XXXIXAN 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 itgave 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 itwas 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’sLusiades. 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 theLusiadesto 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! Mydramatis personærevolted 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 difficultfor us to lay aside theLusiadesto take up Walter Scott’sIvanhoe, 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 ofCharles 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, butMarie-Jeanneinterested 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 overMarie-Jeannethat 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 ofMarie-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 passedwith 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 minealso. 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, nordid 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 bycold 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 manyplans 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 laMessine; 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.”