"Les amis des cahiers"

The Milliet Family. III. Aunt Mélite

The Milliet Family

1847–1860

AUNT MÉLITE

A devout woman. — An intriguer. — Sequestration and complaint. — First trial. — The judgment. — Death of Madame de Tucé. — Second trial.

My grandmother, Marie, Philippe, Aimée, Hué de Montaigu (1) was the last-born of a family of twenty-one children. A heavy charge for a small provincial squire! It seems that her brothers were, like her, very remarkable for their energy and activity. The elder ones went off to seek their fortune in Saint-Domingue and succeeded as they wished in their enterprises. One of them had earned, it is said, sixty thousand livres of income. But all were massacred in the revolt of the blacks.

I did not know my grandfather Louis de Tucé, but to judge by his portrait, it was he who bequeathed

(1) Born in 1796.

the handsome proportions of the body, the grace of the face, and the elegance of bearing — precious qualities, above all when they are joined to benevolence, to loyalty, and to bravery.

Louis could have aspired to the hand of the richest heiresses of the Vendômois, but he preferred to them Mademoiselle Aimée de Montaigu, and he was right. The latter, lacking a large dowry, had intelligence and heart. The sequel of this account will give proof of it.

Aimée had order and decision in serious affairs, which did not prevent her from being merry on occasion. Her letters were much relished for their witty verve in the little family circle.

A short time after the birth of the first child of Louis de Tucé, Mademoiselle Mélite de Tucé, his sister, wrote to him:

Le Mans, this 12 October 1818.

… A million things to Aimée. I remind her that she owes me a reply of long standing. She has perhaps forgotten it, but I do not let her off it; I have too much pleasure in receiving her letters for that. Kiss for me the big baby (1) whom I believe to be very sharp.

I hope to see you all at All Saints’ Day. A thousand courteous things to those ladies; mamma kisses all three of you.

Farewell my good friend, your faithful friend and sister,

Mélite de Tucé

Louis de Tucé died young (1837), leaving to his widow three children: Adrien (born in 1817), the future brigadier general, Louise our mother (1822), and Noémi (1832), who married M. Édouard-Charles d’Harcourt.

(1) This big baby became a general.

Madame de Tucé herself managed a few properties scattered through the Maine, the Perche, and the Vendômois. She usually lived at Fleurigny, a pretty villa that she had had built near Montoire.

Apart from her son Adrien, I have known no one who was so well in command and made herself obeyed. My grandmother held herself very erect; her gait was a little jerky; she showed some stiffness, both in language and in bearing, but the uprightness and the deep goodness of her acts quickly made one forget what her manners might have of the somewhat authoritarian. Active, energetic, never hesitating, astonishingly alive, she was always ready to tend the sick and to succor those who found themselves in need; but this without the least sentimentality. Pitiless toward the idle and the debauched, she assisted only those who deserved her esteem.

She found it regrettable to see private persons and the State lavish enormous sums to try, quite vainly moreover, to prolong the sufferings of a few incurables, of idiots, learned vicious men or criminals, (1) while foolishly they let the most beautiful and the healthiest children, born of honest parents, wither away in misery.

The life of Madame de Tucé passed without any very notable events, but her sister-in-law Mélite was the victim of an odious sequestration. I have just rediscovered a few letters of my grandmother’s which recount

(1) M. Brouardel often related that the upkeep and the guarding of a man condemned to New Caledonia came to five thousand francs a year.

in detail all the vicissitudes of this strange adventure.

Mademoiselle Mélite de Tucé had not married. As she grew old, she became very pious and took for her director of conscience the abbé Lottin, a preacher of repute, an educated, intelligent man, but little scrupulous. The fortune of his penitent was a fine prey; he neglected nothing to seize it. Flattering at first the little manias of the old maid, he showed her the greatest respect; but on the other hand, he carefully cultivated the scruples of her timorous conscience, and ended by acquiring a great ascendancy over her will.

Madame de Tucé had too much wit not to divine the end toward which the worthy apostle was tending. She was concerned for the future of her children, the natural heirs of their aunt. Soon, if she did not take care, these fine properties, which had remained in the family since the fifteenth century, would pass into the hands of the Jesuits, masters in the art of capturing fortunes. She resolved to lodge a complaint. (1)

One will see with what astonishing precision her letters register the successive emotions through which the soul of a mother passed who devoted herself entirely to her children.

It is first the anxious waiting, the impatience before the slowness of the procedure; the somewhat tedious longueurs of the beginning are only the faithful image of reality in almost all lawsuits. Then, the judgment having been rendered, suddenly the events rush forward; the sentence molds itself exactly upon the affective rhythm, it hastens; the

(1) March 1849, then November 1854.

style is chopped into short little sentences, breathless, all vibrant with emotion. Madame de Tucé strikes the rascals with redoubled blows, and lashes them with a singular vigor.

Memoir addressed by Madame de Tucé to the Procureur Général: (1)

“My sister-in-law, Mademoiselle Mélite de Tucé, lived at Le Mans, in the midst of her family, who surrounded her with the cares and the affection that the ties of blood command.

An intriguing and ambitious priest, the abbé Lottin, having taken the spiritual direction of Mademoiselle de Tucé, had soon acquired credit enough with her to obtain permission to install himself as a boarder in her house. Little by little his empire grew to such a point that he seized the management of her fortune, the disposal of her favors, and the freedom of her actions.

Not finding himself comfortable enough in the apartment that had been assigned to him, the abbé tried all those of the house, and ended by demanding the one that Mademoiselle de Tucé occupied. She was obliged to take refuge in a sort of garret. The year after, the abbé seized the company drawing-room, to place his library there and made it his study. Mademoiselle de Tucé was thus reduced to her little bedroom and to a sad little dining-room, excessively cold and inconvenient for receiving.

When in 1844 M. Milliet left the service and came to settle at Le Mans, my sister-in-law felt a true satisfaction at it. She rejoiced with our whole family, and we too, at this decision, and her affection for Louise seemed to revive. She often went to my daughter’s and confided to her her vexations. The abbé did not at first

(1) March 1849.

work openly against us with Mademoiselle de Tucé. He contented himself with filling the house with his confreres, in order to keep away by their presence the visits of the niece. Mélite complained to her friends that she was deprived of receiving her relatives. Indeed, my sister-in-law, to whose house we previously went once a week, now invited us only once a month. Then, for one whole winter, I dined there only a single time. But she kept open table, and every Thursday gatherings of priests were held at her house, who had to be regaled. The expense was enormous and exceeded the revenues of Mademoiselle de Tucé; in one year she had borrowed 1,800 francs from her tenant farmers.

It was assuredly not for herself, for she no longer had the wherewithal to clothe herself decently, but for the numerous guests of M. Lottin.

The presence of Madame Milliet greatly hindered the abbé. When the journey to the Dauphiné was decided upon for May 1845, the moment seemed opportune. The abbé at once sent for a person named Pauline, who did not keep them waiting and even arrived before the departure of Madame Milliet. The separation was painful for Mademoiselle Mélite; taking good care that the clever girl, who came to console her, would find means of acquiring rights to her confidence and her friendship. Mademoiselle Pauline made novenas to ask heaven that Madame Milliet might have a good journey.”

Mademoiselle de Tucé remained in correspondence with her niece, but often it was the abbé who held the pen:

The abbé Lottin to Madame Milliet

Le Mans, the first of September 1845.

Madame,

Mademoiselle Mélite de Tucé begs me to answer you for her, and I accept very willingly, for I assure you that it is a true pleasure for me to be able to converse with you for a few moments…

Your aunt is more or less as you left her. Her health is neither strong nor flourishing. There are from time to time a few slight indispositions, but none has forced her to keep her bed or her room, even for a single day. But Mademoiselle de Tucé has become very sensitive, very impressionable. She always has been, but less than she is now, although I do not perceive that there has been any change since your departure. The least vexation gives her much pain. She weeps, she loses heart, she thus makes herself ill. Unfortunately, there are little domestic vexations from which I cannot always preserve her. She has two girls who are not what they ought to be (the abbé wanted to replace these faithful servants. Adèle was a being without breeding, with her bad temper. When her ill humor takes her, it is a whole tempest of insolences, a tempest which, like the Revolution of July, lasts three days, or thereabouts; and it recurs more often than every month. Several times already I have offered to put a stop to it; but then Mademoiselle de Tucé lets herself be moved by compassion and, in the fear that this poor girl may become quite unhappy, she cannot consent to let her be made to say or do what would be necessary to bring her to reason. I am therefore reduced to making representations, which do not suffice, however just they may be, with a person who, sometimes completely [bad scan], can only be well led by authority. There, madame, is what does the most harm to your aunt at this moment.

In a little while we are going to have a numerous company; it is next Friday that Madame d’Augustin and Madame de Villedieu arrive, with her son and with two of her young ladies… There will result from it some embarrassments for your aunt. Nevertheless, it is possible that this will do her no harm. But it is regrettable for her that you are not at Le Mans. You would have been, in this circumstance, of great help to her. She would often have turned to you, with friendship and confidence, to break up and distract her company. For she ceaselessly repeats to me: “Louise had become for me a true friend. It is a misfortune for me that she is so far away (1) and for so long.”

Noémi has become more sensible. Her teachers are content with her, and she has carried off one or two prizes.

After relating the story of a large bankruptcy that was setting the town of Le Mans astir, the abbé resumes:

You see, madame, that I speak to you with abandon and good nature, and in all confidence. I have, however, on this occasion, a request to make of you, and it is Mademoiselle de Tucé, to whom I am reading my letter, who makes me think of it: We desire, Mademoiselle de Tucé and I, that you do not speak of it to Madame de Tucé, and that you do not speak in front of your servants of what I tell you of Adèle. It might be reported, and then nothing but harm could result from it, without any good. It is a family matter, and I count on your prudence.

It is wrong of me to entertain you only with Le Mans. I would, however, have had much pleasure in speaking to you of yourself and of M. Milliet, and of your interesting little children. Are you still suffering? These ugly toothaches and headaches have nothing dangerous about them, fortunately, but they are very importunate, and do not fail to make one suffer. I pity greatly those who are afflicted with them, and I shall learn with great pleasure that you are entirely rid of them.

I tell you nothing more of Mademoiselle de Tucé. She will write to you herself within the fortnight. I beg you not to forget me to M. Milliet, and I kiss with all my heart your three nice little children. (2)

I have the honor to be, with a respectful devotion, madame, your servant.

