Chapter I: Begin to Study Housekeeping

When I returned to Chauny my grandmother, whom I found more affectionate, more lovable than ever, said to me:

“Now, my dear Juliette, you shall do what you choose; you shall learn only what pleases you, or nothing at all, if you prefer it; but I ask you to take an interest in housekeeping. You shall have entire charge of ours for six months. You shall order, you shall spend as if you were absolute mistress. I reserve for myself only the right of giving you advice. As you love order, to arrange things, and to ornament a house, it will be easy for you to do all this with taste. If you desire to have lessons in cooking, you have only to tell me. I should like you to realise how much an art embellishes life--that of music especially. The new organist is a remarkably good professor. I know you do not care for the piano, but I should like you to cultivate your voice, and I should be glad if you would try the violin; but, I repeat, you shall do just as you choose in everything.”

“I shall be delighted to keep house, grandmother, it will amuse me a great deal; and I will try the violin, it is original; I will cultivate my voice also, and, since you leave me absolutely free to do as I please with regard to my ordinary studies, that will give me time, grandmother, to reflect about the little I know of elementary things.”

I reflected so seriously that, after a few days, I told grandmother that I would ask my father to draw me up a plan of study, so that while becoming the prospective mistress of a house--which idea fascinated me more and more--I could improve myself somewhat in spelling, arithmetic, geography, and French literature, of which I knew but little.

I suggested to grandmother an idea that pleased her--to have M. Tavernier, the master of the school where my father had been professor, give me lessons, as he was particularly clever, it was said, in inspiring his pupils with a love of study.

My father approved all my plans, especially that of having chosen for my professor a man whose merits he had heard praised.

He began by telling me I must copy five pages of Racine every day, and he read to me the first five pages, pointing out to me the beauty of the phrases, the musical sonority of the words. It was curious that my father, with his exaggerated, ardent political opinions, should be purely classical in his literary tastes, having an admiration only for the literature of the ancient Greeks and their imitators.

What admirable lessons I received from him during the few hours he spent at Chauny! We both worked in my pretty, well-ordered room, always full of flowers, whose old furniture he disliked, calling it “trumpery,” but where he was happy, all the same.

“Literature is the great consolation,” my father said to me; “everything else fails us, that alone remains. At Epidaurus the doctors of ancient times declared that the last traces of an illness did not disappear until the convalescent person had felt his mind enlarge with admiration on listening to the verses of Sophocles and of Euripides.”

My father’s dearest dream was to travel in Greece. “No one would enjoy it more than I,” he said, and added: “Be a Greek, Juliette, if you wish to live a privileged life in the worship of what is eternally beautiful, of that which elevates man above his epoch.”

Always deeply distressed about politics, execrating General Cavaignac, who had, he said, more than any one else, opposed all attempts at conciliation “in order to plant his banner in ground sodden with blood,” my father, alarmed at the progress Bonapartism was making in the country, and who until now had talked to me only of public events, scarcely ever mentioned them any more.

One day, when I asked him the reason for this silence, he said to me: “Since the love of politics is the most grievous of all passions when one is sincere, the most deceptive when one is loyal, the most despairing when one loves justice, leave politics alone. Perhaps better days will be born from our present sufferings. Await them. We, the old, enlisted combatants, cannot leave the field of battle, but why should you enter it?”

The proclamation of Louis Napoleon: “If I am made President, I promise to leave to my successor, at the end of four years, strengthened power, liberty intact, and real progress accomplished”--this shameless lie alone reawakened my political indignation. Grandfather, who read it to us, burst out laughing. The five million votes which had elected Louis Napoleon President of the Republic seemed to me an insane act of the French people. From having heard grandfather say that all Bonapartists made game of Republican riff-raff, I believed it, and was not surprised when he said to us one day:

“My Pretender has sworn to be unfaithful to the democratic Republic, and not to defend the Constitution. The fools believe he has pledged his faith to the contrary! Well! I’ll wager my life that Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, simple Prince Louis, a simple Bonaparte, will be, before the expiration of his Presidency, the Emperor Napoleon III.”

“Alas! he is right,” said my father, who was listening to grandfather, and when talking to me one day later of his sadness, his heart-sickness, reproaching himself for having preached his beloved doctrines so earnestly to me, for having initiated me too young in the disillusions of life, he said: “I implore you, Juliette, banish from your memory this lamentable year. Your youth must not be fed on doubt, your faith in the future must not be shadowed by death. I have weighed men, and I despise and hate them. As to the principles in which I believed, they have received so many blows that I no longer know what I wish or what I do not wish. The Liberals are no sooner in power than they become cynically authoritative. The Republicans have scarcely left the ranks of the governed, to become governors themselves, before a touch of madness seems to enter their minds, and they become Cæsarian. All my beautiful edifice has fallen down, stone by stone. I am crushed beneath it. If, for a short moment, I knew the joy of building it, its ruin has soon followed. I would not at any price impose upon your young life the pain of living amid its destruction. I will not speak to you again of politics, I will not write to you about them. You must take note only of facts, and feel compassion that each one will be a fresh torture to your father.”

My grandmother felt much pity for her son-in-law’s sorrows and disillusions. “He exaggerates, but he is sincere,” she said, “and he has a heart of gold.”

My father’s only consolation was to occupy himself a great deal with me. He advised that, as I had not studied primary branches, I should go back to the sources of our literature. He read me numerous passages from Homer in the text, to familiarise me with the admirable sonorities of our “initiative tongue,” as he called it. He dictated to me, word by word, entire chapters from the Iliad and from the Odyssey, those which he thought the most beautiful, saying to me that we had years before us, and that he would take charge of my instruction in Greek.

