FOOTNOTES:
[254] Souvenirs, IV. 286-7.
[255] Souvenirs, V. 276.
[256] p. 140.
[257] Souvenirs, V. 163.
[258] The extremists were led by Ranc, who was a much more sincere admirer of the Great Tribune.
[259] Souvenirs, V. 165.
[260] Souvenirs, V. 166.
[261] I am greatly indebted to Sir Sidney Colvin for having taken the trouble to send me these reminiscences, and for permitting me to use them.
[262] Souvenirs, V. 144-269.
[263] Ibid., I. 169.
[264] Souvenirs, V. 183.
[265] Souvenirs, V. 185.
[266] Ibid., 283.
[267] Ibid., 383.
[268] Gambetta’s speech at Havre. See Hanotaux, Hist. Contemporaine, I. 406.
[269] Souvenirs, I. 278.
[270] Souvenirs, V. 173.
[271] Ibid., 167.
[272] Here are published to-day the Echo de Paris, L’Intransigeant and many other well-known journals. It was in a café at the corner of this street that Jaurès was assassinated in 1914.
[273] Souvenirs, V. 214.
[274] Souvenirs, V. 304.
[275] Souvenirs, V. 76.
[276] Ibid., VI. 212.
[277] MacMahon had succeeded Thiers as President of the French Republic in May 1873.
[278] Souvenirs, VI. 92.
[279] Souvenirs, VI. 473.
[280] Ibid., VII. 5.
[281] Ibid., 49.
[282] Souvenirs, VII. 6-7.
[283] Ibid., VII. 78.
[284] M. de Freycinet’s two volumes of Mémoires should be read by all who are interested in this period.
[285] Souvenirs, VII. 245.
[286] Ibid., 185.
[287] Souvenirs, VII. 187.
CHAPTER XIV
“LA REVANCHE”
1870-1914
“The passion of revenge is habitually over-estimated as a motive, possibly through the influence of the novelists and playwrights to whom it is so useful. When we examine man’s behaviour objectively we find that revenge, however deathless a passion it is vowed to be at emotional moments, is in actual life constantly having to give way to more urgent and more recent needs and feelings. Between nations there is no reason to suppose that it has any more reality as a motive of policy, though it perhaps has slightly more value as a consolatory pose.... In 1870 the former (France) was humiliated with brutal completeness and every element of insult. She talked of revenge, as she could scarcely fail to do, but she soon showed that her grasp on reality was too firm to allow her policy to be moved by that childish passion. Characteristically, it was the victorious aggressor who believed in her longing for revenge, and who at length attacked her again.”—Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, 199 (1916).
Mme. Adam’s attitude towards that policy known in France as la Revanche offers an emphatic denial to one of Germany’s numerous misrepresentations as to the origin of the Great War. In their peace conversations with America, as on many other occasions, the Germans have declared that one of the chief causes of the present struggle was the Revancharde Policy of France. Nevertheless, for at least twenty years before the war that policy, which had never been adopted by the French Government, had ceased to be advocated by the majority of the French nation. One of the countless proofs of this may be found in the title Mme. Adam gives to the last volume of her Reminiscences, Après l’Abandon de la Revanche. About the year 1880 she began to find that those who advocated la Revanche were a constantly dwindling minority. This minority continued to diminish until, in the years immediately preceding the Great War, those whose national hopes were focussed on the reconquest of the lost provinces (for the word revanche means not so much “revenge” in our sense of the word as a winning back of one’s own) came to number not more than one per cent. of the whole population. This was that infinitesimal group in whose Chauvinist activities and aspirations the German Empire professed to see a menace to the peace of Europe. And even among those Chauvinist nationalists, of whom Mme. Adam was one of the most fervent, there was hardly one, certainly not Mme. Adam herself, who would have ventured to advocate an immediate aggressive war for the purpose of reconquering Alsace-Lorraine. Not even the leader of French militarists, Boulanger, desired it. Nevertheless, it was true that Mme. Adam and a few fellow idealists desired to see la Revanche becoming once more what it had been during the first decade after 1870, l’idée reine, the governing idea of France.
La Revanche in this academic sense was the banner of the Ligue des Patriotes, presided over by Paul Déroulède, of the Action Française, a Royalist society founded by Alphonse Daudet’s son Léon, in collaboration with that gifted writer Charles Maurras.
