birth-marked,
shrivelled-up little old maid, wearing a rough black serge gown, a big
black poke bonnet tied with broad strings, she had invariably hanging
over her arm, a capacious bag, half satchel, half basket. Aimé Beuque
had known Fourier when he was a grocer at Lyons. Sitting at his feet
she had imbibed his doctrine and become one of its most convincing
advocates, winning for the new philosophy many a distinguished
adherent. For in that poor little wizened unattractive body there
burned a great soul passionately convinced that perfect harmony would
one day evolve out of all our apparently hopeless social chaos.
This little woman so charmed Juliette that she came away from the
Fourier shop feeling that in _la chère petite vieille Beuque_, she
had made a life-long friend. And for many a year whenever she
was downhearted, depressed by the domestic trials which were now
thickening around her, Juliette’s due feet would not fail to cross the
bridge to Mlle. Beuque’s shop, in search of that encouragement and
consolation which the “adorable” little spinster never failed to give
her.
One of the most delightful features of Paris literary society has ever
been the habit of writers and readers to foregather for leisurely
afternoon talk in some well-known book-shop—at Anatole France’s
father’s, for example, on the Quai Voltaire; at his successor’s,
Honoré Champion’s, on the Quai Malaquais, or at Charles Péguy’s at the
office of “Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine,” in the Rue de la Sorbonne.
Mlle. Beuque, too, had her afternoons; _le Jour des amis de notre
vieille Beuque_ was an institution highly valued by Juliette and her
Fourierist friends.
The great and shining light, _le grand homme_ of _Tante Beuque’s_ shop
parlour, was the eminent writer on natural history, Alphonse Toussenel.
His name had been a household word for Juliette in her childhood. Out
of Toussenel’s book _L’Esprit des Bêtes_, Dr. Lambert had told his
little girl many a thrilling tale about the habits of insects. And
when, in their walks, they came to an ant-hill, father and daughter
would both lie down flat while the red republican parent showed the
ants at their work, designating the fighters, the layers of eggs and
so forth, and declaiming loudly against the laziness of the queen ant
as against that of all other royalties.
Now that Juliette made the acquaintance of Toussenel in the flesh she
found him no less delightful than in his books. Though in certain
respects wildly extravagant and greatly given to paradox, in others
he appeared abundantly gifted with common sense. Some of his theories
were almost as curious as those of his master, Fourier. In his manner
of life he was as eccentric as his devoted comrade, Mlle. Beuque.
In appearance, however, he presented a striking contrast to his
meagre little companion. For Toussenel was a fine figure of a man, an
athlete, whose face was tanned by life in the open air, a sportsman in
spite of his love for animals, and also a bitter anti-semite[80] in
spite of his aspirations after social harmony. Toussenel’s attractive
personality and eloquent talk brought into the Rue de Beaune
book-shop an atmosphere of the most brilliant salon.
Toussenel was an enthusiastic feminist; so, of course, he had read and
appreciated _Idées Anti-Prudhoniennes_; and for its charming author he
speedily developed a rapturous adoration. One of his eccentricities
was to illustrate human intelligence by that of animals. He likened
Juliette to the falcon, because in that species of birds apparently
the intelligence of the female is superior to that of the male bird.
To his “falcon,” or _gerfaut_, he wrote ecstatic love-letters. Though
she laughed at her elderly _amoureux_, she kept his letters; and one
of them, she quotes in her _Souvenirs_.[81] It closes pathetically
with this sentence—
“It is not your fault if you hold a larger place in my life than
I in yours. I do not write to complain, but to tell you that,
whenever any happiness comes to you, you may know that one of my
wishes has been fulfilled.
“Yours in heart, mind and soul,
“TOUSSENEL.”
As well as in the shop in the Rue de Beaune, Fourierists used to
gather in the salon of Mme. Charles Reybaud. She was a novelist of
distinction, whom Juliette thought the only contemporary woman of
letters worthy to be compared with George Sand.
At Mme. Reybaud’s Juliette met many prominent socialists, belonging
to various groups. Some were Saint-Simonians, the followers of that
extraordinary person Claude Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825).
This philosopher, realising, like Fourier, the disastrously chaotic
condition of society, had propounded various comprehensive schemes
for its reformation. Saint-Simon’s life had been one long series
of romantic experiences, wild adventures and hair-breadth escapes.