“You shall learn with me the history of that nation in which nature incarnated herself to such a degree that she made it supernatural. Your aunt Sophie will teach you as much Latin as is necessary for a cultivated woman to know. She loves and understands Roman literature, and I do not fear that she will reap for Rome’s benefit the admiration I shall have sown in your mind for Athens. At Chauny you will have an exceptionally good professor of literature, who will teach you many things you will never forget, and who will interest your grandmother in your studies, which will take her somewhat away from her novels. All this seems excellent to me, and I do not doubt that, if you desire it, you will succeed in knowing more than all the schoolmates you left behind in your monotonous boarding-school!”

XXXVIII

AN EXCITING INCIDENT

Some months of 1849 passed, during which I acquired much serious elementary knowledge; but all my ardour was spent on the study of Grecian, Latin, foreign, and French literature. I identified myself with the characters of certain works, and acted their parts. My grandparents and Blondeau lived happily, occupied with me, interested in all that I did, amused by the superabundance of vitality which I put into everything, and lent themselves to taking part, as they had previously done, in my most fantastic caprices. When a book pleased me, they were obliged to assume the characters of the principal personages of the book, to speak their language, to discuss their acts, and to take part in imaginary conversations which these persons might have held among themselves. I began to write poetry again--perhaps rather better than my first attempts--and poems naturally were my chief delight, those of Homer above all. When I was at Blérancourt, my father would consent to be called Ulysses, and my mother Penelope, although she sometimes rebelled against the rôle I gave her.

I was Nausicaa. I had a passion for washing, and dabbled in water with delight. My father found me many times before a tub filled with soap-suds, and would address me as “Nausicaa with white arms.” He would recite to me the words of the seventh canto of the Odyssey:

“‘It seems to me best to implore you by caressing words, keeping afar from you, for fear of irritating your heart;’” and he would add:

“‘I compare you in height and in presence to Diana, daughter of great Jupiter; but if you are a mortal, inhabiting earth, thrice happy are your father and mother. I am seized with admiration on seeing you. So did I see one day at Delos near Apollo’s altar a young sprig of a growing palm-tree!’”

And he would continue, going from one verse to another, as it pleased him to select them, and I would answer him, for I knew he loved the poems, so many times repeated by heart.

During my visit to him that summer, my father had a great sorrow, in which I took part and from which he suffered so deeply that it touched even my mother’s heart. His last hopes were cruelly taken from him.

On the 15th of June, he informed me that Ledru-Rollin had, on the 13th, asked the new Assembly, which had just been elected, and whose majority was reactionary, for a bill of indictment against the Prince-President and his Ministers, who were found guilty of having violated the Constitution. Under the false pretext of saving Italian liberty, our intervention had culminated by the entrance of French troops into Rome, re-establishing the Pope.

What overwhelmed my father, and made him despair the most, was not so much the failure of their motion, as the hesitating, ridiculous part played by the last two champions of his opinions--Ledru-Rollin and Victor Considérant--in their attempted appeal to the people with what was called “the affair of the Arts and Trades,” and their rather pitiable flight through the back doors of the school. Were they also worth nothing as heads of the opposition party? Had they no courage?

In July all the trees of liberty were dug up, and my father, who had accepted the function of Mayor in order to plant one of these trees, resigned his office on the day the tree was thrown down.

He then began to condemn, in equal measure, the monarchists and the reactionary republicans.

He was destined to suffer blow after blow.

Since the insurrection of June, 1848, secret societies had been formed, some of which were to fight against reaction, others to prepare the Empire, as the insurrection of the 10th of December had done, and all these societies kept watch upon one another. The Bonapartists denounced, above all, those called “Marianne.”

Perquisitions took place, and were called “domiciliary visits.” The reactionists affirmed that the object of certain of these societies was to overthrow the Republic, which was only a pretext for hunting down Republicans.

The pleasure I had taken in searching for my grandfather’s hiding-places for his money had caused me to remark my father’s goings and comings to the garret, which I concluded must arise from his hiding something there. So I determined to find out what it was, and I discovered a hole between two rafters, which held a large package of papers, lists of names, proofs of the organisation of a society, the members of which had taken oath to fight against the tyrants, to answer the first call to insurrection, etc.

One day my mother said to my father: “You should burn the papers of the ‘Marianne,’ which are so compromising to many persons. Since you do not dare to meet any longer, it would be better to rid yourself of the official reports and the lists, which seem to me dangerous to keep.”

“I have thought about it,” my father replied, “and I will begin to-morrow to convoke our brothers and friends, two by two, to ask their consent to destroy our archives.”

That same evening I made myself a large pocket attached to a string which I could tie around my waist, and which I put on the next morning.

It was time! My father had not gathered together ten of the associated members of the “Marianne” (were there traitors among “the brothers and friends” convoked separately?) before an agent of the Republic, at the head of a commission, came to our house one morning at breakfast-time, and, showing his papers of authority, he began to ransack in my father’s writing-desk, aided by two policemen. My father was overwhelmed; my heart seemed turned into stone. I watched our visitors doing their work, concocting the while a plan in my mind. I even helped them by pointing out things in an amiable way, and I went so far as to say, laughingly, to the agent of the Republic:

“What you are doing is not very nice, Monsieur; it might even be called indiscreet.”

The agent and his colleagues were amused at my conversation.

Then I said suddenly to my mother:

“Mamma, will you let me go and tell Blatier (the gardener, who was looking, frightened, through the window) to place some cider to cool, so that you can offer some to these gentlemen? It is so hot!”