But none of these people were practical politicians; and none of them, as we cannot repeat too often, advocated an immediate aggressive war for the reconquest of the lost provinces. They desired above all things that the brethren from whom they had been parted under such heartrending conditions should not feel themselves forgotten. And it was for the sake of these exiles that the revanchards protested against Gambetta’s counsel, pensons y toujours n’en parlons jamais. They spoke of them constantly, they spoke of them loudly—too constantly, and too loudly, perhaps; for they certainly failed to inspire the majority of their compatriots with that consuming desire for reunion which burnt in their own hearts.
To keep this idea alive, Mme. Adam has written and laboured for forty-five years. With this object, as we shall see, she founded a fortnightly magazine, La Nouvelle Revue. In an article in this review, dated September 1881, replying to an accusation made by the German Press that France was likely to appeal to force, Mme. Adam writes: “We have never ceased to ask M. Gambetta to remind our brethren separated from us that we have never renounced the hope of reunion with them.” Then she adds diplomatically: “Nothing in this affirmation need alarm Germany’s military hegemony. Nevertheless, it is well for her to know that, though far from dreaming of a rash war, we shall never be guilty of the crime of forgetting.”
The wave of patriotic and nationalist fervour, which, as the result of the Tangier (1905) and Agadir (1911) incidents, swept over France during the ten years which preceded this war, indicated no desire for aggression even on the part of the most rabid revanchard. It was purely for a defensive war that France was preparing when in 1913, in reply to Germany’s threatening military measures, she increased to three years the term of military service, which in 1905 had been reduced to two. By that time any idea of la Revanche as a practical measure had vanished from the majority of French minds.[288] It was not on her eastern frontier so much as in her vast colonial empire that France now saw herself threatened by Germany.
Mme. Adam, still passionately clinging to the forlorn hope of la Revanche, had in her old age come to find herself practically alone except for a little group of literary idealists. Her adherence to this idea, which had been renounced by the majority of her nation, explains her political and religious evolution during the last thirty years.
Previous chapters of this book will have shown how completely in accord with Mme. Adam’s passionate, patriotic and energetic disposition was this persistent advocacy of la Revanche. Retaliation was in her blood. Even as a child, whenever she or any one else received an injury or suffered an injustice her first thought had been that some one must be made to pay for it. She had never been able to take any wrong lying down. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, was her motto; and nothing appeared to her so humiliating as the Christian doctrine of resignation.
After the war her desire for retaliation grew into a consuming passion. “I suffer acutely,”[289] she writes, “from that malady of defeat, that perpetual pain which maddens a Frenchwoman who has been conquered at every turning of the roads of Alsace, of Lorraine, who has been crushed at Sedan, deceived and surrendered at Paris.” That suppressed combativity (combativité rentrée),[290] which on the capitulation of Paris she felt well-nigh bursting her head and her heart, pursued her from February 1871 until August 1914.
Mme. Adam argued like Mr. Wells’ Letty when she believed her husband, Teddy, to be dead.[291] “You see, if he is dead, then Cruelty is the Law, and some one must pay me for his death. Some one must pay me.... I shall wait for six months after the war, dear, and then I shall go off to Germany.... And I will murder some German. Not just a common German, but a German who belongs to the guilty kind....”
On much the same lines did Mme. Adam reason when the iron of defeat entered into her soul—she, too, would exact payment, not for any personal wrong, but for a national injury; she would murder some German, not only of the guilty but of the guiltiest kind, the arch-criminal himself—none other than Bismarck. Only she would murder him not with the sword, but with a weapon in the handling of which she was more expert—with her pen. With this object, as we have said, she founded, with the fortune her husband left her, La Nouvelle Revue. In the pages of this magazine, in a series of powerful articles entitled, “Letters on Foreign Politics,” she pursued unceasingly the Man of Iron, revealing his hidden designs, disclosing his plots, and warning France against the snares he was perpetually laying for her.
It was impossible that so terrific a disaster as l’Année Terrible should leave any serious-minded French person the same as before the war. But it had not the same effect upon every one. While most of Mme. Adam’s circle embraced the policy of la Revanche, there were some who, like George Sand and Arlès Dufour, turned their hatred not so much against Germany as against war as a whole, and who found their internationalist principles strengthened by defeat. With such ideas Mme. Adam had not a particle of sympathy. They sundered her from many of her friends. They caused her to turn with more enthusiasm than ever to the one man who seemed capable of realising her hopes, to Gambetta, l’Homme de la Revanche. Indeed, Gambetta’s immense energy, his marvellous organising power, marked him as the one man in Europe capable of confronting and checkmating that sauvage de génie, Bismarck.
