“_C’est aller vite_,” exclaimed her friend. “My daughter will be married in February. But if the year does not bring me the joy of being a grandmother, it may give me the hope of being one. In any case, it will make me the mother of a big son, my daughter’s husband. To have children by my two children! Ah! I should go mad with joy. No persons in the world have I envied so much as Mme. Sand and Mme. Dorian, who are grandmothers. And I, who am much younger than they, I shall see my granddaughters marry and I shall become a great-grandmother. _Ah! les superbes chaines enchainantes que celles de la famille!_ And to think that there are those who would break them! _Les malheureux et les misérables!_” Things did not move quite so quickly as George Sand had anticipated. Three years elapsed before Juliette Adam, at the age of forty, could revel in the raptures of grandmotherhood, before she could place in the _adorable Moise_, the gift of George Sand, Alice’s wee daughter, Pauline. Mme. Sand sent with the cradle a long letter of advice as to the conduct of a grandmother. Juliette had her own views on that subject: on the day of Pauline’s birth she began to powder her hair and to wish henceforth to be taken not so much for a woman of charm as for _une femme de valeur_. “At what age did you first begin to love your grandchildren?” asked Victor Hugo, during one of their long talks on the mysteries of grandparentage. “I loved my first little granddaughter passionately from the very first,” Mme. Adam replied; “as soon as I received her in my apron.” “Ah! What blessed privileges you grandmothers enjoy!” sighed the mere grandfather. “You who can receive new-born infants in your apron!”[390] Mme. Adam’s one regret as a grandmother is that her three granddaughters did not marry earlier. Had they only taken to themselves husbands at her own early age, she would by now have been a great-great as well as a great-grandmother. Nevertheless, it is a numerous _petit monde_ which flocks out to Gif in the Easter and summer holidays to play round the palm-tree from Pierre Loti’s garden in the south, to act charades in the rustic theatre, to partake of _goûter_ in the cabaret with its quaintly frescoed walls, and to awake with their merry laughter the shades of those gay damsels of _la Vieille France_, Mlle. de Sévigné and Mlle. Marie Racine, who in the days of _le Grand Monarque_ were educated within the Abbey walls. “_Ah! que c’est beau, que c’est Français_,” we exclaim with an eminent French artist, as we gaze down from the terrace of Gif over the broad, fertile valley, with its white ribbon of a road winding up from the little railway station, to the low distant hills fringed with those graceful, feathery trees which Corot loved to paint. Here, at the arched Abbey gate, stands the Abbess herself, receiving her guests with the stateliness of _une grande dame_, a winning smile lighting up her grey eyes and illuminating her clear-cut features.