It was at the Adam Salomons’ that Juliette met Lamartine. He came there every day: and it saddened her to see this great poet worried by financial embarrassments and attempting to retrieve his fallen fortunes by soliciting subscriptions to his _Cours Familier de Littérature. Ce pauvre Lamartine_, wrote the witty Mme. Mohl, _ce n’est plus une lyre, c’est une tire-lire_ (a sealed earthen pot with a slit into which a peasant puts his money). The poet’s fine, handsome countenance still lit up when he spoke of art, letters or politics, but that unhappily was but seldom.[67] There are those for whom socially the Second Empire signifies little more than hollow splendour, ostentatious display and vulgar luxury. No doubt these tendencies were strongly marked; but at the same time there flourished a rich and original development of art, music and literature. When Juliette was making her _début_ in Paris drawing-rooms, Alexandre Dumas’ _La Dame aux Camélias_ and his _Fils Naturel_ were being played at Le Théâtre Français, Millet and Puvis de Chavannes were exhibiting their first pictures in the Salon, Renan was writing his _Vie de Jésus_, Erckmann and Chatrian their Napoleonic romances, and Victor Hugo, in exile, his _Légende des Siècles_. Those were the days when two of the greatest composers of the modern world, Berlioz and Wagner, were rivalling one another on the Parisian operatic stage. Juliette first met Berlioz at the representation of _Orpheo_ at the Théâtre Lyrique. Mme. Viardot’s sublime rendering of the part of Orpheo avenged Juliette and her neo-Grecian friends, Ménard and de Ronchaud, who accompanied her, for the insults Offenbach had offered to their Greek gods. During the song “I have lost my Eurydice,” Juliette, overcome by emotion, paid the singer the superb compliment of momentarily losing consciousness. When Berlioz himself came round to their box at the end of the act, Ménard did not neglect to tell him of the beautiful Mme. Lamessine’s little swoon. Highly flattered the composer took her hand in his and kept it there.[68] “Yes,” he said, “it is quite beautiful.... Orpheo is near enough to the real Orpheo for the expression of grief rendered as we have just heard it to overwhelm the senses.” Juliette appreciated Wagner’s art, though she was far too much of a Latin to prefer this Teuton to Berlioz. “Berlioz,” she wrote, “is the initiator, he stands above all others. He can well afford to let the Wagnerian fanatics assert that Wagner’s is the music of the future.”