My mother made a sign of assent. She had wished a moment before to go into another room, but one of the policemen had stopped her. They allowed me to go out, however. I told Blatier to draw some water from the well, and I went with him, feeling myself followed by the eyes of a policeman, who was looking out of the window. While the gardener drew the water, I went down into the cellar, and came up with some bottles, which I placed in the pail of cold water. Then I dallied over several things, went down in the cellar again, looked for another pail for more bottles, which I brought up, and I then pretended to enter the house slowly. Then I flew with a bound to the garret-door, and with another bound entered it, after having taken off my shoes, so as not to be heard, for the house had but one story. I put the papers in my pocket, slid down the staircase and entered my parents’ room tranquilly, where the police were rummaging into everything.

My mother, trembling, gave them the keys of the drawers. My father, seated, did not move. I prepared a tray myself, and went outside to have the water in the pails changed. I soon returned and offered some cold cider to our visitors, who were delighted.

They ransacked the stable, the carriage-house, the cellar, and the garret.

When my father heard them go upstairs, he rose, his face convulsed, and I saw from my mother’s expression that she was saying to herself: “The papers must be up there--we are lost!”

I took a glassful of cider and approached my father, always watched by the policeman. He pushed my glass away. I leaned over him as if urging him to drink, and whispered these words to him:

“Don’t let your face change. I have the papers!”

I kissed him, which seemed to touch the policeman’s heart, and my father clasped me in his arms.

Thanks to me, these men had discovered nothing of any importance.

The agent of the Republic said to me: “Mademoiselle, I am glad to announce to you that we have found nothing compromising to your father. It would have been serious for him if we had been obliged to state certain facts which we had been informed existed, for your father’s name figures on the list for arrest, and he might have been imprisoned, even exiled. He has the reputation of being a dangerous revolutionist, and, besides, he is accused of making proselytes.”

“Thank you, Monsieur,” I replied. “You must have a daughter yourself, to act in such fatherly fashion to me.”

The agent smiled, but did not answer me. He bowed to my mother and father, and left.

I accompanied him to the door, and I watched “the domiciliary commission” for some minutes; then I bolted the door, locked it, and went into the dining-room, where I found my father prostrated.

“From the expression of your face,” said my mother to him, “it is lucky they did not find the papers, which must be in the garret.”

My father answered:

“Juliette has them!”

“How did she get them?”

I raised my skirt, and cried, victoriously:

“This is how one can fool those who make perquisitions!”

I told my parents that I had learned the importance of the papers from what my mother had said, and of my fondness for finding hiding-places.

My father recovered from his emotion, and felt great indignation.

“Such a republic,” he said one day, soon after the famous visit, “is more odious to me than the monarchy has ever been. May I see before long those who pretend to serve this Republic of lies, and who, really, only try to persecute Republicans, grovel before one and the same tyrant, and all be crushed together under his heel!”

XXXIX

AN OFFER OF MARRIAGE

I pitied my father for all he was suffering from the bottom of my heart, but had not, in truth, his own Utopian ideas brought about what he called “the lawless reaction”? Grandmother said to me: “Juliette, how can you expect a country to consent to be guided politically by good people as mad as your father? They make public opinion fly to the extreme opposite of their quixotic ideas.” And I agreed with her at last.

During all the latter part of that year and the beginning of the next, I studied very hard, and I recall with pleasure one of my first literary successes. My professor, Monsieur Tavernier, the master of the boys’ school situated opposite to our house, in order to create a double emulation among his pupils, proposed for me to compete with them for a prize.

The entire town was talking at that time of a terrible storm that had occurred in April, and had made several victims, and of which the quiet people of Chauny could not yet speak without fright.

My professor gave the narration of the events of this storm to his pupils and to me as our theme for competition. I had followed and observed every detail of the storm, and had even noted down my observations at the time: the fright of the birds, the trembling of the leaves, the moaning of the trees, shaken by the blast; the terror of the people who passed by, the disturbed heavens, the near or distant sonority of the claps of thunder, the jagged streaks of lightning, the terrible noise of a thunderbolt which I thought had nearly killed me. Thinking the storm over, and stifling with heat, I had sat down in a current of air between two open windows, opposite to each other. The deafening thunderbolt burst and traversed the two windows, throwing me off my chair on to the floor. I described all this with much feeling.

Among the pupils at the school were a good many young men whom I knew, brothers or relatives of my former schoolmates. They were all aware of the cause of my having been sent away from the Mlles. André’s school, and admired me as a “valiant” young girl, an expression frequently used in my behalf in my family, and with which grandmother always endowed me.

I copied and recopied my composition. I devoted myself to it with such intense interest that it gave me a fever, and I was proclaimed the winner by my rivals themselves. One of them came to bring me the news and to congratulate me. I was about to kiss him, when grandmother made me an imperious sign, so I simply thanked him, with warm gratitude.

“What!” grandmother said to me afterward, “were you going to kiss that boy? Why, look at yourself, you are a young girl; you are no longer a child.”

“But, grandmother, I shall not be fourteen before six months.”

“Everyone takes you for sixteen,” she said.

Grandmother sent my father, my aunts, and my father’s family, copies of my famous composition, which she wrote out herself, keeping the original, which I found twenty years after.

From that moment I thought of nothing but literature, and my imagination became intensely excited.

A chiromancer came to Chauny at that time, and my grandmother greatly desired that he should read my hand. He declared that he distinctly saw “the star of celebrity near Jupiter” in my hand, and he added: “I shall see that hand again some day;” and he did, in fact, recognise it twenty years afterward one day on the Riviera, when it was not possible for him to suspect who I was. From that day my grandmother never doubted about my future destiny.

