X
A THREE WEEKS’ VISIT
ON October 4th, when I was eight years old, my father obtained grandmother’s approval to take me to Blérancourt for a three weeks’ visit, until All Saints’ Day, for she felt sure of having directed my ideas according to her way of thinking by that time. We had never before been separated for so long, and were much grieved—I less than I thought I should be, and she more than I feared.
My father loved me so tenderly, so passionately, he took so much trouble with a few words, spoken here and there, to make his ideas interesting to me; he treated me so like a woman, desiring, I could feel, to overcome the repugnance with which my grandmother had inspired me concerning his democratic, Jacobite, free-masonic, anti-religious opinions—“without God, oh, heavens!”—which, like a spoiled child, I had often expressed to him, that this journey with him seemed to me a most serious thing. I fancied that his companionship during the next three weeks would do more toward drawing me to him, and taking me from grandmother, than absence itself.
“Jean Louis,” said my grandmother to him, after kissing him warmly, as he got into the carriage where I was already seated, “bring her back to me the same as I give her to you. You owe it to me!”
We were starting. My father answered, laughing:
“I do not promise any such thing.”
I heard grandmother cry out:
“Juliette, stay!”
A strong cut of the whip started the horse.
I did not turn back my head, but burst into tears. My father did not attempt to console me, as my grandmother would have done. She could never bear to see me cry.
He kissed me violently, repeating: “My daughter, my child, my own—at last, at last!”
My mother welcomed me in her usual cold manner. My father’s growing passion for me, to which he now freely abandoned himself, grandmother’s absence removing all restraint, seemed to her exaggerated.
“It would seem as if your child were a divinity on earth,” she said to him one day before me.
“Better than that; she is my daughter!” answered my father, and added, laughing: “I should not be far amiss in thinking her a daughter of Olympus.”
My mother detested witty sayings, which she classed in the same category with teasings, and this pun on her name did not please her. Ever since my father’s sojourn at Brussels, she called him nothing but Monsieur Lamber, although she still used the familiar thou.
“Oh! Monsieur Lamber, your speech is in very bad taste,” she answered.
On the contrary, it seemed to me very clear, and I often laughingly repeated it to father when he was instructing me about Greece. He had found my mind open to antique subjects, and I would say to him:
“Am I not the daughter of Olympus?”
My father would always take me with him on foot, on his visits round about to his patients. He taught me to drive his rather spirited horse, and we would drive in his two-seated carriage over good or bad roads to see the rich and the poor, especially the latter.
I told him of my studies in history, and of grandmother’s opinions, which I shared.
“See, child,” he said to me, “you and your grandmother have every reason to admire Louis XI. and Louis XIII., because you both think that under their reigns the nobles were cast down; whereas, they only changed their own condition vis-à-vis to royalty. They became courtiers; they were domesticated by the kings, but they remained much as they were towards the bourgeoisie and the people; they kept the same distance between themselves and their inferiors as the sovereigns had kept with them. Before the Revolution equality did not exist anywhere. That alone began the great work. Let me tell you of Saint-Just, whom, of all the makers of the Revolution, I understand the best. He is to me a friend known and lost. I will take you to see his sister, and you will see how sweet and charming she is. You will amuse her. She speaks so affectionately of her brother that he, my Saint-Just, will cease to be to you the beheader and monster that your grandparents have represented.”
“Oh! papa, I shall never be, like you, the friend of that dreadful Saint-Just, or that horrible Robespierre—never!”
“Don’t be too sure. You have as yet heard only one side of the question. You hate all injustice, you love the poor and the humble people; you will therefore absolve those who have emancipated them, even at the cost of violence. You see, there is no moderation in politics. They are like a swing,” he said with a smile. “You are thrown twice up to the extreme heights, and you pass the middle line only once out of three times.”
“Well, papa, I am for the middle place—the middle, above all. Like grandmother, I hate extremes.”
“Juliette, you are not serious?”
“But, papa, you began while smiling in your talk about the swing.”
“Well, I am sorry, and I wish to tell you, once for all, that the great Revolution itself has not done sufficient work.”
