It always strikes me as strange and somehow magical when you follow a random track and it leads you into areas that you had never been aware of. These odd, intricate threads seem to be spun in a wholly haphazard fashion and yet as you get caught up in their mesh, you realise that these are all interlinked and open onto more familiar, clearer ground. So was the case when I visited the rural
église St Julien and learnt of the history of the former château that was once closely associated with this singular country church. Whilst learning of the history of the château, sadly destroyed at the end of the First World War in 1918, I found mention of one of its previous owners, a certain lawyer named
Alexis La Messine (1823-1866), but more interestingly, the woman to whom he had once been married;
Juliette Lambert (1836-1936). As the couple’s marital arrangement seemed rather strange – the wife preferring not to accompany her husband on visits to his family château – I decided to look into their history. Monsieur appears to have been a rather unpleasant fellow, albeit no more so than the norm in a time when the fair sex (women) generally led lives dictated by decidedly unfair conditions. Madame, meanwhile, was a character whose life was shaped by anything but what was deemed ‘normal’.
How disappointing that the name Juliette Lambert (whose nom de plume was
Juliette Lamber and later
Juliette Adam) is little known today… Far from being some retiring provincial spouse as countless others, here was a unique woman of notable literary and political prowess in her own right, even on a par with
George Sand (1804 – 1876). Yet whilst Sand’s name is synonymous with the fight for equality and considerable literary contributions, Juliette Lamber’s has somewhat fallen into oblivion. This is perhaps all the more ironic since the two women did get to know and frequent each other, despite the notable difference in age. It was indeed in Juliette’s first major written piece in 1858
Idées anti-proudhoniennes sur l’amour, la femme et le mariage, that she took the defense of Sand (and fellow writer, Marie d’Agoult) against the misogynistic diatribes of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Later, Juliette’s salon, a socio-cultural hub, would contribute to contemporary movements in literature and politics, drawing in many of the most influential and famous figures of the period such as Flaubert and Victor Hugo and of course, George Sand herself. Likewise, Juliette’s founding and direction of La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1879 enabled her to encourage young writers whilst reflecting her republican, feminist vision of society too. She herself turned to a literary career from that time, with the novel Laide (1878) being dedicated to no other than… George Sand. I am not sure what either woman would say about the political climate today or what has been achieved since their lives for the feminist cause and as I am neither equipped nor willing to ponder on either here, I would rather dwell on a more personal aspect of Juliette’s life – her formative years – which were surely just as captivating as
Sand’s.
Whilst we all come into this world supposedly alone, some beings are destined to lead an existence already ‘crowded out’ by family, their paths set out for them long before birth by the latter’s aspirations, hopes and expectations. From the earliest age, much of Juliette’s life was governed by the largely dysfunctional relationship between her maternal grandmother and two parents, an odd triangle in which she occupied a central position. She was constantly pulled and pushed in opposing directions by individuals ensnared in their own separate obsessive behaviours driven by their specific worldview that they wished to share with her. Most of the members of the family were rather eccentric and - to use today’s parlance – were probably’ on the spectrum’. The figure of the grandmother is the keystone in Juliette’s story and intriguing in its own right.
Firstly, Juliette’s great grandmother chose to marry her cousin but died when giving birth to a daughter, Pélagie (Juliette’s future grandmother), at the age of 16. The infant was subsequently raised by her grandmother, whilst her father remarried and gave Pélagie three half-sisters. It was soon apparent that reading would be the mainstay of her life, to fire her love of adventure and thirst for “written or enacted romance” that rejected anything enforced or preordained. Above all, novels seemed to feed her aspirations, for herself and especially her descendants, and a good match in marriage was to her, the means to realise her dreams. However, much of the drama she underwent must have been at the origin of her paradoxical desire for housebound existence in later life, cloistered in home and gardens with her precious books. Whilst she would only venture from home to attend Mass at church, she dreamt of leaving for Paris, but these dreams were never to be realised. Having chosen her own husband, a doctor called
Pierre Seron, Pélagie suffered from his obsessive wanderings as he left on various army missions and otherwise entertained Don Juan tendencies. Pélagie was often left alone, literally holding the fort and the baby throughout the early years of married life. During the invasion of their hometown, Chauny, in Picardie, in the early 1800s, Pélagie had to flee from the advancing troops of Prussians, which led to the death of her twin baby daughters. She managed to survive and so did her marriage, despite her husband’s ongoing philandering that was accompanied by constant marital spats. Another child was born, Olympe, but unfortunately her great beauty was not matched by a pleasant nature. “Impossible to find a more fascinating creature to look at or one of less good humour”. Olympe had no desire to read books and it seemed that Pélagie’s dearest wish to see her beautiful daughter married off would be dashed too. However, the encounter with an earnest young man – the future doctor Jean-Louis Lambert – finally resulted in wedlock and a son was born to the young couple. Already proving to be a challenging wife due to her “habitual sourness” and her motiveless recriminations, Olympe appears to have been devoid of any maternal instinct. As a chilling testament to this, the child died at 18 months of age as a result of a ‘violent scolding’ adminstered by this brutal mother. The husband, given to excessive behaviour, allowed himself to be led astray by a charlatan so that by the time Juliette was born, the household was in poverty. At this point, Pélagie stepped in to bring up her granddaughter in her home at Chauny, far from her parents, but not free from the family dramas which punctuated her young life.
