Читать книгу Madame Adam (Juliette Lambert), la grande Française from Louis Philippe until 1917 - Winifred Stephens Whale - Страница 4

Table des matières

BIRTH, PARENTAGE AND INFANCY

1836-1839

“L’émotion, l’ébullition sont en permanence dans nos âmes.”—Mme. Adam, Souvenirs.

In the opening pages of her Recollections Mme. Adam has told, with more vivid detail than is unhappily here possible, the story of two generations of her ancestors. Her own career has not lacked romance; but many of its most thrilling incidents pale beside the experiences of her forbears. Tracing them back to the Napoleonic Wars, she presents us with a lively picture of domestic history, which is as far from being commonplace as it is possible to imagine. For it embraces moving scenes of rapturous love affairs, extraordinary marriages, a startling infidelity, quarrels about dowries, and the story of a son who had a rare precocious experience. At the age of nine, he found himself already disinherited and sent forth in the world, cast upon the mercy of the family milkman, with whom he took refuge. This juvenile outcast was Mme. Adam’s maternal grandfather, of whom, under the name of Dr. Seron, we shall hear much more anon. Only by unwavering persistence, and stern resolution did this unhappy boy escape from his benefactor’s vocation. Tramping to Paris, boots in hand, to save shoe-leather, he educated himself into the medical profession and ultimately married Mme. Adam’s grandmother, Pélagie Raincourt. Pélagie also was a highly romantic person, no less remarkable than her husband. For on her wedding morning, as the result of a family broil, by no means rare among Mme. Adam’s forbears, she escaped in a pet from her mother’s house, and was found sitting by the roadside, clad only in a nightcap and dressing-gown, by her bridegroom, who had pursued her on horseback. Swinging her into the saddle, in order to avoid further escapades, he carried her off to the church and there married her out of hand. Her sole bridal adornment was a white carnation, which a woman of the people pinned into her cap.

Juliette in later years was shown the cap and the carnation to illustrate the story, which she heard from the runaway’s own lips.

Mme. Seron continued all her life addicted to romance. When it became a question of marrying her daughter, Olympe, Mme. Adam’s mother, Mme. Seron, a catholic, chose a son-in-law who was an agnostic, because she was attracted by his appearance and his history. Jean Louis Lambert, Mme. Adam’s father, had for the sake of his opinions sacrificed brilliant ecclesiastical prospects, and from the prospective secretary of the Archbishop of Beauvais had become an usher in the boys’ school opposite Mme. Seron’s house. This heroic youth was taken by Mme. Adam’s grandmother, educated as a doctor, and married to the reluctantly quiescent Olympe, who from that time forward adopted that attitude of injured passivity which was expressed by her favourite phrase “where you have tethered the goat there it will graze.”

All this happened in Picardy, a province where people lived well and washed sparingly. The very name of Mme. Adam’s birthplace, Verberie, with its suggestion of oyster patties and sauterne, made Robert Louis Stevenson’s mouth water, as he paddled towards it in his canoe. Juliette remembers how on Fridays at ten in the morning the oyster cart from Boulogne would arrive, bringing twelve dozen oysters for her family, how they would all sit round the table, the oyster barrel in the centre, and how each with his or her knife would open his or her oysters. Juliette’s grandfather and father would consume four dozen each, her grandmother and mother two dozen each, while sometimes there would be a friend who would abstract as many as possible from his hosts’ respective shares. Wine flowed freely at these feasts. Dr. Seron was a twelve-bottle man. But fortunately his beverage was only light Macon; and this, happily for his patients, was not consumed until he had performed his operations at the hospital. Operations! One trembles at the very word when associated with Dr. Seron. For, according to his granddaughter, that country surgeon was a most diligent cultivator of microbes. Ablutions, as we have said, were rare in Picard households. A bath was unheard of. Dr. Seron held that the face should be washed as little as possible for fear of bringing out a rash. Soap was only used on Sundays. The windows, of course, were kept tightly shut. Physical exercise was carefully avoided. The women of Mme. Adam’s family, like old-fashioned Frenchwomen down to the present day, seldom went beyond their own house and garden, declining even the attractions of the provincial theatre, for they agreed with Mme. de Sévigné that une grande dame ne doit pas remuer les os (a true lady should not move about her bones).