“Oh! papa, for shame!”
“No. Listen to me. The nobles had oppressed the people—you know in what manner, you know all about it, for you speak as one well informed. Your grandmother and you judge the ‘great ones,’ as they should be judged. But that is not everything; you must not stop on the road. Since the nobles have been cast down, other oppressors have sprung up, just as hard, just as tyrannical, to the poor and humble ones as the former were, and these are neither as valiant nor as fine as were the feudal lords, the knights of chivalry. The ‘great ones’ of to-day belong to the upper bourgeoise class. We require a second Louis XI., a second Richelieu, and another Revolution, to destroy this new feudal system. We have found the new formula, my child, to open, at last, the reign of absolute justice, and we shall achieve it by a Republic, and by the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. There will be no colossal fortunes on one side and complete misery on the other. Suffering and justice will be equitably distributed.”
“That will be a magnificent time, papa, but will it ever come to pass?”
I had been so often told that my father was an absurd and dangerous dreamer that I was doubtful of the perspicacity of his judgment; and still his words sank into my heart, because I found them generous and tender towards the unhappy ones of the earth.
It is easy to explain the fascination such simple theories would have for a child’s mind. Such conversation made a deep impression. My father was of the type of those who were called later on “the old beards of 1848.” An idealist, without any notion of the probabilities of reality, my father thought that his political conceptions were absolute truths. As sentimental and as romantic as was my grandmother, he fostered illusions about political life resembling those which she fostered about individual life.
However, some of his conceptions seemed sublime to me in my childhood.
My father gave a place to nature in all that he said to me, for he sermonised me continually. The doctrine of Christ, which had given the formulas of liberty, equality, and fraternity, was mingled in his mind with an exuberant, poetical paganism, and this amalgamation furnished his discourses with pompous arguments on charity, on the laws of social sacrifice, and on the divine attributes of human heroism. My childish imagination, already initiated in researches for what grandmother called “superior things,” was dazzled and fascinated by degrees.
My father’s professional ability served marvellously well in placing all things of which he spoke within my mind’s reach. He simplified questions to such a degree that he succeeded in leading me to converse with him, and in making me feel that he took an extreme pleasure in our conversations.
This made me very proud. He was prudent in all that he said to me: “I do not say this to influence you; you are still too young for me to enforce any ideas upon you; I will teach you later,” etc., etc. I listened to admirable sonorous phrases, but could not judge of the gaps in their practical demonstrations, or of the possibility of the application of his ideas. I was touched by his devotedness to the suffering classes, of whom he often spoke.
I had, however, an instinctive feeling that the violence of my father’s character, of which he gave too frequent proofs, might make him, like his friend Saint-Just, cruel towards the fortunate ones of this world, as his good heart made him kind to the unhappy. And I wished to know whether I had guessed rightly. It was a hidden place in his heart to discover.
“I agree, after all, that your Saint-Just loved the humble and poor as much as you do,” I said to my father one day, “but you cannot prove to me that he was not cruel, that he did not kill.”
He answered:
“Action changes a man’s nature; you must judge Saint-Just from his intentions.”
“Hell is paved with them, papa,” I said.
I had discovered what I wished to know.
“In spite of what your grandmother says,” he added, “I do not love Robespierre, because he was born a Jacobin. One should not be born a Jacobin. A person may become one, but it is necessary first of all to have been a humanitarian. Ferocity is permissible only to defend one’s principles, or one’s country when it is in danger. In order to legitimatise it, there must be provocation.”
He had told me about the leaves of the sensitive plant, and, when he said something which displeased me, I would reply:
“Enough, papa, I fold myself up!” Then he would call me sensitive, and we would cease talking.
Sometimes it seemed to me that he actually probed in my brain as with a red-hot poker, as grandmother, also, too often did. I felt great pain in my temples, and would say:
“I can’t listen to you any longer. I feel ill.”
My father took a great journal, La Democratie Pacifique of Victor Considérant, to which he was one of the first subscribers. My grandmother did not read newspapers. She heard the news from grandfather, who read the Gazettes at his club. I thought my father admirable because he read four great pages every day, and knew at Blérancourt everything that was taking place in the whole world.
