THE ROMANCE OF MY CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Léopold Flameng sc

THE ROMANCE OF MY CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

MME·EDMOND ADAM (JVLIETTE LAMBER)

1902 D·APPLETON & CO· NEW YORK

Copyright, 1902, by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Published, November, 1902

PREFACE

AT the present time, the interest which a writer’s work may have lies greatly in the study of those first impulses which gave it birth, of the surroundings amid which it was elaborated, and of the connection between the end pursued and the achievement.

In former times a writer’s personality was of small importance. His works were deemed sufficient. The duality presented by a study of the causes of production, and the production itself, was a matter of interest only to a small minority of readers.

By degrees, however, with the writer’s own consent, indiscreet glances were thrown into the personal lives of those whose mission it was to direct, enlighten, or amuse the lives of other people.

Forty or fifty years ago the public first read the book, and judged a writer by his writings, and then would often base their judgments on the opinion of some great critic, who had slowly given proof of his knowledge, and whose ideas were found worthy of adoption.

To-day it is quite the contrary. A new book[viii] is so generally and indiscreetly announced that the larger portion of the public is quite aware both of the book and of the process of its production. A number of small reviews of the volume are read; they often are, in fact, just so many interviews with the author, and, under the general impression thus imparted, the book is read—a great favour for the writer are such notices, for people might speak of a book and criticise it in that way without ever having read it.

General curiosity is insatiable with regard to the small details concerning the habits and customs of an author if he is already celebrated, or is likely to achieve success.

But, on the other hand, if the present custom weakens to an infinite degree the elements of personal appreciation of any work, it adds to knowledge of the author’s portrait, which stands out from all these inquiries and indiscretions, with traits of physiognomy that possess, perhaps, more lively interest.

We must obviously submit to the custom, and ask ourselves whether, by means of much observation of both the author and his work, we may not obtain a broader and more enlightened criticism, uniting the author’s intentions with the result achieved by his book.

[ix]Or else is it because, overworked as we are, we have perhaps become unable to enjoy the delight of reading a book for itself, containing, by chance, no anecdotes which please us—nothing, in fact, outside the actual interest of the book itself, but forming part of it; or is it that we have no longer any time for profound or matured reflection, or judgments expressed in axioms, the terms of which have long been weighed in the balance of thought?

It requires time to discover the master thought of any work of real worth, in order to disclose its high morality, its art tendencies.

The maddening rule of our new mode of life being the desire to know all things as quickly as possible, we ask the author, whose motives are known beforehand, what he meant to say, or do, or prove, and in this way we think to gain time and not run the risk of “idle dreaming.”

Ah! as to dreams, shall we speak of them?—golden money, no longer current, which we scatter behind us in our haste to pursue what others are pursuing. If, by chance, we find it again, how soiled by the road’s dust it seems!

The asking of a question or two, and even the explanation of a phenomenon which is often as clear as day, can be undertaken as we hurry along, but simply to examine the “whys and wherefores”[x] of things, or to attempt to discover the laws of facts, and group them methodically, giving the logical relation of these laws in general origins—verily, only a few vulgar slang words can express the impression made on the minds of those who wish to be considered “modern men,” with respect to these very problems of which we, of the elder generation, are so fond, and which are called by the moderns—“stuff.”

“In writing your memoirs you encourage what you appear to condemn,” people will doubtless say to me. But I condemn nothing. I simply note a state of mind and ways of life. I feel sure that if in “my time” an author’s work held the first place, and that if nowadays the author himself excites disproportionate interest, the future will establish an equilibrium between these two extremes.

If the candles of literary people of the present time are burned at both ends, it is, perhaps, because there remain few embers of the luminous torches of the past. The authors of the future will be obliged to renew their provision of wood, which must burn itself out, normally, in the middle.

However this may be, it is, perhaps, profitable to register the facts in a fleeting epoch for the use of those who are running in pursuit of an epoch which is to take its place.