LOTTIN, Canon of the church of Le Mans

(1) At Valence. (2) While waiting to be able to despoil them.

The following year, on the occasion of a grave illness of Madame de Tucé, the abbé Lottin wrote to Madame Milliet:

Le Mans, the 6 September 1846.

Madame,

Mademoiselle de Tucé has read me a letter she had just received from you. I hasten now, with a single need, that of expressing to you how much I take part in all that has just happened at Fleurigny. It is very fortunate that you found yourselves, M. Milliet and you, near Madame de Tucé at such a moment. Madame de Tucé, who ordinarily will take no care of her health, had great need of being surrounded by her children, who took care of it for her. For, in such circumstances, a lack of precautions could have very fatal consequences.

But what then is life? Two or three weeks ago, you were undertaking a journey, which everything should have made you consider a pleasure trip, and behold, you had almost at once to cross dangers, which were only too apt to alarm your filial piety. Heaven permitted it thus, so that we may always be brought back to grave and serious thoughts.

I beg you to offer my respects to Madame de Tucé and to tell her how happy I am to learn that she is now well.

Accept yourself, and be so good as to have M. Milliet accept, the assurance of the sentiments of esteem, of attachment, and of devotion, with which I have the honor to be, madame, your obedient servant,

LOTTIN

[Continuation of the Memoir:]

“Mademoiselle de Tucé had kept, after the death of her mother, two old servants who performed her service perfectly. One of them had been there for forty-two years; she had raised M. de Tucé the son, had closed the eyes of Madame and M. de Tucé. M. l’abbé, not finding her agile enough, obtained the dismissal of this faithful servant, who was replaced by a girl of the abbé’s acquaintance. (1) She made herself useful in the house, she saw to it that everything was done with economy, did a part of the servants’ work, swept, cleaned the shoes, strove to make herself agreeable to the maids as to the mistress. Soon she seized the keys and went to poke about everywhere.”

Mademoiselle Mélite naïvely made to Madame Milliet the eulogy of this intriguer:

17 January 1849.

Mademoiselle Pauline of whom I speak to you has been here for several weeks. She is a very agreeable and very endearing companion; we often go out together. She goes to visit the sick, to make pious readings to the infirm, makes herself useful in the house for every kind of thing. M. l’abbé does not wish to be forgotten, and he sends, and to M. Milliet, a thousand courteous and respectful things.

The same to the same

16 February 1849.

My memory leaves me every day… Thank God, I have the good M. Lottin who is indulgent… Mademoiselle Pauline is still here and gives me great pleasure; she thanks you very much for the trouble you took to obtain relics of Saint François Régis; if you can obtain medals, she will be very grateful for them; Saint François Régis is very well known in this country, and in many others, by his life, “which we have and which is very admirable.”

(1) Note of M. Lecourney, clerk of the court: “In September 1843, the abbé dismisses a servant named Adèle, and replaces her by one named Pauline Legrand, a girl of dissolute morals, whose sole occupation in the house is to wait, not on Mademoiselle de Tucé, but on M. l’abbé Lottin, whose shoes she polishes and whose room she does. She sleeps in an alcove off that room and very far from that of Mademoiselle de Tucé.”

The same to the same

9 September 1849.

It is but a few days since I wrote to you, my dear Louise; nevertheless I wish to do so today to inform you of my surprise and my displeasure at the talk that people have the boldness to make about Mademoiselle Pauline, and the source of it is known so that you may destroy it.

Madame de C… came two days ago to ask me whether Mademoiselle P… was to remain here, that she warned me she had been told it was an adventuress, who had been driven out of two communities, which is false…

She even wished to give me doubts about her probity, about her frugality… in a word, Madame de C… drew me, from what she had been told, the portrait of the most perverse and the falsest person it was possible to be. I received these calumnies, as I ought to have done, with the greatest indignation and in such a manner that I am sure Madame de C… will not be tempted another time to take charge of a similar commission. Many courteous things from M. l’abbé Lottin.

[Continuation of the Memoir:]

“However, as Pauline was little educated, the abbé had recourse to Mademoiselle Ducastel, whom he placed near Mademoiselle Mélite to serve her at once as lady’s companion and as governess.

I have said that the abbé had relegated Mademoiselle de Tucé to a very cold garret, which I could not endure without making observations to him. From then on, he resolved to keep me away from my sister-in-law, abolished the custom of our seeing her at table twice a week, and had the door closed to us when she was unwell.

The despotism of the abbé came to bad procedures, and soon no longer had for Mademoiselle de Tucé the regard he owed her. He took from her, for example, the enjoyment of a pretty garden that she took pleasure in cultivating.

It was Mademoiselle Ducastel who was charged with pointing out to Mélite that her nieces neglected her, and with reporting innocent remarks with variants that distorted their meaning. Moreover, ‘Monsieur Milliet was a red, a freemason, and it is known that those people are capable of all crimes.’

These Jesuitical procedures were not slow to bear their fruits:”

Mademoiselle Mélite to Adrien de Tucé

9 December 1849.

I have had very keen sorrows, all the more so as they come to me from persons who are far from being indifferent to me. Although people wish to make me pass for being in my second childhood, I am not yet so far gone as not to be able to choose myself the person I wish to have with me, and I see more than ever that I must not choose her in my family… Monsieur l’abbé Lottin charges me with many courteous things and with interest for you…

[Continuation of the Memoir:]

“Mademoiselle Mélite and her brother had always lived in perfect understanding; she had so great a confidence in him that she had charged him absolutely with the administration of her goods. At the death of M. de Tucé, his sister shared our affliction. The most complete intimacy reigned between us and her, and, for several years, she charged me with settling the accounts of her tenant farmers, as M. de Tucé had formerly done. But profiting by my absence, the abbé Lottin asked Mademoiselle Mélite to accompany him on a visit she made to her properties. It was he who took charge of directing the repairs that were to be made on each farm. From that time, I was no longer consulted. The abbé drew up the leases, had the woods felled (1) and collected the price of the farm rents. He became the necessary man, and Mademoiselle Mélite gave him a general power of attorney.”

Madame de Tucé took advantage of a journey of the abbé’s to pay a visit to her sister-in-law. She had no difficulty in clearing herself of the reproach of indifference. She recalled to Mélite her childhood memories, that brother Louis whom she had raised, and whom she loved so much, so handsome, so good, dead too young, and his children in whom he would live again. She thus awakened that fraternal affection which never quite dies out in loving hearts.

Mademoiselle Mélite, much moved, wept. She assured my grandmother that she had never had the intention of disinheriting her nephew, nor her two charming nieces. She had seen all three of them born; she loved them tenderly.

But she also confessed that she was without strength to resist the will of the abbé Lottin. She saw clearly that one day perhaps, willy-nilly, she would be constrained to sign a will in favor of a religious work, of which the abbé had spoken to her. So fine a work!

Madame de Tucé continues her memoir thus:

“Mademoiselle de Tucé completely reassured me by making over to my children the bare ownership of her goods by an act in the form of a sale, which I had clothed with all the formalities that made it valid. (2) This was done

(1) He has just had a whole fine avenue of walnut trees and various trees of tall timber felled. (2) 19 June 1847.

without the knowledge of the abbé, who was six months without knowing it. But having had need of money, he had recourse to Mademoiselle de Tucé, who refused him. Not understanding this obstinacy, he presumed that she had taken on engagements; he assured himself of this fact at the registry of Le Mans. Then, having acquired the certainty that he could no longer dispose of my sister’s revenues, he had the door closed not only to me, but to my children and grandchildren.”

It was assuredly without the consent of Mélite that the governess wrote to Madame Milliet the amiable missive that follows:

Le Mans, the 26 October 1849.

Madame,

You must have had knowledge, before your departure from Fleurigny, of a letter that friendship imposed on me the painful duty of writing to Madame de Tucé, your mother.

However that may be, and in order to prevent any misunderstanding, I believe myself again obliged, madame, to reiterate to you the express prohibition that your respectable aunt makes you (and you will know only too well why) of presenting yourself at her house, neither you, nor M. Milliet, nor your children.

Any attempt you might make to introduce yourself into her house against her prohibition would be a new offense, and would only aggravate your situation.

I am, madame, your servant.

DUCASTEL

Madame Milliet bore no grudge whatever against her aunt, who had nothing to do with this insolent interdiction. The style of the letter clearly revealed its author.

[Continuation of the Memoir:]

“I then went to lodge a complaint with the procureur du roi and with monseigneur the Bishop. The first urged me to make arrangements to put myself in Mademoiselle de Tucé’s house in place of the abbé. Monseigneur the Bishop, having heard the family council that I had sent him, undertook to have the abbé removed, which was carried out a few days later. M. Lottin was then Secretary General of the Bishopric and Grand Vicar; Monseigneur deprived him of his charges. (1)

But the abbé found means to play us another trick: he took Mademoiselle de Tucé into his own home, and when the Bishop had enjoined him with the order to take her back to her house, he hid her in a convent.”

At the end of 1847, Madame de Tucé wrote to her daughter:

It is pouring with rain and there is no possibility of putting one’s nose outdoors, so I come to chat with you. For I have need to speak of what preoccupies me continually. I am far from the vexation of Adrien, who is weary of speaking of it; as for me, I have an indignation about it that chokes me; the disappearance of your aunt makes me believe, as it does you, that there are evil designs against us. But are you sure that she is no longer in her house? Perhaps she has fallen into catalepsy or into idiocy or even into madness, and they sequester her, so that we do not have her interdicted and so as to profit by this state to get a power of attorney given to them which would authorize them to act in our name. It is therefore absolutely necessary to know this positively.

We must take to the field to discover her before my return. Apply to the chief of police; Charles can do this better than you can with that individual, and recommend to him the most scrupulous secrecy in your researches… If you believe she has left Le Mans, you could still have the police inspect the registers of the stagecoaches. The seats will perhaps not be booked in her name, but in that of her Pauline. You would do well, Louise, to go to see Madame Langcavon, although she is very tight-buttoned; you might draw something from her, were it only to learn whether she is at Le Mans. I do not find it fitting to apply to the Procureur du roi for your

(1) Monseigneur Bouvier entered the Bishopric of Le Mans (1833) a Gallican and a philosopher; but he yielded little by little to the influence of the Jesuits and died an ultramontane.

researches, all the more so as I think of going to Angers to find the Procureur Général. From there could emanate orders much more advantageous for us…

Louise, I come back again to the discovery of your aunt in her house. From the house of Mademoiselle de Biar, one could see plainly whether the windows of her room are open; then through her suppliers, such as the baker, above all the milkwoman, it seems to me that if I were at Le Mans, I would know everything within an hour. You must occupy yourself with this yourself, for your two men (her brother and her husband) are very apathetic; they will know what they are told, but as for the researches — fiddlesticks! If she has gone, Pauline has gone too. Is she ever seen?