But, as we have said, Mme. Adam’s hope in Gambetta as l’Homme de la Revanche was doomed to disappointment. In order to see how her idol came to be dethroned from his pedestal, we must retrace our steps, returning to that critical year for the Republic, 1875.
During the general election for the new Chamber, which took place after the Republic had been definitely established by the constitution of 1875, Gambetta resumed his provincial tours. The political bagman addressed immense audiences at Aix, at Arles, at Lyons. “I am rapidly spending the reserves of rest which I laid in at Bruyères,” he writes to Mme. Adam on the 17th of January. A few days later he is in Paris, then down in the south again at Marseilles, then up in the north at Lille, where he addresses four thousand persons. “Enthousiasme indescriptible,” he writes. “I made a speech with which I am much better contented than with my address at Aix. I explained to them what our next majority must be: republican, democratic, liberal, pacific. Those were the four heads of my sermon. I think I touched their hearts and converted many unbelievers, and some who were indifferent. The town is decorated with flags. The streets are crowded, despite the severe cold. I am delighted. I have ranged their ranks in something like order. All our friends are reconciled; and I count on having fourteen deputies out of the eighteen.”[292] The republican majority of the new chamber was largely owing to Gambetta’s colossal efforts.
Throughout the election the Adams had rendered their illustrious friend invaluable service. Juliette, while she was at Bruyères, in letters which Gambetta described as un vrai rapport de ministre plénipotentiaire,[293] had kept him well informed of the state of parties in the south. Adam, a well-seasoned politician, had placed at his disposal all the wealth of his varied political experience. He had accompanied him on his electoral tours, and once, on the occasion of a great meeting at Auxerre, Juliette had joined the party. Whenever she was at Paris, Gambetta could always count on meeting in her salon people who would be useful to him.
Every one of the triumphs of ce grand entraineur des masses Juliette persuaded herself brought nearer the longed-for day when her brethren would be released from their chains and reunited to the motherland.
THE DEVICE OF THE CRUSADERS WHO ARE LED BY MADAME ADAM AND OTHER EMINENT FRENCHWOMEN
Gambetta’s letters to Mme. Adam at this time show that he was firmly convinced of Bismarck’s intention to renew war. Party strife in France he believed was encouraging the Chancellor to become more and more insolent. “Le désarroi de la lutte anarchique de tous les partis en France,” he writes,[294] “permet au plus terrible adversaire de Berlin de nous presser de plus près en attendant qu’il fasse un suprême effort pour arracher encore un lambeau de la patrie.”
Gambetta was filled with despair to think that under such desperate circumstances the French should have placed at their head le plus imbécile des Français. That at a moment when they needed a Richelieu, a Villars, a Mazarin, a Danton, or at least a Talleyrand, they should have unearthed the most insignificant of the Empire’s knights (reîtres de l’empire) and have confided to him the destinies of the nation. For Marshal MacMahon and his Government Gambetta has not a good word to say. And that, but for the intervention of Russia and England, France in 1875 would have again been at war with Germany, there now seems little doubt.
In a remarkable letter to Mme. Adam, written on the 24th of October, 1874,[295] Gambetta, with a true statesman’s insight, puts his finger on the danger spot of Europe, wherein forty years ago lay the embryo of this present conflict. “The powerful German Empire,” he writes, “is suffocating in Central Europe. With all its nervous energy it is striving to break through to the North Sea. It must have shores, canals, straits, fleets, and a sea-going population. Its Baltic ports are too remote from the high seas. They are in constant danger of being choked up. The straits leading to them are narrow and dangerous. To create a great fleet on those desolate and sandy shores is out of the question. Bismarck realises that he cannot raise Germany to the rank of a first-rate Power without giving her a fleet as formidable as her army. This design is Holland’s death-sentence.”
And Gambetta goes on to express his profound admiration of Holland, which he has just visited, and of the marvellous energy of the Dutch.