Later, in recalling what I had suffered in my childhood and the first years of my youth, I remembered that at that time it seemed to me that the “walls” of my brain were too light to support the pressure of the mass of ideas which my father and grandmother strove alternately to force between them. I felt these “walls” tremble at times and threaten to fall in.
I often played with the chemist’s daughter, Emilienne Decaisne, great-niece of Saint-Just. I thought her kind and charming, but my father said she was not sufficiently proud of her great-uncle. He often made his friend Decaisne angry—“the too lukewarm nephew of Saint-Just,” as he called him.
I went one day to see Saint-Just’s sister, Madame Decaisne, the chemist’s mother, and Emilienne’s grandmother. She lived at the extreme end of that beautiful quarter of Blérancourt called the Marais, where the lines of plane-trees perfumed the place in the spring, and where the ruins of the Louis XIV. château are so fine. Madame Decaisne inhabited a well-preserved house of the eighteenth century, looking on a garden, surrounded by high walls.
She was a very old lady of extreme elegance, tall and slight, dressed in the antique fashion. She made pretty curtsies, and raised her gown with her two hands very gracefully when she walked in the garden, and, as my father said, seemed always about to dance the minuet.
In her large drawing-room, furnished with Louis XV. and Louis XVI. furniture, which my grandmother had taught me to discern and to admire, and which my father thought old-fashioned and horrible, as he cared only for modern furniture—the furniture of “progress” made of mahogany and ebony—Madame Decaisne seemed to me like an apparition.
There lived with her in her house (although her son did not like it, my father told me before we went in) an old friend, the Chevalier de Saint-Louis, dressed also in old-time fashion, who was called simply “Monsieur le Chevalier.”
Madame Decaisne and the Chevalier had both remained thorough Royalists and Legitimists, detesting the “Egalité branch,” but faithful to the memory of Saint-Just, of whom the Chevalier had been the friend. “In spite of the crimes they had made him commit,” said Madame Decaisne, “she and the Chevalier had not ceased to love him.”
The Chevalier amused me very much because he glided and skipped over the waxed floors, and kissed Madame Decaisne’s hand when he left her only for an instant. He spoke of Saint-Just with affection.
“Monsieur le Chevalier,” my father said, “is it not true that Saint-Just still strikes you as having been, above all, a humanitarian and a poet?”
“Yes,” he replied, and added: “Besides, he, who was so intelligent, so superior, so full of hope for the great future, expiated his errors by his death. One should have seen him in the political storm to be able to understand how so good and so noble, but too fanatical, a man could at certain moments have thought that ‘blood was necessary.’”
The “necessary blood” remained in my mind after I heard the Chevalier use the phrase.
I spoke to grandmother about it on my return to Chauny, and she was not as indignant as I supposed she would be.
“When the kings protected the people from the nobles, they caused necessary blood to be shed,” she said to me, “and the kings grew greater in spite of their crimes. If the men of the Revolution had shed only the enemy’s blood at the frontiers, and that of traitors—of which there were a few like the Messieurs de Sainte-Aldegonde, who during the invasion called the invaders of France, ‘Our friends, the enemies’—if, I say, the men of the Revolution had not killed for the desire of so doing, they would have been absolved, but they sacrificed innocent persons to their ferocity, and they will never be forgiven. Your father is one of those who, like Saint-Just, wishes to purify society more and more, after having shed ‘necessary blood.’ He is one of those humanitarian Jacobins, people more cruel than the wickedest, who think they have the right to be implacable under the pretext that they have been tender-hearted in their youth.”
But, to return to Saint-Just’s sister: She took a fancy to me. Living with my grandparents, whom I still considered young, I adored old people. Madame Decaisne one day read to me some of Saint-Just’s poetry. It was about a little shepherd leading his flock to pasture, and the unhappiness of roses because they had thorns. She threw so much feeling into the reading that I shed tears, and thereby won her heart and that of the Chevalier.