In vain did Dr. Lambert, penniless and disillusioned, plead for the return of his wife and daughter. “Not until you have proved yourself able to support them,” was Mme. Seron’s stern reply; and, she added relentlessly, “I adopt the child whom you abandoned, whom you left a prey to the direst poverty. She is mine, and shall be as long as I live.” Thus ended the first of those kidnappings which were to recur at intervals through the first sixteen years of Juliette’s life, until her first marriage. They arose not merely from the rival claims of parents and grandparents to possess the child, but from the fact that each of these four persons held pronounced and divergent opinions as to the upbringing of their adored one. In the quarrels which ensued, Mme. Seron and Dr. Lambert were the protagonists; Dr. Seron and Mme. Lambert played the parts of supers, or supported one side or the other. We are all, even the most obstinate and strong-minded, moulded, though often unconsciously, by various intellectual influences. To this rule Juliette, despite her indomitable will and personal idiosyncrasy, was no exception. And a study of her mental development shows her passing through three distinct phases: her childhood and youth, when her grandmother’s or her father’s influence dominated alternately: middle life, when broadly speaking she sympathised with her father’s opinions: her later years, after the war of 1870, when more or less she was returning to her grandmother’s point of view. With these two formative forces, with these two remarkable persons, Mme. Seron and her son-in-law, Dr. Lambert, we must become intimately acquainted if we would understand Juliette’s character and career. We must also remember that the time of Juliette’s upbringing was the hey-day of the romantic period, a time when individualism ran rampant, when the most Utopian of dreamers believed they were about to realise their wildest hopes. It was true that after half a century of experiments in government France had practically settled down for a while into the jog-trot of Louis Philippe’s reign. But beneath the veil of the moderate and the commonplace which this compromise of constitutional monarchy had cast over the country, there bubbled and boiled a welter of effervescence which twelve years after Juliette’s birth exploded in the Revolution of 1848.