No one was seen anymore.

“On the fifth of March (1849), last Monday,” Madame de Tucé continues in her memoir to the Procureur Général,

I presented myself at Mademoiselle Mélite’s, wishing to give her an annuity payment due on the fourth; I was literally thrown out the door by Pauline, her chambermaid. The latter answered the bailiff who accompanied me that she would not give the address of Mademoiselle de Tucé, because they did not want her to see her family. A man named Le Grand, chosen by the abbé Lottin to receive the power of attorney of Mademoiselle de Tucé, has declared that he knows her domicile, but has persisted in concealing it. The abbé Lottin has made the same declaration.

This persistence in keeping the presence of our relative from us, our useless inquiries, her weakness of mind and of health, her fortune, the hands in which she finds herself so unhappily placed — all make it a rigorous duty for us to have recourse to Justice, and to claim from your intervention, monsieur the Procureur Général, knowledge of the place to which she has been dragged off, hidden, and the assurance that her personal liberty is not violated, as we have powerful motives to apprehend.

No sequel was given to this appeal. A police report of May 1851 informed us, however, that Mademoiselle Mélite had reappeared at Le Mans.

In 1852, when M. Milliet was condemned to exile, Madame Milliet did not wish to leave without seeing her aunt again and bidding her a last farewell. My brother, my sister, and I accompanied our mother. We were not expected; the abbé was absent, we were received.

I was very young, and yet I remember that good old woman with her sad and half-extinguished air.

Her house, situated in a deserted street, (1) had windows fitted with iron bars; the bare rooms were adorned only with pious images and statuettes of the Virgin, with branches of blessed boxwood. Things and people, all was gray and dull in this icy place; one spoke low there, and the noises of the world hardly reached it but muffled. My heart was a little tight. I did not remember my great-aunt, whom I had not seen again since the age of three.

My mother was received coldly, and her visit was not long. Summoned in all haste, the abbé Lottin came running. He dissimulated his displeasure, saluted my mother ceremoniously, and even found a few words of banal politeness for the three children. I think I still feel the contact of his damp hand caressing my cheek. I felt for him an instinctive repulsion.

He was a fairly handsome man, with hard and energetic features. He held his head slightly bent and frequently raised his eyes to heaven by a sort of tic; his half-closed eyelids sought to dissimulate beneath a

(1) The rue du Puits des quatre roues.

humble air the evil expression of his gaze, and his voice took on honeyed inflections, full of unction, to put us politely out the door.

I never saw my great-aunt again. Under the action of the remedies that were lavished upon her, her health deteriorated more and more; paralysis was threatening, and as her strength and her intelligence weakened, her devotion became more and more exalted. Sequestered in a convent, (1) made anemic by fasts, Mademoiselle Mélite fell little by little into second childhood.

The abbé was watching for that moment. Mademoiselle de Tucé had doubtless forgotten the deed of donation signed several years before. By a new will, she bequeathed this fortune, which no longer belonged to her, to a religious work of which the abbé had the direction. Then the innocent old woman believed herself quite certain of escaping the chastisements of Hell.

Henceforth, sure of his prey, the abbé kept no more consideration. Mademoiselle Mélite could have no communication with her family, who absolutely did not know the place of her retreat. Was she still living? No one knew anything of it.

Madame de Tucé did not easily resign herself to this disappearance of her sister-in-law. She made a thousand approaches to discover her; it was in vain.

However, the years passed; her younger daughter, Noémi, was of an age to marry. Guardianship accounts would have to be rendered;

(1) Community of the Sacré-Cœur de Marie, at Baugé.

she asked for the assembling of a family council that would also have the necessary authority to have her sister-in-law sought out.

Madame de Tucé to her daughter

Le Mans, this 13 November 1854.

… As for the interdiction of Mélite, I have not been able to see M. Massiot, who is conducting this affair; so I can speak to you only of what was done previously; thus here it is. A petition in my name, as guardian of Noémi, was addressed to the Tribunal, which accepted it and ordered the assembling of a family council, which was very difficult to compose.

(There follows a list of three members on the paternal side and three members on the maternal side.)

M. Massiot has been warned by Le Lasseux, Mélite’s solicitor, that she would let herself be interdicted by default, appearing nowhere, would answer no summons, and that after the judgment was pronounced, she would arrive with thunderbolts to catch us in default. Our adversaries have had it said to M. Massiot that she had her full reason, that she kept accounts perfectly — in short, that we had everything to fear from our enterprise. That is what we knew, so as to know where we stood. If she does not appear, it is because she cannot be presented to us. We have had a seizure made in the hands of the tenant farmers. She, for her part, has had me summoned to give release; which I have not done. I assure you that this gives me a great embarrassment and much anxiety. Massiot seems certain that she is at the Providence of Le Mans.

… Kiss my grandchildren for me and from Noémi; we love you all very tenderly.

26 November 1854.

… Our affair was called today on the petition made by Le Lasseux to recompose the family council, and on the release of the seizure in the hands of the tenant farmers. At the opening of the session, the imperial prosecutor asked for the floor. Massiot and Richard, who were not expecting it, were surprised and much in fear of what he was going to say; but great was their astonishment when they heard his plea on the captation, making use of all my notes to blame the infamous conduct of Lottin, whom he designated unmistakably, pointing out the danger of introducing near feeble persons influential and intriguing people. He maintained that our family council was assembled according to law, that he urged the tribunal to maintain it, and likewise the seizure made in the hands of the tenant farmers, giving his conclusions on the captation. In short, he spoke so long that the decision of the tribunal was put off until Tuesday.

Massiot thinks that he will order the appearance of Mélite before the Chamber of Council; she will be alone there. Our affair goes well up to that point: but if she were to appear with her reason, in good health, answering all the questions that would be put to her, that would be a famous snub! It gives me gooseflesh. In short, if she is as we may think, they will not bring her. In that case, the tribunal will pronounce her interdiction. The council will be summoned again to name a guardian. Must we propose Adrien, or L’Hermite for her assistant guardian? We still have at least a month of it; this necessitates my presence at Le Mans; I have taken an apartment there in the rues basses, number 15; I have it only for a month.

Le Mans, this Monday 11 December.

… We are no further advanced than at the time of my last letter: our affair was to be called last Tuesday, but one of our judges being ill, it was put off until tomorrow. A new summons for the release has been addressed to me. I am inflexible, I do not answer. M. Massiot told me that M. Grandmaison, who with Le Lasseux is Mélite’s lawyer, had assured him that she would not appear. Then the interdiction will be pronounced by default, a provisional guardian will be named; we already know him, it is

M. le Cornué, he is clerk at the Tribunal, he is said to be a very honest man; it is with him that I shall come to an understanding.

A thing rather precious for us in our debates is that Grandmaison, who had a typhoid fever three months ago, has retained a very great irritation in his character, to such a point that last week, pleading a cause that he could not find good, he flew into such a rage that he took his gown, tore it, and addressed to the Tribunal such invectives that he was ordered to leave. There is Mélite’s defender.

Our lawsuit, which drags on in length through all the oppositions that our adversaries make, is again going to undergo a forced delay through the jury, which begins next Thursday. I believe that all the sessions of the civil Tribunal will be suspended during its duration, at least a fortnight. This vexes me all the more as I have not yet threshed any wheat since my sowings. I cannot leave Le Mans; these gentlemen have need of me at every instant.

Wednesday morning (20 December).

Yesterday evening I went to Massiot’s to learn the result of the hearing. I could not see him. I have just come from his house: all that was done was in our favor; none of the oppositions made by our adversaries was accepted; for you know that they wanted to have the family council changed, to collect the revenues fallen due at All Saints’ 1854. Now we are having yesterday’s judgment served on her, and the Tribunal has her summoned to appear before the Chamber of Council for the third of January, eleven days from today…

Le Mans, this 3 January 1855.

I shall not say to you, like the maxim written on many walls: My days pass like the shadow. I say to you, on the contrary: time crushes me. I am alone here, awaiting tomorrow, which I dread, and which I desire still more, alone within four walls where one barely breathes…

… I am going at once to the house of a gentleman whom I do not know, of whom I do not even know the name (he lives quite near the front steps of the courthouse; he is a new friend of yours) to ask him whether he is willing to allow me to install myself at his place tomorrow from eleven o’clock until three o’clock, when the hearing ends.

… I am sending you only four hundred francs, seeing that I do not at all intend to take upon myself all the costs of the interdiction suit. There will be, at Le Mans, fifteen hundred francs of them, and if we lose, it will be double. Even were she to be interdicted tomorrow, I know beyond doubt that they are going to appeal to Angers. (1) There it will be another song: the judgments, the lawyers are paid double and triple. As I am not [bad scan], I risk only as provider of funds. After the suit you will each take your share of what remains, if remain there be.

This 3 January at 4 o’clock.

Since this morning at eleven o’clock, I have had my face glued to the panes of the garret of M. Cheslot. From there, I saw all those who entered the Courthouse. Hardly had I installed myself there when I see arriving a little person dressed in black with a velvet hat. She climbed with difficulty, followed by a gentleman who carried papers under his arm. I thought I recognized Mélite with her Lasseux. Ten minutes later I see Nanette, Lottin’s servant, going up. I persuade myself more and more. But Nanette comes out almost at once; my illusion too.

(1) Where the judges were more devout than those of Le Mans.

Tomorrow, Massiot, our lawyer, presents his claim to the Imperial Prosecutor, and joins to it a complaint of captation addressed to the President (of the Tribunal).

Le Mans, this 10 January 1855.

I ought to have been at Fleurigny for some days, my dear Louise, but I am so unwell that I do not easily decide to set out, to pass the night in a stagecoach, to arrive alone at four o’clock in the morning on the

(1) Opportunities to perform great acts of heroism are rare. But persons who would be capable of them prove it even in the most ordinary circumstances of everyday life. Very few ladies, at the age that Madame de Tucé was, would have energy enough to give up sleep and to arrive, in winter, all alone, with their baggage, on a deserted road, in the middle of the night.

road. (1) However, I am resolved to go and rejoin Noémi, whom I left to finish an enormous washing. I thought to be here only a few days, for I want to go and take to Paris my receipts, my policy, and all that concerns the insurance of Noémi.

