DISILLUSIONMENT
“_Petit à petit, la guerre, nos malheurs, la Commune, l’abandon de
la revanche, m’auraient détachée du jacobinisme et de la grande
Révolution._”—Mme. Adam.
“_L’âme de la France est-elle donc catholique, et ne peut-on être
en contact absolu avec elle que par le catholicisme et sa plus
pure tradition?_”—Ibid.
“Something is dying within me” (_quelque chose agonise en moi_) Mme.
Adam had written at the close of her most memorable talk with Gambetta
in 1878. That something was not only her faith in her friend’s
determination to achieve _la Revanche_, it was also her hope for the
establishment of an ideal Republic. To her mind the Republic, for the
sake of whose stability Gambetta had found it necessary to sacrifice
_la Revanche_ and to enter into an understanding with Bismarck, was
not worth having.
“One does not make use of a Bismarck,”[321] Mme. Adam had said to her
friend.
“Who knows?” was his rejoinder. “Perhaps it will be he who will give
us the Republic.”
“Then it would be fatal to us,” she replied. And that this Republic
was proving fatal to liberty and fatal to her hopes she was becoming
more and more fully convinced. “It is disenchanting us all, alarming
us all,” she wrote. “It is disappointing our dreams of greatness at
home and showing itself incapable of any effort towards heroism and
greatness abroad.”[322]
From the time of her rupture with Gambetta until the Great War, Mme.
Adam was indeed what one of her contemporaries has most happily called
her, _la grande désabusée de la troisième république_.[323]
Almost as strongly as of his abandonment of _la Revanche_ did Mme.
Adam disapprove of Gambetta’s virulent anti-clerical policy. She began
to agree with Mérimée, who, though an agnostic, feared lest so-called
free-thinkers might prove as intolerant as the Church. “Do you
think,” he had said, referring to the anti-clericals of those imperial
days,[324] “that these men, if they were in the Government would ever
give you liberty? They are the sons of Robespierre, Saint-Just and
Marat. If ever they come into power, they will follow the example not
merely of the Terrorists but of the Church in its darkest days. For
they themselves, the fanatics of anti-clericalism, they are a church,
smaller than the other but equally dogmatic.”
In his first speeches after the war Gambetta had declared himself
in favour of strict liberty of opinion. But, finding the Republic’s
enemies too often in close alliance with the Church, he had become
embittered against the Catholic party.
Thirty years later Combes’ bitter attack on the Church was to
arouse in many a free-thinker Catholic sympathies. In like manner
Gambetta’s extreme anti-clericalism helped to make a Catholic of Mme.
Adam. Towards the end of his life he tended more and more to throw
in his lot with the extreme anti-clericals led by Paul Bert, who,
adapting to the moment Peyrat’s famous phrase, _le cléricalisme c’est
l’ennemi_,[325] declared _le cléricalisme c’est le phylloxera_.
That wily deist Spuller did not neglect this further opportunity
of stealing a march on his rival.[326] He encouraged Mme. Adam in
the idea that by waging war against the Church Gambetta was playing
Bismarck’s game, and helping the Chancellor to carry on in France the
_Kulturkampf_ he was conducting with so much vigour in Germany. Had
not Gambetta himself admitted that the _Kulturkampf_ had changed the
whole aspect of the struggle against the Church![327] In France, he
had come to regard the separation between the Church and State as an
almost necessary condition of any durable alliance with the Italian
kingdom. “As long as we remain the eldest daughter of the Church,” he
said to Mme. Adam,[328] “the papacy will rely upon our support, and
this will inevitably endanger our friendly relations with Italy.”
Gambetta’s attitude in these vital matters was certainly changing
his friend’s religious point of view. She was beginning to feel that
she could no longer, as in 1866, describe herself as a pagan and an
anti-clerical.[329] Then to oppose the Church had been to oppose the
Empire. Now it seemed to her that to oppose the Church was to unite
with Bismarck. The Catholic traditions of her country were beginning
to appeal to her. “I remembered,” she writes,[330] “how for centuries
Catholic France had been superbly patriotic, how for centuries the
association between God and the King, God and _la patrie_, had perhaps
been more essential than I had ever believed.”