Nevertheless, though their bodies were cribbed, cabined and confined, these Frenchwomen’s minds moved in the great world of romance, their fancies glowed with all the fervent imaginings of that effervescent age. Mme. Adam’s grandmother lived, moved and had her being in the “Human Comedy” of Balzac. Turning over the pages of his ninety-seven novels, or sitting over her embroidery frame, she lived the lives of his five thousand characters. Her unfortunate choice of a husband for her granddaughter, Juliette, was largely dictated by the suitor’s resemblance to one of her favourite novelist’s heroes.

Mme. Adam, as we have said, was born at the little Picard town of Verberie, a famous place in mediæval times, the residence of Frankish kings, whither in the ninth century had come Ethelbald, King of Wessex, to wed his thirteen-year-old bride, Charles the Bald’s daughter, Judith. Verberie in the last century was a favourite place of call for tourists, who in pre-motor-car days used to drive leisurely from Senlis to Compiègne. Our English poetess, Mary Robinson (Mme. Duclaux)[2], tells how from the steep brow of a down, known as “la Montagne de Verberie,” she saw through “the poplar screens of the precipitous hill-side, a lovely blue expanse of country with the Oise lying across it like a scimitar of silver”; how her carriage dashed down the hill “and clattered along the sleepy, pebbly ... street, past the inn, full of blouses and billiards.”

It was in that very inn, “Les Trois Monarques,” at Verberie that Mme. Adam was born, at half-past five on the 4th of October, 1836.

Was it a glimpse into their daughter’s future that made her parents name her “Juliette” after that most seductive of all the queens of French salons, Mme. Récamier?

No gold or even silver spoon was in our Juliette’s mouth when she made her first appearance on this world’s stage. At the time of her birth, her parents’ fortunes had reached a low ebb. Dr. Lambert had been in practice with his great-uncle in a village not far from Verberie, and thither to his uncle’s house he had brought home his girl wife. For the first years of their marriage everything had gone well with the young couple. Then had come a deluge of misfortunes. Their first baby, a boy, died in convulsions. Then the uncle died, and his estate was divided among numerous legatees. Finally, a fire broke out which nearly consumed the whole village, and, despite Mme. Lambert’s heroic efforts, burned her husband’s house to the ground.

Thus were Juliette’s parents driven to seek harbourage in the inn at Verberie, where Juliette was born.

Very shortly after this event, her father, one of the most unpractical but at the same time most attractive of scientists, was fascinated by the report of some marvellous scientific experiments, which were being made in the neighbouring town of Compiègne, by a well-known chemist, a Dr. Bernhardt. Leaving his wife and daughter to the tender mercies of mine host of “The Three Monarchs,” Dr. Lambert went off to join his confrère. This Dr. Bernhardt came to be regarded by Juliette’s family as a veritable German Mephistopheles; for the only result of his experiments was the consumption of Mme. Lambert’s dowry.

During her husband’s scientific adventures Mme. Lambert and her baby girl in the Verberie inn were suffering serious privations. And they might have come near starvation had it not been for the assistance they received from Mme. Lambert’s parents. But this timely aid could only be given surreptitiously; for Juliette had had the misfortune to be born, not into poverty merely, but into one of the numerous family feuds which were to chequer all her childhood. Between her parents and her grandparents at the time of the first baby’s death there had arisen a misunderstanding. For some time there had been no communication between the Lamberts at Verberie and the Serons, who lived not far away at Chauny, then a flourishing manufacturing town, now converted by German vandalism into a heap of ruins. It was only by the curtest of notes that Dr. Lambert had announced to Dr. and Mme. Seron their granddaughter’s advent. Had it not been for the report, brought by one of Dr. Seron’s patients, a friendly commercial traveller, Juliette’s grandmother would never have known of the sorry plight to which her son-in-law’s scientific vagaries had reduced his wife and child.

On hearing the commercial traveller’s news, Mme. Seron, with characteristic impetuousness, flew into a passion and declared that she would set off at once for Verberie to rescue her granddaughter from the parents who were obviously incapable of taking care of her. Dr. Seron, however, succeeded in convincing his wife that a family scene would be injurious for the infant, whom her mother was nursing. He reminded Mme. Seron that the first Lambert baby had died in convulsions; and finally he induced her to postpone her intervention until the child was nine months old and might leave her mother without danger.

