In the table scene just described, each of these three classes is represented. Juliette’s mother was a non-laugher, a morbid person whose lack of fun, as is inevitable with women, degraded her to be a mere household drudge. Juliette’s grandfather, the jovial doctor, whose funny stories, nicknamed _Seronnades_, enlivened the countryside, was of the drum and fife order, an apostle of _le gros rire_. Juliette’s grandmother and father, though differing in so many respects, were alike endowed with the true comic spirit. Long years later, looking back on her turbulent childhood, Mme. Adam wrote: “I should probably have been intolerable, had not the gay and merry temperaments of my grandparents ... introduced into our relationship a jocular spirit which did not admit of solemnity, even in our grievances. Whenever I succeeded in reconciling them after one of their disputes, it was because I had made them laugh.”[5] “Certainly,” exclaimed a character in one of Pierre Mille’s stories, “he was no Latin, for he took everything seriously.”[6] Juliette Adam, Gallic by birth, Græco-Latin by education, as she likes to describe herself, has always been ready to see a joke, even when it was at her own expense. Thus she is proud to relate, how when at one of George Sand’s dinner-parties, Flaubert, in Dumas’ presence, pointed out that in one of her books she had made a man who had lost an arm take a box in both hands, she joined in the laugh, saying gaily, “_Merci, Maître_.”[7] FOOTNOTES: [2] _Fields of France_, 163. [3] _Souvenirs_, I. 350. [4] _An Essay on Comedy, and the uses of the Comedy Spirit._ 62, 1903. [5] _Souvenirs_, I. 127. [6] _Le Monarque_, 169. [7] _Souvenirs_, III. 163. CHAPTER II CHILDHOOD 1839-1848 “_De l’amour et de l’indignation furent les aliments dont on nourrit notre jeune cœur._”—Juliette Adam, Preface to her _Souvenirs_, I. v. Despite his intense desire to have his adored child in his own home, Dr. Lambert constrained himself to permit Juliette to remain with her grandparents until she was three. But on his daughter’s fourth anniversary her father put in his paternal claim. Looking back over more than three score years and ten Mme. Adam still sees that day as the first which stands out clearly in her memory. She remembers it for several reasons—because of the new white frock she wore, embroidered by her grandmother; because the _bonne_ Arthémise on that day called her “Mademoiselle” for the first time; because her grown-up friend Charles, professor at the boys’ school opposite, embraced her; because when her parents arrived late as usual from Blérancourt, on account of the bad roads, her father took her up in his arms, kissed her, and with tears in his eyes said, “Juliette, how you have grown, it is so long since I have seen you—three months.”