My Memoirs. Marguerite Steinheil
year."
On Sundays we attended service in the Temple of Beaucourt. The district is a Protestant one, a very Protestant one indeed. My first pastor was old M. Cuvier, a descendant of the great naturalist Baron Cuvier, who died in 1832.
He was very handsome and impressive, was Pastor Cuvier, with his mane of white hair and his gleaming eyes under the bushy eyebrows. My father used to tell me that he looked like Liszt, whom he had met on several occasions in Germany and Hungary, and in Paris. The old clergyman was a great orator, and although I did not always understand what he said, I loved to listen to him. He often called on us, and, in order to tease him, my father, a staunch Huguenot but broad-minded and endowed with a sense of humour, made him sit at the table next to the Catholic priest of Beaucourt. At the beginning of the dinner the two men hardly dared look at one another, and could hardly eat, much to my mother's alarm.... M. Cuvier said, "Let us not talk religion," and the priest added, "Nor politics." My father remarked, "You are both quite right"... and forthwith he started eulogising Darwin's theories and explaining to his two guests the law of natural selection and how it was quite evident that "each species was not independently created."... But all ended well, thanks to the good-humour of my father, the smiling grace of my mother, and the excellent wines and liqueurs in our cellars.
Old Pastor Cuvier was very kind to me. He often received me at his house, which stood opposite the wood in our estate. He had in his library all the works of his illustrious ancestor, and writing down the names on a slip of paper, which I have kept through all these years, he made me promise that I would read, when I was grown-up, the "Tableau Elémentaire de l'Histoire Naturelle des Animaux" and the "Règne Animal distribué d'après son Organisation." I promised, of course, but did not keep my promise. May the two Cuviers, the naturalist and the pastor, forgive me!
M. Cuvier was fond of relating some episodes—within my understanding—of the Revolution and the First Empire. He talked about the Terror as though he had lived through those dreadful days, and about Napoleon as though he had known him intimately. We went several times to Montbéliard together to visit the Cuvier Museum there, and he would stand in contemplation before the great man's enormous and very dirty cap. And my pastor would exclaim: "What a head! What a head!"
He so often talked to me about a certain book by Cuvier on elephants that the thought of elephants haunted me and I begged my father to show me one. And so it was that I went, when I was a little girl, to Paris. The elephant I saw there pleased me very much, although I would have liked it to have been more savage; and, in spite of a ride on the back of the great beast, I was somewhat disappointed.
My pastor was very, very old, and his son came to assist him in his work, but both left Beaucourt after a short time. The son, like thousands of Protestants in the Jura and Switzerland at the time, was a Monodist, and believed that Monod, the great preacher and revivalist, was Christ himself.... M. Cuvier died in Switzerland. A new pastor came to Beaucourt, M. Bach, and I became in time the organist of his church and the leader of the choir.
Three times a week the band organised by my father came to rehearse at our house. Chamber-music did not quite satisfy him, and he had founded this band, which numbered forty-five musicians. Ah! those rehearsals. When the weather was fair they took place under the chestnut trees, but if it rained or snowed the "forty-five" and their conductor would gather in the main drawing-room of the "castle," where two hundred people could have been seated comfortably, or in the dining-room, to the pathetic despair of my mother, who would ask my father: "Don't you think, Edouard, that your band is just a little too noisy?" My father kissed her laughingly, flourished the baton, and the rehearsal began.
One of my father's greatest delights, and mine, too, was to travel together. After my fourteenth birthday he took me to Italy, to Germany, and to Switzerland, where we went round the Léman (he forbade me to say Lake of Geneva); and, of course, we continued to pay our periodical visits to Belfort, Nancy and Bâle.
It was in Belfort that I heard an opera for the first time. This was Faust. My father, who was a friend of Gounod, had told me all kinds of things about Gounod's "nice" music, but I was not half as impressed as I thought I should be. Perhaps it was because Faust was too stout, because Valentine sang too loudly as he died, because Mephistopheles was not diabolical enough, and perhaps, too, owing to the fact that Marguerite's spinning-wheel, having been mislaid, had been replaced at the eleventh hour by a—sewing-machine. And to think that they could have found a spinning-wheel in almost any house of the neighbourhood!
It was also at Belfort that I met M. Thiers, with whom my father was well acquainted. This "meeting" took place, I believe, in 1877. I had to hand a huge bouquet to M. Thiers. Every one was calling him "The Liberator and the Saviour of France," and those words so fixed themselves in my mind that I quite forgot the little speech I had learned by heart; and when M. Thiers stepped from his carriage, I handed him the bouquet and said, "There you are, Mr. Saviour" (Monsieur le Sauveur). The little fat and ugly man with the round head, the beady eyes, and the spectacles, took the bouquet, lifted me up and kissed me. Later on he spent an evening at our house, and naturally I asked for a story. Thereupon, describing some wonderful ceremony, he mentioned Napoleon, sixteen horses drawing a funeral car, and a magnificent palace with a golden cupola, near the Seine, in Paris.... And years later, I realised that Thiers had been telling me about the translation of Napoleon's ashes to the Invalids, in the days of King Louis-Philippe, when he was Prime Minister.
We used to go for long walks or rides, my father and I. We both loved to feel the wind in our faces, and we took joy in the smell of the earth, the smell of grass, the voice of the trees. Often he went out without me, but as soon as I was free from my work I went in search of him, fastening the ribbons of my big straw hat as I ran over hill and dale. Instinct led me in the right direction, and in time I found him, and rushing up, rested in his arms, which was ever my way of greeting him. We returned home together, and on the way never failed to admire our favourite old trees, to linger by the lakes we liked best, to gather ferns and foxglove, and to go at least once round the greenhouses.
And we had endless surprises, and we laughed at everything, often for no reason at all. A word, a common thought, the shape of a leaf or of a cloud, sent us into fits of ecstasy or laughter. And my father would kiss me and whisper: "We get on well together, we two, don't we, Puppele;" and I would answer: "I love you, my daddy."
"Quite right, too," he would say. "Try to love me as long as you possibly can. A father like the one you own is worth all the husbands in the world."
What happy days! What a lovely life! How everything smiled on me, how everything seemed good and simple.... Alas! a few years later disenchantment was to begin, bringing in its wake, temptations, weaknesses, struggles and sorrows; and finally the whole fabric of my life was to be brought crashing down in a terrible, "sensational" drama....
I fear that this note of poignant sadness and regret will sound again and again in these pages like a melancholy and distressing leit-motiv.... But how could it be otherwise? How could I fail to realise, in an intensely painful and bitter manner, all that I have lost and all that I have suffered unjustly, when I recall my childhood and my radiant youth, and the days spent in Beaucourt with a mother infinitely loving and a father passionately devoted, and when I compare those years of happiness with the feverish, tangled years that followed and that resulted, after the appalling catastrophe in which I lost my husband and my mother, both foully done to death, in my being tried and imprisoned in Paris on a double charge of murder.
CHAPTER II
YOUTH—MY FATHER'S DEATH—MY MARRIAGE
I MADE my début in society at seventeen. The circle was quite small, for there were Japys and ramifications of the Japys wherever we went, and, of course, as I knew them all, they were nothing new to me. It was only in Belfort that I met people whom I did not know. They were, however, for the most part only passing acquaintances that I made, for my parents guarded their "Puppele" most jealously....
I remember my first ball at Belfort. I