In the opening pages of her _Recollections_ Mme. Adam has told, with more vivid detail than is unhappily here possible, the story of two generations of her ancestors. Her own career has not lacked romance; but many of its most thrilling incidents pale beside the experiences of her forbears. Tracing them back to the Napoleonic Wars, she presents us with a lively picture of domestic history, which is as far from being commonplace as it is possible to imagine. For it embraces moving scenes of rapturous love affairs, extraordinary marriages, a startling infidelity, quarrels about dowries, and the story of a son who had a rare precocious experience. At the age of nine, he found himself already disinherited and sent forth in the world, cast upon the mercy of the family milkman, with whom he took refuge. This juvenile outcast was Mme. Adam’s maternal grandfather, of whom, under the name of Dr. Seron, we shall hear much more anon. Only by unwavering persistence, and stern resolution did this unhappy boy escape from his benefactor’s vocation. Tramping to Paris, boots in hand, to save shoe-leather, he educated himself into the medical profession and ultimately married Mme. Adam’s grandmother, Pélagie Raincourt. Pélagie also was a highly romantic person, no less remarkable than her husband. For on her wedding morning, as the result of a family broil, by no means rare among Mme. Adam’s forbears, she escaped in a pet from her mother’s house, and was found sitting by the roadside, clad only in a nightcap and dressing-gown, by her bridegroom, who had pursued her on horseback. Swinging her into the saddle, in order to avoid further escapades, he carried her off to the church and there married her out of hand. Her sole bridal adornment was a white carnation, which a woman of the people pinned into her cap. Juliette in later years was shown the cap and the carnation to illustrate the story, which she heard from the runaway’s own lips. Mme. Seron continued all her life addicted to romance. When it became a question of marrying her daughter, Olympe, Mme. Adam’s mother, Mme. Seron, a catholic, chose a son-in-law who was an agnostic, because she was attracted by his appearance and his history. Jean Louis Lambert, Mme. Adam’s father, had for the sake of his opinions sacrificed brilliant ecclesiastical prospects, and from the prospective secretary of the Archbishop of Beauvais had become an usher in the boys’ school opposite Mme. Seron’s house. This heroic youth was taken by Mme. Adam’s grandmother, educated as a doctor, and married to the reluctantly quiescent Olympe, who from that time forward adopted that attitude of injured passivity which was expressed by her favourite phrase “where you have tethered the goat there it will graze.”