FOOTNOTES:
[321] Souvenirs, VI. 30.
[322] Ibid., VII. 356.
[323] Arthur Meyer, editor of Le Gaulois, Ce que mes yeux ont vu, 158-9.
[324] Souvenirs, III. 15.
[325] Ibid., VI. 128.
[326] Ibid., VII. 48.
[327] Ibid., 124.
[328] Ibid.
[329] Souvenirs, III. 86.
[330] Ibid., VII. 380.
[331] Ibid., IV. 119.
[332] Souvenirs, VII. 164.
[333] Technically, Jeanne d’Arc is not a saint. At present she is only “blessed,” having not yet attained to the third and final stage of canonisation.
[334] Souvenirs, III. 106.
[335] Ibid., 36, 37.
[336] Ibid., 106.
[337] Ibid., VII. 404-5.
[338] Les Contemporains, 1ère série, 119-64.
[339] See ante, 69.
[340] Chrétienne, 224.
[341] Souvenirs, III. 401.
[342] Hanotaux, Histoire de la France Contemporaine, I. 504.
[343] Souvenirs, VII. 395-6.
CHAPTER XVI
“LA NOUVELLE REVUE”
1879-1899
“La Nouvelle Revue devait être le foyer, de l’idée, de la revanche et le lien de réunion de la France régenerée.”—Léon Daudet.
“La Nouvelle Revue ... was to be the organ of the young Republic in periodical literature.”—Richard Whiteing.
Intensity is a dominant note of Mme. Adam’s nature. It characterises alike her hatred and her loves, her preferences and her prejudices. While, as Gambetta remarked, she lets her rancour run dangerously near ferocity,[344] she treasures her friendships as the most precious gifts of the gods. Nothing pleases her better than to help her friends. “The surest way to my friendship,” she declares, “is to ask me to render some service.”
Sitting next to Edmond de Goncourt at one of Alphonse Daudet’s dinner-parties, she said, “I have a hundred friends ... and that is about the number I need.... I am always grateful to people who make demands on me. It is my life.... My energy loves to be serviceable.” She has ever been ready to wear herself out in the cause of the unfortunate, pour s’intéresser aux pauvres diables, as her friend Léon Daudet expresses it. I find in one of her letters to me this sentence: “Chacune de vos lettres m’attache maternellement à vous; c’est ainsi que j’aime le plus.” In another letter she expresses this very characteristic sentiment: “C’est tout de suite ou jamais avec moi. Vous avez senti qu’avec vous c’était tout de suite.” At a glance she has always decided whether she likes or dislikes a person. If the former, then she gives her confidence absolutely and completely. But woe to the unhappy wight whom she finds in any fundamental matter unworthy of that confidence. “I don’t envy any one who is Mme. Adam’s enemy,” said Changarnier. “But,” replied Jules de Lasteyrie, “I do envy any one who is her friend.”
In everything which concerns the welfare of her friends Mme. Adam takes the deepest interest. I shall never forget her solicitude for my safety in my numerous war-time Channel crossings. Immediately the Sussex went down, she wrote asking if I knew any one who was on board. As the submarine menace grew more serious, whenever I returned to England she would bombard me with letters and postcards clamouring to be assured of my safety: “Chère amie, ecrivez-moi vite que vous êtes bien arrivée”; then another card: “Chère, très chère amie, je vous supplie de m’envoyez ce simple mot sur une carte ‘arrivée.’” Finally, after the torpedoing of a French man-of-war and the loss of the crew of six hundred, she writes: “Il ne faut plus venir en France sans une nécessité absolue, car je crois que les affreux Boches ajouteront des crimes à leurs crimes.” In another letter she had written: “Le dieu teuton demande des crimes journaliers.”