Born of a noble family, priding himself on being descended from
Charlemagne, at sixteen he was a volunteer under Washington. Returning
to Europe, he grew rich on land speculations and stock jobbing under
the Revolution, but was imprisoned at the time of the Terror. In
prison his ancestor Charlemagne, appearing in a vision, revealed to
his descendant that he was destined to be a second Messiah. On his
release, to prepare for the accomplishment of this high mission,
Saint-Simon entered on a course of scientific study and European
travel. He had married; but he divorced his wife in order to marry
Mme. de Stäel, who had recently become a widow. Journeying to Geneva,
he asked the author of _Corinne_ to unite her life to his, for he
pleaded: “You are, madame, the most extraordinary woman in the world.
I am the most extraordinary man. Our offspring ought therefore to be
still more extraordinary.” To such an argument, however, unfortunately
for the human race, this otherwise public-spirited lady turned a deaf
ear.
Having wasted his substance in wild schemes and extravagant living,
Saint-Simon was reduced to poverty. At one time he attempted to blow
out his brains, but only succeeded in disfiguring himself for life
and in blinding one eye. He died in 1825, leaving behind him the
reputation of a crack-brained Bohemian.
Saint-Simon had been fortunate, however, in meeting with clever
collaborators, Augustin Thierry and Auguste Comte. These two eminent
writers helped him to formulate his somewhat incoherent notions, and
to express them in a series of works[82] which exercised no little
influence. Some of Saint-Simon’s ideas discussed in these works,
notably the piercing by a canal of the Isthmus of Panama, have already
been carried out; others, like the institution of a parliament of
nations for the regulation of international affairs, are still in the
air.
The dominant aim of all Saint-Simon’s schemes was the moral and
physical well-being of the least favoured and most numerous class
of humanity. His doctrines had at once a practical and a mystical
tendency. This dreamer, at a time when French industry was still in
its infancy, “had a prophetic vision of modern production, with its
scientific management and its unlimited capacity. He communicated his
enthusiasm to his disciples, most of whom never saw him in the flesh.”
For it was not until after the apostle’s death that the Saint-Simonian
school of philosophy was formed. Its rapid success, its acceptance by
“all the superior and even all the exceptional young men of the day,”
was largely due to the proselytising vigour and organising faculty of
Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, a man whom Lord Morley describes as “the
most wonderful and impressive figure of modern enthusiasm.”[83]
Father Enfantin, as he was called, had only been introduced to
Saint-Simon as he lay on his death-bed.
Barely initiated (_à peine catéchisé_), writes Mme. Adam, this Elisha
of Saint-Simonianism went forth to preach throughout the towns and
villages of France the golden age of the future. Signal success
attended his crusade. There was much in the Saint-Simonian doctrine
which accorded with the romantic humanitarianism of the age. “Its
key-note was love—love and pity for the oppressed, for the poor, for
the fallen woman, for the sinner, for Satan himself.” The service of
mankind was the essence of this religion. For Saint-Simonianism was a
religion. As such, its founder and many of its disciples regarded it.
_Le Nouveau Christianisme_ is the title of Saint-Simon’s last book,
published in the year of his death.
But, as we have said, this new philosophy had also its extremely
practical side. Its adherents preached “the gospel of great public
works, railroads, maritime canals, free trade.” Here again they were
responding to one of the great needs of the age.
A striking characteristic of society under the Empire was the
intensity of its material activity. Industry on a large scale had
begun to develop under Louis Philippe. It had received a powerful
impetus from railroad construction.
One of the most wonderful experiences of Juliette’s childhood was her
first railway journey. When she was ten and a half, her father took
her by train from Amiens to Boulogne. This line, the first in France,
had recently been opened. Juliette was horribly frightened. Everything
terrified her: the snorting of the engine, the diabolical air of the
engine-driver and fireman, the piercing shriek of the whistle, and,
above all, the darkness of the tunnel, in which, she was told, a poor
lady, who had put her head out of the window, had only that morning
been guillotined by a passing train. When Juliette returned to Chauny,
quite a heroine, because she had been in a train, this story told to
her schoolfellows had a brilliant success. That unhappy passenger’s
tragic fate remained for many a long day an object of intense
interest to the Mlles. André’s pupils, to whose inquisitiveness it
suggested all manner of questions.