[xi]Old people are fond of describing what took place in former times, and they have a real mission so to do if only they will refrain from trying to enforce upon us the superiority of the teaching of that which has disappeared, and if they will tell their story simply, leaving a younger generation to discover its lesson, and from it form conclusions.

Those of the older generation who educated us thought sentimentalism and humanity, which appeared at first brutally, and then were gloriously driven back by the Terror and the Empire, had returned again triumphantly.

Moreover, the Revolution and Bonaparte had opened our gates to a foreign influx. Our fathers gave shelter to every Utopian idea brought from Italy, Germany, Austria, and Russia. The mixture was so confusing that all manner of extravagant things sprang from it.

The consciences of the “men of progress” were concentrated around the social conception of the “suffering classes,” and the political conception involved in the crimes of the “higher classes.” Love and indignation were the food with which they fed our youthful hearts.

The Bible, the socialism of Christ, and examples of sublimity of character taken from Greece and Rome, became the strange mixture that was the[xii] guiding spirit of our fathers’ action, and inspired our primal ideas.

People of reason, who possessed solid common-sense, the Bourgeois, were, naturally, to a much overrated degree, our enemies.

We are, in all our primal impulses, the children of the men of 1848; our very reaction was born of their action.

We have been led on solely by their example; haunted, just as they were, by the feeling that we should add to our unlimited dreams what they had deemed to be the counterpoise to the great love of humanity, namely, science; but a science which we thought was to bring relief to the worker, by machinery, a cheaper rate of living to the poor, and a more equal distribution of wealth to the unfortunate.

“The rights of man,” that oft-repeated phrase which has never been rightly understood by those who called themselves its defenders, possessed for them, before, during, and after 1848, only one significance, namely: the realisation by society in general of the greatest sum of possible happiness for each individual.

Those who at that time proclaimed themselves socialists—and this tradition exists among the same class of the present day—took no account of general[xiii] society, of its affiliations, of its necessary average existence, or of its “badly cut coats,” so to speak.

They refused to see opposed to the rights of the socialist man the general social rights, which mean, in plain words, the rights of each individual man, and which, summed up, become the rights of all men.

Religious dogma alone can affirm the absolute right of an individual soul, because each soul comes in contact with other souls only in the infinite. Absoluteness can only be realised in evolutions towards death. But contact with living men has its contingencies which society pulverises well or badly, according as individuals mingle together happily or not, or according as they disturb society or serve it well.

Social problems, whether robed in dithyrambic form or clad in offensive rags, are unable to force upon society reforms which are laid down in names unless society has become ready to assimilate them; otherwise they upset society, agitate it, and throw it back on reaction.

I am the daughter of a man who was a sincere sectarian, disinterested even to self-sacrifice, and who dreamed of absolute liberty and absolute equality. Until the terrible year of 1870, his mind[xiv] mastered my own. For an instant, during the days of the Commune, he thought his dreams were about to be realised. Were he alive now, he would be a disciple of Monsieur Brisson, whose political ancestor he was. He would have pursued only one idea: the upsetting of everything.

The revolutionists and the Brissonists are, after all, only belated and antiquated minds, not yet freed from sophistries by the terrible vision of 1870; not stimulated by the lamentations heard from men on French soil, when trodden under foot by Prussia; not armed with patriotic combativeness by the sight of the panting flesh of those provinces which were torn from France, and which, in the figurative image of our country, occupy the place of the heart.

Juliette Adam.

I MY GRANDMOTHER

AS I advance in years, one of the things which astonishes me most is the singular vividness of my memories of my childhood.

Some of them, it is true, have been related many times over to me—and these are the most indistinct—by the nurse who tended me and by my grandparents, for whom everything that concerned their only granddaughter had a primal importance.

However, amid these oft-repeated stories I discover impressions, acts, that might have been known to any of my family, which arise before me with extraordinary precision.