At that time I made my family act the parts of Camoën’s _Lusiades_. Each one of us had his or her rôle; and, for more than a year, my grandparents, Blondeau, even my father, who had become “Mousshino d’Albuquerque,” preserved the character of the heroic personages we had chosen. We intermingled, to our great amusement, fiction with daily life, and laughed heartily when commonplace events compromised the dignity of “Vasco da Gama,” whom I represented.

My grandfather, the “giant Adamastor,” called his pigeons by reciting a passage of the _Lusiades_ to them. We knew the admirable poem literally by heart. And how amusing it was when a cart passing in the street would shake our house, which had become our vessel! What sorrowful reflections we had on the dangers we were running! My _dramatis personæ_ revolted against my demands sometimes, especially at table, where we were all gathered together. I would, on such occasions, quiet my rebels by draping my napkin around my body to recall the flag scene. The mixture of our admiration for the poem and the absurdities of our interpretations was so amusing that it was difficult for us to lay aside the _Lusiades_ to take up Walter Scott’s _Ivanhoe_, with which I was delighted.

My father, just then, thought of leaving Blérancourt. Grandmother’s entreaties and mine prevented him from accomplishing another folly which would have caused him to lose the position he had acquired.

He wished to join the phalanstery at Condé-sur-Vesgres. The deputy, Baudet Dulary, having given a large portion of his fortune to Victor Considérant, to make an experiment of Fourier’s doctrines, my father desired to take part in this trial, which later failed lamentably, but to which one of his friends, of whom I have spoken, lent his active aid.

During the spring of 1850 a theatrical troupe came to Chauny. I had never been to the theatre, except to hear the opera of _Charles VI._ at Amiens, at the time of my first railway journey. I had read a great many plays of all kinds, for I devoured books like my grandmother, but I had never seen a play acted in reality.

Blondeau decided that he would take me to see the drama, _Marie-Jeanne, ou, La Fille du Peuple_. Grandmother disliked so much to go out that grandfather accompanied Blondeau and me.

The wife of my grandfather’s barber, Lafosse, who came to shave him every day, and who lived in the Chaussée quarter, was a milliner. Grandmother commissioned Mme. Lafosse to make me a pretty blond lace cap, trimmed with narrow pink ribbon. They wore bonnets when they went to the theatre at Chauny, but a pretty cap was more elegant than a bonnet.

People looked at me a great deal, and grandfather and Blondeau kept whispering together, and I knew they were talking of me, but _Marie-Jeanne_ interested me more than my own appearance.

I heard people say several times: “How old is she?”

The young men looked at me more boldly at the theatre than in the street, and I saw they were talking together about me, and I soon knew they were not making fun of my cap with narrow pink ribbons, which I feared they might do before I went to the theatre.

I cried so much over _Marie-Jeanne_ that I returned home with my eyelids swollen. Grandmother, who was waiting for me, said I was very silly to have disfigured my eyes in that way. But grandfather and Blondeau calmed her by whispering to her as they had whispered to each other.

All grandmother’s friends, men and women, came to see her during the week following the representation of _Marie-Jeanne_, and told her I had made a “sensation.”

Grandmother could not contain her joy, and she committed the error of writing about it to my father, who also came to see her, very angry. The “family drama” assumed tragical proportions on this occasion. My father spoke of his rights, and said it was his place to watch over me and preserve me from my grandmother’s follies.

Was it possible that she had sent me to the theatre with a comparative stranger and with grandfather, whose eccentric habits, to speak mildly of them, forbade his assuming the rôle of chaperon? Was it not the most ridiculous absurdity to dress up a child not yet fourteen in a young woman’s cap? All the town must pity me and ridicule grandmother, he said, and if she acted in this manner I should never find a husband!

“You are mistaken, my dear Jean Louis, in this as in everything else,” grandmother replied angrily; “for not only has the demand of Juliette’s hand in marriage, that was made to me a year ago, been renewed, but just now, before you arrived, I received another.”

“You cannot say from whom?”

Grandmother showed my father a letter, and mentioned a person’s name.

“One and one make two,” she said.

My father was silent for an instant, and then replied in a vexed tone:

“So you wish to marry Juliette as you were married yourself, and as you married your daughter?”

“No,” she answered, cruelly; “I do not wish to make my grandson-in-law’s position for him. He must have one himself.”

“I shall take Juliette home with me; she belongs to me!” cried my father, in anger.

“I shall keep the child you abandoned, and whom I rescued from the poverty in which you had thrown her!”

“I will send policemen for her!”

“Try it! I will leave you all, and take Juliette off to a foreign country.”

Then followed terribly sad days for me. Assailed by letters from my father, who did not come to grandmother’s any more; by the visits of my mother, who always found a way of irritating me against my father and my grandmother, my life became insupportable.

I did not see my father for several months. All the family blamed him. During the time I passed with my aunts, they, who never had written to him, sent him a letter approving grandmother’s actions, and telling him he had no right to influence my mind with his eccentric ideas; that the majority of those who loved me possessed certain rights from the affection they felt for me.

In one of my letters to grandmother I spoke of this letter my aunts had written to my father, and she was deeply grateful to them for it.

Strangely, their intervention calmed her, and she began from that time to speak less bitterly of my father.

By degrees the quarrel was again patched up. I wished to see my father again. I suffered from my separation from him in my heart, and in the development of my mind. Becoming more and more attached to my studies on Greece, I needed a guide, and no one could replace my father. I told my grandmother how much I missed him, how my progress in the study of literature was arrested, and I laughingly added that she was hindering my future career as a writer by her spite.

One day in the autumn grandmother told me that she would permit me to pass Christmas and a part of January at Blérancourt.

My father’s sorrow was to be consoled, and mine also. I rejoiced at it with all my heart, and it was with transports of joy that we met again. My father evinced so much love for me, he was so tender, so occupied with everything that could please, amuse, or instruct me, that my mother, overcome by one of her outbursts of morbid jealousy, became openly hostile to my father, and continually tortured me.

