The Milliets. I. Up to the Threshold of Exile

The Milliets. I. Up to the Threshold of Exile

The Milliet Family

TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED PARENTS

“Any history that is not contemporary is suspect.”

Pascal

Old age has come: memory grows feebler with each passing day; the images, fresh or somber, once so vividly colored, and which seemed so strongly engraved upon my brain, are wearing away, like the imprint of a worn seal, or are fading, like a watercolor left too long in the sun; some of them no longer exist at all.

The old man sees with sadness the intelligence that grows dim, the will that loses its spring, the sensibility that grows blunt. But the oldest memories are the last to be effaced; let us hasten, then, to cast a glance backward toward that fleeting past. Soon, images and the consciousness that contemplates them, spectacle and spectator, all will have vanished.

Eugène Sue once had the idea of genius, which he carried out in an imperfect fashion in The Mysteries of the People: to follow, “across the ages,” two families, the one of poor artisans, the other of personages occupying a privileged place in the social hierarchy.

It is the work of a novelist, and one may dream of a more authentic resurrection of the past.

In our day, every family preserves in an album the photographs of all its members at different ages; this practice is excellent. If, to complete these faithful images, each portrait were accompanied by a biography indicating the temperament of the one it represents, his character, his tastes, his illnesses, the events of which he was the witness or the actor, these family archives could be consulted with profit. The physician and the philosopher would perhaps discover there some glimmers to illuminate the mysterious problems of heredity, the historian would find there a useful complement to his account of the great battles and treaties. It is a chapter of this anecdotal history that I attempt to trace here.

In an age fertile in revolutions, my parents found themselves in relations with men of the most varied kinds, some famous, others obscure, and the latter are not the least interesting. So it is that there are in our museums excellent portraits of unknown people. Men of genius themselves do sometimes no more than translate the sentiments that prevail in their age, but this translation, strongly impregnated with their exceptional personality, is less exact than that of more modest witnesses, and thereby closer to the average level. These last vibrate better in unison with their contemporaries and, if they have not played a great part in historical events, they at least make known to us the resonance of the facts in souls. Sometimes too they show us a few traits of that common and eternal stock which humanity as a whole transmits to the new generations.

“Far more than the living, the dead govern the earth. In the self that I know and that I received from them, The part I have contributed is a grain of dust, This atom is mine, the rest belongs to the forefathers.

We think their desires, their hopes, their angers, We thus relive all that they lived; In vain has time torn our fathers from us, They are still within us, and time is vanquished.”

LÉONCE GUIMBERTEAU: Human Becoming.

When we copy familiar letters, a few naïve notes from an intimate journal, schoolboys’ exercises filled with mistakes of spelling and of French, verses of an amateur or a beginner, our intention is not to offer them for the admiration of readers, but they are sincere documents and worthy of belief. We shall be very careful not to correct the incorrectnesses and the awkwardnesses of style, which guarantee their truthfulness. (1)

Here, most often, each one simply tells what he does, thinks aloud, and paints himself, without suspecting it.

[note: (1) I am very grateful to MM. Pascal Guébin and Georges Roth, who were good enough to help me choose and classify these documents.]

It is this that gives at once value and charm to these psychological analyses; they are unconscious. Adventures abound, but the true interest does not lie there. In a novel, the characters are all of a piece, good or bad. It is not so in real life; the best have their weaknesses and their failings. My parents were far too trusting and too credulous, but I was happy, in rereading their letters, to encounter there more than once proofs of courage, of disinterestedness, and above all of that nobility of soul which reconciles one a little with human nature.

The reader who makes the acquaintance of my grandmother, of my mother, and of all my kin, will not refuse, I hope, to grant their valor a little sympathy.

To publish these letters is to raise to dear memories the modest monument to which they have a right.

The family of Tucé became extinct with my maternal uncle. Twenty years ago, and most of the persons here in question have been dead for a long time.

The first part of these memoirs may therefore be published without inconvenience. It would not be so with the second. To divulge intimate memories relating to persons still living would be a veritable profanation, which I shall not commit.

In these memoirs, one will see all the members of a family of republicans succumb one after another beneath the blows of powerful enemies relentless against them.

Read, and judge.

I. — Up to the Threshold of Exile

1811-1852

I

A MARRIAGE OF LOVE

POETRY IN THE TIME OF LOUIS-PHILIPPE. — IN GARRISON: FÉLIX MILLIET. — PORTRAIT OF MADEMOISELLE LOUISE DE TUCÉ. — THE PREJUDICE OF NOBILITY. — A PASSING DISCOURAGEMENT. — LAST TRIALS.

1

In the time of Louis-Philippe, orators, journalists, novelists, and poets had a mania for “grand syntheses” in which bombast mingled with naïveté. People made the “philosophy of history,” whose laws they believed they knew; the least rhymester was persuaded that one had to go back to the origins of the world in order to explain the genesis of his talent. Monsieur Prudhomme has remained the personification of the bourgeoisie of that time; he has its solemn tone and its grand words draped around meager ideas. One recognizes something of this turn of mind even in very eminent men; one discovered traces of it in Guizot, in Quinet, and even in the preface to Cromwell.

Félix Milliet was too modest not to avoid this failing. His easy improvisation always remains without pretension. It has its negligences, its weaknesses; the formulas then in fashion are today out of fashion. But make no mistake about it, look more closely, listen well, and you will recognize the loyalty of the accent and the sincerity of the emotion.

Oh! you will easily find more skillful chisellers of verse: our young contemporary poets, refined seekers of rare vocables, know how to drown in a mysterious mist the intermittent flashes of their imprecise thoughts and their fleeting impressions. When they speak of their loves, which one guesses to be rather prosaic in reality, it will be with the exaggerations of a sickly sensibility. And yet their Muse, with the shimmering spangles of her dishevelled costume, seems to us nearer the gutter than the Empyrean.

The poetry of Félix Milliet is altogether simple, it does not pose; what it says, it feels keenly and deeply. Having to choose among numerous productions — they would easily fill twenty volumes — we have taken by preference those in which the poet, without wishing it and without knowing it, finds himself having recounted his life. No event struck him or touched him without his at once experiencing an imperious desire to express his emotion in verse. He yielded to this instinctive and probably hereditary need; he sang his sorrows and his joys; in this he is indeed a true lyric poet.

The fantastic has no place in his imagination. Here, nothing is arranged for pleasure, nothing is prettified, nothing is painted over. It is the truth altogether simple and altogether naked, the faithful portrait of a soul.

1

Jean-Joseph-Félix Milliet was born at Valence (Drôme) on July 19, 1811. An orphan from the age of nine, he was raised by friends of his family, as was his sister Celle, fourteen years old. M. and Madame de la Croix surrounded the two children with care and tenderness. Their uncle, M. Vialet, colonel of artillery, then Director of the arms manufactory of Saint-Étienne, had retired to his property at Saint-Flour, on the right bank of the Rhône.

At the collège of Valence, then at Lyon, Félix does not seem to have been a very studious nor a very attentive schoolboy. On his class books, he himself shamelessly inscribed his nickname: Milliet the scatterbrain. He nevertheless made fairly good studies and obtained the diploma of bachelier ès lettres. (1) He had a quick and open mind, a facility for assimilating the knowledge that pleased him, an excellent memory; but he liked to pass capriciously from one study to another, letting himself be carried away by that passion to which Charles Fourier gave the pretty name of papillonne.

[note: (1) October 16, 1829. Academy of Lyon.]

He was in Paris in 1830 and was preparing for the examinations of the School of Law, with his friend M. de Montal, when the Revolution of July broke out. Already a republican, he accompanied the people, at the time of the flight of Charles X, in the picturesque expedition to Rambouillet.

Generous ideas then made all hearts beat; it was a moment of hope, of social and artistic renewal, of intense intellectual life.

At the theater, the young student had attended with enthusiasm the first performance of Hernani. He became from then on a fanatical admirer of Victor Hugo, whom he took for his model when he tried to write.

The political and literary events that then impassioned all minds were not very favorable to positive and practical studies. Feeling nothing but repugnance for the career of lawyer, or for that of physician, Félix Milliet enlisted in the army, preferring the life of a simple soldier, with the hope of warlike adventures. Soon, however, made wiser by his hard trade, he resolved to work, and got himself admitted to the School of Saint-Cyr, then to that of Saumur. He came out of it with the rank of sub-lieutenant, in the Chasseurs first, then in the 7th Lancers.

A bold and skillful horseman, he excelled at breaking in the most refractory horses, without having recourse to whip or riding-crop, without the least brutality. He admired and practiced the method taught by Baucher, a learned and reasoned method, whose gentleness had won him over.

He had begun the study of drawing and painting. Soon love made him a poet. Horsemanship, art, and poetry, such were the occupations, or to put it better, the passions that divided his existence.

To these peaceful tastes he was soon to add another, more dangerous one, that of politics.

2

Félix Milliet was in garrison at Montoire when he saw for the first time Mademoiselle Louise de Tucé, with whom he became madly in love. As soon as the service left him an instant of liberty, he would come to caracole before the windows of the young girl, then in all the brilliance of her first flowering.

It is the old and ever-young romance of love. It is recounted in an album in the fashion of the time: vellum paper, large handwriting, yellow ink, troubadour style, all that is grown old, but remains charming. Hour by hour, or rather minute by minute, Félix Milliet also noted his impressions in an intimate journal; they are psychological snapshots. The reader will excuse the minuteness of the details and the literary inexperience, in favor of the sentiments, which are sincere and deep.

All this will make you smile, young people of the twentieth century, these are faded flowers, with paled petals, but they are still flowers. They keep a very sweet reflection of their freshness, colors of long ago, and as it were a reminiscence of their penetrating perfume.

Read on, then, if you wish to learn how people cooed and how they knew how to love in 1838.

Those who have observed the paintings and engravings of that time remember those young girls with the naïve air, their hair dressed in flat bands, with kiss-curls. At the ball, they wore a flower planted at the top of the head and falling back onto the brow.

Félix Milliet faithfully retraced from nature the portrait of Louise de Tucé:

I love the head of hair Whose dark adornment Parts into bands, Then gently arranges itself Around your angel’s brow In gracious ringlets.

Adorned with your sixteen years And intoxicated with joy, When you come to the ball, I love the white rose Whose stem leans Over your virginal brow. (1)

Would one not think one saw a portrait painted by Winterhalter? Further on, one would say a sketch by Viollet-le-Duc.

[note: (1) Those “timid beauties” whose virginal brow is “bathed in modesty,” all the poets of the time sang of them, and all too, the very greatest among them, have left us of them the same image, in the Louis-Philippe style. With more preciosity, Sainte-Beuve, in his Joseph Delorme, paints for us… Upon a brow of fifteen years the blond hair of Alice / Spreads the band that veils it from our eyes. / … the soft swelling of her silken tresses / Makes a double stream descending from the hill. / And in the evening, shutting herself away in a depth full of Ondine, / Loves to play around, and in the silken waves / To trail a white finger, and the nail like a rose / Skims as it glides the edges where their course is traced.]

The young officer recounts a joust on the water in which he had taken part. His eyes turned often toward the bank.

Oh! it was that she was there, the young demoiselle, Seated on the bank of the Loir, Her album in hand, sketching the turret Of the Gothic manor.

Madame de Marescot was one of those amiable persons who, when they have passed the age of pleasures, still love to attend the gay diversions of youth.

She was announcing a great ball, and the young officer was not invited to it! Hell and malediction! Despair and jealousy!

When amid the games, the laughter, the wild dances, The men, vying with one another, will press toward you, Your ear will hear words very sweet, That will make your young brow blush with pleasure.

Then think sometimes that, far from this fête, Far from all the happiness that the world promises, There is a loving heart, a poet’s soul, That sings to you very low and adores you in secret.

One would have to recount the prodigies of diplomacy, the visits, the flatteries, the intrigues employed by the young sub-lieutenant to get himself invited to Madame de Marescot’s. She laughed, the old lady, as she made the suitor languish. His quality as an excellent waltzer at last opened the doors to him.

A naïve page of the candid Bernardin de Saint-Pierre describes for us gatherings of young girls that are not without analogy with those to which our young officer was invited:

”… it is the custom for the young ladies of the same society to invite one another in turn to assemblies. They went with their mother to the house of the one who has invited them. Colacé serves them coffee with cream, with all sorts of pastries and preserves made by her hand. Sometimes she unveils before their eyes, on a great piece of tapestry at which she works day and night, forests of ever-green willows that she has planted herself, and streams of watered silk that she has made flow with her needle. Sometimes she weds her voice to the sound of the harpsichord, and seems to gather in her apartment all the birds of the groves. She invites her companions to sing in their turn. It is then that the praises redouble: their mothers, filled with joy, secretly applaud themselves, like Niobe, for the praises given to their daughters. A few officers in uniform and in boots, escaped furtively from their exercises, come to enjoy among them an instant of delicious calm; and while each of the girls hopes to find in one of them her protector and her friend, each of the men sighs after the companion who must one day soften, by the charm of domestic talents, the harshness of military labors.”

AFTER THE BALL

The torches grew pale, and the elegant crowd, Deserting the salons like a water that flows away, Gave the signal of the end of pleasures. And you have departed, still fresh and laughing, But forgetting, alas! perhaps disdainfully, Your pretty bouquet from the ball.