Already she had travelled far from the days of the siege of Paris,
when, in admiration of the nuns’ fearlessness during the small-pox
epidemic, she had reflected, “Ought not my philosophy to give me as
much courage as they derive from their religion?”[331]
By a strange contradiction Mme. Adam’s passion for revenge was
carrying her towards a religion whose Founder had refused to
countenance such a sentiment. But in wending her way Romewards she
was obeying not so much the dictates of reason as ancestral voices,
impulses arising from her subconscious self, beckonings from that
Catholic past which is never far removed from any child of France.
The years 1876 and ’77 were dark years for Juliette Adam. They had
reft from her George Sand, her father, Dr. Lambert, and then her
husband. Dr. Lambert had died early in 1876, while his daughter was
at Bruyères. Mme. Sand’s death occurred on the 8th of June. In the
August of the following year, it fell to Mme. Adam’s lot to perform
a melancholy mission. George Sand, shortly before her death, had
expressed a wish that her study should remain under lock and key for
one year, at the end of which it should be opened by her son Maurice
and Juliette Adam. For this purpose Mme. Adam went to Nohant, where
she found awaiting her a strange and sorrowful experience. When the
seal was broken, there was the study just as George Sand had left it,
with a partly finished manuscript on the desk, with the arm-chair half
turned round as when its occupant had risen from it for the last time.
During those moments the spirit of the departed seemed to come very
near to her friend.
By that time Mme. Adam was a widow. Her husband had died in the
previous May. Throughout her bereavement, there was no one to whom she
turned more willingly for consolation than to Adam’s friend Thiers. He
never tired of hearing her talk about her husband, whom he had known
long and intimately, and whom he had never failed to appreciate. But
three months after Adam’s death, Thiers followed him to the grave.
“Blow after blow falls upon me,” writes Mme. Adam. “Thiers’ loss
creates another blank in my life.”
Her buoyant cheerfulness, however, her unquenchable hopefulness, her
innate optimism would not permit her to remain long a prey to grief
and melancholy. If earthly things disappointed her, if she failed to
find here below the fulfilment of her hopes, the realisation of her
dreams, then she would look elsewhere. She refused to be altogether
disappointed. With Jean Jacques Rousseau she felt that she had wept
too much in this life not to believe in another. Henceforth she began
to dwell more and more on that other world, of faith in which her
paganism had never succeeded in depriving her. With her the unseen had
ever been vividly present.
Her exuberant Celtic imagination had projected itself into the spirit
world. She believes that her grandmother appeared to her after her
death, and that many important events of her life have been prophesied
to her by some soothsayer, palmist or somnambulist. She herself used
to tell fortunes; and, at the close of her evening receptions, to
a few favoured guests, Gambetta, Girardin, Spuller, for example,
who liked to linger after the rest had gone, she would predict the
future by cutting cards. But her own soothsaying must not be taken
too seriously. For she admits she was glad to take this opportunity
of telling some home truths, and giving to her friends useful advice
which, administered in any other way, might have offended them.
Gambetta was frequently the recipient of such counsel. The cards,
for instance, warned him that by a meeting as “diabolical as that
of Christ’s temptation on the mountain” he was risking the loss of
his prestige.[332] He was also enjoined to beware of women and their
advice. Some would dash him into the abyss of ruin, he was told,
while others would raise him on to dizzy heights no less dangerous.
He was bidden to be a lover and a friend, but to choose only men
for his confidants. Refusing to recognise in such warnings anything
but the advice of the fair necromancer herself, Gambetta replied
mischievously, “You are rather hard on yourself. But perhaps it is in
order that you may be still harder on others.”
In the past, the main object of Mme. Adam’s adoration had been _la
patrie_. So it will continue to be until the end. In her pagan days,
after _la patrie_, she had adored the gods and heroes of Greece and
Rome. They had represented to her the ideals of a civilisation which
she regarded as the highest and most complete to which humanity has
yet attained. When Mme. Adam became a Christian the gods and heroes
of antiquity made way for Christ and His Saints, and for Mme. Adam’s
patriotic soul first among the latter is Jeanne d’Arc.[333] For even
now _la patrie_ remains enthroned in the first place in her hierarchy.