It is impossible to see anything more uncertain than our affair. I will not and cannot deal with anyone but a person in full possession of reason… Those who hold her desire an amicable arrangement and to keep her with a good pension? That is a good sign: it gives us the certainty of her mental state and decides us to continue the procedure. But there is one essential, necessary thing we lack, namely proofs: acts of madness or of stupidity. It is seven years since we have seen her. What do you expect us to advance and to prove? I have begged M. Massiot to go and see the Imperial Prosecutor; he always has the best dispositions and gets on with the president Le Costeux; both repeat to us: Bring some proofs, and you are certain of your affair. But the whole Tribunal is not there, and our adversaries have worked on the judges who are little disposed in our favor.

An amicable arrangement would draw us out of these uncertainties. By the interdiction you would immediately enjoy the revenues; but shall we get there? With an arrangement you make a life annuity a little larger, but you can already make the divisions.

Fleurigny, this 12 February 1855.

You must be astonished, my dear Louise, to see the date of this letter. You supposed me at Le Mans today, for you have not forgotten that it is this morning at eleven o’clock that Mélite is expected at the Chamber of Council. So I need to

tell you that for six days the snow has not ceased to fall day and night, so as to block the roads and stop the circulation of public carriages. We have the mail from Paris and from Le Mans only on the day after the day we are to receive it. To give you an idea of the mass of snow that blocks us, there is more of it in my garden and in the plain than the height of the wall that runs along the road. The carriages from Vendôme to Le Mans have not run for several days; the railways no longer come to…

The order to appear today has been maintained. So then at this hour, they are at the Tribunal, or she will not appear. If her mind is normal, the prosecutor is certain to have full power, and the help of all his authority to find her. Some time ago we were told: she is not at Baugé, she has not left Le Mans. And when Le Lasseux pretended to be willing to go and find her, he said: I need several days to make this journey. You must well understand my impatience to know the result of the day; so I am preparing this letter to dispatch it as soon as I have received Massiot’s. I hope that despite a very bad cold, I shall go on the 16th.

The 22nd. I have still received nothing.

The 25th. I receive a letter from Massiot; it is dated the 19th, it has spent two days in the snow.

The 26th. I receive a new letter from Massiot. Mélite did not come to the Council. They have drawn up a procès-verbal of the third summons; she defaults. The Tribunal did not wish to name an administrator before the 28th. Massiot seems to dread the decision of that day. If our family council is not maintained, and if another is named, it will all have to be begun again. It is killing to have to do with such people.

Fleurigny; 7 March.

… I again set out in weather of which you have no idea. One had to have a very great desire to know the decision of the tribunal… It was, as usual, a postponement of a week, and, as the jury is holding its sessions, one must wait until the 13th of March. I therefore came back as much by water as by land. The snow that was melting set up currents, or rather torrents, that threatened to engulf us. I found Massiot perfectly reassured about the result of our enterprise, and above all very satisfied with the manner in which the imperial prosecutor has pleaded our cause. Grandmaison apostrophized Le Lasseux, saying that it was shameful for him to defend such a cause. Legrand went out, followed by Le Lasseux, very sheepish, who repeated: “It is annoying; I am vexed to have lent myself to this scandal.”

Massiot had me write to Jean-Louis du Haut-Sorret, whose farm rent falls due on the first of March, and to Vadé, who never pays all his Toussaint farm rent; he pays more and more on the first of May. I urge them to keep their money, seeing that I have not given them release…

You see, my child, fatigue and cares are wearing me straight down toward idiocy; I no longer have any memory, I shall soon be more in second childhood than Mélite. I am wearing out my physical and moral strength. I have aged ten years in the six months since this began.

Le Mans, Tuesday 13 March.

I arrived yesterday evening, and this very morning I ran to Massiot’s. He had just received a notification from our adversaries, about a petition that they present today to the Tribunal, to have Mélite visited and questioned by the (clerical) President of the tribunal of Baugé, where they declare that she has resided for seven years. Massiot and Richard are going to plead to obtain a provisional administrator and the return of Mélite to her domicile, so that the tribunal of Le Mans, which is informed of the intrigues, may be able to question her. The others dwell on her bad health, her weakness, her great age. If we are granted the administrator, he will leave this very evening with Massiot. I shall perhaps accompany them.

The decision is going to be taken in a few hours; I am, I assure you, my dear Louise, in great anxiety.

Half past three.

The judgment has just been pronounced in our favor. The family council is maintained. The provisional administrator is named; it is Lecorney, a very worthy man, detesting the Jesuits. He is already in office: the seals are being put up at Mélite’s; Pauline is thrown out the door, this evening, at once. Massiot leaves tomorrow by post for Baugé, with M. Lecorney. There she will be brought back! That is what they will decide at Baugé. We are writing to the tenant farmers to announce to them that they have no more to do with Legrand. Legrand is summoned to render his accounts. All this is being done instantly. I am going to look for a person of confidence to guard the house and to receive no one whatever.

I am happy to learn of so important a success.

Wednesday morning (14 March).

I wrote to you yesterday evening in such haste, my dear Louise, that I could not enter into any detail. I am still all agitated, so hard do I find it to understand that it is the end of my anxieties. Joy has given me a fever, and this night, I have not closed my eye. Yesterday, in order to calm myself, I wrote to Noémi; I began the letter, but I could not stay in one place. The decision of the Tribunal was so important for the present and for the future, that I was losing my head over it. I prowled around the Courthouse and came back to the hotel, when I caught sight of Massiot raising his big nose. He was looking, with his spectacles, for someone he had glimpsed; it was me. He accosted me with so sad an air that I had gooseflesh from it. The hearing was not over, it was still only two o’clock. I persuaded myself that he had some disaster to announce to me; I did not dare to question him. But he looked at me, laughing, and said to me: “Victory! great victory! You will come after the hearing to Lecorney’s.” I was there when the justice of the peace arrived, to go and put up the seals at Mélite’s. They went there at once. — Pauline did not want to give up the place.

The justice of the peace at once gave her notice to quit; but she asked to spend the night there. Then an inventory was made of what remained to her at hand. — Lecorney told me that the furniture was pitiable, little linen, seventeen Good Virgins; the silverware is in a writing-desk on which the seals have been put.

Massiot and Lecorney would have left that very evening, if the judgment could have been countersigned. It is today at two o’clock that they leave, provided with an order of the Imperial Prosecutor, with the judgment, and with all that is necessary. It was not judged fitting that I should accompany them. The Tribunal and the Prosecutor have ruled against the captation and condemned Mélite to all the costs. Then Massiot said to me in a mocking tone: “We shall come back the cassocks.” To Le Lasseux I assured him that Legrand had a good sum to hand over to us; he is summoned to render his accounts this morning, before the departure of these gentlemen.

… I am much vexed by your being so far away. I am worn out with my running about, and Lecorney wants me to go at once onto the farms, to do the accounts and the appraisals.

Wednesday, at two o’clock.

I have just witnessed the departure of Massiot and of M. Lecorney. They go by post, because, if Mélite is in second childhood as we have been told, they will bring her back to show her to the Prosecutor and the judges. Then they will immediately pronounce the interdiction.

Legrand presented this morning at the registry accounts so in order that Lecorney could not verify them; besides, Legrand wanted to leave at once. His mandate is not dated; there are going to be many difficulties in getting out of the matter, for our administrator is not on good terms with these rascals. He is also setting things in motion to learn what has become of the sums that Mélite had in ready money… (there follows a long enumeration)… What has become of it? I presume that Lottin will have taken it as a sunk investment. Fauvelière (one of the tenant farmers) tells me that, on the first of March, a bailiff came to declare to him that I had given release

of the seizure made on the farm rent. This bailiff threatened to seize his goods if he did not pay the next day. Legrand has received his money. The wood merchant is also going to be harassed, and for him it will be very serious, for prison is at stake. He is a knave. I had had him warned by the Prosecutor of Mamers, but he continued to fell. There is more than four thousand francs’ worth of it. Where is it?… I long for Saturday, for Friday is the fair, we shall not be able to lift the seals. All yours.

I kiss my grandchildren.

Thursday (15 March).

… It was necessary to use violence to penetrate into the convent (of Baugé). On being summoned to open in the name of the law, the terrified sisters set the door ajar. Massiot, the clerk Lecorney, and the commissioner entered at once; they were not expected. In a cell without a fire, Mélite lay on a wretched bed. Her clothes were worn out, and she looked very ill. Her body no longer had the strength to hold itself upright. And she was left alone, deprived of care. Her intelligence is extinguished. She was barely able to answer a few words to the questions. These gentlemen were indignant. The clerk’s report is crushing. Mélite had bled from the nose in the night and had a stitch in her side. I wanted to leave at once. I had permission for it asked of M. Morcette, who, without refusing me, urged me to do nothing of the sort, fearing the impression that the sight of me might make her feel.

Friday morning (16 March).

These gentlemen arrived yesterday toward two o’clock. Lecorney went at once to the Courthouse, where he found the Tribunal and the Prosecutor still assembled. All of them surrounded him with an interest hard for me to render to you. He declared that Mademoiselle Mélite was in good health, very well able to bear the journey from Baugé to Le Mans, but that she had received no order to go there; that she no longer had any memory, little reason, that she does not know who is managing her affairs, that she has given a mandate to no one; that she wishes to see her family, and to return to her home. Other questions were put by the Imperial Prosecutor.

While the account was being rendered, Massiot had taken me to his house, and was relating to me the details of their entry into the community. They had to read, through the grilles, the judgment, the order of the prosecutor, the injunction to the gendarmerie to lend armed assistance. Then six sisters appeared, the Superior at their head. They did not want to admit these gentlemen to Mélite; but Lecorney declared to them that, upon their resistance, he was going to take her and bring her back. That calmed them. However, she pays only twelve hundred francs of pension, but she does not get a quarter of it. She does not look very satisfied; what is more, those ladies have kept back clothes that were not sent to them. If we had an apartment in her house to put her in, we would have brought her back, but the people who live in it have a lease, and we want her to be there alone.

Le Mans, this 18 March 1855.