Some of the most entrancing pages of Mme. Adam’s Souvenirs tell the story of her literary friendships with Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet. It was in friendship that she found her greatest consolation at the time of Adam’s death. Gambetta was with her when the doctor gave up all hope of his recovery. “I shall return this evening,” said her friend, “and many of us will come.” Her husband during his last days liked to know that she was receiving as usual.[345]
As the breach between Mme. Adam and Gambetta widened, her salon underwent a change. Its mistress, disappointed with politics, turned more and more to her artistic and literary friends. “If in politics there is much to sadden me,” she wrote,[346] “I have my literary consolations.” Coquelin was now to be found frequently at her receptions, so were the Alsatian painter, Henner, the battle-painter, Detaille, and Carolus Duran.
“My salon is quite changed,” she writes, “but it is no less lively than of yore. Conversation has gained in brilliance what it has lost in weight.”[347] Artists, authors, sculptors, musical composers were delighted to meet one another; and the politicians who still visited her were pleased to se dépolitiquer.
In this transformed salon there gradually materialised an idea which Mme. Adam had long cherished.
Even before the war it had more than once been suggested to the Adams that they should found a review. George Sand, while she was visiting Bruyères, had tried to induce her host and hostess to start a fortnightly magazine which might rival La Revue des Deux Mondes, from the tyranny of whose editor, Buloz, she was suffering much. “Adam,” she argued,[348] “has been a journalist, you are literary. He with his critical gift and sound common sense would be an ideal editor, you with your zeal and your passion for admiring would discover new talent; you would revel, as I have always done, in the joy of bringing others into notice.”
But Adam was too much of a politician to entertain the idea of inaugurating a publication which should have a strong literary as well as political strain. After Adam’s death, however, George Sand’s words often recurred to his widow.
She first communicated her idea to Flaubert. That consummate master of literary style had never made much money by his books. Mme. Adam, who had been his friend for years, was seriously distressed by his financial embarrassments, which he had vainly tried to conceal from her. His pride rendered him one of the most difficult people to help. But Mme. Adam, with his friends Taine, Tourguénieff, and others, succeeded in persuading Jules Ferry, then President of the Chamber, to appoint Flaubert librarian of the Arsenal Library. It was when he came to thank Mme. Adam for her kindness in this matter that she broached to him the subject of a magazine, in which he should be “the master of masters,” if he would agree to contribute one article a month.[349]
“What!” he exclaimed in horror; “like that—by the yard, so much a line!”
“No,” she replied, “so much the word, the letter! For anything by Flaubert is gold, it is rubies.”
“That is enough,” he interrupted. “When I have completed my revision of L’Education Sentimentale, of which I am publishing a new edition, I will finish Bouvard et Pecuchet, and you shall have that.”
“You will swear it?”
“I swear it.”
Flaubert was greatly taken with the idea of the new venture. He demanded a place in the review for his young disciple, Guy de Maupassant. Littré, too, approved of the enterprise. He agreed to write articles on philosophy. But Girardin was appalled at the capital such an undertaking would require. Mme. Adam was known to be wealthy, her husband having left her a considerable fortune. Nevertheless, so many other similar enterprises—La Revue Nationale, La Revue Germanique, La Revue de Paris—had foundered miserably, having failed to hold their own against the veteran Revue des Deux Mondes. Girardin had grave doubts as to the possibility of success. Nevertheless, he thought it an excellent idea to replace the waning influence of her salon by that of a review in which she could say anything and criticise everything. He advised her to found a company, in which she should take half the shares; and he himself promised to become a shareholder.
Gambetta Mme. Adam found far from encouraging. “Whatever is this mad idea of founding a review?” he exclaimed.
“Nothing is more serious,” she replied. “As republican politics seem to have resolved themselves into nothing more nor less than a distribution of rewards, my political salon has ceased to interest me. It is about to be transformed into a literary salon with the solid support of a review.”
