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
Introductions from the north speedily surrounded her with interesting
acquaintances: her physician, Dr. Maure, the friend of Thiers; Dr.
Maure’s friends, Prosper Mérimée and Victor Cousin; Jean Reynaud,
an eminent Saint-Simonian, but not of Enfantin’s group. At Jean
Reynaud’s villa, la Bocca, she met Lord Brougham. Mme. Reynaud, one of
Chopin’s most accomplished pupils, entranced Juliette by her rendering
of Beethoven. Jean Reynaud took her long rambles. In one of these he
related how he had come to leave Enfantin, having found his views on
sexual morality quite impossible.
Next winter, when Juliette returned to Cannes, her little Alice, now
seven and a half, came with her and joined in these rambles at her
mother’s side. Jean Reynaud was amused by Juliette’s respect for her
daughter’s personality. For Mme. Lamessine, mindful of the suffering
endured in her own childhood through the proselytising ardour of her
grandmother and father, was careful not to impose on Alice any of her
own ideas. With regard to fundamental things Juliette would say to the
child: “Grandfather thinks so and so, my view is such and such. You
must form your own opinion.”
The first time Jean Reynaud heard this kind of conversation he burst
out laughing, and was about to repeat the phrase in jest, when
Juliette stopped him with a look, and sending her little girl away to
pick some flowers, said: “Joke with me as much as you like, but not
before her. Remember she has only me to respect.”
So charmed was the young author with her life at Cannes, so beneficial
for her own health and her daughter’s did she find the climate of
Provence, that, before the end of her second winter there, she had
persuaded her father to buy a building site on the Golfe Juan; and
before her return to the north in the spring of 1862, the walls of her
villa of Bruyères were already rising.
Dr. and Mme. Lambert were thinking of selling their house at Chauny,
in order to spend the summer months with their daughter in a Paris
flat and their winters on the shore of the Mediterranean.
The winter of 1862-3 found Juliette and Alice installed in their villa
of Bruyères. Mme. de Pierreclos was their first visitor. Dr. Maure
called frequently, always bringing with him his last letter from his
friend Thiers, which he was proud to read to his friends at Bruyères.
But, alas! he by whose advice Juliette had settled on the Golfe Juan,
Jean Reynaud, her “third father,” as she called him, was no more. He
had died in Paris, during the summer, after a surgical operation.
His loss left his adopted daughter disconsolate. Her book _Mon Voyage
autour du Grand Pin_ she dedicated to his memory; for every one of
its pages, she writes, had been inspired by their walks and talks at
Cannes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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