Indeed, she has returned to the Catholic Church chiefly because thus
she hopes best to fulfil her mission as a patriotic Frenchwoman. “I
believe,” she said to me, “that a true French patriot can no more
escape being a Catholic than can a truly patriotic Turk escape being a
Mussulman.” Nevertheless, that it may not always be easy to reconcile
patriotism and religion is suggested by the following letter, which
Mme. Adam wrote in reply to my inquiry as to her views of the reputed
pro-German attitude of the present Pope—
“_Abbaye de Gif_,
“14.ii.16.
“.... _Pour le Pape—Je suis catholique, apostolique et romaine.
Revenue aux croyances de ma grand’mère.... Vous comprendrez que je
n’ai pas, si tardive croyante, le droit de discuter les actions
du St. Père. Mais mes vœux étaient pour le Cardinal Rampolla, que
l’Autriche détestait et que la France eut tant aimé! Là encore je
dois me taire. Vous pouvez seulement dire à quel point mes vœux
accompagnaient le Cardinal Rampolla, que j’avais la fierté de
connaître._”
[Illustration: (1885)]
We have seen how Mme. Adam’s father had brought her up in communion
with the Hellenic soul; how in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon she delighted
to fraternise with those enthusiastic Hellenists, de Ronchaud,
Paul Saint-Victor, and Louis Ménard. After her rupture with Mme.
d’Agoult, and throughout all the vicissitudes of the intervening
years, this _Grecque ressuscitée_, as Victor Hugo used to call her,
had never ceased, whenever she met her Hellenic friends, with them
to live and move and have her being in the world of ancient Greece.
Together they dreamed of seeing established in France what they
described somewhat vaguely as “the Athenian Republic.” Together
they welcomed the advent of those young poets, “the incomparable
Parnassians,” whom Ménard fathered, François Coppée, Sully
Prudhomme,[334] Hérédia, Alphonse Daudet, Baudelaire, Villiers de
l’Isle Adam, Anatole France and Lecomte de Lisle. Mme. Adam had been
delighted when Gaston Paris brought to her salon that wonderful Sully
Prudhomme, who from a workman in Creusot’s factory had developed
into a poet, scholar and philosopher.[335] Volume by volume, as they
appeared, she devoured Lemerre’s edition of the Parnassians’ collected
works, becoming every day, she writes, _sauf quelques réserves_, a
convinced admirer and an ardent propagandist of the new school of
poets.[336]
The reserve she referred to was this: she could not bring herself to
admire the marmoreal immobility cultivated by the Parnassians. “_Ils
ne rêvent pas comme moi_” she writes,[337] “_de draperies flottantes
au vent qui souffle du golfe de Phalère ou du mont Hymette: ils
veulent le pli statuaire, moi je l’aime vivant_.”
One, who attended Mme. Adam’s reception when her salon was at the
height of its political influence, tells how eager she was to withdraw
from political discussion whenever an opportunity offered of talking
about Greece and things Greek.
Her three best novels, _Laide_, _Grecque_ and _Païenne_, are inspired
throughout by these Hellenic sympathies. In a delightful article on
_Le Néo-Hellenisme_,[338] Jules Lemaître, that most eminent of French
critics since Sainte-Beuve, bestows high praise on this trilogy
of novels, which he describes as “a rare effort of sympathetic
imagination.” Nevertheless, though in all sincerity Mme. Adam strove
hard to attain to the Greek point of view, a mind so essentially
actual as hers could not fail to introduce a certain modernity
into her portrayal of what seemed to her the Greek atmosphere and
temperament. As Lemaître points out, in these novels every passion,
every impression, every phrase, is obviously three thousand years
older than a line of Homer, twenty-four centuries older than a line of
Sophocles.
Mme. Adam, with her antipathy to everything Gothic, Teutonic and
mediæval, may try to cultivate a dislike of romanticism, she remains
notwithstanding, and her criticism of the Parnassians quoted above
proves it, a romanticist, the child of Chateaubriand and Mme. de
Staël. She may try to ignore the Middle Ages, but she cannot suppress
them. And Jules Lemaître may well inquire whether “if the whole Middle
Ages had not groaned and bled beneath the Cross Mme. Juliette Lamber
would be able to rejoice so rapturously in her Greek gods.” For the
vague paganism of that day depends for its very existence on the
Christianity of which it was the negation. The paganism of Mme. Adam
and her friends was provoked by the Christian’s enmity to all things
carnal. It was a protest in favour of that _joie de vivre_, of that
physical beauty, of those natural joys which the mediæval Christian
had condemned as the works of the devil. When life’s joyfulness began
to fade, Mme. Adam, like so many others, turned to Christianity.