I am the prey, moreover, of a scruple, and I ask myself whether these impressions really do come to me strictly in the manner in which I felt and acted them at the time, or whether, returning to them after all the experiences of life, I do not unconsciously exaggerate them?

[2]To reassure my wish to be sincere, which has many disturbing suggestions, I endeavour to recall to myself in what terms, at every epoch of my life, I have spoken of my childhood, and also to obtain information from a few notes, too rare, alas! that I wrote in my youth which have been kept by my family. It is, therefore, preoccupied with a jealous desire to be entirely truthful that I begin this work.

As I was brought up by my grandmother, I shall speak of her a great deal. Shall I succeed in making her live again in all her originality, in her passion for the romantic, which she imposed upon us all, making the lives of her family, from the primal and dominating impulsion she gave to all their actions, a perpetual race towards the romantic?

No woman in a gymnasium was ever more closely imprisoned. I never saw my grandmother leave her large house and great garden a hundred times, except to go to mass at eight o’clock on Sundays; on the other hand, I never perceived in any mind such a love for adventure, such a horror for preordained and enforced existence, such a constant and imperious appetite for written or enacted romance.

Her affection for me was so absorbing that I[3] monopolised her life, as it were, from the moment when she consecrated it to me.

I loved her exclusively until the day when my father, with his power for argument, in which he usually opposed the accepted ideas of our surroundings, and, with his kindness of character, took possession of my mind and led me to accept his way of thinking.

Between these two exceptional and somewhat erratic beings, the one possessing admirable generosity of heart, sectarian uprightness, passionately earnest in his unchangeable exaltations, the other with true nobility of soul, rigid virtue, but with an imagination fantastic beyond expression; between these two, loving them in turn, sometimes one more than the other, I was cast about to such a degree that it would have been impossible for me to find foothold for my original thoughts, amid these continual oscillations, if I had not constantly endeavoured to seek for my own true self and to find it. And yet, in spite of this effort, what a long time it took me to free myself from the double imprint given to my character by my beloved relatives!

What shielded me from total absorption by one or the other of them, what caused me to escape from the ardent desire of both, to mould me to[4] their image, so dissimilar one from the other, was the very precocious consciousness I had of the precious advantages of possessing personal will.

Between my father and my grandmother I applied myself, instinctively at first, determinedly later, to be something. Was that the starting-point of my resolve to be somebody?

In the ceaseless struggle between my father and grandmother, myself being the coveted prize, there were three of us.

Many stories are involved in my souvenirs, more strange, more eccentric, one than the other, of the marriages of my grandparents and great-grandparents in my maternal grandmother’s family.

Their adventures interested my youth to such a degree that I should not hesitate to unfold them to the surprise of my readers were they not too numerous.

My grandmother, who talked and who related stories with a very quick, sharp, and bantering wit, took much pleasure in telling of the romantic lives of her grandmothers. She delighted in repainting for me all these family portraits on her side, never speaking to me of my father’s family, which I grew to know later.

She possessed the pride of her merchant and bourgeoise caste. I learned through her many[5] obscure things in the history of the struggles of French royalty against the great feudal lords, the internationalists of that time.

She said, speaking to me of her own people: “We are descended from those merchant families of Noyon, of Chauny, of Saint-Quentin, so influential in the councils of the communes, of whom several were seneschals, faithful to their town, to their province above all, faithful to royalty, not always to the king, to religion, not always to the Pope; liberals, men of progress, of pure Gallic race, enriching themselves with great honesty and strongly disdaining those among themselves who, for services rendered to the sovereign, solicited from him titles of nobility.”

My grandmother’s mother, when fourteen years old, fell madly in love with one of her relatives from Noyon, who had come to talk business, and who, after a day’s conversation, more serious than poetical, and continued through breakfast and dinner, received at his departure the following declaration from her: “Cousin, when you come next year it will be to ask me in marriage.” They laughed much at this whim, but, as the young girl was an only daughter and would have a large dot, the relatives of Noyon, less well off, did not disdain the offer made to their son.