I was flattered by everyone at grandmother’s; I was humiliated unceasingly at my mother’s. If my father spoke of my intelligence, or my beauty, my mother said I was as stupid as I was ugly.

It seemed to me at that time that I was overestimated in both ways by them, and I began to criticise myself, as I have always since done--not with extreme indulgence nor with determined malice. I am grateful to my mother, after all, for having kept me from acquiring too much self-complacency.

I began my study on Greece again, with delight. My father was not only a professor, he was a poet.

“How can you be such a red republican, with such a love for Marmorean Greece?” I asked him.

“With the Greeks, marble was only the skeleton of architecture and sculpture,” my father replied, “and in Grecian colours red predominates. Besides, there is no question of art in republican conceptions, but only of politics. Art is eternal; politics is the science of an impulse toward progress. I may be classical in my taste in art, and worship what is antique. In politics I desire only new things. When the people shall have heard the vivifying good word, they will understand beauty and art as we understand it. They already appreciate them better than the middle class.”

I cannot describe how my father spoke of the people; the very word was pronounced by him with fervour, almost religiously.

“Papa,” I replied, “I want a white republic, an Athenian republic, with an aristocracy which shall arise from out the masses and which shall be the best portion of those masses. I wish a superior caste, which shall govern, instruct, and enlighten.”

“And I wish only the people, nothing but the people, in which we shall be mingled and melted as if in a powerful crucible,” said my father. “The mass of the people has sap which is exhausted in us; it has a vitality which we no longer possess. The humble class is not responsible for any of its faults, which no one ever endeavoured to correct usefully and intelligently during its youth. How admirable it is in its natural qualities, which so many elements strive to mislead! Why are the upper classes so vicious? Why have they not given the people some elementary instruction before they tried to educate them? They would not then have allowed themselves to be speculated with by wicked and ambitious men.”

The President, Prince Louis Napoleon, passed reviews; made proselyting journeys; the “Orléans,” as they then said, intrigued at Clermont, the Legitimists at Wiesbaden; what remained of the republican form of government suffered assault on all sides.

My father said: “We still have the people with us!” But his conviction disagreed with the proof, constantly made more evident, that the government was eliminating the people by all possible means from taking part in national questions. The patriotic workmen were influenced by those who said they had suffered from the diminished part played by France in Europe under King Louis Philippe, and who did not cease to recall the glorious epoch of Napoleon I.

When I was with my father I was obliged to hear politics spoken of, willingly or not; as I no longer took any personal interest in them, as I looked upon political events with indifference, I did not allow myself to be carried away by them, nor did I enter into discussions, and our life might have been peaceful, or nearly so, but for my mother’s embittered nature, and my father’s frequent outbursts of anger.

The same interminable disputes took place, though differing in character from those between my grandparents. I do not know whether similar disputes occurred in all households at the time of my youth. But I believe people were then more sensitive, more susceptible, more dramatic than they are to-day.

Many years later my life was again mingled with my mother’s and father’s, and it seemed to me that in the reconciliations following these perpetual disputes there entered a sort of excitement of the senses. To weep, to be angry, to accuse each other, even to hate for a moment, and then to grow calm, to pardon, to be reconciled, to embrace and love each other--this all seemed to be a need in their lives and to animate their existence.

My father could not master his terrible paroxysms of anger; he would be in despair every time after he had given way to them, and then would yield to them again whenever he was irritated.

My mother would provoke these paroxysms by cold comments or criticisms, ironical and stinging, such as these, for example:

“Monsieur Lambert’s temper is going to be stormy. We shall not be spared the dancing of the plates and glass at breakfast or dinner.” Or: “The republican gentleman sees things with a bad eye to-day; we shall be in danger,” etc., etc.

As my character so much resembled my father’s, I often felt anger rising within me; but the example of my father, who was naturally so good and so tender, but who when blinded by passion became bad, even cruel, taught me to hold myself in check, and I never, in my long life, have allowed myself to give way to violent temper, except in moments of indignation and strong hatred against wicked people, or against my country’s enemies.

The proverb: “An avaricious father, a prodigal son,” or the contrary, is often used, and there is truth in it; for children, witnessing their parents’ example, take note of their daily actions, which are engraved and imprinted on their young minds, never to be forgotten, and forcing them to criticise and to condemn those dearest to them.

From hearing my father and his numerous “friends and brothers” talk violent, “advanced” politics, as they then expressed it, I had become entirely moderate in my opinions. How many plans for “Republican Defense” were formed in my presence! Some men wished to assassinate the Prince-President; others to blow up the Chamber of Deputies; still others to make the people rise up against the traitors.

There came one day to breakfast with my father a very “advanced” republican, who was, moreover, a “Comtist,” a name that my father was obliged to explain to me, for it was the first time I had ever heard of Auguste Comte. Our guest was a lawyer of the Court of Appeals at Paris, but lived at Soissons for the time being, taking charge of a series of very important lawsuits of a relative. His name was Monsieur Lamessine, and he had the reputation of being a man of talent. His brilliant conversation pleased me, but his scepticism displeased me. He said that right had no other interest than that of being the counterpart of wrong; that morality appeared to him as only forming the counterpoise to immorality. He endeavoured to persuade my father that society must become more corrupted than it was in order that a new growth should spring from it. He was of the type of an Italian of the South, with very sombre eyes, a pallid complexion, lustrous blue-black, curling hair. His grandfather, who came from Sicily, was named de la Messine; he had naturalized himself as a Frenchman at the time of the great Revolution and simplified his name.