“Why did she lean out of window?” asked the elder girls. “People who
go on journeys ought to take care.”
“Had she any children?” asked the juniors, “and, if so, were they
present?”
And when Juliette replied that they were, the horror was indescribable.
Juliette’s fame as a train traveller, however, soon faded, for so
rapid was the spread of railway construction throughout France
that train journeys soon became every-day occurrences. Chauny was
before long united by a railway line to Paris, which Haussman was
rapidly rendering almost unrecognisable. And in all this mechanical
activity the Saint-Simonians were playing a prominent part. With them
originated many industrial enterprises: the Saint-Simonian Pereires
founded the _Magasin du Louvre_ and the General Transatlantic Company.
Father Enfantin himself, a capable railroad administrator, was the
first to conceive the project of the Suez Canal.
Mme. Adam inclines to the opinion that as employers the
Saint-Simonians were inferior to the Fourierists; for the latter
practised division of profits among employers and employed, whereas
the Saint-Simonians showed a tendency to exploit their workers. They
encouraged trusts. Their system Benjamin Constant described as _le
papisme industriel_.
By the time that Juliette came to Paris the Saint-Simonians had split
up into two sects. The scission had first declared itself during the
Revolution of 1830, when Enfantin insisted on standing aloof from
politics, while his colleagues, Bazard and Rodrigues, declared that
the Master’s teaching rendered it incumbent upon them to take an
active part in political affairs. Further contention occurred over the
relations of the sexes. Enfantin declared himself the apostle of free
love, Bazard and Rodrigues upheld marriage; and it was on this point
that the Saint-Simonians finally separated into a school which was
entirely political and philosophical—that of Bazard and Rodrigues—and
the so-called church of Enfantin, which represented the mystic and
individualist side of the Saint-Simonian doctrine.
Enfantin and such followers as remained to him, only forty in number,
left the Rue Taitbout, which had been the Saint-Simonian headquarters,
and went off to the suburb Menilmontant, where they established a
settlement. Singing songs especially composed for them, and attired in
tam-o’shanters and light blue dalmaticas, the brethren, most of whom
were university students, cultivated the ground under the supervision
of Father Enfantin, who wore a scarlet robe with a violet girdle and
a large metal necklace, each link of which represented one of his
disciples.
Father Enfantin and his followers lived in the hope of the coming
of a feminine Messiah, who, in conjunction with the Father, was to
redeem the world. But their labours were interrupted and their hopes
dashed to the ground by the intervention of justice. In the columns of
the Saint-Simonian newspaper, _Le Globe_, the Father had enunciated
his views of marriage and sexual morality, with the result that he
found his settlement at Menilmontant broken up, and himself (in 1832)
condemned to a year’s imprisonment. It was on his release that he went
to Egypt and studied the feasibility of cutting a canal through the
Isthmus of Suez.
When Juliette published her _Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes_ Father
Enfantin was back again in Paris acting as director of the Paris-Lyons
Mediterranée Railway. Struck by the cleverness of Juliette’s first
book, he sent two of his followers to invite the young authoress to
a Saint-Simonian banquet. But she thought it prudent to refuse the
invitation, having heard that the Father regarded her in the same
light as his Master had regarded Mme. de Staël, viz. as a possible
feminine Messiah, who with the Father should make all things new.
“Enfantin,” remarks Juliette, “at the age of sixty-two, was somewhat
late in discovering his fellow-saviour,” though for her at twenty-two
the discovery was premature, for she did not feel herself ripe for so
exalted a mission. “Just think what I was expected to bring to the
world!” she exclaims. “Nothing less than the golden age!”
Though Juliette had refused the invitation to the banquet, she
permitted her friend Arlès Dufour to take her to one of Enfantin’s
evening receptions, where she found him assisted by a stout and comely
lady. Arlès Dufour had been one of those who had brought her the
invitation to the Father’s banquet. From the first he had taken a
fatherly interest in the young Mme. Lamessine; and she felt drawn to
him by a sentiment of filial devotion which never left her. He must
indeed have been an attractive character. An ardent Saint-Simonian, a
pacifist, an advocate of women’s rights and an Anglophil, he was the
friend of John Stuart Mill and Richard Cobden. “It is charming to see
him, at sixty-five, with his heart still running off with his head,”
writes Cobden in 1860.[84] “He would not allow the word ‛obey’ to be
used by women in the marriage ceremony, and has other very rebellious
notions.”