I, I gathered it up. With an attentive hand I set it to refresh in a water pure and living, After having covered it with a long burning kiss. And I saw each flower, on its withered stem, Recover its brilliance and be reborn to life As though by an enchantment.

This bouquet of awakening — how much sweeter it would have been for me To obtain it from a heart touched by my constancy, As a happy symbol of joy and of hope That one receives upon both knees!

Then, when the flowers have faded, the poet continues in a graver tone:

Well then! I love you thus, pale and sad relic, When I turn toward you my melancholy eye, A sigh escapes from my oppressed heart; A tear, sometimes, comes to moisten my eyelid, It is that I think then of your former splendor, Of your brilliance too soon passed.

It is that I see in you the most faithful image Of our illusions, of the dreams of the fair age, Of those beautiful golden dreams that one has at twenty years, Brilliant like the flowers, like them ephemeral, And which one sees fly away, alas! sad chimeras, On the cold wing of the south winds.

3

JOURNAL OF FÉLIX MILLIET

Thursday, July 12, 1838. — Visit to Madame de Marescot, confidence proposed and “received.”

Sunday, July 15. — This afternoon, from one o’clock to two, Madame de Marescot paid a visit to Madame de Tucé. Decisive moment! At four o’clock, visit to Madame de Marescot. The refusal is colored by saying that she is too young for anyone to think of marrying her. She is only sixteen and a half.

Wednesday. Review. — In the evening, a walk with M. de Launay. We spoke of her. (1) He knew nearly everything. Alas, he admits it, birth is an insurmountable obstacle. I shall never obtain her hand! — When fortunes are unequal enough, one may struggle; one may struggle, make for oneself a social position that satisfies self-esteem or even ambition. If, to obtain it, only gold were needed, I should have it. I would place all that I possess in one of those hazardous operations in which, if one runs the risk of losing one’s fortune, one may also have the chance of multiplying it tenfold. If only a brilliant position were needed, I could still hope; with time and a power of will such as I should have, nothing would be impossible for me.

[note: (1) Mademoiselle Louise de Tucé was taking lessons from M. de Launay, professor of drawing at the collège of Vendôme. Félix hastened to make the acquaintance of this amiable and skillful artist, of whom he asked advice.]

But it does not depend on me to have been born noble; all human power breaks against such an obstacle. Prejudice or not, it is one of those barriers that one cannot hope to cross or to break.

Thursday, August 8. — I left my friends at table and went out. A happy chance made me meet Madame de Tucé and Mademoiselle Louise at the corner of the square. Nothing could lead me to suppose that I would meet her at that hour. How white and rosy she was! How well her great straw hat suited her! Oh, how I love her! She has an amiable air, a charm that I cannot define! She entered an apartment. She was often at the window and looked out over the square. Her eyes turned for an instant toward the café. I was there, hidden by the shutters which left only a narrow opening. I was very happy during those few minutes. It would be impossible for me to render a single one of the thoughts that crossed my mind; or rather I did not think, I was absorbed in my contemplation… (1)

[note: (1) Sentiment substituted for reasoning — this is the road that leads to ecstasy.]

Toward half past six, they went out for a walk. I was on horseback on the square. I supposed they were going to Madame de M…‘s; and I took the road to Troo. Then, I changed my mind and, without knowing why, by instinct, I took the boulevard and went to come out on the road that leads to the ruins of the château of Lavardin. They were just then coming out of a house, and were heading toward the château. Fearing to seem to be following them, I made a half-turn, I took the boulevard again at a trot, then turning down a cross-path, I arrived before them at Lavardin. I did not know whether they would come as far as there. I had guessed it. (2) I was going to approach them, when I saw them enter a garden, at M. de Clinchant’s; I leapt down from a distance. Mademoiselle Louise must have seen me. She was a few steps behind, with her little sister Noémi. I followed her with my eyes, admiring

[note: (2) These intuitions or presentiments may be interpreted as a result, in some cases, of telepathy, today so passionately discussed.]

her figure, slender and graceful. M. de Clinchant was not at home; they retraced their steps. But I was already a little far off, and I did not dare turn my head. I took to the trot and was already at Montoire to see them once more, when they came back in.

Friday. — I have just come from the marionette show. Her servant — I saw her light at her window, and I wished the angel who is going to fall asleep a sleep calm and pure as her heart, dreams all rosy like her fresh face, and gentle as her soul.

Saturday the 6th, half past ten in the evening. — The marionettes were playing every evening. I dressed as a townsman and went back; I had guessed that these ladies would go there. They were already in the hall. Madame de Tucé had the kindness to have me seated at her right.

Sunday. — Oh, the agreeable day! I was coming from the horse-breaking, it was about eight o’clock, when Madame de Tucé and Mademoiselle Louise went to Madame de M…‘s. Then, I followed them to the restaurant, to high mass. From two o’clock to four o’clock, M. de Launay drew Madame de Tucé’s house, and Mademoiselle Louise with him. I dressed in haste to go to Madame de Marescot’s. Seven or eight young ladies and two little young men were around a table, playing little card games. I played at drawings with Mademoiselle Louise. I was a little distant from the table and could without affectation look at her from time to time. I was able to admire her eyes of a beautiful dark color, so soft and so velvety. Oh, happiness! three or four times, in giving her the cards, I brushed the tips of her fingers!

No, whatever may be the fate reserved for me, I shall never dare to complain. For I have had days so vivid and so sweet, so unhoped-for, that they surpass all that I had dreamed! Whatever may happen to me, I can only bless fate, I can only bless her, the source of all my joys so pure and of my ineffable happiness!

Tuesday, a quarter past seven. — I am at the quarters. I often cast my glances through the curtains of her closed window. She looks at herself in the mirror. She combs her hair, which falls on both sides along her cheeks. My heart beats violently in my breast. I almost reproach myself for looking at her thus. — She is not alone. Is it Madame de Tucé who is with her? No. It is Mademoiselle Louise Mousseron. The two pretty cousins smooth their hair. They laugh, the happy girls!

The rain begins to fall. They come to look through the panes. Have they seen me? The window is open. Mademoiselle Louise made two or three pirouettes, then she saw me, and disappeared suddenly. — They have just left by carriage for Fleurigny.

4

Soon the young officer had to leave Montoire to go in garrison to Vendôme. The distance between these two little towns is only a few leagues; nevertheless the occasions of seeing Mademoiselle de Tucé were going to become rarer.

… It was about half past four when I caught sight of a great open calèche, all filled with ladies and young ladies. It passed like a flash of lightning, but I do not think I was mistaken: a pink dress! Mademoiselle de Tucé was there… My heart tightened. A sudden cold ran through me from head to foot. (1) I do not know why I experienced a painful impression. It is regret, alas! Soon I shall no longer be able to see her… And no one to whom to confide my sorrows! The friendly hearts in whom I hoped to find an echo of my grief seemed to me so cold that I shut it up within myself.

[note: (1) All those who concern themselves with psycho-physics know the fact noted here by Félix Milliet: the intimate connection that exists between the sensation of cold and distress; as, inversely, the rise of temperature that accompanies joy and love. “Love is an increase of the power of acting, of thinking, in whoever experiences it. A deep joy floods the soul when it passes to a greater perfection. Reciprocally, sadness and melancholy, in the man who sees the one he loves drawing away, are the sign of a true diminishment of his being.”]

FAREWELL

The more I love her, O my God! the more I am wretched. On her brilliant path I pass unnoticed; In vain I implore her, she is inexorable, And yet what I have suffered, she has known it.

All happiness here below rests upon the sand; My morning hope by evening is deceived; With her bitter refusals the cruel one overwhelms me, And I shall have given all without having received anything.

I asked so little to cherish existence, So little to be happy: a shadow of hope, A single word of pity… which never came!

Could I, in spite of myself, have merited your blame? A fire of divine love illuminated my soul; All is going to be extinguished; farewell!… How I loved you!

Vendôme. Sunday. General review. — I did nothing but think of her all day long.

Since I left Montoire, my ideas are sadder and more somber. Down there, the happiness of seeing her often kept me from considering how little founded my hopes were; I enjoyed the present without thinking too much of the future. Now my mind resembles the wavering flame of a lamp that is going to go out.

Tuesday. — They will come tomorrow to the distribution of prizes at the collège. — I went to see Colonel Bignon; we spoke much of her. Monsieur and Madame are unstinting in their praises of her.

Wednesday the 29th. — I accompanied Madame Bignon to the distribution of prizes, kept places for Madame de Tucé. When they arrived, I was placed behind them. Obliged to give up my place to some ladies! I could see nothing more than her straw hat.

On going out, I accompanied Mademoiselle Louise during her visit to the exhibition of drawings; there were there some lead-pencil works and watercolors very fine indeed.

During the concert, Madame Bignon had invited me to spend the evening at her house. Madame de Tucé and Mademoiselle Louise came. I gave her my arm to go down into the dining room. At dinner I was near her! We took a turn in the garden. We came back in at once because of the cold.

I accompanied them at half past ten as far as the hotel. Chance has favored me greatly today, but alas, all this happiness only makes her loss more bitter and in no way increases my chances of success. They are definitely leaving Friday for Le Mans.

Thursday the 23rd. — She leaves tomorrow! I shall go Saturday to Montoire. I shall see the empty house.

Saturday the 25th. — On arriving at Montoire, I caught sight of the open windows. They had not gone. I went into Madame de Tucé’s, under the pretext of announcing to her that the projected fête would take place only on Sunday. They knew it.

Sunday. — Danced the first contredanse with Mademoiselle Louise opposite me, and the second with her!…

The evening over, Madame de Tucé asked me to go and fetch her daughter’s cloak. In the joy mingled with surprise that these words caused me, I set off like a madman, without taking, I believe, the time to answer. The servant was running after the horse, which had escaped among the trees, abandoning the carriage. The cloaks were not there. I hastened to tell this to Madame de Tucé. Then, I came back in haste to the servant, who showed me the cloak and the shawl set down on a stone bench. I took them, I was thanked, and there they go, departed. My hired carriage found itself behind theirs during the whole journey… And that was the end of my happiness.

HER RETURN

I suffered in silence, Cursing her absence So slow to come to an end; I saw her in dream, But my happiness draws to its close, She is going to come back.

All grows fair, gilds itself, Comes to life and takes color From this ray of hope. Hidden in the greenery, The gay brook murmurs: Soon you will see her!…

My friend C… told Mademoiselle Ch… that I was very much in love with Mademoiselle de Tucé, that I had written verses for her, and that he had already set them to music.

Mademoiselle Ch… said that Madame de Tucé set great store by name and by fortune. A certain X…, having twenty thousand livres of income but no name, was refused. M. de B…, likewise — as for him, he was not rich enough.

Yet nothing discourages the young officer.

Sunday, December 2. — I sent a letter to Madame de Marescot to ask her to be so good as to present my request for marriage.

Tuesday the 4th. — It is today or tomorrow that my fate is going to be decided. Must I fear or hope?

Saturday the 8th. — Madame de Marescot sends me the reply that Madame de Tucé made to her:

”… I have need, Madame, to speak with an open heart to you who have always shown so much interest in my daughter. I have spoken neither to Louise nor to her guardian of the proposal you had made to me, for I am quite decided not to marry my daughter before her eighteen years are completed. For such was the intention of M. de Tucé… You know also, Madame, that my daughter belongs to one of the most ancient families of the Maine, which would find it little fitting that I should have Louise make an alliance in which she would find neither birth nor title. I cannot give you a positive answer before having obtained fresh information. But I beg you, Madame, to tell M. Milliet that I neither ask for nor accept any, unless he first consents to wait until the month of September or October 1839, and unless he consents also to take a title in marrying, for I believe that he is not a gentleman. I fear too that difficulties may yet arise concerning the distance of the properties that M. Milliet may have. I have heard it said that he was from Valence. I could not consent to see Louise go away to so great a distance.

I renew to you, Madame, my thanks for the interest you show to Louise, and beg you to accept the assurance of my respectful attachment.

De TUCÉ, née HUÉ DE MONTAIGU”

Félix Milliet to his friend, M. de Montal:

”… In case Madame de Tucé should consent to my marriage, I am assured that she would make it a condition that I add to my name that of one of my properties, of Saint-Flour for example. If I had been asked to take a title, I would not have needed to consult you in order to answer no; but if it is only a matter of the addition of the name of an estate… I fear to be inferior, without knowing it, through the keen desire I have for this union. Advise me, you who are calm and reasonable; tell me what you think of it. Can I promise that without making myself ridiculous? Those who know me know well that I shall never attribute to myself a title that does not belong to me.”

The uprightness and the probity of Félix Milliet won over Mademoiselle Louise de Tucé; and the sincerity of his love triumphed over the absurd prejudices of nobility, more powerful then than today. Soon, the affection of the two young people having become reciprocal, Madame de Tucé had the wisdom not to oppose her daughter’s inclination. She wrote to Madame de Marescot:

“If I overlook the grave inconvenience of marrying Louise before her eighteen years are completed, it is because of the good information you give me of M. Milliet’s conduct, to whom moreover his superiors and his comrades render justice. For myself, I know him little, but I have been able to appreciate his discretion toward my daughter; I am grateful to him for it…“

5

December has come, but the lover braves the rain and the snow. The poet writes to a friend:

You see, if you have not, once in your life, Felt the magic power of love, You will not understand the ineffable happiness, The unspeakable pleasure that fills the heart, On Sunday at noon, when, leaving the week behind, One dashes off on horseback right across the plain, At a gallop, full of hope, drunk with love. Often, When the rain falls and the wind blows, To pass, streaming, a workman who smokes And who chews while bowing his bit white with foam, Before a window, where one will suddenly see A curtain, lifted by a white hand, Then there will appear to you the gracious face Of a child with blue eyes who, of your passage Anxious, awaited the desired moment, Perhaps, alas, too slow to come for her liking.