If Pélagie occupied a central position in Juliette’s life, this was equaled by that of Juliette’s father. Both adults held very different views and stances on virtually everything, except in their devoring love for this child. After a few years, Juliette’s father wanted to reclaim his daughter and bring her back to his home in Blérancourt in order to educate her in his manner, inculcating her with his Republican opinions and steering her away from religion. This was a polar opposite to the upbringing she had received at her grandmother’s, and so started a strange competition to win Juliette over as she oscillated between the two camps – and two forms of idealism. Despite the opposing positions in this tug of war, Juliette loved her adoring father and grandmother to equal measure, and both exerted a huge influence on her worldview during her formative years and beyond. Predictably, perhaps, neither adult would accept the values of the other, considering these as detrimental to Juliette and both failed to acknowledge the dilemma the situation caused for the young girl. Furthermore, Juliette’s father was given to violent outbursts of anger to the point that Pélagie referred to him as a “dangerous madman”. Following an accident in which he almost blinded Juliette, he intended to kill her and himself afterwards rather than have a disfigured daughter. That Juliette escaped from the episode alive, was down to her ability to reason calmly with her father and this conciliatory trait was one that she developed throughout her life thereafter. Her mother, needless to say, was a persistently embittered presence, ready to bring her daughter down to earth with a cutting remark on her intellect and appearance - “as stupid as ugly”. Juliette was however a highly intelligent child, precocious for her years, and well versed in literature, Greek and of course actively involved in politics to the point that she was expelled from school for exposing the socialist Republican views her father had encouraged in her. Her inquiring mind and vivid intellect were down to both her father and grandmother’s efforts to inculcate her with what they held dearest. Their interests and beliefs would invariably cover opposing areas yet these somehow grew in harmony in Juliette although the virtual indifference to what she herself may have felt or wanted is mind-boggling! Whilst her father admitted to her that his “greatest ambition is to make your mind the offspring of my own”, her grandmother, Pélagie, wished to see her married, with a fine dowry, and living in Paris and thus become “a woman unlike everyone else”.
Appearing older than her years, even as a young teenager, Juliette attracted attention and when La Messine, a lawyer for the Court of Appeal in Paris of Southern Italian origin, asked for her hand in marriage, Pélagie was delighted – “ My dream is realized!”. Striking an agreement with La Messine, Pélagie arranged that she would spend each winter with the married couple in Paris, in exchange for the sizeable dowry she had been building up over the years. Olympe was likewise content to see her daughter set to be married off so that she would be free of a rival and thus no longer obliged to vie for her husband’s attention. Juliette, meanwhile, was less sure of a marriage to a man considerably older and with far more cynical views than herself, even if she had initially found the conversational ‘jousting’ between them entertaining. Pélagie assured her granddaughter that this mature suitor resembled one of the intriguing characters from her Balzac novels, and therefore with such a romantic figure, nothing could surely go wrong. Her father, meanwhile, was resolutely against the marriage to this “unworthy man”, and rightly so… Unfortunately, the couple were indeed wed and shortly afterwards Juliette fell pregnant. Going back on his gentleman’s word, La Messine refused to allow Pélagie to stay with them, whilst brazenly confirming his father-in-law’s fears; he and Juliette agreed on nothing and the household was not a happy one. Heartbroken, Pélagie left the couple and in despair starved herself to death, finally appearing to Juliette as a ghostly apparition just before passing away. This loss had a profound, lasting effect on Juliette, not only inciting her to leave her unhappy marriage and to fight for herself and her daughter but also to recover the religious faith she had previously dismissed. Her father encouraged her to leave her spouse and to strive forward “Work, work and become known”, and indeed she followed his advice. Publishing her first successful piece in 1858, in her mere 20s, Idées anti-proudhoniennes sur l'amour, la femme et le marriage, she nevertheless wrote as Juliette La Messine. The success of the work was such that her estranged husband sought to claim his share of the profit garnered but this spurred her on to spouse the feminist cause even further and to fight for her political views. Once widowed in 1867, Juliette went on to marry the senator, Edmond Adam. Her Parisian salon was matched in success by the soirées that she later organized in the setting of her grand property
L’Abbaye Notre-Dame du Val de Gif where the great political and literary figures of the Third Republic would meet. In later life, she carried out charity work and was invited by
Georges Clemenceau to the signing of the peace treaty of Versailles in 1918. Juliette finally died in 1936, at the grand age of 100 at the end of an incredible life. It saddens me to think that such an inspirational individual is overlooked, at a time when we need to see figures that act and achieve in spite of challenges – focusing on accomplishment rather than dwelling excessively on the injustices that may hamper this.