As usual, I took part in the discussions, and grew excited over them. Monsieur Lamessine did the same, and our joust was amusing. He believed in nothing. I believed in everything. When I would hesitate, my father furnished me with arguments, sometimes contrary to his own ideas; but he wished to see me come off victorious against an unbeliever.

Monsieur Lamessine left us laughing, and said to me:

“Don’t bear me malice, Mademoiselle the fighter.”

I replied:

“My best wishes, Monsieur, that Heaven may shed upon you a little knowledge of what is right and what is beautiful.”

XL

THE “FAMILY DRAMA” AGAIN

My great-grandmother at Chivres, who was very ill in March, thought her end approaching, and wished to see me. Happily, it was only an alarm, and our joy was soon complete at seeing her entirely recovered.

Under the pretext that he was called by business to Condé, Monsieur Lamessine, who lived at Soissons, came to visit my aunts, as my father’s friend, while I was staying with them. He was rather badly received, and he saw me in my peasant’s costume, which I had improved a little, however, as grandmother would not permit me to be badly dressed, even when away from her.

Attired in gingham, with a printed cotton kerchief, and a Bordeaux cap, I was not uglier in this than in other costumes. Monsieur Lamessine complimented me on my picturesque peasant dress. But the coolness of his reception prevented him from coming again.

Aunt Constance teased me about my suitor, but I grew angry, and told her I had other suitors younger than he, and begged her to leave me alone.

Two months later I saw Monsieur Lamessine again at my father’s. It was in June, 1851. The republicans were plotting a great deal. The President had just made a speech at Dijon, in which he had said that if his government had not been able to realise all desired ameliorations, it was the fault of the factions.

In Monsieur Lamessine’s mind and in my father’s this speech contained the threat of a _coup d’état_.

They gathered together some friends in the evening to deliberate; I, of course, was not present at these deliberations. My father only said to me the next morning:

“The moment is serious; but we have a man with us who has the blood of a ‘carbonaro’ in his veins. He will do something.” He meant Monsieur Lamessine.

On the 1st of December M. Lamessine came to plead a cause at Chauny. He brought a letter from my father to my grandmother, to whom he was extremely courteous.

Asked to remain to dinner, he showed himself much less sceptical, and pretended that my arguments and my wishes had produced a great influence on his mind. I did not believe him. I thought this was simply flattery, the motive for which I could not explain to myself, but it seemed to me hypocritical. I felt a sort of uneasiness, an inexplicable pain, that evening, and I left the drawing-room early.

The next day grandmother said to me triumphantly:

“Monsieur Lamessine has asked for your hand! He pledges his word to live in Paris in three years’ time. My dream is realised. His aunt has given him a certain sum of money to compensate him for having left the capital, and for protecting her fortune, of which he has already recovered a part; I, also, will give you a dowry; but I will not say how much it will be, on account of your mother and her jealousy. It is agreed that I shall spend every winter with you in Paris.”

I was stunned, bewildered, crazed.

“What? What? You are going to marry me in that way! You have promised my hand to that man, who is double my age? I won’t have him, I won’t have him!”

“Juliette, you are absurd. We shall never find another such opportunity at Chauny, far from all Parisian acquaintances. He is sent to us by Providence. Besides, he is very good-looking. He resembles one of my heroes in Balzac, feature by feature. You shall see.”

And she went to get one of her favourite novels, which she knew nearly by heart, and read me several passages from it, which I have always remembered.

I took grandfather and Blondeau to witness the folly of my grandmother’s plan. It was useless. It was already too late. Early in the morning she had persuaded them, if not of the happiness I should find in this marriage, at least of the possibility of my living in Paris and “conquering celebrity” there.

My father and mother, who had been sent for, arrived a few days later. My father was in an extraordinary state of excitement. The _coup d’état_ which he had foreseen had taken place.

My mother at once declared that she shared grandmother’s views regarding my marriage. My father flew into one of his rages. He said, in a loud voice, that he would never consent to the union of his only daughter with “an old man”--that was to say, a husband double the age of his wife. He raved, he overstepped all bounds in his objections, and finally left the drawing-room, swearing at and insulting everybody. He reappeared a few moments later, and, half-opening the door, called me, took me in his arms, after having wrapped me up in a shawl of my mother’s, bore me to his carriage, standing outside, and, whipping his horse, carried me off, while my mother and grandmother, screaming in the street, ordered him to leave me.

He was literally mad, and spoke in violent terms against Monsieur Lamessine, telling me things of which I had never heard about the life of “an old bachelor.”

However, the evening I passed alone with my father at Blérancourt touched my heart more than I can describe. He depicted the despair of a father who adored his daughter, who had scarcely ever had her to himself, and who was urged to give her, still a child, to an unworthy man. Tears ran down his face. He told me how unhappy he was, and related his whole life to me.

“The more I have loved, the more have I been crushed by what I loved,” he said. “At first, crushed in my faith, then in my affection for my wife, my first, my only love, crushed by friendship, deceived by my best friend, Doctor Bernhardt, for whom I abandoned everything, my small means, my happiness, and my child; am I now to be crushed in my affection for my idolised daughter, just at the moment when my love for the Republic and liberty is betrayed?”

Terror had reigned for several days. All the heads of the party of liberty were exiled. Twenty-six thousand were sent out of the country; the republican leaders were despatched to Noukahiva; their soldiers could not reassemble.

Scarcely had Louis Napoleon Bonaparte assured the country of the purity of his intentions, in November, before he took possession of France by fraud.

“France has understood,” he said at that time, “that I infringed the law only to enter into my rights.”