You will not understand the intoxication, the delirium, The voluptuousness one has in thinking, in saying to oneself That your adored angel, in seeing you thus, Will pity you, then very low will murmur: thank you. For she will know well that it is because of her That on your cloak the rain streams in floods, That it is for her alone and to see her beautiful eyes, To hear the melodious sound of her voice, To see her beautiful white neck, sown with blue veins, That at a gallop you have traveled four leagues.

Art alone can make the lover worthy of the one he loves.

I would wish that my poetry Were harmonious and choice, Like the song of the nightingale; Then my ardent thought, In a cadenced stanza, Would take its flight up toward you. I would wish that my poetry Were harmonious and choice.

I would wish, by a spell, To have the brush of Correggio, Of Albani or of Raphael: Your beauty, luminous star, Would shine upon the humble canvas, Its brilliance would be immortal. I would wish, by a spell, To have the brush of Correggio.

I would wish to be a sculptor And, giving your form to the stone, To seat you upon a high pedestal, In a ravishing pose; Then, on the base of rose granite, To engrave your virginal name. I would wish to be a sculptor To give your form to the stone.

I would wish to be, in my intoxication, The light sylph who caresses Your beautiful brow during sleep; Then, in the morning, when your eyelid Opens its lashes to the light, To be a white ray of sun. I would wish to be, in my intoxication, The happy sylph who caresses you.

But alas, I am little enough, Neither great painter, nor rosy sylph, Nor poet with the golden lyre; What does it matter, if you will take me Such as I am, a dreamer very tender, With my heart for my whole treasure. But alas, I am little enough, Neither great painter, nor rosy sylph.

6

In January 1839, the consent so ardently awaited was at last granted. The poet’s joy overflows, and he already mingles with it the gravity of a solemn oath. He promises Louise to embellish and build her new existence.

That she may not be able to tell the difference Between her present happiness and her happiness past, To be a faithful elm to this tender vine Which has just found me worthy to support it, Oh, when a divine knot unites us forever, Both my soul to your soul and my days to your days, Like a river with golden waves the hours will flow. If you wish, we shall flee far from sad dwellings, Far from the noise, from the crowd, that insufferable swarm, And we shall go together, and giving each other our hand, Walk slowly upon the green hill, Near the old tower, from which the gaze commands The valley calm and fresh, furrowed by the Loir.

I shall tell you how sad my days were, Before your presence came to charm their course, How peacefully my childhood flowed by, How, while still very young, I knew suffering, And later, in the world where I tried my steps, How much bitterness I met with, alas! From the day I loved her, I shall tell you my fears, Then my flashes of hope, my sighs and my laments, And my days without rest and my nights without sleep, And the senseless vows I addressed to heaven. At last you will hear me say that I adore you, Say it to you a hundred times, then say it to you again.

April 1839.

Félix Milliet was 27 years old at the time of his marriage; Louise de Tucé was 17.

II

FAMILY LIFE

1840-1851

PORTRAITS OF MY PARENTS. — BIRTH OF FERNAND, OF ALIX, AND OF PAUL. — M. MILLIET RESIGNS HIS COMMISSION AS OFFICER. — MÉLOTTE. — FANCY AND REALITY. — A MARVELOUS VISION. — CHILDISH PRANKS. — AN UNPUNISHED MISDEED. — EDUCATION ACCORDING TO MONTAIGNE. — DIATRIBE AGAINST TOBACCO. — A MAD DOG.

1

My father, whose family was originally from Savoy, recalled by his features the ancient type of the Allobroges: chestnut hair, which never turned white, and a great moustache of a reddish blond. His stature was a little below the average; his colored complexion and his extremely lively gray eyes marked a temperament at once sanguine and nervous. His character was sensitive, passionate, ardent, irascible, but without rancor, frank, loyal, affectionate, and good. Probity was so natural to him that he could not even conceive the possibility of the least breach of delicacy. His absolute disinterestedness and his devotion to his principles drew to him numerous and durable sympathies.

The face of my mother breathed at once gentleness and firmness. Her eyes were of a dark blue, her hair brown, almost black, her cheeks of a dazzling freshness; flat bands framed the very pure oval of her face. Her beautiful hands resembled those of the Mona Lisa, whose pose they often had. The natural nobility of her manners, the charm of her smile, and the fineness of her features fully justified her reputation for beauty. My father was very proud of it, but she did not seem to suspect it. She set more store by the renown that her intelligence, her uprightness, and her inexhaustible goodness earned her.

I do not remember ever having seen her angry, nor even sullen. This constant serenity of mood bore witness to the harmonious relation that unites moral health to physical health in a well-balanced nature.

Accustomed from her earliest age to tending the sick, my mother had the instinct of medicine. How many times did she heal us! And her devotion was not limited to family egoism. In an epidemic of cholera, she gave proof of great courage, not hesitating to bring help to those who were stricken around her.

M. and Madame Milliet passed their first years of marriage gaily. The regiment, which changed garrison several times, stayed for a time at Pontivy, then at Alençon. Louise had to go to Le Mans for her confinement, and the separation seemed very cruel to the two young people.

My brother Fernand was born on August 6, 1840.

Military life in the provinces offered no great attraction to minds avid for liberty and intellectual life. As soon as a son is born to him, Félix thinks of leaving the service:

PLANS

Do you wish us to make an existence Fresh as a fair April day, And that never again may begin For us the sorrow of exile? Tell me, do you wish that, far from the world Unjust, wicked, and perverse, Our days may flow by, like the water Of a brook, beneath green trees?

Come with me into my homeland, Where the sun always smiles, Sweet companion of my life, There, we shall pass happy days.

And fear not that I shall regret No longer hearing the bugle, No longer seeing my epaulette Gleam at the head of a squadron;

No longer being able to gird on The steel saber that streams, That comes, with a ringing sound, To beat the flanks of my charger.

Ah, without regret I shall know how to say To arms my last farewells, For my glory is in your smile And my happiness is in your eyes.

Close by the torrent that pours forth, Not far from the Rhône with its great waters, We have a white house That rises at the foot of the slopes.

You will not be a châtelaine; It has neither keep nor tower, But it commands the plain And the villages round about.

But in this modest refuge With us will come pleasure, And then love will do the rest, For love knows how to embellish all things.

A little later Félix wrote the pretty romance entitled “The Dream” (music by Madame Magnin). He did no more than translate into verse a page of prose composed by Louise.

THE DREAM

My beloved, I had a dream That I want to tell you very low; Come onto the sand of the shore, The echo will not hear us.

You were departing for a long voyage; I, in the form of a cloud, Was swimming in the serene ether; At my flanks bearing your thought, I followed your hurried march And gave shade to your road.

Suspending your distant course, You stopped at the fountain With its verdant and flowering banks, And I, suddenly, three times happy, Became the amorous wave, Bathing your aching feet.

Then, the sky having veiled itself with shadow, You met, near the dark wood, A provoking enemy; I was then the good sword, Prompt, faithful, and well tempered, My point went to bite him at the heart.

My beloved, that is my dream, My mouth has told it to you very low, Come into my arms that it may be fulfilled, The echo will not hear us.

The dream was realized: what the young woman wished to be, the admirable wife was.

At the birth of his eldest son, Félix expressed in a charming fashion the delicate and tender sentiments of a young man astonished at being a father for the first time. He hardly dares touch the newborn, he remains plunged in a delicious contemplation:

And my soul stops short, in ecstasy, enraptured… It is that you appear to me beside his cradle, Beside our child whose first smile Was for you, the first, O mother with the divine heart, Who gave him life at the price of a long martyrdom, And who, to nourish him, gave too your breast. Then with a pure happiness my sad brow brightens, Like a somber horizon at the rays of the sun; And I kiss my son and I bless his mother, And I address for them a prayer to heaven.

TO THE MOTHER OF MY CHILD

Mother, little mother!… oh, how to your ear This harmonious word will appear far sweeter, When it escapes from the rosy mouth Of your little Fernand, seated upon your knees.

But in this white book you alone dare to read; You read in his look, you read in his smile, O mother, even as God reads in the depth of the heart.

Oh, what poetry, pure and unmixed, Must shine for you upon this angel’s face, Which for other eyes expresses nothing yet! And in the confused sounds of his childish voice, A stammered language that you alone divine, What sweet harmony and what celestial accord!

Tell me what very low his breath murmurs, When upon your knees you rock his sleep; No doubt, when toward him you bend your face, Your ear gathers a sound that comes from heaven.

Tell me what his eye, mirror of his young soul, Reflects of the divine, of the pure, and of the intoxicating; Tell me what, in your heart of mother and of wife, This child’s smile pours of voluptuousness.

Oh, tell me all that, I shall know how to understand you, Tell me all your happiness, I beg you on my knees, For I envy you and, if I were less tender, And if I loved you less, I would become jealous of it.

Pontivy, October 1840.

2

My sister Alix was born on May 18, 1842. She was all slight, and M. Milliet’s orderly, a colossus, carried her on his outstretched arm in the hollow of his hand.

M. Milliet, afflicted with a malady of the larynx, which prevented him from making military commands well heard, decided a little rashly to resign his commission. The special knowledge he possessed could have procured for him, in the stud farms, a position that would have allowed him to wait for his retirement. He preferred to settle at Le Mans. It is there that I came into the world, on March 6, 1844. (1)

[note: (1) At the beginning of her pregnancy, Madame Milliet had consulted an ignorant physician who, not divining the cause of her indisposition, had ordered bleedings. The patient, watched over by her nurse, had lost consciousness, bathed in her blood. Such was perhaps the cause of the predisposition to anemia from which I have suffered more than once.]

I was a big peaceful little blond, easy to raise, like all healthy children. I was entrusted to the affectionate care of a pretty and excellent little maidservant of fifteen, Émilie, whom we called Mélotte. I do not think she ever once forgot her task as guardian, even when, on a walk, she would meet — oh, quite by chance! — a handsome lad of twenty, Charles Delaporte, a skillful decorator, whom she before long married. I have kept a vague but charming memory of that idyll, at which I was present without understanding it.

3

In growing old, I have forgotten many interesting and useful things, which had nevertheless cost me long efforts to learn, but I still remember the strange songs with which Mélotte lulled us in the evening. Like many musicians, she attached no importance to the words and mangled them so well that they ended up having no sense at all.

But what charmed us still more were the fairy tales, of giants or of brigands, that strike so vividly, too vividly perhaps, young imaginations. Mélotte had a story of a hanged man, of which I never grew tired. She would take me astride upon her knees, whose movements varied according to the sense of the tale:

The horseman advances at first quite gently, at a walk, in a dark forest. Evening comes, he is sad, he laments being all alone; for three days he has not eaten. Will he find a lodging to sleep in? Will he be reduced to dying of hunger?

Come, courage! let us trot a little: hop! hop! Suddenly the horse neighs and stops short! stop!… What is this great phantom that sways at the end of a branch and bars the road? It is a hanged man who sticks out a long tongue… — And Mélotte imitated the hanged man. — Hunger is a bad counselor. The horseman stands up in the saddle, draws his great cutlass, and cuts off a leg from the hanged man.

Quick, quick, off he goes again, at a trot! at a trot! What a good stew we are going to make at the next inn! Night comes, let us hasten! at a gallop! patatras! patatras! The wind whistles through the branches and carries off his hat. No matter! Patatras! patatras! The thunder rumbles in the distance. The horseman takes fright. His conscience is not at ease, and remorse speaks within him. Patatras! patatras! breathless, with great strokes of his spurs, he quickens the gallop of his mount. It is in vain! no house on the road. The horse, exhausted with fatigue, returns to a walk.

Little by little, with the moans of the gale there mingles a small voice, which very low, very low, speaks to him in his ear. It is slow and pleading. What does it say? — “Good horseman, I beg you, give me back my leg!” — But no. The hanged man is over there, very far away, it is doubtless the wind moaning in the dry leaves! — Hop! hop! The horse trots, and the knees begin to move again. But now the voice becomes more severe and stronger: “Give me back my leg, come now! give me back my leg!” The voice swells, threatening but still contained, low and muffled. — All at once, plouf! a great abrupt leap, and a voice of thunder cries very fast, at the top of its lungs: “Give me back my leg!!!”

The effect was striking! — What good laughter, after the first shudder! Again! again! — I have unfortunately forgotten the end of the story.

A man will remember all his life the first impressions he has received. One ought to take advantage of this faculty to engrave, upon the white page of memory, images beautiful and good, which would leave there an ineffaceable imprint.

After the example of more than one illustrious savant, Mélotte was very credulous, and the legends to which she gave faith were not always very orthodox. The poetry of nurses’ tales, like that of the religions come from the East, knows how to excuse their absurdity.

Every day the crumbs of bread that we set on the window attracted the little birds. They would come in a flock, peck with joyous chirpings, and seemed to thank us by their little festive airs. I did not then know what these pretty sparrows are, and I am sure that you do not know it either. Mélotte taught it to me: they are the souls of little children dead in the cradle.