The lifting of the seals is to take place tomorrow, my dear Louise, and I am going to give you an account of Lecorney’s second visit to Baugé. He made an inventory, but I find his estimates much exaggerated, except the silverware, which is weighed (there follow a few details which we abridge). Her linen is dry and her wardrobe pitiable. Curious letters were found: one from Amédée X…, who had Mélite sign an engagement to continue the annuity until the death of Madame X…, his mother, but he set about it too late. Amédée speaks of you and of me with a contempt that is horrifying; above all when one thinks that it is we who paid his pension for seven years. Another letter no less curious is that of Legrand, who confesses to having emptied out the house. He took for it a man named Pasquier, who carried all that he stole to Mademoiselle Ducastel’s. “We began at four o’clock in the morning,” he writes; “we made three trips in seven hours, and we were well loaded. In the evening I had three dozen fine new napkins carried, twelve pieces of silver plate, and then… and then…” It never ends. He declares that Pauline chose, to leave us in the cupboards, the worst sheets, that the good ones are in safety at Ducastel’s. Of course, we have spoken to no one of this letter, which mentions all that he removed. The friends of the justice of the peace are going to Ducastel’s to claim what she has concealed. Our complaint will allow the Prosecutor to clap her in prison.

We shall put Mélite in her house, with one or two trustworthy persons. She will have to come before the Chamber of Council before the naming of a guardian.

Wednesday, 21 March 1855.

Before leaving Le Mans, I wish, my dear Louise, to keep you informed of our affair, which ended yesterday with the discovery and the return of the furniture, which had been stolen from us by Ducastel, Lottin, and even Bignon. I believe I told you that, among the letters and papers seized by Lecorney at Mélite’s, there was a letter from Legrand, which makes mention of what he carried off from the house. With this precious document we caught Legrand and company in a trap perfectly arranged by Lecorney.

Legrand arrived to render his accounts before the notary and the justice of the peace. After receiving them, Lecorney said to him: “I require of you the oath by which you will declare what remains of the furniture. It is not possible that Mademoiselle de Tucé had not in her possession other linen, silverware, etc… — I know nothing. — You had an inventory as keeper and mandatary. — I have lost it. — Then you are going to sign your declaration.” Which he did, believing it a gain made in his denial. When he had signed, the justice of the peace said to him: “Legrand, I thought you an honest man,” and taking up his letter, which Legrand recognized at first sight, he read him the memorandum of which I spoke to you, where he said that he had been loading up for three days. You can have no idea of the consternation of the individual. He wept, blasphemed against the monsters who had set him to work. He wanted to throw himself at the knees of Lecorney, who said to him: “If I pardon you in the name of the family, it is because you are going to declare to me where you carried all these effects, their nature and quantity.” Too happy, he accepted.

It was already late: they betook themselves to Ducastel’s; the objects deposited at her house were claimed. She declared and signed that she had nothing belonging to Mademoiselle de Tucé. Then the famous letter was read to her. She was in a tight spot. Legrand was brought in, and a curious scene was made with him.

She was obliged then to point out the hiding-place, which contained no less than 14 pairs of very fine sheets; 18 dozen napkins; 50 new dishcloths; 30 kitchen aprons; 4 mattresses; gilt porcelain, and a multitude of other objects.

From there, they went to Lottin’s, who was not at home. He was sent for, for he would have been warned, and during the night everything would have disappeared. It was absolutely the same scene as the preceding one. After his signature was given, it was proved to him that the chest of drawers, the chairs, the armchairs, 10 dozen plates, dishes, decanters, glasses, linen (14 very fine tablecloths) had been stolen by him. There was a quarrel with Legrand, who felt himself very guilty, for Lottin said to him: “I received what you brought me. — My good Monsieur Lottin,” replied Legrand, “then here is the truth: I brought them because you ordered me to.” The report is at the registry. I was not there, as you may well think, but this morning, we were all assembled at Lecorney’s, and each one related what had happened. Of course, a procès-verbal was drawn up of that famous day, which ended only at eleven o’clock at night.

They sent for Latouche, solicitor, who went there; Le Lasseux had his door refused to them, as did Grandmaison. At one o’clock after midnight, they sent for an old bailiff to consult with Latouche, for they believed they would be arrested the very next morning, seeing that, before them, it had been agreed that all their declarations would be handed over to the Imperial Prosecutor.

In the meantime, two men, a cart, and a horse were occupied all day yesterday in bringing back our effects.

These facts have become the domain of gossip. We have fully promised ourselves to publish these exploits; so I shall not go out without being told: So you have discovered the thieves of your furniture, etc., etc.

… The house has an extreme need of repairs; we shall sell the surplus of the furniture, what they had stolen from us; we shall make repairs of it and pay off the costs of the suit, etc… It is no longer the story of Perrette and the milk-jug, it is a true and sincere story. I can hardly give myself over to the idea.

The prosecutor urges me to keep myself outside of all that is happening: I have not set foot in the house. I shall not go to Baugé before she has come to Le Mans to undergo her interrogation. To let justice and its agents do their duty would make much more of an effect than to see me at the head of these vile doings.

The tenants of the house are going to be put out on the 1st of April and the 1st of May, and we are preparing a room for her where I do not want her to remain long. She will return immediately to Baugé after the interrogation and the interdiction pronounced.

Fleurigny, this 26 March 1855.

… The Prosecutor has had it said to me to have confidence in Lecorney; he urges me to remain outside of all that is happening, and not to set foot at Baugé for some time, so that I cannot be reproached with having prompted Mélite as to what she could say. Her head has greatly declined. Since he has had the will, Lottin has gone to see her only a single time, Ducastel twice. Pauline went twice a year. Legrand also went to take the pension to the sisters and to fetch a discharge — you understand what a discharge!

I do not yet know the conditions of the leases; only I have seen by the letters that she consented to give to the poor all the under-the-table payments (as much to the poor as to Lottin’s Nanette and to Pauline). Vadé has obtained a third reduction on his farm rent. The annuity had been set by my father at 2,000, and certainly that was not dear, for the fellow Vadé made his fortune from it. His lease has been renewed and set only at 1,600 francs. Massiot had urged me to warn the tenant farmer to pay no one but the administrator. At once and very promptly, Vadé comes to Legrand’s, pays him the Toussaint annuity and the term of next May. I think I do not need the power of attorney to evict him, so I have his acquisitions well, very well. And if we cannot pinch him, we shall have his lease rescinded.

The other farm rents have also been reduced, and that by means of very large under-the-table payments, which they have put in their pockets. Vadé gave one, I am assured, of a thousand francs, Demmet, one of three hundred. In our deed of sale, (1) Mélite reserved the revenues, and spending nothing, she could dispose of fine savings. Then Lottin had a new will made which grants him all the sums that will be found at her house at her death. According to that, the four or five thousand francs that are at Legrand’s would belong to Lottin, if we do not spend them.

So, in order to spare him the embarrassment of riches, we pay with these funds our judgments, our solicitors, lawyers, etc… So that it is really Lottin who pays the costs. With the surplus, if any remains, we are going to have her house repaired, so as to be able to rent it. M. Lecorney has already found us a tenant who would move in at Toussaint. Our solicitude for the interests of Lottin will go so far as to sell the furniture, in order to repair and beautify the farms.

Tell us whether you remember any objects that would be to your taste. The inventory of the thefts made by Ducastel has

(1) It will be remembered that the notary, instead of drawing up, as he had been asked to do, a simple deed of donation between living persons, had had a deed of sale signed, whether to have the right to larger fees, or rather so that the deed could be contested. It was indeed a fictitious sale, and the properties were valued there well below their real value. The deed was paid eight thousand five hundred and forty francs in principal and eight hundred fifty-one francs forty centimes for the tenth. It was registered at Montoire on 13 June 1847, folio 14.

reminded me of various objects, such as a tea-service in gilt porcelain. I shall take 58 pairs of sheets from those that have been returned to us, for those that Pauline had chosen for us were in tatters.

Adrien has just been sent to Saintes; he is delighted with our task. I had not spoken to him of it, for he did not approve the petition for interdiction. Certainly, I have done more than he would ever have wished to do. What a number of journeys, of trips, of approaches at Paris, at Angers, at Le Mans! When I sum all that up, I do not understand how I persisted. I had to do with two traitors, Ra… and Ri…; they cost me very dear and I was their dupe… I had but one idea, that of seeing it through. I would have spent twenty thousand francs without regret. At last all is over…

I kiss my grandchildren. I have thought much of them in all my tribulations. I have often been tempted to leave everything aside, and it is quite certain that the friendship I have for them alone determined me to continue my enterprise.

Poor grandmother! She was not to survive long after this victory which she believed definitive.

Madame de Tucé had seen with sadness our exile prolong itself, and the isolation so dreaded by the old extend more and more around her. Her most ardent desire would have been to keep her grandchildren near her. In 1852 Madame Milliet had taken the three of us, and one has seen by what indulgences our grandmother tried to make us love the stay at Fleurigny. (1) But the journey was a great expense, and my mother resolved to take with her each year only one or two of her children. In 1854, it was I

(1) She had given Fernand a little carriage with a donkey, Alix a heifer, Paul a kid and a pigeon.

who accompanied her. My grandmother awaited us at Fleurigny; my mother had to spend a few days at Le Mans for the sale of her house, but, hardly arrived, she was seized with intolerable pains between the shoulders. The doctor, called at once, understood nothing of this strange ailment. He prescribed a strong dose of morphine, which was placed on scarified cupping-glasses. Did he make a mistake in writing the prescription, was it the pharmacist’s fault? I do not know; the fact is that the dose of morphine was much too strong; my mother fell asleep and no longer woke up. One may judge of the dismay and the consternation of the servants. I was ten years old; the danger my mother was running was hidden from me, and besides I could be of no help to her. The physician called in all haste manifested the greatest anxiety and the keenest grief. He managed, not without difficulty, to save the patient; I remember the enormous quantity of black coffee that was made her swallow.

The following year, Madame Milliet wrote:

Madame Milliet to her son.

Le Mans, 1st September 50.

My dear Paulo,

I have first a very sad piece of news to tell you: your poor grandmother is dangerously ill with dysentery. She goes as much as thirty times a night, and the blood [bad scan]. M. Vallée, who is tending her, leaves here; he told me that she would be in danger until the fourteenth day, and it will only be next Sunday. She scarcely recognizes us; she is much weakened and much changed. We had left her last Tuesday of last week, leaving her at Le Mans a little unwell, but believing that she would leave in the evening for Fleurigny with Fernand. The illness declared itself in the course of the day and she could not leave. She sent Fernand back to me

on Thursday at Bélême, but having it told us that it was useless to come and rejoin her. However, on Friday, we returned to the farms of la Ferté and Noémi continued her route as far as Le Mans to see how she was. She found her very ill and wrote to me at once, but the address was badly put and the letter did not reach me. It was only yesterday at la Ferté that I found a second letter which informed me of the state in which mamma was. I immediately took the railway and arrived here. The illness must now follow its course. Fortunately mamma is strong, and I hope she will pull through. M. Vallée finds a little improvement in her state. You see, my poor children, that I have torments of every kind: it is always thus when I leave you.