When the crisis of 1875 was past, when the elections of 1876 had resulted in a Republican majority in the Chamber, although MacMahon still remained President, Gambetta became more hopeful. At length the Republic had been placed upon a definite footing. The four years’ provisional government was now over. The constitution had been established. On the eve of the election, towards the end of the debates on the constitution, Gambetta had written to Mme. Adam:[296] “At last we are nearing the end of our difficulties. And despite the malcontents and the mere office-seekers, we (i.e. the republican party) shall appear before the country in great force, offering it the two things we had promised—the dissolution of the Assembly[297] and the Republic. Thus we shall place the country in a position to send us a new political generation worthy to complete the work and capable of successfully accomplishing the regeneration of la patrie.”
Throughout the debates on the constitution, as we have seen, Mme. Adam’s salon continued to serve as a lobby to the chamber. Every new stage in the progress of that republican constitution she had so long desired, filled her with rejoicing. “On the 24th of February,” she writes,[298] “was passed the law establishing the Senate. Imagine our joy. Imagine the meetings in our salon.... Of course, as yet our Republic is but in its infancy; but it will grow. And we are certain that in a few days’ time the law defining the various parties of the constitution will be passed. All our gratitude as old republicans is due to Gambetta, who has conducted the negotiations with marvellous tact and diplomacy.”
Encouraged by the success of his labours, Gambetta began to take a more hopeful view of the European situation. The crisis of 1875 having been tided over, the French army having attained to a high degree of excellent organisation, something approaching universal service for five years having been instituted, he began to see his country in a position to hold her own against Germany. Alas! how very far this was from being the case was born in upon Gambetta when, in 1877, he visited that country. On his return Gambetta sent Mme. Adam an account of his journey. “This idea (the idea of the German visit), chère amie,” he wrote,[299] “originated with you in a friendly conversation.... We said to one another: ‘How useful it would be ... to go to Germany, and to take the opportunity afforded by the manœuvres of studying on the spot, and with one’s own eyes, the results of that vast military organisation of which we have been the victims, and of which we remain the objective.’
“My only difficulty was how to carry out such an idea, how to observe closely, how to penetrate everywhere without exciting attention and suspicion, without being recognised.”
The simplest plan Gambetta found was to shave off his beard, thus rendering himself—as he puts it—uglier than ever, and quite unrecognisable even by his most intimate friends.
The result of that tour was to fill Gambetta with admiration of the work accomplished by M. de Bismarck. But he was quick to see also that Germany’s prosperity depended on the Prussian sword. Once that was allowed to rust, then the whole mechanism of the German State would fall out of gear. “The men of this nation,” he writes, “were well advised to concentrate their attention on the army. Their efforts have met with the most complete success. Unhappily,” he continues, “we possess no force which is worthy to be compared with the troops I have just seen.”
There is little doubt of the profound effect produced upon Gambetta by this and other visits to Germany. They convinced him that France was far from ready for la Revanche, at any rate for a revanche by force of arms. He did not, however, abandon altogether the hope of regaining the lost provinces by some diplomatic arrangement with Bismarck. He could not believe that Germany would long be able to endure the enormous burden of such vast military expenditure. To a deputation of Alsatians who visited him he held out this hope, adding,[300] “that the time would come when Germany would be willing to enter into some friendly agreement with France, and that for such an agreement there could only be one basis.”
Meanwhile, until that happy day should dawn, Gambetta advocated the strengthening of the French army. And henceforth, with renewed vigour, he never ceased to urge on the Government the necessity of perfecting every means of defence. No doubt it was partly due to this impulsion given by Gambetta that seven years after his death the German military attaché in Paris was compelled to admit to Prince von Hohenlohe that the French army was superior to the German.[301]
But while France was improving and strengthening her defences, Gambetta was inclined to seek elsewhere compensation for the lost provinces. He advocated colonial expansion. He also advocated powerful alliances, notably with England; and with this object he more than once met the Prince of Wales (afterwards Edward VII) in Paris.
On every one of these points, with the exception of the strengthening of the army, he found himself in disagreement with Mme. Adam. “If I did not regard the establishment of a Republic as an absolute guarantee of the reconquest of Alsace-Lorraine,” she had said to Gambetta on the eve of the passing of the 1875 constitution, “then I would not support the Republic.”
“I thought you were a republican above all things.”
“No. I am first a Frenchwoman, then a passionate adorer of liberty, then a republican!”
“And you are always out of rank,” added her friend, not without impatience.[302]
It was during a picnic at Fontainebleau that Mme. Adam first heard Gambetta advocate the return of France to her old colonial traditions. It seemed to Juliette that by so doing he was postponing la Revanche.
“For love of France,” she entreated, “do not think of these diversions.”
