After dinner, finding her very agitated, he sent her to bed. “_Va te coucher, Basile_,” he said. “I will read your book to-night, and tell you what I think of it in the morning.” At three o’clock in the morning he came into his daughter’s room and awakened her with the words:[48] “It is good, it is good. But it is mine. I sowed the seed in your mind of these _Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes_. My dear child, this means your success, your salvation,[49] influential friendships, your grandmother’s wishes realised. Why is she not here at this moment?” The next morning at breakfast even the usually despondent Mme. Lambert was gay, although she could not help her customary gloom breaking out in the exclamation, “I tremble to think what a life of work and worry this will mean for you.” Dr. Lambert was eager for his daughter to be off to Paris, there to receive the congratulations which he was convinced were awaiting her. And he was not mistaken. Every day brought some new proof of the attention this little volume had attracted. The book was widely noticed in the press. The review which pleased her most, even to the point, she confesses, of for the moment making her lose her head (_cet article me monta un peu à la tête_),[50] was by Eugène Pelletan, in _La Presse_. The writer came to see her the day after the article’s appearance: and from that moment he became one of her most faithful and devoted friends. The _Siècle_, the periodical which had published her first prose effort,[51] in the following terms noticed her volume only a few days after its publication— “We received yesterday a book destined to produce a profound sensation. It is a reply to Proudhon and to the insulting attack upon George Sand and Daniel Stern contained in his last work. This book, despite its virility, is said to be by a very young woman. The title of the volume is _Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes_. It is signed ‛Juliette Lamessine.’” Virility is, indeed, the dominating feature of this, Juliette’s first production, as it was to be of all her work. She writes as one having authority. Her style is crisp, terse, dramatic, vivid and, above all, forcible. It is essentially the style of a woman of action as well as of thought. In controversy she has always been at her best. And she could not possibly have found a subject better suited to her temperament and training than this answer to Proudhon’s attack on women. That in this year, 1858, three years before John Stuart Mill began to write his _Subjection of Women_, three years before our first woman doctor, Mrs. Garrett Anderson, began to study medicine, a young woman of twenty-two should have been able to present a bird’s-eye view of the whole field of feminist reform; that she should, in such forcible terms, have enunciated feminist principles and contended for those rights which it has required half a century of conflict to win, was a very remarkable achievement.