“All is over with the Republic, and through the fault of republicans themselves,” my father said, despairingly. “I hate in the same way those who have let themselves be conquered through weakness, and those who have conquered by brutality. And now they wish to sacrifice my daughter to I know not what idiotic dream of future celebrity. Juliette, Juliette, my child!” he cried, “I will protect you. You are my last refuge, my last hope--I cling to you!”

And my father wept like a child. I consoled him almost maternally, and said to him:

“Father, calm yourself; they cannot marry me against my will.”

The next morning my mother, who had been left behind, and who never knew how to hide a grievance, arrived, very angry, and had a quarrel with my father, during which never-to-be-forgotten words were said, wicked words, which my parents should never have used to each other before me, for they suggested to me for the first time the desire to escape from so much violence, and from the sight of so many cruel wounds opened under my eyes.

“Nothing more--they have left me nothing more! I have lost everything!” cried my father. “I am a shipwrecked man, struggling amid wreckage. I would like to die! Do not let them take my daughter from me, for pity’s sake!”

“Your daughter cannot remain here,” replied my mother; “her grandmother is waiting for her, for it was she who brought me home; she is at the Decaisne’s. Juliette will now be always tossed about between us; it is she who will be the shipwrecked one. Besides, I do not want her! Her grandmother has taken her, brought her up according to her ideas; let her keep her, marry her, arrange her happiness according to her will; it is not our place to meddle with it. The responsibility of it all remains with you, who forgot your fatherly duty years ago.”

And my mother took me away, vanquished, feeling myself reduced to powerlessness. And I was again wrapped up in the same shawl and returned to Chauny, this time in a closed carriage, for the night was dark and the rain fell in torrents.

My father wrote me a letter, which I had the misfortune to keep, and which later occasioned one of the most sorrowful crises in my life, which had already begun to number a good many.

“My beloved daughter,” wrote my father, “do not allow yourself to be doomed to unhappiness. The man whom they wish you to marry is a sceptic; he desires to unite the attraction of your person to his own, to advance him in society, and to better a position to which he aspires. He is not a man to love you, or whom you will ever love. They cannot marry you without my consent, do not forget it. Should I be obliged to lose forever what tranquillity remains to me, on account of this, I will not sacrifice you. If you should let yourself be led astray, and should ask my consent to this marriage, I should only have to add the despair of my private experience to the hopelessness of my public life.”

How shall I relate my struggles, which lasted for long months? They can be imagined. My grandmother and my mother desired this marriage for different, but equally selfish motives, which blinded their eyes. The former wished not to lose me entirely, Monsieur Lamessine having promised her that she should live with us during the winter, in Paris, so soon as we should be settled there; my mother desired the match in order to remove me from my father.

Poor father! He was often a prey to his wild fits of anger, and threw himself again headlong into politics, making himself conspicuous, compromising himself, thinking only of falling on some enemy, no matter whom it might be, of giving battle, of fighting, and of escaping from his present sufferings by other sufferings.

He succeeded, and his name soon figured at the head of a new list of convicts to be sent from the Aisne department. When they came to arrest him, in 1852, he was so seriously ill in bed that he could not be removed. This delay gave my grandmother time to write to my friend Charles, who, after having left Flocon, to rally himself to Bonapartism, had become an influential man. He succeeded in having my father’s name erased from the list of convicts, but implored my grandmother to make him keep quiet, for he would not be able to save him a second time, he wrote, “if his democratic-socialistic follies pointed him out again as dangerous.”

Alas! when this letter reached grandmother my father had brain fever, which endangered his life for a week. As soon as my grandfather heard the news of his illness he hurried to Blérancourt, installed himself by his son-in-law’s bedside, and by devoted care snatched him from death.

When my father was out of danger my mother and my grandmother dared not refuse the poor convalescent his desire to see me again.

I went, but how sad we both were, and in what suspicion did we feel ourselves held! Grandmother accompanied me there, and neither she nor my mother would leave me alone with my father for a moment.

I said to him, before my two stern guardians: “Dear father, I think it would be better, after all, for me to consent to this marriage, because when I am married I shall be at liberty to ask you to come to me, and to talk with you a little alone, heart to heart.”

“No, no!” he replied; “I would rather see you dead than delivered over to certain unhappiness!”

And yet it was he who delivered me over to the unhappiness he foresaw.

In a moment of violent anger, which my mother had finally succeeded in provoking, he signed a paper, which until then she had endeavoured in vain to make him sign.

I felt myself abandoned even by my aunts, who, at the idea of having me live for three years at Soissons, near to them, and then at Paris, whence I should be glad to come to pass some months in the country, told me that after having seen Monsieur Lamessine again, who had gone several times to make them a visit, they approved of the marriage.

“Besides,” said aunt Constance, with her customary banter, “if you should be unhappy and abandoned, my dear Juliette, Chivres is here to give you asylum. If you should have a numerous family, Roussot alone would become insufficient, and, to compensate you for your husband’s absence, we would buy another donkey!”

XLI

MY MARRIAGE AND ITS RESULTS

I married Monsieur Lamessine. My father was not present at my wedding. He confessed to me later that he was so unhappy on that day that he wished to blow out his brains; but he thought, perhaps, I might have need of his protection some day, and he resigned himself to living.

Alas! I ought to have claimed his protection from the very first hours of my marriage, but I felt that if I spoke a word it would be a new anguish for my father, whose fears it would have confirmed; to my grandmother, whose scaffoldings of dreams it would have cast down, and to my dear aunts, whose peace it would have disturbed. I did not say a word until after my confinement, for which I went to Blérancourt, and where I was, so to speak, forced to confidences by my father, who divined all that I must have suffered.