Neither would she hear of an alliance with England. The Picard blood ran too strong in her veins.[303] Not until our entrance into this great war did she consistently display sympathy with great Britain.[304] Even during the Entente Cordiale she wondered whether England would not, after all, prove herself perfide Albion. Her grandmother had taught her to mistrust the English, hate the Prussians and love the Russians. As a young girl she detested the idea of fighting the Crimean War in alliance with England; and when peace came she rejoiced that now France could return to friendship with Russia and enmity with England.[305] So now, if France must seek for an ally, let her go to Russia, not to England. Bismarck was eager to avert any understanding between France and Russia. For that very reason, she said to Gambetta, we should seek it.[306]
As to Gambetta’s real opinion of a Franco-Russian alliance there is considerable uncertainty. André Tardieu in his book Nos Alliances[307] quotes Gambetta as having said to a French Ambassador, Chaudordy, about to set out for Petrograd: appuyés sur la Russie et sur l’Angleterre, nous serons inattaquables. Mme. Adam tells of a mysterious journey she and her husband took with Gambetta to Geneva, where Princess Lise Troubetzkoi had arranged for him an interview with Gortschakoff.[308] The interview did not take place, however. And it is perfectly clear from Gambetta’s correspondence with Mme. Adam that then, for the time being, at any rate, he thought France should hold herself free from any alliances.
“La France,” he wrote to Mme. Adam, “doit se tenir à l’écart, elle doit, tout en faisant des vœux pour la paix, ne rien faire, ne rien dire, qui puisse de près ou de loin l’engager même en parole avec personne.”
“Europe,” he continued, “had stood by while France was conquered. Let Europe now arrange her own affairs. It was the turn of France to stand aloof, to concern herself entirely with her own resurrection, to put her own house in order. When the day of her power and her strength returned, then would be the time for her to make her voice heard, and, as the price of her support to say, ‘What will you give me?’ On that day,” wrote Gambetta, “we may receive attractive proposals from a quarter whence we least expect them.”
What that quarter was Mme. Adam knew perfectly. Gambetta, it seemed to her, over-rated Bismarck’s power and influence. Her friend, she thought, was inclined to reduce the whole of French policy to the mere expectation of a day when from the Omnipotent, from the quarter “whence they were least expected,” France might receive propositions.[309]
Mme. Adam suspected Gambetta of being influenced in this direction by a certain salon which he had begun to frequent. With a few exceptions, those of Duclerc, de Reims and Gambetta, there were no people who, after Bismarck, were more bitterly hated in Mme. Adam’s circle than Count Henckel de Donnersmarck and his wife, the widow of the Vicomte de Païva. Mme. Adam believed that la Païva, as she called her, had been Bismarck’s spy before the war; and it was rumoured that her husband, the Vicomte, on discovering it, had hanged himself. Count Donnersmarck was certainly on the best of terms with the German Chancellor, who after the surrender of Metz had made him its Prefect. The holding of such an office was in itself enough to make the Count detested in Paris. Nevertheless, finding Metz too hot for him, with brazen effrontery he returned to the French capital and to the mansion in the Champs Elysées, which before the war he had built on the site of the Jardin des Fleurs, and which has now been converted into the Travellers’ Club. The rumour that he had advised Bismarck to demand five milliards war indemnity instead of three did not increase the cordiality of his reception. And one of Mme. Adam’s friends, Xavier de Feuillant, so she tells us, horsewhipped him up the Champs Elysées.[310] Other Frenchmen, however, deemed it politic to cultivate the acquaintance of one who was in Bismarck’s confidence. And it was apparently in order to ascertain Germany’s real attitude towards France that politicians like Thiers and journalists like Émile de Girardin accepted invitations to the magnificent dinner-parties at Païva House.
To Mme. Adam such breaking of bread at an arch-enemy’s board was nothing short of the basest treachery. She wrote to her friend de Reims, who had visited the Donnersmarcks,[311] that if he continued to frequent Bismarck’s agent she would break with him for ever and deliver him up to Xavier Feuillant, who would treat him as he had done Henckel.
