That which most distressed Juliette and her father was the failure of the National Workshops. It had become obvious that, far from being organised by Louis Blanc, they had been initiated by his enemies. Émile Thomas, who directed them, was suspected of being Louis Napoléon’s agent. Far from constituting, as Dr. Lambert had fondly dreamed, a national benefit and a model for the whole civilised world, they proved useless and costly. They grew like an ulcer; as many as 119,000 men were on the pay-roll. They were a club of loafers, a reserve army of insurrection, a perpetual strike supported out of public money. No wonder there was talk of suppressing them. But Dr. Lambert, though bitterly disappointed with the way they were conducted, was horrified at the idea of suddenly depriving of occupation and turning adrift these thousands of workmen. It would mean, he thought, nothing short of a sanguinary revolution. Juliette, of course, shared her father’s horror. What had “the people,” “the people” who had behaved so admirably on the 26th of February, done to deserve such treacherous treatment? She could think of nothing else. Her rage and disappointment were such that she became absolutely insupportable. And when her grandmother remonstrated with her, she implored to be allowed to go to Blérancourt to her father, who shared her disappointment. But Mme. Seron was still living in dread of her son-in-law’s threat of a working-class marriage for his daughter. She had other ideas for Juliette. “Already,” she told her little granddaughter, “you have pleased young X——, who is seventeen; and his father, half in jest, half in earnest, because of your age, has suggested that in a few years’ time there might be an alliance between the families.” Moreover, Mme. Seron did not wish again to interrupt her daughter’s studies. So she proposed a compromise. Instead of going to Blérancourt, Juliette might become a boarder at the _pension_.[15] This suggestion was a terrible blow to Juliette. That such a proposal should come from her grandmother, that she, who generally complained of the length of the school hours which deprived her of her idolised granddaughter’s company, should now of her own free will suggest a far longer separation, seemed incredible. The child was quick to see that her own behaviour had brought her grandmother to such a pass. By her ravings and recriminations she had made herself intolerable. Her grandmother was glad to get rid of her. “I was thunderstruck,” she writes. “Nothing but wicked pride kept me from throwing myself on my grandmother’s neck and asking pardon for my folly; for I realised how wild and extravagant I had been. But what grandmother had told me about X——, a tall youth, whom I thought both handsome and clever, had so puffed me up that I could not see a young person like myself, close upon twelve, kneeling to ask forgiveness like a little girl. So, though my heart was in my mouth all the while, I merely said—