Meanwhile the landlord of “The Three Monarchs” was secretly given to understand that Mme. and Mlle. Lambert must be made comfortable, and that Dr. Seron might be held responsible for the reckoning.

With great difficulty during those interminable nine months did the ardent grandmother possess her soul in patience. She occupied the time, however, in working out the details of the cleverly devised plot by which she ultimately succeeded in carrying off her grandchild.

Juliette in after years used to delight to hear her grandmother describe all the stages of that famous coup: how the landlord of the inn was made privy to the plot; how there stood ready a coach, nothing less than a berline, recalling another flight, more famous but less successful; how in the coach had been placed a warm shawl and a bottle of hot milk; how, while Mme. Lambert was haggling over the bill with the landlord, Mme. Seron, bearing a certain precious bundle, was stealthily stealing to the berline and then speeding away with baby Juliette to join the diligence outside the town; how ultimately the stolen jewel was deposited safely at Chauny, whither not long afterwards her mother followed her.

In vain did Dr. Lambert, penniless and disillusioned, plead for the return of his wife and daughter. “Not until you have proved yourself able to support them,” was Mme. Seron’s stern reply; and, she added relentlessly, “I adopt the child whom you abandoned, whom you left a prey to the direst poverty. She is mine, and shall be as long as I live.”

Thus ended the first of those kidnappings which were to recur at intervals through the first sixteen years of Juliette’s life, until her first marriage. They arose not merely from the rival claims of parents and grandparents to possess the child, but from the fact that each of these four persons held pronounced and divergent opinions as to the upbringing of their adored one. In the quarrels which ensued, Mme. Seron and Dr. Lambert were the protagonists; Dr. Seron and Mme. Lambert played the parts of supers, or supported one side or the other.

We are all, even the most obstinate and strong-minded, moulded, though often unconsciously, by various intellectual influences. To this rule Juliette, despite her indomitable will and personal idiosyncrasy, was no exception. And a study of her mental development shows her passing through three distinct phases: her childhood and youth, when her grandmother’s or her father’s influence dominated alternately: middle life, when broadly speaking she sympathised with her father’s opinions: her later years, after the war of 1870, when more or less she was returning to her grandmother’s point of view.

With these two formative forces, with these two remarkable persons, Mme. Seron and her son-in-law, Dr. Lambert, we must become intimately acquainted if we would understand Juliette’s character and career. We must also remember that the time of Juliette’s upbringing was the hey-day of the romantic period, a time when individualism ran rampant, when the most Utopian of dreamers believed they were about to realise their wildest hopes. It was true that after half a century of experiments in government France had practically settled down for a while into the jog-trot of Louis Philippe’s reign. But beneath the veil of the moderate and the commonplace which this compromise of constitutional monarchy had cast over the country, there bubbled and boiled a welter of effervescence which twelve years after Juliette’s birth exploded in the Revolution of 1848.

The national temperament of France during the first half of the last century partly accounts for the temperament of Juliette’s family, and for the atmosphere of intellectual and emotional feverishness in which she was brought up. Looking back from the vantage point of old age on the stormy scenes of her childhood, she asked: “Were we more sensitive then, more susceptible, more dramatic than to-day? I believe we were.”[3] It is not improbable also that Mme. Adam, regarding her childhood through the long vista of years, may have unconsciously exaggerated the violence of her sentiments and experiences. One of her charms is that feeling for the dramatic, with which Gambetta once reproached her, saying, “Vous dramatisez trop, madame!”

“My love for my grandmother and for my daughter,” said Mme. Adam to me shortly before her eightieth birthday, “have been the two great passions of my life.”

Of her grandmother, she announces in the beginning of her Souvenirs: “I shall write of her often, but shall I ever ... be able to make her live with that originality, that passion for the romantic which she infused into us all, lifting on to the plane of high romance the whole of our family life and each one of our daily actions?”

Though Mme. Seron hardly ever went outside her own domestic domain except to attend mass on Sunday, her granddaughter could say that never had she met a mind “more avid of adventure, more scornful of the every-day and the commonplace, more eager for the romantic in life and in literature.”