Imagine her horror, therefore, when Spuller told her that Gambetta, above all people, had actually dined at la Païva’s table. Spuller swore her to secrecy. She could not, therefore, unburden her mind in those torrential reproaches to which she was now in the habit of treating her former hero. But after Spuller had left her she gave way to despair. “I felt something die within me,” she writes.[312]
Yet another blow was in store for her; and again it was Spuller’s hand that was to inflict it. That Spuller who had been and was still thought to be Gambetta’s devoted friend, his right hand, his shadow, his Achates, should thus have sowed discord between Mme. Adam and Gambetta seems unaccountable until one considers that, while Spuller was a fervent deist, Gambetta was constantly inclining more and more to the extreme anti-clerical side, and to so-called atheists, represented by such politicians as Paul Bert. Further, after Edmond Adam’s death in 1877,[313] if rumours may be credited, both Spuller and Gambetta aspired to marry his widow.[314] Adam himself, in view of his wife’s impulsive temperament, and well aware how numerous would be the suitors who, after his death, would solicit her hand, on his death-bed exacted from her a promise not to remarry for three years. The promise was unnecessary. Mme. Adam, who has always believed in a life after death, feels that she and her husband have not been finally parted. Nous continuerons à vivre notre vie tous les deux,[315] were some of the last words she spoke to him. And in that belief she has continued faithful to his memory for forty years.
It was after Adam’s death that Spuller committed what one cannot help regarding as a treacherous betrayal of Gambetta’s confidence. He made a communication to Mme. Adam which for ever destroyed her belief in Gambetta as l’Homme de la Revanche. On the 23rd of December, 1877, Spuller wrote from Paris to Mme. Adam at Bruyères[316] that Gambetta was contemplating an interview with Bismarck at Varzin. Let us say at once that, as far as we know, the interview never took place. But that Gambetta ever should have entertained the idea was enough for Mme. Adam. Apparently the scheme had originated with Count Henckel and Prince von Hohenlohe,[317] then German Ambassador in Paris. They had communicated it to Thiers shortly before his death. He had passed it on to Gambetta.
A few weeks after she had received Spuller’s letter, Gambetta visited Mme. Adam at Bruyères. He was on his way from a conference at Rome with the Italian Prime Minister, Crispi, well known to be Bismarck’s fervent admirer and staunch supporter. Mme. Adam determined, without betraying Spuller’s confidence, to reproach her friend with his politique bismarckienne. And in the last volume of her Souvenirs[318] she relates that memorable conversation in which she took him to task not alone for his abandonment of la Revanche, but also for his bitter anti-clerical policy.
They had been wandering along the shore till they found themselves on the point which forms the extremity of the Baie des Anges. There they sat down on a rock. Against it, at their feet, the waves were beating persistently.
Half joking, half in earnest, Mme. Adam said to Gambetta, “That sighing wave for ever repulsed by the rock is I.”
“And who is the rock?”
“You and your perverse foreign policy.”
“What policy?”
To avoid a direct reply, she asked a question: “And what was your object in going to Rome if not to seal your Crispian and Bismarckian policy?”
“I was compelled to choose between two evils: that of national effacement, called isolation, and that of participation in the diplomacy of Europe. I chose the latter, because it furnished me with a support, the importance of which you cannot divine, in my domestic policy.”
“I do divine it,” she replied. “My Russian friends tell me things which enable me to draw my own conclusions. But, my dear friend, in coming to terms with Bismarck (here Gambetta could not refrain from a movement of surprise, which Mme. Adam feigned not to notice) you are involving yourself in a Kulturkampf of which Bismarck himself is weary, for it disintegrates all parties. Your French Kulturkampf may serve Italy and her feud with the papacy, and Victor Emmanuel must have welcomed you as a friend. But it also benefits Paul Bert, Ranc, Ferry, Brisson, Clemenceau. Now, although they may call themselves your friends, they, the two last especially, have only one idea: viz. to remove you when you have removed all obstacles to the rise of these demagogues.”
“So you think me Bismarckian because I am anti-clerical.”
“Certain of your restrictions, the change in your way of referring to our lost provinces, have tortured me. As soon as you refrained from sympathising with Russia at the beginning of the Russo-Turkish War, I concluded that you had abandoned the idea of la Revanche; for the only way to regain Alsace-Lorraine is by winning the hearts of nations whose interests like our own render them the enemies of Germany and of England. This we may do by displaying our sympathy with those nations in their hours of trial.”
“My dear friend,” remonstrated Gambetta, “you must know that it is madness to think of reconquering Alsace-Lorraine.”
“Now; yes, I know. But later? Duclerc, whose efficiency and devotion as president of the army commission you yourself have so often admired in my presence, constantly tells me we shall be ready in 1880.”
