The national temperament of France during the first half of the last century partly accounts for the temperament of Juliette’s family, and for the atmosphere of intellectual and emotional feverishness in which she was brought up. Looking back from the vantage point of old age on the stormy scenes of her childhood, she asked: “Were we more sensitive then, more susceptible, more dramatic than to-day? I believe we were.”[3] It is not improbable also that Mme. Adam, regarding her childhood through the long vista of years, may have unconsciously exaggerated the violence of her sentiments and experiences. One of her charms is that feeling for the dramatic, with which Gambetta once reproached her, saying, “_Vous dramatisez trop, madame!_” “My love for my grandmother and for my daughter,” said Mme. Adam to me shortly before her eightieth birthday, “have been the two great passions of my life.” Of her grandmother, she announces in the beginning of her _Souvenirs_: “I shall write of her often, but shall I ever ... be able to make her live with that originality, that passion for the romantic which she infused into us all, lifting on to the plane of high romance the whole of our family life and each one of our daily actions?” Though Mme. Seron hardly ever went outside her own domestic domain except to attend mass on Sunday, her granddaughter could say that never had she met a mind “more avid of adventure, more scornful of the every-day and the commonplace, more eager for the romantic in life and in literature.” In no point, save in their passionate adoration of Juliette, did Mme. Seron and her son-in-law agree. Yet in temperament they were not altogether unlike; for they were both dreamers. But Juliette’s grandmother, if she did not possess it, at least respected that worldly wisdom which Dr. Lambert regarded with the utmost contempt. He was an idealist pure and simple. We have seen him sacrificing a brilliant ecclesiastical career to conscientious scruples. We have seen him risking the happiness of his wife and child in his pursuit of science. We shall see him again, more than once risking not only his family’s happiness but his own life in the cause of political reform. “I am the daughter,” writes Mme. Adam, “of a sincere sectary ... of one who dreamed of absolute liberty, absolute equality.... Only for a moment, during the Commune, did he believe his dream realised.”