This metempsychosis did not astonish me at all; I found it as plausible as the stories of horned demons and of guardian angels.

Madame Milliet counted among her friends a person of rare intelligence and of inexhaustible goodness, Mademoiselle Marie Carpentier, who, in 1849, became Madame Pape. Directress of the Salle d’asile of Le Mans, she was inaugurating in France that new system of teaching, whose very great and very merited success is well known. From then on the lesson of things substituted itself little by little for purely bookish instruction. Fairy tales were advantageously replaced by the observation of nature, whose marvels are well suited, they too, to awaken the imagination of a child.

Sometimes, on Sunday, Mélotte took us to the Museum. Most of the inhabitants of our provincial towns do not suspect that they have at home an excellent school of art, where they would have great need to go and take lessons in taste. They do not see what a delicious source of pure enjoyments they thus neglect, through a disdainful and regrettable ignorance.

Do you know what, in the fine little Museum of Le Mans, most piqued our childish curiosity? It was neither the famous enamel that preserves the heroic image of Godfrey of Bouillon, nor the admirable family painting, masterpiece of Louis David, it was… the mummy! That distant princess who had had herself embalmed, four or five thousand years ago, in the hope of taking up life again on the day of Judgment — I believed her simply asleep, and death appeared to me like a long sleep. Sometimes I saw in a dream the mummy resurrected; she would take me by the hand, and I followed her with rapture into her strange country.

My mother, in showing us some beautiful pictures, had described to us Egypt, “the gift of the Nile,” the great majestic and venerable river, with its unknown source, with its fecund inundations; the sphinxes of rose granite; the enormous monuments, powerfully seated in their solemn calm, beneath a sky of an intense blue, beneath the fiery arrows of an implacable sun; the terrible simoom that dries up everything; and, in the immense, desolate solitude, without greenery, without water, in the terrified sands of the interminable desert, the long caravans filing by far off, lulled by the tireless pace of their callous camels; the brilliant mirages that bring a deceptive hope to the traveler dying of thirst; then the groves of palm trees with their elegant plumes; the delicious oases, rare as the days of happiness in life.

These realities seemed to us as interesting as the most fantastic legends.

4

The instruction received by Louise at Montoire could only be that of Catholic young girls, slender baggage assuredly. She was happy to find in her husband a mind more open and more cultivated. What pleasure to initiate themselves together into the questions of art, of literature, of philosophy, and of politics, in an age when so many new and generous ideas were fermenting. In spite of her apparent calm, her sympathy suffered from the miseries inherent in our bad social organization. She brought a youthful ardor to all noble causes. — A learned professor of mathematics, M. Chassevant, had communicated to our parents his enthusiastic admiration for the doctrines of Fourier, that utopian of genius. The phalanstery, with the harmonious organization of attractive labor by means of the series, seemed to them to be the remedy that was going to regenerate the world. With the logic of a deep conviction, they always put these doctrines into practice and left to their children the fullest liberty in the choice of labors and of pleasures. If my brother was a soldier, if I was a painter, it is because “the attractions are proportional to the destinies.”

We lived at Le Mans, in the rue Marengo, a pretty house between courtyard and garden, built upon the plans of my parents. In this peaceful nest, between my big brother and my little sister whose doll I was, cherished among three of our relatives, we had the happiness of receiving, without suspecting it, the best of educations, that of the daily examples of devoted affection, of mutual respect, and of constant accord.

Young plants grow well in that sweet warmth of the domestic hearth. I learned that the union of the family is the principal condition of happiness, and I lulled myself with that childish hope that my whole life would be but one long joy. These sweet illusions make a painful contrast with the bitternesses with which I have since been filled.

5

My mother taught me early to read and to write, without fatigue, in playing. I already recited a few verses, which I understood only half; but what filled me with pride was to have penetrated the mysteries of addition. I liked to slip beneath a little chiffonier of rosewood, behind which my blackboard was kept, and there, gravely squatting like a little Buddha, I would set myself difficult problems, with numbers of two and even of three figures! When I had succeeded in finding the total which, dominant thing, sometimes had up to four figures, I was marveling at my own learning and as content as Archimedes. People complimented me, and I liked that very much. I had, as the phrenologists said then, the bump of approbativeness.

My parents did not worry too much about this tendency, knowing of what help vainglory can be in the studies of a child.

“The passions,” said Fontenelle, “are in men the winds that are necessary to set everything in motion, even though they often cause storms; if reason were to rule on the earth, nothing would happen there.”

This just idea is at the base of the system of education invented by Fourier, and which he expounds in so charming a fashion.

We often went to take our afternoon snack at my grandmother’s, whose house was a neighbor of ours, in the rue Auvray. The children played in the garden, the ladies, seated in the shade of a magnolia, worked at some tapestry. My mother had undertaken to knit a great counterpane that was my admiration, and she charged me with carrying on my shoulder the precious work rolled around her long wooden needles. Dressed in a little blouse of black velvet, a cravat of red silk knotted around a great white turned-down collar, I advanced with an important air, I believed myself a traveler setting off on a mission for a long voyage, and I was persuaded that I contributed a little to the making of the masterpiece.

My mother encouraged these illusions. The child who has been congratulated for a small service seeks the occasion to render others; he takes the habit of being obliging and of thinking of others. And besides, who has not been happy to render a service to his mother?

6

During the holidays, and there were often some, we would go to my grandmother’s at Fleurigny, near Montoire. The villa, built halfway up a wooded hill, has for its dependencies very spacious vaulted cellars, hollowed out in the tufa, like the dwellings of the ancient Troglodytes. (1) — The neighborhood of the farm delighted us: hens, ducks, sheep, goats, and cows were our intimate friends, not to mention Bas-rouges, the shepherd’s dog.

[note: (1) Not far from Fleurigny, the village of Troo presents a truly singular aspect: imagine a rocky hill, terraced in irregular tiers, like the steps of a colossal staircase, carved out by giants. In its vertical part, each step is hollowed with spacious grottoes that serve as dwellings for numerous families, as barns for their harvests, as stables for their cattle. There one has need neither of mason nor of carpenter; a few strokes of the pick in the calcareous tufa, and there is a house created. The birth of a child compels one to enlarge it, or to hollow out a new room beside the preceding ones. The chimneys of the lower grottoes seem to push up into the gardens that are cultivated on the terraces of the first floor. The vine and the climbing roses gracefully frame the doors and the windows. The inhabitants of this village take pleasure in these dwellings, cool in summer, warm and dry in winter, thanks to their orientation full south.]

In the spring, I had been very astonished to see little yellow balls come out of the eggs, opening a great beak, and no less surprised to learn that these chicks would soon transform themselves into beautiful hens and into great roosters with vivid colors. Wishing to make an experiment, I asked my grandmother for some pink feathers, the faded ornament of an old hat, and I planted them in my garden. A precocious partisan of the transformist doctrines, I had the hope of seeing, the following spring, a few pink chicks sprout up. Who knows? Life has so many mysteries. Even now, its enigmas have not ceased to interest me.

My grandmother had given to Alix a heifer named Néra, to Fernand a little cart and a donkey. Our happiness was to jolt ourselves along in paths all hollowed with ruts, and above all to tip ourselves over on purpose into the ditches, which is, as everyone knows, very amusing.

Like many little girls, Alix loved to imitate the carriage and the manners of old persons. She knew how to hitch up her dress with a particular gesture, in the manner of her grandmother; she straightened up and advanced like her with a decided gait, stamping her heel a little. It was diverting to recognize in this little girl the caricature of Madame de Tucé. The latter was the first to be amused by it, remembering that she too, in her young age, had had this same talent. It denotes at once the taste for critical observation and that precious gift: to divine what can make others laugh. When it is free of malice, gaiety is so good a thing!

Our days flowed by sweetly, and it seems to me that we had a consciousness of our happiness.

The following winter, the Prefect of Le Mans organized a great fête with a costume ball. My mother was to be dressed as Ceres. A superb crown of golden ears of grain was sent for from Paris, from Froment-Meurice’s. I had a great desire to see this costume, of which there was so much talk. Alas, I was sent to bed at the usual hour. I obeyed, with a very heavy heart. I had so desolate a look that my mother had to promise me to say goodbye to me before leaving.

I was sleeping deeply, when a kiss upon my brow came to wake me: I half open my eyes, believing myself still dreaming, and, in a glory of light, the Goddess appears to me, all resplendent with diamonds, smiling and majestic beneath her crown of golden ears of grain.

I was in ecstasy, it was a vision from heaven! Since that moment, I know very clearly what those mean who speak of the ideal Beautiful.

And I knew also in that instant what it is, the happiness of being loved. That young woman, marvelously beautiful and admirably adorned, was my mother. She bent toward me, she smiled, and her smile expressed at once the joy of being admired and maternal tenderness. — She kissed me and disappeared… I fell asleep again, but divine dreams lulled my sleep.

7

I would not wish to give to understand that deep meditations upon the destiny of beings or upon aesthetics were the ordinary state of my thought. For a future ascetic, I was very much of a glutton, and my greatest ambition was to become a pastry-cook. (1)

[note: (1) One should read in Fourier’s New World (1829) the chapters on gluttony. What social progress would it not bring about in Harmony! By it, youth would take an interest again in agricultural labors; the consumer would know on what soil and according to what method his food is cultivated, and adulterations, those “knaveries of the commercial spirit,” would be impossible; the workers would receive food healthy and sufficient to repair their fatigues; intemperance would disappear, for a reasoned gastronomy is the best preservative against the abuses of the table. “It is nature that gives to children of all countries a taste so general for fine colors, sweetened creams, lemonades, etc.” Eugène Sue made use of these same reasons to show the happy effects of gluttony. Besides, the ideas of Fourier are found already in part realized by the cooperatives of production, the social hostelries, the cooperative restaurants, the school canteens, and, in certain nursery schools, is not the teaching of the theory of fractions done with fruits and cakes?]

Mélotte called me “my dove” or “my Holy Ghost,” but she had to recognize on many occasions that this Holy Ghost was very imperfect. This philosophical term is employed at Le Mans to designate a turbulent, mischievous, or scatterbrained child.

I even fear to have been somewhat an accomplice in a crime, committed by a friend of my brother’s, Émile Magnin, and to have gone to fetch the logs that those wicked urchins threw onto the greenhouse of the neighboring proprietor. The panes flew into shards and the rare plants were crushed. — This bombardment was, it seems, the effect of a vendetta. There was beneath it some tragic story of ears tweaked.

We believed the neighbor absent. But suddenly an irritated voice bursts out. We flee, terrified.

To our great astonishment, Émile, instead of hiding, goes straight to his mother. — Madame Laure Magnin, an excellent musician, was a young widow, who sought a consolation for her grief in the reading of the most romantic poems and the most romanesque novels. Living thus in an imaginary world, which over-excited her artist’s sensibility, she no longer saw real things very soundly. Blinded moreover by maternal love, her son appeared to her as the most beautiful, the most intelligent, and the best of beings, his foolishnesses were strokes of genius, and she had communicated to Émile her exaltation. Our hero therefore came to throw himself weeping at the feet of his mother, to kiss her hands with transport, and to cry out: “O my mother, we are lost! M. X… is going to slap us; protect us, save us!” And the mother answered him, covering his head with kisses: “O my beloved son, calm yourself, fear nothing! I am here to defend you. Let him come, then, your enemy! Very bold would be he who would dare to lift a hand against my child!”

She was superb like a great tragedienne. We others, simple little bourgeois, accustomed to the calm good sense of our mother, remained dumbfounded. Very crestfallen, we expected to be severely punished. — Not at all! It was the neighbor who was in the wrong. He enters at last, red with anger, stammering. He complains of the misdeeds of this urchin, of this rascal…

— “Stop!” cries Madame Magnin, with the majesty of an offended queen. “I will not permit anyone to insult my child!” — The broken panes were paid for with a supreme disdain. Was the neighbor not too highly honored that such a child had deigned to divert himself at his expense!

In my capacity as a budding moralist, I already had the mania, frequent among my great confrères, of criticizing the faults of others rather than of reforming myself. — The daughter of Doctor Barbier, Euphémie, was a pretty child, but she was told so too much, and she knew it too well. As her approbativeness pushed her to look at herself frequently in the mirror and to deck herself out with a few ribbons, my stoic austerity blamed these worldlinesses in long remonstrances that ended by producing a deluge of tears. Fernand made me bitter reproaches about the hardness of my heart; I myself remained very confused at the unforeseen effects of my eloquence.

On the other hand, I can say that my good-natured character drew upon me more than once the malice of my comrades. I was their whipping-boy, and my nurse said to me with a sigh: “You will never be anything but a pâtiras.” (1)

[note: (1) I suppose that a philosopher, meeting an inoffensive child too resigned to human wickedness, made him this prediction: “Poor little one, you will always be a victim, and if you do not learn to defend yourself, everywhere and always you will suffer (tu pâtiras).” From this verb the common people made a noun; and as it [the husband] often makes a whipping-boy of his wife, they sang at Le Mans to a chiming tune: Pâtiras is at the mill, / His wife is at her window, / With the pot-ladle, / And with the old skimmer, / Madame, quick, open low, / Pâtiras will not come back.]

She was right. Struggle is a necessity of life. One must resist injustice. Woe to those who are too gentle and too good!… And yet, must one answer insults with other insults, blows with other blows, slanders with other lies, ceaselessly reviving hatreds with perpetual vendettas?

