Juliette felt that she had won a victory. Her grandmother had certainly learnt a lesson. She now realised that her granddaughter was the kind of child she herself had been—one of those who must be led and not driven. Henceforth Juliette was brought up on what we now call the Montessori system. And the time came when she herself elected to go with one of her playmates to that same school, which she now found quite amusing. Indeed, considering the strongly pronounced and utterly divergent opinions held as to her upbringing by the four persons who desired to control her, the only possible course was for the child, as soon as she was able, to train herself as far as possible. But there were certain questions which even this head-strong little girl found settled without her participation. There was notably the religious question. Dr. Lambert, as we have seen, was a bitter anti-clerical, an aggressive agnostic of the old-fashioned Voltairean stamp. Mme. Lambert, Dr. and Mme. Seron were all catholics. And there gnawed at Mme. Lambert’s heart the painful secret that Juliette was still a little heathen, for, as the result of her father’s anti-clericalism, she had never been baptized. To remedy this omission, without confessing it to her parents, Juliette’s mother devised a clever and effectual stratagem. Under the pretext of being present at the wedding of one of her mother’s friends, the little girl was brought over to Blérancourt by her grandfather. Then at the end of the wedding ceremony, she was hurried into one corner of the church and held over what seemed to her a yawning gulf of a basin, where, amidst her violent protestations, she was transformed, as her grandfather afterwards told her, from “a poor little unbaptized girl” into “a big, happy baptized girl.” But this blessed conversion she was carefully enjoined not to mention to her father, because he did not like churches. Whether the youthful convert would have kept the secret is doubtful. But the opportunity of doing so was reft from her by one of her playmates, who during the wedding festivities called her, in her father’s presence, by her baptismal names of “Camille Ambrosine.” This led to inquiries and to a disclosure, followed, of course, by the inevitable _drame de famille_. Fortunately for the conspirators an accident to one of Dr. Lambert’s patients put an end to this extremely unpleasant situation. And while the Blérancourt doctor was at the injured man’s bedside his father-in-law seized the occasion to drive the “little bone of contention” back to Chauny. Juliette, having been once captured by her catholic relatives, Dr. Lambert agreed to surrender her mind to their keeping until she had taken her first communion. And he must have been pleased that Mme. Seron, with her usual ambitious desire to force the pace in Juliette’s education, persuaded the Dean to admit her clever little granddaughter into the Church one year earlier than was customary, at ten instead of eleven.