When she knew herself a great-grandmother and that she could embrace her granddaughter’s child, my grandmother hoped to extend the agreement of living with me every winter at Paris to the house at Soissons, which we were to inhabit for eighteen months longer.

One day, when she had come to see me, to complete the secret dowry, the last installment of which she had engaged herself to pay only so soon as we should be settled in Paris, but which she anticipated, she said to my husband when breakfast was over:

“Do you know why I have brought such a large trunk?”

“Why, no, madame.”

“It is because I expect to pass the winter with you and Juliette.”

“Impossible, my dear madame.”

“What do you mean by impossible?”

“I made a mistake; I meant to say, you will never come.”

“Never, do you say?”

“You will never live in my house with your grandchild.”

“You are joking, monsieur.”

“No, I am speaking most seriously. You think Juliette is happy, she is not; we agree in nothing, nor about anything. If you should be a third party in our household, what would our unhappiness be then?”

“Is it true, my Juliette, that you are unhappy?” asked my grandmother.

“Yes,” I answered, choking with sobs, “I am as unhappy as one can possibly be.”

My grandmother rose from her seat suddenly, but she was obliged to lean against a chair to keep from falling. She tottered like a tree that is being uprooted.

“But your promises?” she said to my husband.

“They were necessary, my dear madame,” he replied, “only until you had finished keeping yours integrally.”

My grandmother opened the dining-room door without saying a word, took her cloak from the hall, and left our house. I went up to my room to put on my bonnet, and followed her. I did not know where to look for her. A man had come to get her trunk, which I saw put on the diligence. I learned later that a lady had taken a place for herself in it; that she had left the village in a carriage and was to take the diligence outside of the town. She had done likewise when she carried me off from Verberie.

I could not leave my daughter, whom I was nursing. I returned, and implored my husband to take the diligence, to rejoin my grandmother, and bring her back to me.

“Ah! no, indeed!” he said to me; “it has gone off too well! No drama, no quarrel. I am delighted.”

I could do nothing but give the driver of the diligence a letter for my poor grandmother, in which I told her all my sorrow. I added: “I am ‘tied’ in my turn, and I ‘browse’; but I shall untie myself as soon as I possibly can.”

And so my grandmother’s last and dearest romance ended cruelly. On returning to Chauny she starved herself to death. Knowing she had but a few days more to live, she sent for my father and asked him to pardon her for the harm she had done to him and to me, in marrying me against his wishes and mine.

My father forgave her, and implored her to do all that she could to live (alas! had she wished it, there was no longer time!), saying that I had need of all those who loved me, more than ever now.

Knowing I was nursing my child, she had not let me suspect anything about her tragical determination; on the contrary, in each one of her letters she reassured me, saying she did not take my husband’s words seriously. I did not even imagine that she was ill.

One night, about ten o’clock, I had just put my daughter in her crib, had returned to bed, and was about to go to sleep, when, by the light of a night lamp that was always burning, I saw my grandmother come into my room.

“Ah! grandmother, is it you?” I cried.

With a slow gesture, she put her hand up to her eyes. The sockets were empty! I jumped out of bed and went toward her--she had disappeared!

I rushed into my husband’s study, where he was writing.

“My grandmother, my grandmother, where is she? I have just seen her, with empty eyes, in my room!”

“You are crazy,” Monsieur Lamessine said; “your grandmother cannot be here. Your mother writes me that she is ill, and begs me, on account of your nursing, not to inform you of it.”

The next day I heard that my grandmother had died at the very hour she had appeared to me.

* * * * *

When I began to believe in religion again, this apparition of my grandmother was to me one of the strongest proofs of a hereafter.

The movement of her hand carried up to her eyes, whose sockets were empty, seemed to me to signify: “Blindness is death!”

I had remained blind too long, and always in my dreams I saw my grandmother again with the frightful gesture of her hand raised to her empty eyes.

I have never seen her again with this gesture since I wrote my _Rêve sur le Divin_, which, with my reborn soul, I dedicated to the newly born soul of my granddaughter, Juliette. It was a book written with deep feeling, the inspiration of which I believe to have come from my beloved grandmother.

* * * * *

The day after this strange apparition I left for Chauny with my daughter.

My mother, profoundly moved by her mother’s death and by the causes which had determined it, received me with tenderness and with tears of repentance. When my grandmother was dying, and when she implored my father’s forgiveness, she had exacted from her daughter a promise that she would at the same time ask her husband’s pardon for the harm she had done by her jealousy.

I passed some sad but peaceful weeks with my parents. My grandfather obtained my father’s and mother’s consent to come and live with them.

“It will not be for long,” he said to them; “for I can never live without my dear scolder, and you will bury me before this year is over.” He died eleven months after my grandmother.

From the day my grandmother left us, my father’s one thought was to replace her in my life, and he bestowed a double affection upon me. He encouraged me to work, aided me with his advice, and said to me:

“When your married life becomes even more intolerable to you than it is now, your mother and I will dedicate our lives to you. We will follow wherever you may lead us. Work, work, and become known. There is no other way by which a woman can gain her liberty than by affirming her personality.”

I worked while nursing and bringing up my daughter. I completed my education, very much developed in certain matters, very insufficient in others.

Then, one day, after some insignificant literary attempts, revolted at the insults Proudhon had thrown at Daniel Stern and George Sand in his book, _La Justice dans la Révolution_, I wrote my _Anti-Proudhonian Ideas_, and my real literary life began, with the record of which I shall some day continue these memoirs.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] This friend Charles was a professor in the boys’ boarding-school opposite my grandparents’ house.

[B] My three aunts all lived till past eighty years of age. Anastasie, the youngest, said to me in her last illness: “My niece, pray do not defend me from death. I do not like your epoch.”

[C] The final syllable only is correct.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.