8

My parents raised their children without severity, as without weakness. Montaigne seemed to them to be the true initiator of modern education: most of the reforms proposed by Rousseau and by Fourier himself are to be found, in effect, at least in germ, in the Essays.

It would be wasting one’s time to direct a child toward a goal that he is not capable of attaining. Fernand, for example, had no taste either for drawing or for music. One had therefore to try to recognize the vocations or “natural propensities.” “Nothing is lodged in the head by simple authority. — He who follows another finds nothing, indeed seeks nothing. — To know by heart is not to know.”

My mother strove to develop our initiative: by her questions, she knew how to bring us to say or to do what was needed, and even to find a few good rules of morality, “instead of plastering them onto our memory, like oracles.”

No one possessed better than she the art “of making a herdsman, a mason, a passer-by speak, and of drawing profit from their special knowledge.”

She led us to knowledge “by shady, grassy, and sweet-smelling roads.”

Before Fourier, Montaigne already conceived of virtue as the nourishing mother of human pleasures: “in rendering them just, she renders them sure and pure; in moderating them, she keeps them in breath and in appetite. She loves life, she loves beauty and glory and health, but her proper and particular office is to know how to use these goods with regulation and to know how to lose them with constancy.”

“It is not a soul, it is not a body that one trains, it is a man. One must lead them equally, like a pair of horses harnessed to the same shaft.”

Neither pensum nor ferule. Did my mother have cause to reprimand us, she would address us with vous, call us monsieur, or else condemn us to eat our bread-and-butter upside down, which is, in truth, very humiliating. But, as much through natural gentleness as through principle, our parents never struck us. Blows debase, and make the child lose that bloom of pride which will one day be his dignity as a man.

“If you wish him to fear shame and chastisement, do not harden him to them; harden him to sweat and to cold, to wind, to sun, and to the hazards that he must learn to scorn; take from him all softness and delicacy in dressing and in lying down, in eating and in drinking; accustom him to everything; let him not be a pretty boy and a dandy, but a fresh and vigorous boy.”

Freed from the false doctrines of an ascetic spiritualism, M. Milliet thought that games, as well as lessons, can and must concur in the integral development of the child. He had installed in our garden a fairly complete gymnasium, and himself directed our exercises.

The secular traditions of harshness and of barbarism are not yet completely enough abandoned in certain schools. At least already, beside the education of the memory, very important, one begins to establish that of the judgment.

Perhaps some of the modern educators go a little far in their desire to render learning attractive. One should not suppress effort. (1) The habit of meeting at every step with obstacles and of surmounting them is one of the benefits of school education. It exercises the child in conquering his repugnances, in courageously accepting tedious tasks, in view of a useful and elevated goal.

[note: (1) “Sometimes one tries to tear out the passions, sometimes one neglects to teach the child to dominate them.” Ellen Key, The Century of the Child, page 84.]

As for the optimism of Rousseau and the native goodness of man, it has indeed had to be recognized that this is an error. Upon long centuries of barbarism have followed centuries of artificial civilization which have for a long time deformed human nature. In what country, moreover, in what age, shall we find that soul virgin of all the prejudices, of all the superstitions, of all the bad instincts that the ancestral faults have rooted in us? — The theory of evolution shows us humanity continuing with effort, from generation to generation, attempts at adaptation less and less imperfect. It is the actual child, sick and sometimes wicked, the real child, that one must take, in order to try to heal him and to amend him, and not an ideal man who never existed. The task is difficult, the obstacles are great; they are not insurmountable.

9

Fernand was more of a fighter than I; moreover, an excellent comrade, very gay, very sociable, he made himself loved by all. He also let himself easily be carried away by example. To play the man, he tried to smoke, which gave him a headache and a sick stomach. He nevertheless ended by hardening himself and, proud of this fine success, believed he was doing me a great honor in offering me to draw a few puffs of his cigar. I tried, it made me cough, and the acrid taste of tobacco seemed to me as unpleasant as its odor. It is the only time in my life that I have smoked.

I had the good sense to understand that it could be useful or agreeable to no one that I should take up this habit which does not please me. — What folly to believe oneself obliged to imitate those who act foolishly!

What good is it to surmount the natural repugnance that all feel for this nauseating narcotic? The force of will that one spends to attain that result, little to be envied, could be directed toward a better goal.

My parents often had a few friends to dinner, instructed and witty people, whose amiable conversation, although it was above my reach, gave me pleasure to hear. At the end of dinner, one had to renounce these agreeable chats; the ladies remained alone, the gentlemen were obliged to go and smoke.

I was shocked by their impoliteness.

Later, I learned and tried to practice a principle generally admitted, but of which smokers do not appear to suspect, which is that individual liberty has for its limit the liberty of others. It seems to me inadmissible that a smoker, to satisfy his personal taste, should oblige me, who do not like the odor of tobacco, to swallow out of politeness his foul smoke, that he should permit himself to impregnate with it for a long time the clothes of his neighbors; it is an attack upon the liberty of others.

The pianists, it will be said, also condemn us to the torture of hearing their scales. That is true; they at least can give pleasure to others, if they succeed (a rare thing) in having talent. But if you remark that smokers spit filthily everywhere, that their dried-out throat demands refreshments which are most often alcoholic drinks, that the cigar leads to the tavern, that the acquaintances made in that place are not always very recommendable, you will admit, as I do, that smokers are very disagreeable people and that they care very little about it.

There are some who throw to the ground badly extinguished matches, at the risk of setting fire to a forest. I have seen near Rambouillet vast spaces, once covered with magnificent shade trees, ravaged in a few hours by fire; I have seen also horrible burns cause the death of a young girl, whose clothes had been set in flames by the imprudence of a smoker.

More tolerant than I, my mother never complained of that odor of tobacco, which nevertheless incommoded her.

What qualities did she not have, my mother? She was as courageous as she was good; here is one proof of it, among many others.

We had a big watchdog, with which we loved to play, and which peacefully accepted our childish teasings. For some days this dog seemed ill. All at once, his fierce eye, his bristling coat, the foam that ran from his jaws became disquieting signs. My mother saw with terror her three children playing in the garden, very close to the mad beast.

If, from afar, she had ordered us to flee, the dog would have hurled himself upon us. Without hesitating a minute, she went straight to the poor beast, which she loved very much, she took it by its collar and, gently, brought it as far as the kennel, where she tied it solidly. Through a remnant of habit, the dog let itself be led. We were saved.

Soon the rabies manifested itself by evident signs. My father took his gun and fired a first shot. Wounded only, the dog cast upon its master a look of reproach so pleading that my father’s hand trembled. It took him a violent effort to decide to finish off the unfortunate beast.

We were so young then that the heroic action (1) of our mother seemed to us altogether natural, but it was one of those examples of courage that remain engraved in the memory. The most beautiful sermons are less effective in elevating hearts.

[note: (1) One must remember that at that time the antirabies serum was still unknown.]

III

1848-1851

SOME REPUBLICANS OF LE MANS. — POLITICAL SONGS: HATRED OF TYRANNY. — PITY. — DREAMS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE. — FAITH IN THE FUTURE. — A DUEL.

1

My parents had numerous friends who remained faithful to them in misfortune; I shall cite M. Choinet who, more than once, proved his devotion to the republican cause; M. Fontana, a Polish refugee; M. and Madame Trahan, phalansterians; de la Boussinière, whom my father found again at Geneva and who, later, was the very honest hero of a very bizarre lawsuit; the learned M. Silly; Napoléon Gallois, a historian and journalist of talent; M. Chassevant, professor of mathematics.

The latter had a son and a daughter of about the same age as my brother, and who both already showed remarkable dispositions for music. (1)

[note: (1) Mademoiselle Marie Chassevant is today a professor at the Conservatory of Geneva.]

But my father’s most intimate friend was Doctor Barbier. His wife, although a little devout, got along with my mother, because she was intelligent, good, and devoted. She had a turn of mind somewhat sentimental, which earned her the nickname of “Dear and Tender.” Her daughter, Euphémie, of the same age as I, was our habitual companion of games.

Often, on Sunday, the families Chassevant, Milliet, and Barbier gathered for a picnic in some inn in the surroundings of Le Mans. M. Chassevant, very gay and very witty, held forth with an inexhaustible volubility, with a frantic verve. He liked to scandalize the gallery with the boldest paradoxes. Nothing diverted him so much as to see the bewildered faces of the peasants when, with a pleasant gravity, he expounded the terrible theories of Fourier upon love and marriage.

Doctor Barbier was a man of high intellectual and moral worth. He possessed a quality that should be rare among physicians, ardor in the struggle against illness. The sureness and the promptness of his diagnosis resembled divination. He questioned his patients little; a glance had sufficed for him to know what they were feeling and… he healed them.

His sound judgment and the fineness of his literary sense made of him a critic at once severe and benevolent. My father, very modest, took great account of his opinions. Both had affiliated themselves with freemasonry, where their advancement was rapid; both collaborated with zeal on a valiant republican journal, the Bonhomme manceau, and on the Jacques Bonhomme, to which Joigneaux gave interesting articles on agriculture.

2

It is there that there appeared first the songs that F. Milliet improvised from day to day. When they were gathered into a little collection, Napoléon Gallois made for them a charming preface that deserves to be recalled here:

What does the people do, asked Mazarin? — It sings. — It sings! Then it will pay. Mazarin was right, Mazarin was wrong: he was right, for the poor people did indeed pay; he was wrong, for the song is not always the sign of resignation. This proverb born in France — Everything ends in songs — has ceased to be a truth since 1789.

The song is, in the times in which we live, as well as under Mazarin starved for taxes, gaiety in suffering, the wealth of the mind in physical misery, the ray of sun amid the frosts; how many hopes it has lulled, how many sorrows it consoles!

So, see it slipping in everywhere that the frankness of the heart reigns: in the workshop, it renders work sweeter; in the barracks, it lessens the rigors of discipline; in the prison, it is the reflection of liberty; at the domestic hearth, it sits down upon the stool like the good fairies of long ago; at the patriotic banquet, it elevates the soul to the sentiment of equality; in combat, it precedes victory.

Let us take pride that the song is eminently French.

It slips in everywhere, I was saying? Alas! no; it stops at the threshold of the palace, of the aristocratic mansions; it knows that there is not its place, that there it would be found out, unnoticed, it so humble, so simple, so good a girl, beside its adulterine sister the romance, simpering, adorned, stiff, painted over, coquettish, like the great ladies whom the dandies of the world prefer to the loving and modest grisette. Repulsed from the salon, it enters the cabaret, and dips its crust of bread in a thimble of wine, and finds there the people who understand it and who love it. Must conspiracy not make it proud? That is why the song is popular in France; that is why the songwriters who know how to sing to the masses their language, their sufferings, their aspirations, and to pour a little joy and forgetfulness into the chalice of bitterness, have their legitimate part of this popularity.

The songs that follow are the work of a newcomer, after Désaugiers, after Émile Debraux, after Béranger, after the proletarian P. Dupont. Will he find in his turn a little place at the banquet? He sang first for himself, with his heart, and when one sings thus, one sings for everyone. My indiscreet friendship one day addressed to the supreme judge in matters of taste, to the one whose verses are the odes of the street, to Béranger, one of the productions of Félix Milliet, having, I believe, for its refrain: “No more songs!” Béranger replied thus to this submission:

“M. F. Milliet’s song is very witty and well turned; I urge this young author not to give credit to his refrain. Let him make songs, and many of them.”

This encouragement from the master bore its fruits; Félix Milliet forgot his refrain; he sang, and here are his works. Popular in the depths of the province he inhabits, they will become so in Paris too, for a single sentiment has dictated them: the love of the Republic, faith in our immortal device: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

NAPOLÉON GALLOIS

These songs had at Le Mans a true success. A young mechanic workman, Charles Delaporte, who had a very beautiful voice, sang them in the popular gatherings, and the crowd, charmed to hear its own thoughts expressed, took up the refrains in chorus. (1) Progress walks slowly; since that distant epoch the aspirations of the people and the promises of the republican party have not changed much. One must believe that it is not useless to recall this program, since it still raises the violent opposition of numerous blind men, who have remained the belated defenders of the past that is going to die.

[note: (1) Ch. Delaporte became an engineer, built a railway in Romania, then, returned to Le Mans, was elected municipal councillor.]

Béranger was then the most popular of poets. F. Milliet dedicated to him one of his songs:

… The people suffers, soften its pain, Sing again, O Béranger.

Are you not the muse who consoles? Of the pariahs the liberating angel? Of the workman are you not the idol? Does he not know all your refrains by heart? Alas! in vain the poor proletarians Would wish to free themselves from a fatal yoke, Capital grips them in its talons: Sing again, O Béranger.

The holy war in Europe is preparing; Liberty recruits its soldiers, Everywhere the slave has lifted his head, And before him the potentates tremble. Against the Kings, at the signal of France, See, see our brothers rise up in revolt! Sound for them the hour of deliverance, Sing again, O Béranger.

ENVOI

Sweet memory! your indulgent mouth Deigned to smile at my modest verses, And your voice said to me: young man, sing, Sing in the sun and even in irons;

And I dreamed, but I was in delirium, Of becoming one day the light echo, Vague and distant, of your great lyre. Sing again, O Béranger.

April 15, 1849.