Though in practice a staid citizen of Lyons, a devoted husband and
father of a family, theoretically Dufour, like his master, Enfantin,
believed in free love. This was the only point on which he and his
young friend Juliette disagreed. “Woman needs a certain dignity,”
she argued, “which can never be hers if she violates convention and
neglects her duty to society.”
Arlès Dufour, a convinced free trader, was deeply interested in
his friend Cobden’s mission to Paris, for the purpose of arranging
a commercial treaty between France and England. During these
negotiations, Arlès, who was regarded as an authority on free trade,
was more than once consulted by the Emperor, and at a restaurant
dinner in the autumn of 1860 he entertained Juliette, Mme. Reybaud,
Girardin and some Saint-Simonian friends with the story of his
imperial audiences. Unlike most of Juliette’s acquaintances, Dufour
was an Imperialist. But he had spoken rather freely to Napoléon on the
subject of his Saint-Simonian faith and his dreams for the future.
Thereupon the Emperor had remarked, “Don’t you think, M. Arlès, that
people may not be far wrong when they call you a crank?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Arlès Dufour, “I am a crank, but your Majesty
knows it is only the cranks who succeed.”
The Emperor laughed loudly; then he rose and said: “Go, you bold man,
and don’t return until to-morrow at two o’clock.”
At the same restaurant dinner the talk fell on the Suez Canal, which
had been begun two years earlier. The Saint-Simonians were aggrieved
by Ferdinand de Lesseps’ appropriation of an idea which they regarded
as the property of their sect. Girardin argued that de Lesseps had
conceived the idea independently; that it was he who had communicated
it to Saïd Pasha, who had received it with enthusiasm, and that de
Lesseps alone could carry the project through, particularly in the
face of England’s opposition. Lord Palmerston, always suspicious of
Napoléon’s designs, was, as Girardin remarked, conducting a veritable
campaign against the making of the canal.
“Come, Arlès,” said Girardin. “You know how malicious Palmerston can
be when it is a question of any French enterprise. Your friend Cobden
has suffered enough from that. Palmerston’s campaign against the canal
ought to make you support de Lesseps instead of attacking him.... When
de Lesseps comes to Paris I will take you to him, and you are too much
of a Frenchman not to say, ‛Succeed, and you will have deserved well
of the Saint-Simonian School in France.’”
Thus did this wily journalist of a Girardin win Arlès Dufour to
his side. But with the other Saint-Simonians present he was not so
successful; and one of them, who had a prophetic soul, was heard to
mutter: “We shall see. But if the canal is a failure it will remain
French; if it succeeds the English will buy it, as they buy everything
that is worth buying.”
It was in this year, 1860, that Mme. Lamessine published her second
volume, _Mon Village_,[85] a series of charming rural sketches,
stories, dialogues, quaint old country ballads put into the mouth of
a village weaver. From the beginning to the end of this little book,
one breathes the atmosphere of the Picard countryside, when it was
still remote, before railways and motor-cars had brought it within
reach of the capital. Juliette had written the book at the suggestion
of George Sand, who, replying to a letter in which Juliette had said
that the days spent at her village of Blérancourt were the happiest of
her life, enjoined her to write her memories while they were fresh.
“Your title is found,” she added, “Mon Village.” The publishers
were, by a curious irony of fate, Hetzel and Lévy, the very two who
had most emphatically refused her first book. M. Lamessine, having
taken advantage of the power given him by the Code Napoléon, had
appropriated the profits of her earlier publications. Juliette now, at
Hetzel’s suggestion, by dropping the last letter of her maiden name,
made use of the pseudonym “Juliette Lamber.” “It is a clever trick,”
said her husband. “But I will make you pay for it.”
Juliette’s domestic life was growing steadily more and more unhappy.
Arlès Dufour, her _bon père_, as she called him, advised her to
separate from her husband. But to such a course Dr. Lambert was
strongly opposed. However, the two fathers—the adopted and the natural
one—met at Chauny. There Arlès, “the white-haired old gentleman,” whom
little Alice described as _un bon génie_, arranged everything, and for
a time Juliette gave up her life in Paris and returned to her parents’
home.