Gambetta shrugged his shoulders and replied impatiently—
“We must experiment in a policy of expansion, we must conquer or by a tactful neutrality win the equivalent of that we have lost. Afterwards we shall see. As for my anti-clericalism at home, so much the better if it furthers my policy abroad. But rest assured, it will not blind me so far as to risk the loss of the advantage to France of being regarded as the upholder of Catholic traditions.”
“To carry out so double-faced a policy on a question which is so vital, surely that is impossible?”
Gambetta was convinced that it was possible. He went on to speak of Italy, of Victor Emmanuel, of his friendship for France, provided she would undertake not to restore the Pope’s temporal power, of the benefits of Italian unity. “Italy,” said Gambetta, “is now what France once was, a perfect organisation.”
“While with us,” replied Mme. Adam, “the loss of two of our organs is constantly destroying our equilibrium more and more.... Never shall we regain it until we have reconquered Alsace-Lorraine, as Italy has reconquered Lombardy and Venetia. Ah, my friend, how can I tell you my grief at suspecting you more and more implicated with Germany? You, our national defender—you, whose words, whose acts galvanised in her humiliation the France to whom you promised a resurrection, you are false to your mission! You must forgive me, but the cruel words must be spoken: you betray your destiny. Never will Bismarck raise you to that pinnacle of greatness on which you were placed by your fidelity to Alsace-Lorraine. But I wound you.”
It argues well for Gambetta’s magnanimity and also for his patriotism that he could hear such reproaches and still remain the friend of her who uttered them.
“You cannot wound me, my dear friend,” he replied. “For you speak to me as you must speak—you, an idealist, whom reality does not restrain from arriving at contradictory conclusions.... You follow the dictates of your heart, I of my reason. We must each go our road.”
“Mine,” she replied, “is the national road, marked out by the great proud past of my race; yours is a combinazione with a scoundrel.”
“Whatever our differences,” replied Gambetta, smiling, “let us promise to remain faithful to our friendship.”
“I swear it,” she replied.
In taking that oath Mme. Adam was sincere. Despite their disagreement on such vital matters, she valued highly Gambetta’s friendship. Nevertheless, each pursuing so widely divergent a road, it was inevitable they should drift apart. The one great disagreement was magnified by a thousand minor differences. She, who had first made him un homme du monde, grew appalled to observe his increasing passion for luxury, for ostentation; his susceptibility to the flatteries of fashionable women who gathered round him; his neglect of the simple folk from whom he had sprung; his financial and amorous embarrassments.[319] Now that Adam was no longer at hand to extricate him from the latter, she did what she could. But it was obvious to Gambetta that he had forfeited her approval. Their meetings too often passed in mutual recrimination. Mme. Adam’s disappointment in her former hero was accentuated by a series of events: first, when on MacMahon’s fall in 1877, Gambetta, instead of, as she hoped, becoming President of the Republic, accepted the office of President of the Chamber; again, when in 1879, as President of the Council, he roused immense opposition by the irony of appointing as Minister of Public Worship so pronounced an agnostic as Paul Bert; finally, when after a few months in this highest political eminence to which he ever attained, he was defeated on a motion for electoral reform, and went out of office.
By that time Mme. Adam and Gambetta had ceased to correspond. They met but seldom.
Of the mystery which surrounds his death in the December of 1882 she refuses to talk. “We never speak of those things,” she said sadly, when one day at Gif I referred to them. Equally silent is Mme. Adam about that veiled figure dominating the background of Gambetta’s later years, that Mlle. L. L——, who never missed one of Gambetta’s speeches in the Assembly, whose letters Gambetta used to read to Mme. Adam in the early years of their friendship.[320]
With her innate cheerfulness she now prefers to dwell on the early years of her friend’s career, when as an ardent young Bohemian meridional he was first making his appearance in her salon, or when at the height of his fame he kept his state at her evening parties, remaining in an ante-room apart and there receiving in solemn conclave those whom, as likely to help him in his political designs, his hosts thought it desirable he should meet. In those days he was still living with his old Aunt Tata in Paris, and in affectionate intimacy with his parents and sister in the south. His sister’s sons are to-day as dear to Mme. Adam as if they were her own. Of one of them, Léon, the younger, who is now a cavalry officer at the front, she relates with pride that he has sworn to be the first to ride into reconquered Strasbourg.