In no point, save in their passionate adoration of Juliette, did Mme. Seron and her son-in-law agree. Yet in temperament they were not altogether unlike; for they were both dreamers. But Juliette’s grandmother, if she did not possess it, at least respected that worldly wisdom which Dr. Lambert regarded with the utmost contempt. He was an idealist pure and simple. We have seen him sacrificing a brilliant ecclesiastical career to conscientious scruples. We have seen him risking the happiness of his wife and child in his pursuit of science. We shall see him again, more than once risking not only his family’s happiness but his own life in the cause of political reform.

“I am the daughter,” writes Mme. Adam, “of a sincere sectary ... of one who dreamed of absolute liberty, absolute equality.... Only for a moment, during the Commune, did he believe his dream realised.”

Jean Louis Lambert was one of those rare persons with tastes both scientific and literary. But it was only classical literature that appealed to him. He was a passionate Grecian and an ardent admirer of the French masterpieces of le grand siècle. In the remarkable literary works which his own day was producing, in the novels of Balzac and George Sand, which were his mother-in-law’s meat and drink, he took not the slightest interest. His Homer, on the other hand, he almost knew by heart; and he made his little daughter as familiar with tales from the Iliad as are most children with “Red Riding Hood” or “Cinderella.” Dr. Lambert himself wrote verses in the classic style, which he would recite to his mother-in-law; but there were others which were red republican, and which he would have kept from her hearing had not that enfant terrible of a Juliette caught them up and repeated them parrot-like to her grandparents. Dr. Seron, an old soldier of la grande armée, was infuriated by poems in which his son-in-law dared to attack his idol, the Emperor.

Indeed, the family tendency to wrangle was considerably accentuated by the fact that three of its members (Juliette’s mother took no interest in public affairs) held directly divergent political opinions. Mme. Seron was a liberal monarchist, Dr. Seron a Buonapartist, and Dr. Lambert a social democrat. None of these fervent partisans had the remotest idea of keeping their opinions to themselves. Consequently, whenever Dr. Lambert and his wife drove over from Blérancourt, a village nine miles from Chauny, where Juliette’s father had set up in practice, the voice of controversy rose high. These debates generally occurred at meal time. And baby Juliette, accustomed to have the attention of her doting elders fixed upon herself, strongly objected to these diversions. She tells how to restore herself to the limelight she would clamber into the middle of the table and begin to upset the plates and glasses. The device never failed. Discussion ceased; the three controversialists would be overcome with laughter, while the silent member of the group, Juliette’s mother, would suddenly become active. Snatching her daughter from the wreck on the table, she would be administering a sound smacking when three pairs of hands would be eagerly outstretched to rescue the culprit. Thus Juliette learnt two lessons: first, not to fear her mother’s severity, from which she might always count upon the indulgence of her other relatives to deliver her; second, to appreciate “that first born of common sense,” the comic spirit. In her earliest years it was her inestimable privilege to have “laughter for nurse, pure fun for friend.”

George Meredith, it will be remembered, divides humanity[4] into three classes: the non-laughers, the excessive laughers and those who stand where the comic spirit places them, “at middle distance between the inveterate opponents and the drum and fife supporters of comedy.”

In the table scene just described, each of these three classes is represented. Juliette’s mother was a non-laugher, a morbid person whose lack of fun, as is inevitable with women, degraded her to be a mere household drudge. Juliette’s grandfather, the jovial doctor, whose funny stories, nicknamed Seronnades, enlivened the countryside, was of the drum and fife order, an apostle of le gros rire. Juliette’s grandmother and father, though differing in so many respects, were alike endowed with the true comic spirit. Long years later, looking back on her turbulent childhood, Mme. Adam wrote: “I should probably have been intolerable, had not the gay and merry temperaments of my grandparents ... introduced into our relationship a jocular spirit which did not admit of solemnity, even in our grievances. Whenever I succeeded in reconciling them after one of their disputes, it was because I had made them laugh.”[5] “Certainly,” exclaimed a character in one of Pierre Mille’s stories, “he was no Latin, for he took everything seriously.”[6] Juliette Adam, Gallic by birth, Græco-Latin by education, as she likes to describe herself, has always been ready to see a joke, even when it was at her own expense. Thus she is proud to relate, how when at one of George Sand’s dinner-parties, Flaubert, in Dumas’ presence, pointed out that in one of her books she had made a man who had lost an arm take a box in both hands, she joined in the laugh, saying gaily, “Merci, Maître.”[7]