The poet replied:

“I thank you, monsieur, for the charming song that you address to me. I told you to sing, and that word you repeat to me in the most flattering fashion for me.

“I have a very simple answer to make to your couplets, a double inspiration of the heart and of the mind. I am sixty-nine years old, monsieur, and when you have arrived at that age, the reason one has then to fall silent will appear to you only too clearly.

“Happily for you and for your friends, you have a long time yet to sing. Profit from it, monsieur, and keep a good memory of the old songwriter who begs you to believe in his very cordial regard.

“BÉRANGER

“Passy, April 15, 1849”

3

We give here only a few specimens of the numerous songs composed by Félix Milliet. From one end of this collection to the other, it is the same sentiments that animate the poet: the hatred of tyranny, pity for those who suffer, the aspiration toward a more equitable organization of society, faith in a future of peace and of world harmony.

LIVE FREE OR DIE

To the air of The God of Good Folk

Republicans, the struggle begins again! See already all our white enemies Insolently unfurl over France Their labarum sown with fleurs-de-lis. That standard is the one of the Church; Ours, friends, the flag of the future, Unfurls in the wind this noble device: Live free or die!

To repress the socialist faith, Power makes a useless effort; Standing, always, the holy faith resists, Braving irons and exile and death. Truth ceases to be misunderstood, A sacred torch, nothing can tarnish it; By its light we read the device: Live free or die!

You forget, ministers in madness, That one day the people reconquered its rights! What its arm weighs in the balance, You will learn it, O clumsy jugglers; For today, no, nothing divides it, As a single man one sees it come running Beneath the flag that bears for its device: Live free or die!

To revive the Lion’s wounds, Hurl upon him all your darts at once! The proud Lion scorns your stings, Hope not to reduce him to bay. In your nets, should he fall by surprise, With fright he will soon make you grow pale, Roaring his ancient device: Live free or die!

April 1849.

The executive Commission was then composed of Lamartine, Arago, Ledru-Rollin, Marie, and Garnier-Pagès, “timid republicans, whose politics no longer answered to the aspirations of the democrats and the socialists.” Misery was great. An attempt had been made to remedy it by the creation of national workshops, where a hundred thousand almost unoccupied workers pretended to work. It was a dangerous army of the discontented.

On May 15, a first riot was easily repressed; Blanqui, Barbès, and Raspail were imprisoned. But when the Government abruptly disbanded the national workshops, the workers, abandoned without resources, rose up in insurrection. This movement lasted three days (from the 23rd to the 26th of June). The workers were vanquished only after a bloody struggle. The harsh repression that followed this riot tore from Félix Milliet this cry of pity:

COURAGE AND FAITH

A new air by Madame Laure Magnin

On the prison-hulks a proletarian, Bent under the weight of misfortunes, In thinking of his old mother Felt his eyes moistened with tears. Suddenly, from his paled lip Escapes this cry full of faith: Liberty, dream of my life, It is sweet to suffer for you.

When I heard the fusillade, O Liberty, filled with hope, I climbed up onto the barricade, The better to catch sight of you. Wounded, not a friendly hand, Alas, was stretched out toward me. Liberty, dream of my life, It is sweet to suffer for you.

They garrote me, they imprison me, They exile me without judgment. Later, hope shines forth, France names a president. He had promised the amnesty, Alas, he lied like a king. Liberty, dream of my life, It is sweet to suffer for you.

An ardent fever wears me away, Soon I shall suffer no more. Now the sea breeze Rises, the angelus rings, It is the knell of my agony: O Death! I see you without fright. Liberty, dream of my life, It is sweet to die for you.

The same sentiment is expressed in another song that has for its refrain:

Glory to the martyrs, shame to the executioners! That is the cry of the people in France.

Long before Zola had written his beautiful novel entitled Travail, F. Milliet wished to draw attention to one of the most crying social injustices. A capitalist, whose fortune has not always a very pure source, buys, for example, a few shares in coal mines. By that fact, his descendants will be forever exempted from all work, whereas a family of honest workers will have no part in the surplus value that their labor alone will have produced. It will see its children, weakened by misery, wilt away through the prolongation of excessive and unhealthy labors.

THE MINER

An unpublished lament

A child conceived in the delirium Of a mutual and holy love, For him the martyrdom begins Before he has received the light of day. And, from the womb of his mother, Already marked with a fatal seal, He finds at the end of his career The cold morgue or the hospital.

Work, work, work! Far from the sun that shines so fair, Work, work, work! In the mine, a somber tomb.

Alas! on the day of his birth His mother dared not bless him; She was seen to weep in silence: She was thinking of the future. At his first cry in this world, He had, to appease his hunger, Nothing but a barren breast To which his mouth clings in vain. Work, etc…

The father, on returning from work, Takes the child in his sinewy arms, And says to his wife: Courage! I shall work for two.

The poor mother, torn By illness and by sorrows, Answered with a smile Even sadder than her tears. Work, etc…

O power of nature! The child grows in this sad place, Like an uncultivated plant That grows by the grace of God. His feeble hand can scarcely lift The pick and the iron crowbar. Let the father take him along with him: They plunge into their hell. Work, etc…

In the entrails of a mine, A dwelling like the grave, There labors the man-machine, Lacking pure air and sun. Buried in his retreat, He digs from morning to evening And, from time to time, there is thrown To his hunger a little black bread. Work, etc…

He grows up, a new sacrifice! He hears the call of the drum; The State takes him for the service. Come out from these places, frightful dwelling, Where your puny body grows deformed, Come, conscript, straighten yourself up! You are going to put on the uniform And become a soldier of the King. Work, etc…

Embrace your father and your mother, Then under the colors take your rank; Go then, child of the proletarian, You have no gold, give your blood!

For, you see well, gold alone exempts one From having courage and heart. He who possesses an income Has no need of other worth. Work, etc…

Having paid the debt of the rich man, You come back, weary of waging war; But death, hideous and mute, Has seated itself at the poor hearth. Your mother is no more, and your father Lies upon straw in a dunghill; Soon he dies. That he may be buried, You give your last sheet. Work, etc…

Sweet miracle of youth! Love has made your heart beat, And, even in the bosom of distress, It makes you dream of happiness. Hasten, take a companion, Be happy before dying, For the miner’s sickness gains on you, It does not make one suffer for long.

Work, work, work! Far from the sun that shines so fair, Work, work, work! In the mine, a somber tomb.

March 1851.

The attenuation of misery, such is the grave and urgent problem to which all the socialists devote themselves with passion. Evidently, the present inequality in the distribution of the riches and the joys of life is excessive and intolerable. A society in which one sees, beside numerous idlers who amuse themselves, courageous workers reduced to dying of hunger, is not a well-organized society.

Félix Milliet makes himself the echo of the workers’ demands:

HUNGER

Bread, bread! That is the refrain That hunger sings. Long live bread!

Kings of our republic, Concern yourselves a little less With grand politics, A little more with our needs. Bread, bread, etc…

Chiefs of sects and of schools, This failing is common to you: To have nothing but words For the empty stomachs.

Barren jealousy Does not excite our desires; Keep, O powerful ones of the world, Your luxury and your pleasures.

And yet, when the fête Intoxicates you with its noises, On the wing of the tempest Hunger enters our hovels.

When your daughters and your wives Bloom at the ball, Ours, the poor souls, Tremble with a fatal shiver.

O you who dance, light of foot, To the sounds of intoxicating chords, Do you know what to their mothers Our little children say: Bread, bread, etc…

Near the palaces, misery Has planted its standard; Rich ones, of the goods of the earth, Each one must have his share.

Modern Sardanapali, What will you say, when at last Our pale faces rise up, In the very midst of the feast. (1)

[note: (1) These verses announce the drama of Marsolleau: “But someone troubled the feast…”]

It will be too late, my princes, To make fine speeches; When their bellies are too thin, Men become deaf.

Bread, bread! That is the refrain That hunger sings. Long live bread!

Yet the young poet remains full of hope and predicts a better future:

LET US SING

Air: In the autumn of life

For the artisan, young girl, See how the sky is fair! Come, leave your needle And put on your little hat;

Close your half-open window, Come onto the green lawn Where the ball whirls; Of the noisy orchestra do you hear the signal? It is the dance That begins Its joyous festoons; The better to follow the cadence, Let us sing, let us sing, My charming one, let us sing.

What are you doing there in the street, Young woman with the painted complexion, Showing your bare shoulder To this belated passer-by? Ah! it is hunger that presses you, And you put all the treasures Of youth up for auction; Prostitution rivets you to its iron collar!

Foolish virgin, God consoles, He has his pardons. Suffering is a halo, Let us sing, let us sing, Poor woman, let us sing. (1)

[note: (1) Doctor Barbier criticized, with reason, this refrain, which appears to celebrate carelessness. Yet the great musicians and the great artists have also sung their sorrow.]

The democratic party Mourns valiant soldiers; Heroes whom an iniquitous destiny Confounded with convicts; But they suffer without murmurs, And God places upon their wounds Hope, a sovereign balm;

Friends, let us sing like them this consoling refrain: Proletarian, The misery That we combat Will disappear from the earth; Let us sing, let us sing, Proletarians, let us sing.

September 1849.

It would have been necessary not to sing, but to keep watch, and to strike vigorously the conspirators and the traitors.

TO OUR CHILDREN

A new air by Madame Laure Magnin

The old world falls into decrepitude, It is the old man at the gates of the tomb, Who, of the mantle of our servitude, Would still like to keep a shred; His hand clenches, and his withered mouth Casts at the future a jealous defiance; We who hasten his hour of agony, Cherished children, we labor for you.

We were brandishing the socialist scythe That must soon mow down the old abuses; Privileged ones whom progress saddens, Resign yourselves, for the times have come. To the troubled eyes of your so-called wise men We are all dreamers and madmen; Faith makes us scorn their outrages. Cherished children, we labor for you.

You will found the era of the new world! Courage, children! your young battalions Will harvest that fecund crop Whose furrows our labors dug;

But, without reaching the promised land, We, your elders, we shall all succumb; We fulfill the role of Moses, Cherished children, we labor for you.

November 1849.

A convinced socialist, F. Milliet was not a partisan of the “war of classes.” For him, the people is composed of all the citizens, rich and poor, French and foreigners. Already the hatreds of races tend to disappear; internationalism and antimilitarism will render more and more rare the wars of conquest, but not the social war between employers and workers. A more equitable distribution of riches among capital, labor, and talent can alone halt this fratricidal struggle, as mad and as condemnable as the chauvinism of long ago. (1)

[note: (1) “The error into which our civilized philosophers have fallen is to believe that one must labor for the happiness of the poor, without doing anything for the rich. One is very far from the ways of nature when one has not labored for all.” Manuscript of Fourier, page 45.]

LET US MARCH AS BROTHERS

A new air by P. Garraud

Too long stirring up the hatreds, Dividing the better to enslave, Masters have riveted our chains; Union is going to set us free. In the countryside, in the towns, Beneath the thatch, in the palaces, The tocsin of civil wars Will have no more echoes henceforth.

Bourgeois, soldiers, and proletarians Have at last clasped each other’s hand; Let us march as brothers Beneath the republican standard.

We are made to live together, Harmony is the normal state; Come, let a single bond gather together Labor, talent, and capital. That to the henceforth common work Each one bring with ardor The one his arms, the other his fortune, The other his genius and his heart.

Our stepmother society Does not give bread to all; One must still struggle, combat Against misery and hunger. But from hearts hatred is effaced Like the shadow at the rising of day; At the banquet each one will have a place Under the new law of love.

Homicidal and cruel war Will exercise its furies no more, And of universal peace Our sons will savor the sweetnesses. At the hearth they will hang up the sword Whose rust will extinguish the gleam; And the child who plays and who dreams Will say: Mother, what is this iron for?

4

At Le Mans, the artillery of the national guard was won over entirely to the advanced opinions; it elected my father captain. But a wind of reaction was beginning to blow. In a review, Félix Milliet, marching past at the head of his company, raised his saber and seemed for an instant healed of his loss of voice, so much did he cry with conviction: Long live the Republic! All the artillerymen and the entire crowd made the place des Jacobins resound with a formidable acclamation.

Poor Republic! it was very near its end.

A reactionary journal of Le Mans having insulted the national guard, ten officers sent a challenge to the ten members of the editorial staff. After some negotiations, the seconds agreed that M. Vallée, director of the journal, alone, would fight with Félix Milliet. The latter, in his quality as the offended party, had the choice of weapons. He took the sword. — The encounter took place.

Madame Milliet, in spite of the precautions taken to hide this duel from her, learned of it and awaited its outcome with anguish. Madame Barbier hastened to her side to support her in this trial; but this excellent friend did not have the courageous energy that never abandoned my mother amid the gravest dangers.

The hour fixed for the encounter had just struck. The two young women mingled their tears; both were pregnant. Madame Barbier, overcome by emotion, grew pale and fell into a swoon. At such a moment, Madame Milliet had hardly need of this surplus of anxiety.

On the field, M. Vallée, little versed in the art of fencing, defended himself by brutally crossing swords, but laying himself open in the most imprudent fashion. Félix Milliet, a fairly good fencer, saw himself at once master of the situation. He could have killed his adversary, but he had a horror of murder, and contented himself with punishing the insolent man with a light wound to the wrist.