She had always, as she had confessed to Littré at Mme. d’Agoult’s
dinner-party,[339] had the will to believe.
“Would you know how and why I became a Catholic, then you must read
_Chrétienne_,” said Mme. Adam. And indeed this novel describes her
conversion from paganism to Christianity. Here we see how that
adoration of Greece, which she owed to her father’s upbringing had
ceased to be a living inspiration, how it had been relegated to
the past. That old conflict of her childhood between her father’s
paganism and her grandmother’s Christianity recurring, resulted in her
grandmother’s influence gradually alienating her soul from Greece, and
transforming into a mere literary preference what was once a religious
inspiration.
_Chrétienne_ is the sequel to _Païenne_. The two novels tell the
story of a beautiful Frenchwoman, Melissandre. She is married to a
heartless rake, whom she has never loved, a M. de Noves. She has a
lover, a gifted painter, Tiburce. Both novels are in the form of
letters. They contain few incidents. But they tell the story of a
consuming passion, which in _Païenne_ burns with fierce ardour and
in _Chrétienne_ cools down into serene affection. The death of the
husband, M. de Noves, which occurs in a duel at the close of _Païenne_
does not, as one might expect, lead to the lovers’ immediate marriage.
Before the consummation of their legal union intervenes the whole
of _Chrétienne_. For religious misgivings, which have arisen in the
heart of Melissandre, cause her to banish her lover for a while. He
goes to Greece. She remains in France. In the interval, Melissandre
and Tiburce, who had both been fervent pagans, fall under Catholic
influences, which convince them that their Hellenic ideals are only to
be cherished so far as they lead to Christ. In the words of Tiburce,
they follow “the great pagan” St. Paul on the road to Damascus.[340]
And not until they have been received back into the Church of their
fathers do they become man and wife.
In these two books Mme. Adam brilliantly displays one of her most
eminent literary gifts, which she has shown in all her writings: her
passion for the beauties of nature and her power of describing them.
It was their love of nature that had first attracted her to the Greeks.
The idea of race has ever played a dominant part in Mme. Adam’s
mentality. “_Je suis Gauloise, je suis Grecque, Latine, mais rien
d’autre_,” she writes.[341] In returning to Christianity she flattered
herself that she was returning to the traditions of her race, to the
Roman Church which she regards as the highest expression of Latin
culture, and of that Mediterranean tradition, which embodies all
that she loves and respects, and which is the direct antithesis to
the northern tradition, to the _Kultur_ of Berlin.[342] Bismarck she
hated, not only as the conqueror of France and the persecutor of
Catholics, but as the sworn foe of Latin culture. Spuller had told
her that the Chancellor had a horror of everything Latin, that in his
_Kulturkampf_ he was warring not merely against the religious idea,
but against Latin influence in letters, philosophy and art.[343]
FOOTNOTES:
[321] _Souvenirs_, VI. 30.
[322] _Ibid._, VII. 356.
[323] Arthur Meyer, editor of _Le Gaulois, Ce que mes yeux ont vu_,
158-9.
[324] _Souvenirs_, III. 15.
[325] _Ibid._, VI. 128.
[326] _Ibid._, VII. 48.
[327] _Ibid._, 124.
[328] _Ibid._
[329] _Souvenirs_, III. 86.
[330] _Ibid._, VII. 380.
[331] _Ibid._, IV. 119.
[332] _Souvenirs_, VII. 164.
[333] Technically, Jeanne d’Arc is not a saint. At present she is only
“blessed,” having not yet attained to the third and final stage of
canonisation.
[334] _Souvenirs_, III. 106.
[335] _Ibid._, 36, 37.
[336] _Ibid._, 106.
[337] _Ibid._, VII. 404-5.
[338] _Les Contemporains_, 1ère série, 119-64.
[339] See _ante_, 69.
[340] _Chrétienne_, 224.
[341] _Souvenirs_, III. 401.
[342] Hanotaux, _Histoire de la France Contemporaine_, I. 504.
[343] _Souvenirs_, VII. 395-6.