But I must keep a little space to chat with your father.

My dear friend, here I am then with an additional anxiety. Mamma is very ill; there is really danger; however nothing is yet desperate, and I hope with good care to draw her out of this bad pass.

You would do well to write to Montal to send you a little money. With all the embarrassments I have on my hands, I do not know whether I shall be able to go to Valence.

Fernand to his father.

Le Mans, 19 September 1850.

… I have a very sad piece of news to tell you; my poor grandmother died in the night of the 18th to the 19th. Her burial will take place this evening. MM. Fontana and Chassevant have had the kindness to undertake to go to the town hall and to settle everything for the burial. The illness has taken our poor grandmother from us with very great rapidity. On Monday she was not yet in danger. It is a cerebral fever that joined itself to the dysentery.

(1) Madame de Tucé thought that she was the victim of a poisoning, but her mother would not believe in such blackness on the part of her enemies. After more than fifty years, it is difficult to know which of the two was right.

Mademoiselle Mélite de Tucé was gently fading away, but the abbé Lottin had not renounced the struggle. He produced a will made in favor of a religious work and wished to attack the deed of sale. But for that it would have been necessary to prove that Mademoiselle Mélite no longer had her wits in 1847. Now, the wills were posterior to that date.

M. Lecorney wrote on 19 April 1860:

We are confronted with two wills, one to the profit of M. Lottin, the other of Mademoiselle Ducastel; the latter is instituted universal legatee… There is a factum signed by your aunt, but which can only be the work of M. Lottin, and in which the signature of the deed of sale made to your profit is contested. The suit is going to begin and I have in hand, I do not doubt it, the wherewithal to win it. Three other wills are announced. The more there are, the better it will be. They are the work of captation, but it must be judicially established.

Madame Milliet to M. Lecorney

Geneva, 22 April 1860.

Dear sir,

Here we are launched into the suit that you always predicted to us. Frankly, I did not believe in so much audacity on the part of Lottin. You ask whether we are resolved to defend our rights; I should think so, by Jove! I am delighted that my sister has given you her power of attorney; you will find everything in your hand. I shall write to my brother, and not knowing whether he is at Constantine or at Bône, for greater surety, I write simultaneously to these two places.

I quite expected what is happening to us on the part of Lottin and of Ducastel. This will probably cost us fairly considerable expenses, but I believe it impossible that we should lose… I am of opinion that we should take a good lawyer at once. M. Lecorney has spoken to me of Jules Favre; I entirely approve his choice. Besides, since you are going to Le Mans, I rely on what you will decide with him… I think the affair must be hastened, because the moment is propitious against the attempts of the curates; (1) there might be a reaction some time hence.

M. de Tucé answered from Constantine:

Madame Milliet, having received full powers from her brother and her sister, decided upon an amicable arrangement. Her prudence could appear excessive, but, not to speak of the threats and the blackmail, she had just learned what had happened in another affair of captation: The honest judges had been transferred under various pretexts, the affair had dragged on in length for years, then, when the tribunal at last found itself composed in the majority of judges devoted to the Jesuits, it gave the case in favor of the devout monopolizers of inheritances. Great scandal throughout the whole country! But the holy personages care little for these wretched matters.

(1) “A legitimist conspiracy has been discovered. The rendezvous of the conspirators was at the Sacré-Cœur of Le Mans. In less than a week, the house was emptied, the pupils returned to their families, the superiors and the religious dispatched each to her own [place]; the house sold, the church closed; there is a spinning-mill in the new building. The accounts of these bigots were settled. They owed at Le Mans more than sixty thousand francs, which are owed to the suppliers.” Letter of Madame de Tucé. The Emperor came to lean on the clergy, but the latter still keeps its preferences for the legitimate monarchy. Without this conspiracy of Le Mans, the magistrates, subject to governmental arbitrariness, would perhaps not have dared to do justice.

My mother, in the quite chimerical hope of mollifying the abbé, gave him a fairly large sum, for masses and for his good works, on the condition that he renounce raising new quibbles.

As for Mademoiselle Ducastel, persuaded that she had not many years to live, she had invested her savings, giving up the capital, in such a way as to draw from it for ten years large interest. Now, the tenth year was passing, and the old woman had no desire whatever to die. As she found herself without resources, my mother, who has always known how to forgive, assured her a life annuity.

Thus ended this affair, which made a great noise at Le Mans, and which, set beside a thousand others of the same kind, ought to have opened the eyes of naïve people. But these are incorrigible; they will always remain persuaded of the disinterestedness of Tartuffe.

ANNEX TO CAHIER II

I had said in our youth that one would see plainly that the papers we publish of the Milliets were themselves chosen from a heap of documents. Drawn from a heap of documents. One does indeed have the impression that these papers are, so to speak, steeped in a heap of papers of the same order and of the same family. The choices that one makes under these conditions are necessarily a little arbitrary, and one always regrets being forced to let some of them drop. One will forgive me for having once again saved from oblivion the few following letters, which chronologically ought to have taken their place in the second cahier, the farewells. M. Milliet had shown them to me, not without some regret, only after the making of that second cahier. I could not bring myself to let them be lost, nor [could we do otherwise than] make a place for them here. One will easily put them back, in thought, in the place they ought to occupy. They will complete, they will not finish, that impression of family, of intimacy, that these first two cahiers gave so directly. — Charles Péguy.

Félix Milliet to his daughter Alix

Geneva, 17 May 1852.

My dear little Alix, I live in a pretty town, situated in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, surrounded by high and ravishing mountains, on the shores of a lake of blue and transparent waters. In this charming town I have found again old friends and made new acquaintances… it seems that I ought to find myself happy, or at least content. Well, no. If you do not guess why, ask your little mother; I believe she will tell you that the mountains would be much more beautiful if we climbed them together, that the lake would be of a purer blue if I furrowed it in a boat with you.

I do not, however, want you to imagine that you are arriving in a paradise; no. Geneva is a great town in miniature, or better a scrap of a great town. In short, if it is not a land of plenty, it is at least an agreeable place to stay.

I am in search of a nest for my little birds and their mother; I have not yet found it. — I am hard to please. — I would desire for them pure air, greenery, and then the proximity of the town, so that my nice birds do not become goslings. I have looked, I shall look again, and I shall end by finding. The college courses open in July. Tell our lads that the little boys of Geneva are less devilish than those of Le Mans; as for the little girls, they are all perfections; a hint to you. I leave you to chat with your mother and kiss you as I love you.

I was very happy yesterday, my dear Louise, in receiving your letter. I had awaited it all Saturday and I was like a soul in torment; but the sight of it alone put balm in my heart, my sadness disappeared as if by enchantment. Everything seemed to me beautiful and smiling, and I made with some friends a charming walking excursion, ended by an outing in a canoe. I want to learn to row and to steer a boat, to take you out on those fine blue waters.

Let us speak of business. — First, I approve, as always, all that you have done…

Give me your positive instructions on the choice of a dwelling. I must tell you that the climate of Geneva is very variable, the winter is rather long and rather cold; one must therefore not move too far away, on account of the children; there are, besides, omnibuses and carriages of every kind, and in quantity.

I have rented a little room for 15 francs and I give 3 francs to have it done and to have my boots polished. — I am to see one of these days a good painter on enamel; I have been told that few lessons would suffice me; it is a work that one does at home and that is naturally remunerated according to the talent of the artist. They make brooches, watches, snuff-boxes, etc.; it is pretty. — The riding-school is very fine and belongs to the town; I shall see what there would be to do on that side… You made me shudder by informing me of Paul’s accident; I had not believed in such a danger. Kiss for me all the same his dear children, kiss [bad scan]. I offer to the mother my respectful attachment. My friendly greetings to Noémi. Farewell, dear Louise; in a month I shall tell you by word of mouth what I write to you: I love you.

F. MILLIET

Many things from me to the inhabitants of Fleurigny.

Félix Milliet to Madame Milliet

28 May 1852.

… My position is fairly good and does not necessitate on your part the journey to Paris. The best is to say nothing and do nothing. — Of what do you expect me to think, if not of you and of our children? Your thought is always present to my mind and to my heart; it is my faithful companion, my joy and my torment at once, for I desire you as much as I love you.

I do not want to let myself go to expressing what my head feels at what you tell me of the conduct of your Colin cousins. It is a perverse race, depraved in heart and mind; not the least vestige of an elevated sentiment in the soul; one can define them in three words: foolish, wicked, and cowardly. But let us leave this [matter]; I do not like to stir up the mud. Dear wife, you have had the troubles and the embarrassment of the moving-out and the sale; I would like to spare you those of the moving-in. However, I do not want to deprive my little wife of the pleasure of occupying herself with our installation; I want only to be in a position to receive her and to have her able to lodge in her manor. I would not like to see you long at the hotel; it is dear and tedious; believe me, come and sleep in your own home.

The house I have in view belongs to a worthy man who lives with his wife on the ground floor. A large garden and a fine meadow, a wash-house — in a word, I have not yet seen anything that suited me better. Now, here are the drawbacks: the trees are young and the house lacks a little shade; it is a good quarter of an hour from the town, and one would have to count half an hour to get to the college. This trip is made on an admirable road, lined with houses, and many children come from farther off, with a pack on their back, like soldiers; it is very nice to see them.

I am very glad that Fernand is practicing horseback riding. If I find the means to give him a few lessons here, I shall do so willingly, but on condition that he works, and I see that at Fleurigny one thinks only of amusing oneself. How is my poor Paulo?

27 May 1852.

I announce to you, my dear Louise, that a lady of your acquaintance, Madame Milliet, has just secured a lodging. As her man of business, I have reserved myself the faculty of occupying a little place in her new dwelling, which consists of a first floor, five convenient and independent rooms, plus a pretty garret. The house is between courtyard and garden. The price is 540 francs.

I have told you, I think, that the holidays took place in the month of June and the return to college in the month of July. For Alix, there is a boarding-school which, I believe, will suit us. She would go there as a day pupil. You will be astonished to see the little girls of Alix’s age go all alone and very nicely in the streets, with their little portfolio or their books. Never does an accident happen.