M. Vallée cried out dramatically: “There is the first blood that I shed for the Fatherland!” as if the Fatherland had anything to do with the gross insults of a journalist. (1)

[note: (1) I am assured that M. Vallée was a perfectly honest man, and I am willing to believe it; but he had kept from his Catholic education a certain mask of scruples in polemics, and a predilection, very special to the devout, for the weapon of Basilio.]

The next morning, the band of the national guard came beneath our windows to give a joyous serenade to its valiant defender.

A friend of Madame Milliet’s, Madame Clémentine Giédroyck, wrote to her:

Louise, without trembling he staked his life, He whom you cherish and whom we admire! Ah, let us ask, for you, for us, for the Fatherland, That he spare the hope that we possess in him.

And I was far from you… But I learned that at the depot, sublime with courage, Your hand with love had pressed the hand Of him who, braving a perfidious rage, Could have left, alas, your heart without a morrow.

Enough, enough of blood! This perfidious barbarian In spite of us too long has reigned over us. France, of your children show yourself more sparing, Permit combat only for liberty!

And you, the charming sister, you whom on a day of fête Heaven, smiling, took pleasure in modeling, If sometimes sorrows come to bow your head, Have you not your poet and our hearts to love you?

July 1851.

Félix Milliet replied:

… You whose charming hand Poured the oil and the wine Upon my Muse lying By the wayside of the road; You whose voice is full Of charm and of gentleness, Good Samaritan, Thank you from the depth of my heart.

Let it flood our soul, Our senses, and our heart, It is always from a woman That happiness comes to us.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER III

For those whom the history of the republican socialist party in 1848 interests, we shall give still, by way of documents, a few verses by F. Milliet, which seem to us to be a faithful echo of that opinion, in the provinces, at that time.

THE ELECTIONS OF 1848

Let us thoroughly unmask the Jesuit, For he slips in everywhere, This rogue with the accursed face Is still standing among us; To purge of him forever French territory, Citizens, citizens, Let us name Republicans, Citizens, citizens, But true Republicans.

The Jesuit transforms himself Like a true chameleon, He dons the uniform When that seems good to him, But, soldier or general, That he may do no harm Citizens, etc…

A friend of the joys of the family, F. Milliet had not the least personal ambition. Put forward as a candidate for the deputation, he had chances of being elected, but he very correctly withdrew before the candidacy of the great orator, Ledru-Rollin. (1)

[note: (1) Ledru-Rollin (1807-1874), a lawyer at the Court of Cassation, defended a great number of journalists and republicans prosecuted by the Government of Louis-Philippe, and made a popularity for himself by claiming national sovereignty based upon universal suffrage. Unfortunately the political education of the people was still very insufficient: “to make ignorant people vote,” it was said to him, “is to put a razor into the hands of a monkey.” Elected deputy of Le Mans in 1841, he became, by his vast eloquence, the most rousing orator of the extreme left; he is compared to Danton. He revealed the immoral use of secret funds, raised indignation against the ill treatment inflicted upon political prisoners, and combated the project of the fortifications of Paris presented by Thiers. A romantic marriage had brought him a great fortune; he put it at the service of the opposition. He founded the journal La Réforme, where he formulated with energy and clarity the just demands of the democrats. On February 24, 1848, he is named a member of the provisional Government and charged with the ministry of the Interior. He strove in vain to bring about an understanding between an egoistically vengeful bourgeoisie and ungovernable proletarians. He had the insurgents of the June days brought before the jury and courageously took up the defense of Louis Blanc and of Caussidière, threatened with complicity with them. In the Chamber, the eloquent tribune defended the liberty of the press, opposed the re-establishment of the surety bond for journals, and tried to prevent French intervention in Rome. The promoter of the campaign of the banquets, he was a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic, obtained 370 thousand votes and, in 1849, was elected deputy in five departments. The odious slanders spread against him only increased his popularity. Later, at the time of the Roman expedition in favor of the pope, he protested energetically and demanded the impeachment of President Louis-Napoleon and of his ministers. Then, his proposal having been rejected, he placed himself at the head of an insurrection that was promptly repressed. He then took refuge in England, where he remained twenty years; there he formed with Mazzini, Kossuth, and a few other republican leaders an international revolutionary committee. Napoleon, who kept a personal grudge against him, excepted him from the amnesty of 1859 and even from that of 1869; he had gone so far as to demand his extradition, but the English Government honored itself by refusing it. Ledru-Rollin was not able to return to France until 1870. His age and his poor health no longer permitted him to play more than an effaced role.]

TO THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE MOUNTAIN

A song dedicated to citizen Ledru-Rollin, and sung at the banquet that was offered to him on April 10, 1849

… The hour has struck, begin the campaign, Tear us away from the yoke of the oppressors, Ardent tribunes of the holy Mountain, Of all our rights be the defenders.

Of the capital that crushes us Break the malevolent power; One must at last take for a base The right to live by working…

See! the monarchical party Has unfurled its standards; To the rescue of the Republic Come running, valiant mountaineers…

ENVOI

O you! upon whom calumny Long distilled its poison, Courage! the enemy league Breaks against reason.

Truth, even in the countryside, Has made the blindfold of error fall away, Ardent tribune of the holy Mountain, Of all our rights be the defender.

The Prince President had promised to bring back to France credit and wealth. It is to the air of Cadet-Roussel that this song was sung:

MONSIEUR CREDIT

Monsieur Credit, in his exile, Long said: So be it! That he might at last be drawn out of his trouble, He had it said by a writer. Ah! ah! ah! yes truly, Monsieur Credit is a good fellow.

Monsieur Credit would be content To be chosen for President. But alas! let it be pardoned him, It is while waiting for the crown. (1) Ah! ah! ah! yes truly, Monsieur Credit is a good fellow.

[note: (1) Poet, prophet.]

Monsieur Credit has promised us That one would be among his friends, Provided that one goes to mass, And that above all one confesses. Ah! ah! ah! yes truly, Monsieur Credit is a good fellow.

It is said that from these divine places The nobles will be cherubim, The Jesuits will be archangels, And all the Whites little angels. Ah! ah! ah! yes truly, Monsieur Credit is a good fellow.

There are sixteen couplets, I cannot cite them all.

ARE YOU BUT A DREAM?

Ignorance, scourge of the world, To your yoke they wish to bend us; To the darts of the fecund press The back opposes a shield. The right to think and to write Is halted in its soaring; Soon one will be able to read no more: Are you but a dream, O liberty!

Of every sincere republican Making a vile conspirator, Every journal of the ministry Transforms itself into an accuser. Already the prosecutions begin… Then, the University is placed Under the extinguisher of the good Jesuits, Are you but a dream, O liberty!

Upon the worker, upon the proletarian, The packsaddle is put back on his back; Far from relieving the misery, New taxes are forged. And the people, which serves as an anvil, Seeing its hope aborted, Says again, alas! full of bitterness: Are you but a dream, O liberty!

Let me be permitted to add still a very beautiful song that was often attributed to my father. This vivid and enthusiastic account of the “three glorious” days and of the fall of Louis-Philippe had a resounding success that still lasted under the Second Empire. At Geneva, while still a child, I more than once cried out at the top of my lungs my part in the chorus of the young proscribed, hurling at full throat those energetic words which a rousing music sets off so well. Thanks to the deep conviction of the singers, the effect was of a power that the warlike choruses of our most famous operas assuredly do not approach. The Geneva police, so good-natured, was somewhat frightened by it.

THE GAMIN OF PARIS

To the air of Charlotte the Republican

I am the gamin of Paris, Child of the holy rabble; Braving iron and grapeshot, At the tyrants I laugh.

When of February Shone the magic day, On the public square I was seen the first; I had in my hand Neither saber nor carbine, And I offered my breast To the wavering soldier.

I am, etc…

Crying: Do not fire! Before you are brothers, Lay down your angers And come into their arms;

Let us wed on this day The uniform and the smock, Let jealous hatred Give place to love!

I am, etc…

My voice was heard, The arms were lowered; No blood, nor tears, At least for this once. But the municipal guards, At my cries of “Reform!” Bearing down in an enormous mass At the gallop of the horses.

I am, etc…

These cowards, without peril, Gave us battle! Ah, for the reprisal! Let us arm ourselves with the musket. And let, on every side, The great barricades Against their cavalcades Serve us as ramparts!

I am, etc…

Then the giant tree Succumbs beneath the axe, This paving-stone that is torn up Rises triumphant. But on the boulevard The fusillade bursts out; We come running in haste, Alas, it was too late!

I am, etc…

On the steps of the palace Where Guizot takes his ease, Corpses in a mass Lie heaped up… Let us parade by torchlight This horrible hecatomb; Let all this blood fall back Upon the cowardly executioners!

I am, etc…

At all the crossroads Where the procession advances, The echo repeats: Vengeance! From the city to the suburbs. Of the people and of the bourgeois The formidable army, Formed in the blink of an eye, Marches on the palace of the kings.

I am, etc…

In vain the old fox Who governs France Proclaims the regency, One answers: It is too late! Down with the lullers Of the monarchical party, Long live the Republic! Was the cry of the victors.

I am the gamin of Paris, Child of the holy rabble; Braving iron and grapeshot, At the tyrants I laugh.

IV

1851 - 1852

MONSIEUR REAC. — THE COUP D’ÉTAT. — THE MIXED COMMISSIONS. — A HOUSE SEARCH. — DEPARTURE FOR EXILE.

1

Those who desire to know the turn of mind particular to the men of 1848 will do well to consult the Revue comique, a witty publication to which my parents subscribed, and which long was our delight. It deserves its subtitle “for the use of serious people,” because it reflects, without distorting it too much, the public opinion of that time.

In all the epochs of history, one observes the same eternal struggle between two opposed tendencies: the one aspires to repose, and seeks order in the immutable maintenance of the established institutions, or even in a vain effort toward the return to ancient traditions; the other, knowing well that movement is the necessary condition of life, leads us to believe that all change is a progress, and, dreaming of reforms possible or chimerical, it hastens, a little too much sometimes, in its march toward the better.

It is the first of these two tendencies that Nadar has ridiculed in a series of amusing caricatures entitled: The Public and Private Life of Mossieu Réac. The drawings, which we should like to be able to reproduce, are of a drollery full of wit.

The introduction is a parody of the pretentious historical syntheses then in fashion, and Nadar there demonstrates very learnedly that Mossieu Réac has always existed: “It is he who had Prometheus consumed by a vulture, for having stolen the fire of heaven and given it to men. — Is it not he who, delivered from slavery by Moses, bitterly regretted the onions of Egypt? — And who gave the hemlock to Socrates. — And who exiled Aristides. — Who regretted the Tarquins, vaunted the continence of Sextus, and pushed the people to recall them, etc.”

“Mossieu Réac came into the world late, his mother having carried him eleven months. — As a first education, his nurse gives him the most complete information on all the Bogeymen, past, present, and to come. — His historical studies are limited to learning that the Inquisition was a philanthropic and moderate institution… — Then, jealous to obtain some palm, M. Réac buys the composition of a comrade. — This stratagem succeeds. He is the first and dines with M. Peteloup, a severe but just man. — His parents, delighted, have him dressed in new clothes, with a redingote of all beauty… — … The time of the railways having come, a usurer among his friends launches him upon the baron de Vaumorée de Courteuve, an Angevin gentleman. —

The latter realizes his fortune placed in bad 5 per cent annuities and pours the amount into the coffers of the Railway from Cracow to Monaco, with a branch line to Madagascar. — The pretty little shareholders arrive in a crowd. The shares rise rapidly. — Meanwhile M. Réac, in a very remarkable report, announces that a mountain to be tunnelled occasions some delays. The engineers have encountered the Atlantic Ocean, which they had forgotten in the first estimates; but the difficulty will be easily surmounted by means of so-called marine rails, laid upon cork brackets. — Meanwhile the shares begin to fall. — Revolted at such ingratitude, M. Réac withdraws with indignation… and with the bag of money.

To make use of his leisure, M. Réac invents the dung-bread, and lays the foundations of the great philanthropic Society for the exploitation of flour of horse droppings. — A commission of savants is named by the minister: considering that the dung-bread contains fewer nutritive parts than ordinary bread; considering that, by reason of the difficulties of extraction, the cost price is higher, it decides that there is cause to adopt the dung-bread for the service of the hospitals…”

A precursor of the opportunists and of the modern pragmatists, M. Réac passes through all the nuances of political opinion; scruples of conscience do not trouble him; he has no other morality than that of success. A candidate for the deputation, we see him full of good-naturedness and of deference toward his electors, then haughty and disdainful after the election. All this satire has not aged much, and one must recognize that, to make amusing caricatures, it often suffices to trace from nature resembling portraits.

2

For every clear-sighted man, the projects of that other M. Réac, who bore the name of Louis Napoleon, were easy to divine: to the peasants, he promised to diminish the taxes; to the workers, he skillfully recalled the socialist tendencies he had manifested in his youth; but how far the acts were from the words! M. de Falloux had just handed over the schoolteachers to the authority of the prefects, and the direction of public instruction to the Jesuits. Every political meeting was severely forbidden. Supported already by the retrograde tendencies of the clergy and of a pusillanimous bourgeoisie, Napoleon was winning over to his cause some of the chiefs of the army. It may be that simpletons let themselves be deceived by his fine promises, but the true force of the Bonapartist party was the triumph of venal souls.

