Madame Adam (Juliette Lambert), la grande Française : $b from Louis Philippe until 1917Whale, Winifred Stephens
History
Madame Adam (Juliette Lambert), la grande Française : $b from Louis Philippe until 1917
Whale, Winifred Stephens
Adam, Juliette, 1836-1936
The end of morning school was a regular riot. The pupils rushed out
into the playground, where they surrounded Juliette, in a crowd,
clamouring to receive a full account of her famous interview. She,
on her part, was only too eager to relate it in every detail, and to
follow it by an appeal to her comrades to bear themselves like true
and worthy republicans, not to be insolent towards their teachers, but
to make them realise that, although younger than they, the Republic
regarded them as their elders’ equals. Then followed a babel of
conversation. Each schoolgirl had her own idea of what the Republic
should do. But all were agreed that the first reform must be the
establishment of universal suffrage. No mere tax-payers’ franchise
would satisfy these ardent suffragettes. Every one must vote, men,
women, and, of course, schoolgirls. Only thus could the Mlles. André’s
pupils conceive of a really universal suffrage, and later they prided
themselves on having invented it.
Nothing in the Revolution pleased Juliette’s father better than the
opening of the National Workshops. An ardent believer in the right to
work, he, with his idol, Louis Blanc, had always advocated them. And
though Louis Blanc did not appear to be directly concerned with those
that the Government was establishing, Dr. Lambert, like most people,
believed that he was secretly connected with them. They had not been
running more than a few weeks, however, when he began to suspect that
he had been mistaken. As time went on he grew less and less satisfied
with the Republic. There were too many reactionaries in the National
Assembly. This Republic, from which he had hoped so much, was too
pleasing to comfortable middle-class people like his mother-in-law.
“Jean Louis,” she would say, “I find that I agree very well with your
Republic.” “Wait a little,” her son-in-law would reply at first. By
and by he would answer: “You agree with it better than I do.” And
finally there came a day when he exclaimed: “No wonder you approve of
the Republic, for it is constituted for your advantage! The Orléans
may come back and they will not need to alter anything as far as their
_bourgeois_ supporters are concerned.”[14]
Seeing his dream of a Christian, classical, social, scientific
Republic vanish, Dr. Lambert resumed his old part of malcontent,
and, of course, Juliette followed suit. She filled the house with
her recriminations. She made herself excessively disagreeable to her
grandparents. Her grandfather infuriated her by chuckling with delight
and repeating: “All this augurs well for the Empire.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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