How is my Paulo’s knee? and my big Jeanne, does she continue to grow like a rose-bud? Present, I beg you, my affectionate respects to your mother. I kiss our darling children. Farewell, dear Louise, write to me often and love me always as I love you.

Cologne, 17 May 1853.

… I arrived yesterday at Cologne and I counted on staying there until the reception of your letter, but this morning a police agent came to ask me for my passport, which I exhibited. The agent invited me to follow him to the police office, from which I was sent back to the central office. There I was notified to clear off as quickly as possible. I indeed made a few objections, but those gentlemen did not understand French.

As my passport and the certificate of the doctor of Berne had not been returned to me, I thought they were going to come and fetch me to take me either to the boat, or to the railway, or even to prison. But while I was busy taking a cup of chocolate, two agents, this time, one of whom knew a little French, brought me back my passport, inviting me very politely to leave this evening, and still more politely to open my trunk for them, which they searched from top to bottom in the hope of finding there, they told me, some dangerous pamphlets or papers. As I was perfectly easy in that regard, I could not help laughing in my beard, on two occasions; the first is when this worthy agent laid his hand on the volume of the songs of Désaugiers that I had placed in my trunk; he set himself to reading or [thinking it] a dangerous book for more than ten minutes. About convinced that he had not before his eyes a socialist work, he resumed his search, and joy of joys on discovering… a box of colors. His disappointment was prompt and great. “You are a painter?” he said to me. ”— Ja, mein Herr.” And that is why I take this evening at eight o’clock the steamboat for Düsseldorf, from where I shall set off again tomorrow for Rotterdam… The time hangs heavy for me until I am in London, for it is only there that I shall be able to receive without fear your news and that of my dear children, as well as that of my good friends of Geneva.

I have hardly the mind disposed to speak to you of the banks of the Rhine, which are, however, very beautiful. I have but one serious preoccupation, which is to be able to fix for you approximately the time when you will be able to come and rejoin me. I feel it still very distant, but what is to be done? I have good courage and I love you from afar as from near. I urge the children to work well; I kiss all three of them. Farewell, dear wife, be strong and love me always as I love you.

”The Friends of the Cahiers”

Charles Péguy

It is with a very great sadness that, going over again with M. Bourgeois at the beginning of this twelfth series the list of our subscribers, as we did every year in order to gauge the start of this new series, I counted that we did not have a single subscriber more than last year at the same date. And it has been so for twelve years. Every year on the first of September we start out at nine hundred subscribers. Every year by incredible efforts and devotions we climb to eleven or twelve hundred. And every following first of September we start out again at nine hundred. Now it is entirely evident that we cannot live with nine hundred subscribers. Nor even with the eleven or twelve hundred that we reach regularly at the end of the year. Our budget only begins to become sound somewhere around fifteen or sixteen hundred subscriptions.

If our cahiers were a failed enterprise, there would be nothing to say. The few friends who follow our existence know that no retreat would make life as hard as the trade I ply. If our cahiers were a contested enterprise, there would be the for and the against, there would be something to say. What makes the tragedy of our situation is that on the one hand we have succeeded, and that on the other hand, after twelve years of this success, we are not assured of the morrow.

In the measure in which a human enterprise succeeds, one may say that we have succeeded almost fully. We have not merely fulfilled the greater part of our expectations. On many points we have overflowed them. We have behind us a work of which we have not only reason to be proud, of which the world is proud for us. Not only have we almost generally succeeded, but everyone recognizes, and with friendship, that we have almost generally succeeded.

Thus our situation is the following, and I am forced to confess that it is poignant. We have behind us a work of twelve years; this work is considerable; it is in full growth; everyone recognizes, with much friendship, that it is considerable and that it is in full growth; we live in a unanimous esteem, in a general friendship, in an attention that is becoming total. And we cannot live because we have only nine hundred firm subscribers.

The reputation, the estimation of the cahiers in the public has become so great, the hearing we have obtained in the public has become so great and such, we are not only so esteemed, so regarded, but so read, that if one asked someone who does not know: How many subscribers have the cahiers? he would answer without hesitation: Two thousand. Such is our amplitude. Some have said five thousand. We are far from the mark.

This lowness of our water-mark, and this formidable gap there is between our hearing and our water-mark, would be explained by a very great number of causes. One will permit me not to seek them out here. Many of these causes would involve the whole economic, political, and social history of this time. I have not the heart to carry out a search for the causes; nor for the responsibilities. Most of these causes hold too deeply to the very nature of man to be able to figure anywhere but in Confessions. It is certain that if everyone had done his duty for twelve years we would have those three thousand and those five thousand subscribers, and I would not be constrained to lead the life I lead. I am ashamed to say it (so true is it that he who is the object of an ingratitude is in a sense more affected, more dishonored than the ingrate himself, and that in the crime, in the sin of ingratitude the victim is, as it were, more guilty, feels herself more guilty than the criminal and the other sinner), I am ashamed to say it: it would suffice that all our collaborators were subscribers to the cahiers for our situation to be easy. I do not say: that they make us additional, extraordinary subscriptions. I say: it would suffice that all those who have brought us, for twelve years, copy — good copy, moreover, which we have published — were still subscribers to the cahiers for our situation to be prosperous. That is to say: consented to make us still twenty francs a year regularly and to receive in exchange the excellent series that we continue to give, for our situation to be sound.

A man comes, sometimes a woman, a comrade; he brings a thick packet of copy, which is good, and consequently which would pass nowhere. It is taken from him at once. It is published for him. We publish it for him. That is to say that we take from our meager budget five, seven hundred francs, twelve hundred, eighteen hundred francs to make it appear, pleasantly printed, before twelve hundred subscribers such as there are no others in the world, chosen by a selection of twelve years. When it is finished, the author begins to find that the new series is hardly interesting. He remembers that, moreover, I made him wait a long time before publishing his copy. Finally duty prevails. He writes to M. Bourgeois. And it is not only because, after all, that is always twenty francs gained a year, an income of twenty francs.

But I believe that it is above all because, in the end, one has been able to cause suffering. One has been able to make a wound in someone who had never done you anything but good. One must believe that the voluptuousness of avarice, a little dry, is nothing yet in comparison with the voluptuousness of ingratitude. Only, when this accident has happened to you fifty times, one is old. What is worse, one is aged. And [though] the young people may not pardon, one lacks a little enthusiasm, one is faded for receiving the new young people.

What then to say of those who do not appear at all. Generally they are decent. But there are terrible exceptions. A few months ago a friend whom I have in the valley of the Bièvre made me a few proposals to gather into one cahier a very great number of articles, and large articles, that a young man had just finished publishing in the Annales de la Jeunesse laïque. I do not believe I am going too far in saying that this request was official, that it came directly on the part of that young man. I could not take this copy for twenty reasons. It makes an enormous cahier, which would have cost us two or three thousand francs. I answered, and it is truth itself, the first truth, that we have copy for two and three years ahead of us. I had moreover felt in this copy, in the articles themselves which I read as they appeared, a certain baseness of soul, a kind of primary haste that disquieted me strangely.

The consequence? Two months had not elapsed before there appeared, in the same Annales de la Jeunesse laïque, an article by the same young man, in which my friend of the valley of the Bièvre and I (but above all I), we were treated like the lowest of voters. As an apology for our past and our youth, and for the two articles (but above all our youth), we were treated as evidently we deserved. A few days later one or two Lyonnais cancellations warned me that the Turks had passed that way. And today I have the pleasure of knowing that we have in the town of Lyon a young man bent on the sanctification of our youthful years. But it is not finished. This young man is full of activity. He has even that sort of almost unbeatable activity that baseness of soul gives. He will have a high university fortune. He wants to be, he will be, one of the pillars of the popular intellectual and liberal party. He has inexpiable intellectual ambitions. He will be a powerful enemy. He will never forget me, in his prayers. Enemies never forget. God grant only that friends may have a memory as faithful. Enemies do not pardon. If only friends did not pardon any more either.

Thus for a work that everyone today recognizes to be a work of common interest, to defend, to maintain, to build up this work, to ensure its salubrity, its health, its labor and its cleanliness, to ensure its flowering, its just fructification, for twelve years I heap upon my single head inexpiable resentments. May our friends not forget us any further. May they watch as much as the enemy. I heap them upon myself for my whole life and without remission. For a work that is evidently of common interest, for twelve years I heap upon my single head all the responsibilities of the commercial house, all the cares of the falling-due date, all the cares and all the worries of the manufacture, of the establishment, and of the sale, all the fatigues of the labor and all those of the responsibility. I am not only founder and manager. I am secretary of the editorial staff, sometimes writer. I have allowed myself to say sometimes that there was in this a certain injustice. I have allowed myself to add: and a certain barbarity. I have allowed myself to add: and a certain imprudence. It is not proved that a constitution permits from forty to sixty years the same excesses of labor and of care that it permitted from twenty-five to forty. And if I [were to keep on] until I break down, everyone afterward would regret me.

We have everything against us. Our budget itself has within it an inner principle of penury, of misery, of distress, of constant straitness. On the one hand our receipts are artificially, institutionally reduced. And on the other hand our expenses are artificially, institutionally exaggerated.

We do not have our true subscription price. Our ordinary subscription price was calculated for the cost of living, and particularly for the cost of industrial manufacture as it was fifteen years ago. But so many people occupy themselves with the happiness of the people that for fifteen years the cost of living has gone up again by a good third, and that the unfortunate are a good third more unfortunate. The poor and the wretched (that is us) are a good third poorer and more wretched. This increase in the cost price has notably made itself felt in the industries and trades of the book, where everything has gone up again, material and labor, where we have notably had the typographers’ strike. All the reviews that were at twenty francs fifteen years ago have since put themselves, have been forced to put themselves, at twenty-five francs. Our true subscription price would be twenty-five francs. We have maintained ourselves at twenty francs. It is for us a constant cause of imbalance.

On the other hand our expenses are exaggerated. Our series are much too thick. When we fixed this ordinary subscription price at twenty francs (itself since become, today, insufficient), we engaged ourselves to give, for the price of that ordinary subscription, only twenty cahiers a year. I mean twenty cahiers of 72 pages, which was then our unit. Twenty cahiers of 72 pages a year, per series, that is, about 1,440 pages. Such was our statute, the kind of moral contract that we made with our subscribers. Today we are far from it. I believe that we have constantly exceeded this number of 1,440 pages. For a very great number of series it is known that we have exceeded it enormously. Even for the ordinary series, if I may say so, for the less heavy, the less laden series, for the less thick series, our old subscribers know that we have generally exceeded this number, which was like a contractual number. To confine myself to this eleventh series, which we have just completed, the school year 1909–1910, the fourteen cahiers of this eleventh series were spaced out thus.