Mme. d’Agoult approved of the course her young friend had taken. And
Juliette for some months devoted herself entirely to her literary
work. She was writing her third volume, a study of a Chinaman,
who visits Europe and somewhat in the manner of the travellers
in Montesquieu’s _Persian Letters_ compares Eastern with Western
civilisation. Under the title of _Un Mandarin_ this book appeared in
the same series as _Mon Village_, before the end of the year 1860.
Juliette at Chauny, now that the railway line had been opened, was
not altogether isolated from her beloved Paris. Her friends were able
to come and visit her on Sundays. Hetzel on his way to Brussels made
a point of calling at Chauny; and Juliette herself sometimes went to
town.
On one occasion she went to Paris to visit her friend Eugène
Pelletan,[86] who was in Sainte Pélagie prison. The Imperial
Government always kept a watchful eye on the press; and Pelletan had
been sentenced to three months imprisonment for an article attacking
the Government, entitled _La Liberté comme en Autriche_, which had
appeared in the _Courier du Dimanche_.
This was the first time that Juliette had been in a prison. The visit
left an impression of horror on her mind, which obsessed her for
many weeks. Pelletan took her to see one of his fellow-prisoners,
that famous “monomaniac of conspiracy, Blanqui, who spent half his
political life in the prisons of four different _régimes_.” Juliette
respected and pitied Blanqui as a martyr to Republicanism and the only
kind of martyr with whom she could ever sympathise, the kind that
returns blow for blow. Passive resistance never appealed to Juliette’s
rebellious spirit. Not even now, when she has become a Christian, does
she believe in the doctrine of turning the other cheek. In Blanqui she
found all the bitterness and disillusionment of the defeated rebel.
When she offered him Daniel Stern’s _History of_ that _Revolution of
1848_, in the first months of which he had played a prominent part, he
seemed to regard it as an insult and refused even to touch the volume.
Juliette returned to Chauny depressed and ill. She had contracted a
severe cold, which speedily developed into hæmorrhage of the lungs.
She concealed this alarming symptom from her parents, however, and
made an excuse to return to Paris, where she saw her doctor, not Dr.
Bonnard, but a throat specialist, a Dr. Cabarrus, whom she had lately
been in the habit of consulting. He thought so seriously of her case
that he hurried her off to the South of France at once. From Paris
to Cannes in those days was a long journey. The train took a day and
night to reach Toulon, which was the terminus. Then before Cannes was
reached there were two days of driving.
The much-vaunted Riviera seemed to this young Picarde at first
extremely dull. In her _Voyage autour du Grand Pin_, a book published
in 1863, she writes: “I loathe travelling. I love the things I know,
old books, old friends, familiar landscapes, familiar melodies,
familiar enthusiasms.... I feel much worse at Cannes than I did at
Paris, and I can’t forgive the people who are for ever praising
Provence.... What has happened to the sun? I have been asking. I am
told that it will soon come out. I wait. If you have heard any news
of Phœbus do be kind enough to send me a telegram. I fear that some
accident may have befallen him. Perhaps a seal may have devoured him
over there at the back of the sea, where he is said to set in this
country.”
But it was as she had been told, she had not long to wait, Phœbus
Apollo soon rose radiant from the sea; and with the glorious sun of
Provence returned Juliette’s health and spirits.
Introductions from the north speedily surrounded her with interesting
acquaintances: her physician, Dr. Maure, the friend of Thiers; Dr.
Maure’s friends, Prosper Mérimée and Victor Cousin; Jean Reynaud,
an eminent Saint-Simonian, but not of Enfantin’s group. At Jean
Reynaud’s villa, la Bocca, she met Lord Brougham. Mme. Reynaud, one of
Chopin’s most accomplished pupils, entranced Juliette by her rendering
of Beethoven. Jean Reynaud took her long rambles. In one of these he
related how he had come to leave Enfantin, having found his views on
sexual morality quite impossible.
Next winter, when Juliette returned to Cannes, her little Alice, now
seven and a half, came with her and joined in these rambles at her
mother’s side. Jean Reynaud was amused by Juliette’s respect for her
daughter’s personality. For Mme. Lamessine, mindful of the suffering
endured in her own childhood through the proselytising ardour of her
grandmother and father, was careful not to impose on Alice any of her
own ideas. With regard to fundamental things Juliette would say to the
child: “Grandfather thinks so and so, my view is such and such. You
must form your own opinion.”