By a solemn oath, the Prince President had sworn fidelity to the Republic; but a perjury weighs little upon an ambitious man. Riddled with debts, like most of his accomplices, he could no longer draw back. Victor Hugo, in the History of a Crime, has recounted the supreme struggle of the republicans against the usurper. Right was vanquished by force.

Napoleon had three principal accomplices: M. de Saint-Arnaud, minister of war; M. de Morny, deputy; and M. Maupas, prefect of police. — The conspirators combined their plan with skill. Three operations were to be executed simultaneously: arrest of the chiefs of the republican party, investment of the Chamber of Deputies, distribution of troops throughout Paris.

Everything was prepared secretly and accomplished at the fixed hour.

I borrow a few details from the account published at the end of the year 1881 by Granier de Cassagnac. It is an apology for the crime, but it is at the same time an avowal:

“At a quarter past six, the arrests were being carried out; at half past six, the troops were arriving at their posts; at seven o’clock, the decree of dissolution and the proclamations set off from the Prefecture of police to go and cover the walls of Paris.”

Without consulting the Chambers and on his own authority, de Morny, accompanied by 250 chasseurs of Vincennes, had taken possession of the ministry of the Interior.

At midnight, a company of gendarmes seized the National Printing Office. — Eight hundred police sergeants, gathered at the Prefecture of police, set off from there to go and begin the arrests. — They had as their mission not to imprison a few malefactors, but the most modest, the most honest, the most respected of men: the generals Changarnier, Cavaignac, de Lamoricière, Le Flô, Bedeau, vice-president of the Assembly, Colonel Charas, etc… All those who were supposed to be likely to remain faithful to their mandate were arrested, in flagrant violation of the law.

M. Thiers, whom it would be difficult to pass off as a fierce revolutionary, was not able to escape the claws of the Corsican police:

“When the commissioner of police Habaut the elder penetrated into the bedroom of M. Thiers, place Saint-Georges, 27, M. Thiers was sleeping deeply. The commissioner parted the curtains of crimson damask, lined with white muslin, woke M. Thiers, and notified him of his quality and his mandate.

M. Thiers sat up briskly, put his hand to his eyes, over which a white cotton nightcap was slipping down, and said: What is it about? — I have come to make a search at your house; but be calm, no harm will be done to you; no one wants your life. — M. Thiers was dismayed.”

Conducted at first to Mazas, he was soon dispatched to the right bank of the Rhine, to the bridge of Kehl.

Colonel Espinasse, at the head of the 42nd of the line, invested the Chamber of Deputies. President Dupin, a man without character, said to his colleagues: “Gentlemen, the Constitution is violated; we have right on our side, but we are not the strongest. I urge you to withdraw.”

The next day numerous official posters announced that the state of siege was proclaimed, the Assembly dissolved, as well as the Council of State.

Napoleon’s proclamation to the army is a masterpiece of hypocrisy. After the customary flatteries, he adds:

“Today, at this solemn moment, I wish the army to make its voice heard. Vote then freely as citizens. But as soldiers, do not forget that passive obedience to the orders of the chief of the government is the rigorous duty of the army, from the general down to the soldier.”

In other words: You are free, but if you do not vote for me, you will have cause to repent of it.

In vain two hundred deputies, gathered at the town hall of the tenth arrondissement, voted the deposition of the President and named General Oudinot commander of the national guard, with Tamisier as chief of staff. At the head of numerous troops, General Forey seized the town hall and led the representatives to the barracks of the quai d’Orsay.

At the fall of night, the 217 representatives arrested during the day were transferred to the prison of Mazas, to the Mont Valérien, and to Vincennes.

The high court of justice, gathered at the Palais, was likewise dispersed by force.

The men who tried to organize the resistance were the elite of the republican party: Michel de Bourges, Schœlcher, Leydet, Mathieu de la Drôme, Jules Favre, E. Arago, Madier de Montjau, Eugène Sue, Esquiros, de Flotte, Chauffour, Brives, etc… — A few barricades were raised; blood flowed; there were admirable acts of heroism: the deputy Baudin had himself killed on the barricade of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, and Madier de Montjau was wounded at his side.

On December 4, the struggle was announcing itself as being bound to be terrible, but resistance was impossible. Four brigades, combining their movements, covered the barricades with heaps of corpses. They even killed the inoffensive passers-by who had imprudently ventured out of their houses.

The minister thanked the murderers by a proclamation.

It is just to stigmatize here the names of the chiefs who are the most responsible for these crimes before history; they are: MM. de Turgot, de Morny, de Saint-Arnaud, Fould, Rouher, Fortoul, Magne, Lefèvre-Durufflé, Ducos, etc…

Taken by surprise, the provinces did not know how to organize an effective resistance. Twelve departments showed a little energy in this struggle of right against brutal force; they were: the Aude, the Saône-et-Loire, the Drôme, the Yonne, the Sarthe, the Gers, the Hérault, the Jura, the Nièvre, the Allier, the Var, and the Basses-Alpes.

Everywhere, having the army at their disposal, the prefects chosen by Morny were invested with the monstrous right of “immediately replacing all the functionaries whose cooperation did not seem to them assured.” The justices of the peace themselves were revoked.

Granier de Cassagnac recounts all this with an incredible unconsciousness. It required a strong dose of credulity in his readers to accept his impudent lies. Here, for example, is how this Bonapartist depicts the defenders of the law:

“The reds, in taking up arms, in killing the soldiers, in pillaging the public coffers, in violating the women, in burning the children alive, denounced themselves to the magistrates, to honest people, and to the public force.”

Then he encourages denunciation:

“Everyone knows one another within three or four leagues’ radius, in the department. People are going therefore to seek out, pursue, hunt down, arrest one by one, everywhere they took refuge, these malefactors.”

Thus all the laws were suspended. Militarism and clericalism had joined hands.

The cowardice of the people completed the baleful work that was going to deliver France for twenty years to a band of tainted men, greedy for the spoils. — Yet, to give to the iniquity an appearance of justice, tribunals of exception were named, each composed of a general, a bishop, and a prefect. Their work is comparable to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The most enlightened and the most honest portion of the population was driven out of our country.

“Exile,” says Victor Hugo, “banishment, deportation, ruin, nostalgia, death, the despair of forty thousand families, that is what history calls the mixed commissions.”

It was a great disaster. A few republicans, not being able to suppose that their judges could be debased to that point, had given themselves up as prisoners. They were judged summarily and dispatched to Cayenne. People counted on the murderous climate to rid the usurper promptly of these men of integrity, in whom the conscience of the Fatherland was incarnated.

One of our friends, M. Pierre, who was trying to hide, was taken, dragged with handcuffs on his hands, tied by the gendarmes to the tail of one of their horses. His feeble constitution could not resist the ill treatment he underwent in Africa, at Lambessa. He succumbed, leaving his wife and his children in misery.

3

Félix Milliet suffered at being obliged to hide like a criminal; he would have given himself up as a prisoner, if my mother, very wisely, had not dissuaded him from it.

Courageous friends offered him then a hospitality that was not, for themselves, without danger; so he frequently changed his refuge.

At the very bottom of our garden, a little abandoned door, half hidden beneath a mantle of ivy, opened onto a deserted lane. Toward midnight one could have seen this door open a little and close again briskly, after having let out an old beggar-woman whose tottering steps were supported by a stick. Her lowered head disappeared beneath the great hood of one of those heavy black mantles such as the mourners wore on the sculpted tombs of the fifteenth century. Soon, however, the gait of the supposed old woman became more rapid: Madame Milliet was in haste to go and bring to the fugitive the comfort of her devotion and of her tenderness.

Very active ordinarily, my father was irritated by the idle immobility to which he was reduced.

To make him have patience, his children often wrote to him; here is one of their letters:

My dear little father,

We shall be very happy to see you; however we should very much like that you were not obliged to go abroad in order for us to go there too. Alix and I should very much like to go to Geneva, to see that beautiful blue lake, then to climb upon the mountains, upon Mont Blanc; Fernand would like to go to Tahiti to eat pineapples; and you, little father, where would you best like to go? We all have a great desire to go and see the railways, the mountains, the steamboats. — Fernand has told you, I think, that I was first in arithmetic. I composed this week in sacred history and geography.

Goodbye, dear little father. Your little Paulo who embraces you with all his heart.

January 1852.

An intense desire to see his children again made my father forget all prudence. Not being able to bear it any longer, he shaved off his moustache and, decked out in a false beard, headed early in the morning toward his home. An excellent friend, M. Morancé, a carpenter, gave proof of a rare devotion in these critical circumstances. He had brought my father a workman’s clothes, and the two carpenters walked along carrying upon their shoulders a long plank.

One can imagine with what effusion our father embraced his cherished children. The morning was spent in trying out and perfecting a hiding-place that M. Morancé had prepared at the bottom of one of those vast recesses that also served as a storeroom. Old papers had been pasted onto the planks, hung clothes concealed the grooves of the entrance.

After lunch, the two friends were peacefully smoking their pipes, when Mélotte, my mother’s chambermaid, came in all frightened: “It is the police!” Someone is knocking with redoubled blows at the gate of the courtyard: “Open in the name of the law!”

Some neighbors, astonished to see two carpenters working at so early an hour, had hastened to denounce them.

— Go and open, said my mother calmly. The agents entered precipitately, full of joy, and believing they already held the reward promised for such a capture. Very quickly recovered from her emotion, Mélotte obligingly conducted these intruders throughout the whole house, from the cellar to the attic, onto the roofs, under the staircase; she did not spare them the least little closet. Meanwhile my mother was haggling with M. Morancé over the price of a bill.

— The agents divined well that they were being made fun of; they had seen the two unfinished cups of coffee, they had smelled the odor of tobacco. M. Milliet was there, they were sure of it. So they persisted in ferreting about everywhere, and could not decide to withdraw.

Always calm, Madame Milliet had opened for them, one after another, all the cupboards, including the one at the bottom of which the hiding-place opened. Her cool blood and her assurance were such that the agents ended by supposing that the bird had flown.

What a sigh of relief when these unsympathetic visitors at last turned on their heels! My mother was broken by emotion. The departure of my father remained, moreover, very dangerous.

The mixed commissions were briskly dispatching their contemptible task. The abbé Lottin, a personal enemy of our family, was secretary general of the bishopric; he had enough credit with monseigneur Bouvier, bishop of Le Mans, to have my father exiled. On March 27, 1852, a passport was handed to M. Milliet, with an obligatory itinerary and a special mention in red ink which placed the condemned man under the surveillance of the high police. My father was sent to Nice, which then formed part of the Kingdom of Sardinia; he would have preferred Geneva, but the imperial government had refused him that residence, fearing to see formed, near the frontier and in a free country, an important center of opposition, a focus of revolt.

Nevertheless, after a few days spent at Valence, where his affairs had called him, the proscribed man headed secretly toward Geneva. Freemasons had entrusted him to the driver of a stagecoach, who passed on to another the recommendation, so well that M. Milliet, escaping the imperial police, succeeded in reaching the Swiss frontier. He was in safety.

4

I was going to be seven years old, and I was attending an infants’ class at the Collège of Le Mans. One day, in connection with geography, the teacher was recounting to us a voyage in Switzerland. He described with admiration the beautiful situation of Geneva at the end of the Léman, the purity of the blue waters of the Rhône when it comes out of the lake, and the grandiose panorama that one enjoys from the top of the Mont Salève. — I listened with all my ears, and my unconscious smile said: “I shall soon see all that.”

Before our departure, we paid a farewell visit to the teacher: “I know where you are going,” he said to us, “I divined it on seeing Paul’s eyes shine when I spoke of Geneva.”

I was very astonished and very confused at my involuntary indiscretion, but struck also at learning that there exists more than one language. I retained that lesson, and very often I have tried to divine what one thinks, behind what one says. Yet the interpretation of gestures and of physiognomy remains imprecise and conjectural. No doubt it is to intuition that one owes fine discoveries, but this method is too seductive not to be dangerous.

The task that remained for my mother was a heavy one: she had to attend to the moving out of our dear home, to sell what we could not take with us into exile, to rent the house, etc… And all these troubles came to overwhelm her at the moment when she was going to give birth to a fourth child. Happily my grandmother was there to come to her aid. We shall see further on that she too was a valiant woman.

It was a great sorrow for Madame Milliet not to nurse her little Jeanne, as she had done for her three first children. The emotions had exhausted her. Jeanne was put out to nurse near Fleurigny.

We departed. I remember the stagecoach painted yellow which from the place des Halles brought us to the station, then all new. There, an immense crane seized and lifted carriage and travelers, which it set down upon a railway truck. At Paris, a similar operation, and the same stagecoach led us near the Palais Royal.

Thus my mother had to leave her friends, her family, her infant daughter, her native town, that country where she left so many dear memories. What crime had she committed? She had married a republican!

It was again a stagecoach that transported us from Lyon to Geneva. For us children, exile was nothing but a pleasure trip. We were at that happy age when one laughs with joy, when one laughs at everything and everywhere. Everything was new, everything charmed us along our way. We were drawing near the hospitable land that had already welcomed our father.

When we crossed the frontier, there were cries of joy; we leapt, we clapped our hands, we cried: Long live Switzerland! Long live Geneva! Long live Liberty! Long live the democratic and social Republic! to the great amazement of our traveling companions.

Soon we threw ourselves, weeping with joy, into the arms of him who was the gentlest, the most honest of men, the most devoted of friends, and the most tender of fathers.