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!”