The first time Jean Reynaud heard this kind of conversation he burst
out laughing, and was about to repeat the phrase in jest, when
Juliette stopped him with a look, and sending her little girl away to
pick some flowers, said: “Joke with me as much as you like, but not
before her. Remember she has only me to respect.”
So charmed was the young author with her life at Cannes, so beneficial
for her own health and her daughter’s did she find the climate of
Provence, that, before the end of her second winter there, she had
persuaded her father to buy a building site on the Golfe Juan; and
before her return to the north in the spring of 1862, the walls of her
villa of Bruyères were already rising.
Dr. and Mme. Lambert were thinking of selling their house at Chauny,
in order to spend the summer months with their daughter in a Paris
flat and their winters on the shore of the Mediterranean.
The winter of 1862-3 found Juliette and Alice installed in their villa
of Bruyères. Mme. de Pierreclos was their first visitor. Dr. Maure
called frequently, always bringing with him his last letter from his
friend Thiers, which he was proud to read to his friends at Bruyères.
But, alas! he by whose advice Juliette had settled on the Golfe Juan,
Jean Reynaud, her “third father,” as she called him, was no more. He
had died in Paris, during the summer, after a surgical operation.
His loss left his adopted daughter disconsolate. Her book _Mon Voyage
autour du Grand Pin_ she dedicated to his memory; for every one of
its pages, she writes, had been inspired by their walks and talks at
Cannes.
Dr. Lambert, when he came to Bruyères, was as charmed as his daughter
and granddaughter with the villa and its surroundings. He was
delighted with the garden which Juliette had planned. But, above all,
he was enraptured by the Mediterranean, which he saw for the first
time, and by the view of the island of Corsica in the distance.
Gazing upon this lovely prospect, the fervent classicist cried: “Ah!
this is Greece. And to think that I could ever have imagined that I
understood Homer and all he described! Why, I must read him again,
in the light of this new experience. And I will begin this very day.
Juliette, have you our old Homer here? If not, I must go and buy a
copy at Cannes, at Nice, or even in Corsica, if need be.”
Henceforth Dr. Lambert had no hesitation as to leaving Chauny. He
wrote to his wife that the house must be sold. Juliette, as soon as
the winter months were past, returned to Paris to look for a flat.
Dr. Lambert, _le vieil étudiant_, as his daughter called him, would
have liked to settle in the Latin quarter, but Alice was bent on the
Rue de Rivoli, opposite the Tuileries Gardens, where she loved to
play. And it was Alice who had her way. Besides, as Juliette explained
to her father, all Revolutions began in the Rue de Rivoli, and a flat
in that street would be like a place in the stalls at the theatre.
FOOTNOTES:
[75] _Lettres à Marcie_, III. (1837).
[76] _Biographie Générale_ under “F. M. C. Fourier.”
[77] With regard to this phalanstery there is a slight discrepancy in
Mme. Adam’s _Souvenirs_. According to vol. i. p. 342, Condé was the
phalanstery which her father, during her childhood, wished to join,
whereas according to vol. ii. p. 136, that phalanstery was Guise.
Probably Guise is correct. For the Condé movement had been abandoned
before Juliette was born.
[78] Among the latter was Donald McLaren, author of a virulent
diatribe against Fourierism, published at Caledonia, Livingstone
County, in 1844, entitled _The Boa Constrictor_, in which Fourier’s
gospel is denounced “for the licentiousness of its principles, its
hypocrisy and sinister aims.” In this connection it should be noticed
that, as a concession to the prejudices of the times, Fourier never
attempted to give practical application to his theories as to the
relations between the sexes, to that “Phanerogamy” which is but
another name for promiscuity.
[79] Founded in 1841, the Brook Farm Community broke up in 1847. In
his delightful story, _The Blithedale Romance_, Hawthorne describes
this settlement.
[80] Author of _Les Juifs, Rois de l’Epoque_, 1844.
[81] _Souvenirs_, II. 216.
[82] _La Réorganisation de la Société Européenne, l’Industrie ou
Discussions politiques, morales et philosophiques_ and others.
[83] Morley, _Life of Cobden_, 1910 ed., 760.
[84] Morley, _Life of Cobden_, ed. 1910, 830.
[85] _Mon Village_, Collection Hetzel, Michel Lévy Frères, Paris;
Méline, Cans et Cie, Brussels.
[86] See _ante_, 57.