[6]When she was fifteen, the precocious Charlotte married her cousin Raincourt, a very handsome youth twenty-two years of age, but she died in childbed the following year, giving birth to my grandmother.

The young widower confided little Pélagie to his wife’s mother, now a widow herself, and while my great-grandfather married again when twenty-four years of age, and had three daughters, who were very good, very properly educated—Sophie, Constance, and Anastasie—my grandmother grew up like a little savage and sometimes stupefied the quiet town of Chauny by the eccentricities of a spoiled child.

She read everything that fell into her hands, no selection being made for her, and refused to allow herself to be led by any one, or for any reason whatever.

As soon as she was thirteen she announced to her grandmother that her education was finished. She left the boarding-school, where during five years she had learned very little, and devoted herself entirely and for the rest of her life to the reading of novels.

Witty, full of life, brilliant, and even sometimes a little impish, my grandmother had red hair at a time when “carrotty”-coloured hair had but little[7] success. She had superb teeth, a delicate nose with sensitive nostrils, bright green eyes, and her very white complexion was marked with tiny yellow spots, all of which gave her the physiognomy of an odd-looking yet very attractive girl.

Romantic, as had been her mother and her grandmothers, she wished to choose her own husband, and she had not found him when she was fifteen. In spite of the sad fate of her mother, who had died in childbirth, being married too young, Pélagie was in despair at remaining a maid so long.

Mlle. Lenormant’s predictions had given birth throughout France to a crowd of fortune-tellers, and my grandmother consulted one, who told her: “You will marry a stranger to this town.”

This did not astonish her, for she knew all those who could aspire to her hand, and there was not one among them who answered to all that her imagination sought in a husband. Not a single young man of Chauny of good family had as yet had any romantic adventure.

She took good care not to confide her impatience to her three half-sisters, their father having declared that Pélagie should not marry before she was twenty-one. He wished to keep in his own hands the administration of his first wife’s fortune[8] as long as possible for the benefit of the three daughters born of his second marriage.

These, moreover, continually said that Pélagie was too eccentric to be marriageable. The eldest, Sophie, was only fourteen months younger than Pélagie, but ten years older in common-sense and knowledge.

Pélagie made a voyage to Noyon with her grandmother to look for a husband. She lived for a month in a handsome old house on the Cathedral Square, owned by an aged relative who would have liked to make a second marriage with her grandmother. The love-affair of these old people amused her, but she did not find the husband for whom she was seeking, and—she left as she came.

But one fine day a young surgeon arrived at Chauny in quest of practice.

Here is “the stranger to the town” predicted by the fortune-teller, thought Pélagie even before she had seen him, and she spoke of her hope to her grandmother.

“There is one thing to which I will never consent,” replied the latter, “it is that you should marry any one who is not of a good bourgeoise family,” and her grandmother assumed an air of authority, at which the young girl laughed heartily.

[9]The young surgeon’s name was Pierre Seron, and he could not have been better born in the bourgeoise class. He was descended from one of the physicians of Louis XIV. His father was the most prominent doctor at Compiègne, and his reputation reached as far as Paris. A cousin Seron had been a Conventional with Jean de Bien, and had played a great political rôle in Belgium, from whence the first French Serons had come.

“Of good family!” Pélagie and her grandmother repeated in chorus. “If only he has not had too commonplace an existence,” thought Pélagie.

Pierre Seron went up and down all the streets of the town, so as to make believe that he had already secured practice on arriving, and he soon had some successful cases which gave him a reputation.

He was a superb-looking man, his figure resembling that of a grenadier of the Imperial Guard. His face was not handsome. He wore his hair flat à la Napoleon, but his forehead was a little narrow, and he had great, convex, grey eyes and too full a nose, but his mouth—he was always clean-shaven—wore an attractive, gay, and mocking smile, in spite of very thick, sensual lips.