One must reckon that when we give a cahier of 316 pages, it is as if we gave three cahiers:

XI-1… 72 pages XI-2… 132 XI-3… 316 XI-4… 80 XI-5… 88 XI-6… 352 XI-7… 152 XI-8… 108 XI-9… 156 XI-10… 116 XI-11… 72 XI-12… 116 XI-13… 116 XI-14… 108

Total… 2030 pages

Thus our history is the following: Twelve and thirteen years ago we made a statute by which we engaged ourselves morally, if I may say so, to give, for the price of an ordinary subscription of twenty francs, twenty cahiers of 72 pages, that is, appreciably 1,440 pages. Since these twelve and thirteen years the economic event has played in such a way, and in such a sense, and with such rapidity, that twenty francs today are worth no more than fifteen or sixteen. On the other hand, our 1,440 pages have swelled until they have become generally at least two thousand. And the first cahier of this twelfth series already had 268 pages.

Such is, from then on, our situation: Either on the one hand the price of our ordinary subscription has become a quarter or a third too low. Or on the other hand, or rather in addition, on the other hand, our series are a quarter or a third too thick.

And the result is, finally, the following: Without speaking of the capital of animosities that I have accumulated upon my single head: I have labored and produced for fifteen and sixteen years. I have written four or five thousand pages. I have published two or three thousand of them. I have read and made up into pages twenty or thirty thousand pages of proofs. I have manufactured, published, managed, put on sale twenty or thirty thousand pages of printing. I ruined myself completely a first time, the interested parties and I, for the founding of these cahiers. I ruined myself constantly there as fast as I recovered. I ruined myself there definitively my health. Even today I pay integrally into the cash-box of the cahiers the little author’s royalties that I receive for the Mystère at Plon’s and for Notre jeunesse at Ollendorff’s. By dint of which I am infinitely less sure of the morrow than when I was twenty-five years old. I have to climb as many stairs. But I no longer have my legs of twenty-five.

What makes this situation tragic is that we have so high a position in the esteem, in the judgment of everyone, that everyone is convinced that all is going very well, that our situation is prosperous, and that I am content. People want me to be content. They condemn me, they force me to be content. We have with us the friendship of all our confreres. We have upon us a general esteem such that I can only thank opinion for it.

And yet this enterprise is a common enterprise and of common interest. And it is, without any hesitation, recognized as such. I am asked to make alone, for a common enterprise, an expenditure of myself such as one would not ask of an ambitious man for the account of his personal ambition. I know that it is the rule. I know also that it is a great injustice and a great barbarity. It is perhaps not for me to say it. I have said it in vain several times. What I have the right, and perhaps the duty, to say is that it is also a great clumsiness.

When I turn back upon my life, I find that I have been very badly used, that very bad advantage has been taken of me. When a man is worth what I was worth, it is to use him very badly to let him exhaust himself with cares and distresses.

We cannot raise the price of our subscription. There is in this a sort of contract that we made once and for all, which must remain. Any raising of the price of our subscription would strike precisely those of our subscribers who are dearest to us, most devoted, who cost us the most. On the other hand, we cannot dream of diminishing our thickness. We would have to increase it on the contrary, to increase it still. I am only too much forced every day not to be able to accept very good copy because we never have any room. In any case it is not in impoverishments that the solutions must be sought.

What makes this story truly tragic is the frightful quantity of money that for sixteen years I have seen squandered around us, provided that it was lost. Tens and tens of thousands of francs in the Universités Populaires. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of francs, millions, in the reviews and in the newspapers. Not to speak of politics. (And not to speak of the theater.) Is it not frightening to think that only yesterday M. Francis de Pressensé avowed having handled for years a budget much higher than a hundred thousand francs a year. It is true that for this enormous budget he refused to soil, even with refreshments, an insidious oversight. Must one also speak of the finances of L’Humanité.

We have but one means of making our situation healthy; and perhaps of making for me an end of life where I would have only to work much. For some years a certain number of our friends and of our subscribers, in order to help us live, made us, in addition to their subscription, one and sometimes several second subscriptions to be served to public Libraries. It is a system that presented many advantages. First, it would bring us the resources that are necessary to us. Second, it is a system that controls itself. Every entry of money corresponds to an outlay of matter really served. Third, this sending of cahiers has the happiest consequences of diffusion.

It is this effort that must be extended and generalized, organized. There alone is our salvation. Since an enterprise so sound, so vigorous, so organized, so full of the most real promises has never been able to find a financial backer, and since it appears that it cannot find one, we can count only on ourselves. We founded on the first of November a society that we have named the Friends of the Cahiers. As there are the Friends of the Louvre and the Friends of the Muséum, the Friends of Versailles and the Friends of Fontainebleau. I mean that it is a purely friendly society. It is a Golden Book of the cahiers that we open on this date of the 1st of November 1910. M. Bourgeois has taken a register and has entered the first inscriptions in it.

We are founding a Society of the Friends of the Cahiers. There will be part of this Society, without any other engagement on either side of any kind, any person who shall have asked us to inscribe him for at least a second subscription.

That is to say that we simply open a register, a golden book in which we inscribe on the one hand the names of the subscribers, on the other hand the names of the subscriptions served. It is a mechanism of the greatest simplicity.

This system offers first this advantage, that it is of an entire sincerity. A second subscription is subscribed. This second subscription is really served, in matter, to a destination itself inscribed. Thus this system verifies itself, controls itself automatically. Every subscriber follows his subscription without any interference of government, without the interference of anyone. He does with it what he wills, himself, directs it here or there, diminishes it or increases it, suppresses it or continues it. He does with it what he wills, himself, he alone, without the shadow of an intervention of a partisan form; he administers, he governs, he distributes himself the second subscription that he has subscribed.

I allow myself to recommend most particularly to those of our subscribers who have no preference the subscriptions to be served to foreign Universities. We have established, starting from the Minerva, a very complete list of the foreign Universities that are interesting. When we are left the choice of the recipients, we serve these foreign Universities in a certain order, and we render account of it to the subscribers. These subscriptions served to foreign Universities give the best results. The letters of thanks that we have received from a certain number of Universities did not bring us only official thanks; they brought us very detailed thanks, very devoted, so to speak; they bore witness that our cahiers were read abroad with profit. With fruit and with respect. There must be no doubt, for all those who have some concern for French culture and for the fate reserved to it in France and abroad, that for several years, perhaps for eight or ten years, we have been witnessing a renascence, not only a renascence within, but also a renascence without, a strong remounting — I do not say only of the influence, but of the hearing — of France abroad. Everything is ready, and there would be almost nothing to do for the world — I do not say, alas, to begin again to follow us, but at least to begin again to hear us. A few thousand francs, wisely scattered, would suffice. It is for that reason that it is a great sadness to see hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of francs squandered everywhere. The world is ready. The world awaits only a sign to welcome French culture as in the fine days of the eighteenth, of the seventeenth, of the nineteenth century. When I think of all that we have done, we little ones, we personally, when I see all that we have done, without resources, with nothing, to make ourselves friends in all the countries of the world, notably in Italy, I see how much could be done with little, and I catch myself wishing that our friends would at last help us to complete this work that we have so patiently begun. I repeat it. We have established a very well made list of the Universities that would be served in a certain order. And it is of so capital an interest, not so much for us as for the world itself, that the world should come back yet, once more come back, to listen to the French word. And the world is quite ready, the world awaits only that.

Another advantage of this system is that it allows the effort to be graduated, the subscription to be dosed exactly. An annual subscription of twenty francs makes, constitutes, a subscription to be served to a French library. (And in France itself how much the public spirit — be it said without eloquence — how much the public spirit does not need to be assailed; and minds; (and brains); and public and private morals.) An annual subscription of twenty-five francs makes a subscription to be served to a foreign University. The persons who will and can subscribe a little more will thus be able to regulate their annual subscription by units of twenty or of twenty-five francs.

Of the persons who will and can do still more we shall ask, no longer only to inscribe themselves for an annual subscription, but to replace this annuity, this income of an annual subscription, by the corresponding capital. We shall name these persons no longer only subscribers, but founders, not at all in order to create grades in our society, honors and vain authorities of command, but because in reality these founders will be persons who will have indeed made foundations. One must reckon that a subscription in capital of four hundred francs founds a perpetual subscription to be served to a French library, and that a subscription in capital of five hundred francs founds a perpetual subscription to be served to a foreign University.

Subscriptions in annuity, in income, or subscriptions in capital; annual subscriptions or foundations; subscriptions under one or the other form; annual subscriptions or perpetual subscriptions; subscription-subscriptions or founded subscriptions — what we ask is that out of our nine hundred subscribers there rise up three or four hundred who will make us at least a second subscription. What I ask also, personally, is that the friends of the cahiers be so good as to inscribe themselves at once, following their first impulse, that they send first to M. Bourgeois their inscription, so that we can regulate our print run. They will afterward regulate naturally as they wish.

One sees that this is an appeal. I am aware that it is hardly stirring. It is that I am very tired. And there is perhaps cause for it. If I were in a state to make a stirring appeal, I would have no need to appeal. It is also a difficult trade to ask for money, and all the harder the older one grows. I have in me, I have kept that old pride of the old French workman, the greatest nobility there was, of never asking anything of anyone. When I was little my mother said to me: He who works has no need to ask anything of anyone. I had been raised in that. Since I have known myself I have worked, and I have always had need to ask everything of everyone. It is a hard trade, when one grows old.

What I ask precisely is that, by a sort of de facto statute, a little situation be made for me, an end of career where I shall have only to work much; to work and to produce. A charge that crushes me would be nothing if borne upon three or four hundred heads.

This appeal, which is not stirring, is serious. I believe I would not be in a position to begin it again. Nothing can be as fatal to us as this belief, which I know one generally has, that it will always go well, that I shall always pull through, that one can trust to me, that one can rely; that I have a strong back. That it has lasted too long not to last always. Since I have indeed lasted up to now, I shall indeed last always. It is as if one said that because a man has never died up to now, doubtless he will not die. We are entering a zone where this common belief is on the point of becoming mortal.

I am forced to declare that I have not a strong back. The most serious warnings of health make me believe that I shall not be able to give, during the years to come, the effort that has been asked of me during the years past.

Péguy