“You won’t carry on your review for six months,” he retorted.... “You don’t know what you are undertaking. How could a woman ever possess enough authority, knowledge, energy, and business faculty to direct a review?” Gambetta carefully ignored the famous Revue Internationale, founded and successfully edited for some years by Napoléon I.’s great-niece, Mme. Ratazzi, better known by her nom de guerre of “Baron Stock.”
“My dear friend,” replied Juliette Adam, “will you take the trouble to remember this? I shall carry on my review for twenty years, and I shall introduce to my readers twenty new authors.”
The question of the title puzzled her for some time. Then she writes—
“Tiens, j’ai trouvé mon titre La Nouvelle Revue. Ce titre me plaît et plaît à tous. Je l’ai tant cherché, et il est venu tout seul.”
Her old friend Laurent Pichat, one of those who had always recommended Adam, “that millionaire in wisdom and moderation,” as he called him, to found a review, threw himself heart and soul into the project. “You cannot have too many contributors,” he said.
It was chiefly among the young authors and writers that these contributors were recruited. “Our review,” they called it, for them it was founded. One of its main objects was to give the chance to the young and the unknown which La Revue des Deux Mondes denied them.
But, as we have seen, many of Mme. Adam’s old friends were also to be represented in its pages: Challemel-Lacour, Spuller, and her fellow-Hellenists Saint-Victor and de Ronchaud. Nothing pleased her more than the interest taken in it by M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, a new acquaintance whom she owed to Girardin.
Another of her great acquisitions was Alphonse Daudet, the writer who to her seemed more essentially French than any other author of that day. She considered him the equal of Balzac and Flaubert. She had hardly dared to hope for his collaboration. All the greater, therefore, was her joy when he assured her that any project destined to help forward young writers might count on his support. And Daudet was not one to give his name alone. As long as he lived the editress of La Nouvelle Revue found in him one of her most trusted supporters.
But the course of editing, like that of true love, does not always run smooth; and Mme. Adam had her disappointments. One of these was Taine’s refusal to collaborate. On the 29th of March, 1879,[350] he wrote excusing himself on account of bad health and absence from Paris. Though he was by no means devoted to La Revue des Deux Mondes, he reminded the new editress that when an attempt had been made fifteen years earlier to give that journal a rival, it had been calculated that such a project could not be realised in less than six years, and would necessitate an expenditure of a million of francs.
Mme. Adam hoped to carry out her design in two years, and with an expenditure of five hundred thousand francs. On this basis and before the summer of 1879 was over, the company had been formed. In June, Mme. Adam had left her Paris flat for a house in the Parc de Séchan at Montmorency. But on a lower floor of the Maison Sallandrouze she established the office of the review. All through July, August and September she was busy buying paper, negotiating with printers, making all the preparations for her first number, which was to appear on the 1st of October.
Her salon—all that was left of it, for she had little time for receiving visitors either at Montmorency or at La Maison Sallandrouze—was becoming more and more le Salon de la Nouvelle Revue. “Je suis tout à la littérature,” she writes.[351] On her editor’s desk were accumulating piles and piles of MSS.—poems, plays, stories, novels, political articles.
There was no lack of contributors. “Les adhésions me viennent en foule,” she writes.[352] “All those who are suffering from disillusionment, who are indignant to see our politicians prefer their personal interests to the national cause, come to me.” On the whole, she displayed in her choice of contributors a certain eclecticism. Among her earliest collaborators we find women as well as men, Protestants as well as Catholics, not only Frenchmen but foreigners, the Russian novelist Tourguénieff, the Spanish statesman Castelar, the Hungarian general Turr, the Italian publicist Gioia, the Turk Abdul-Hakk, while English letters were represented by Sidney Colvin. Sarcey and Théodore Reinach were to contribute literary articles, Theuriet, François Coppée, Lecomte de Lisle poetry, General Gallifet and Paul Marchand military articles, Joseph Reinach political. Science was represented by Camille Flammarion and Stanislas Meunier, history by Thierry and Gebhart, mythology by Elie Reclus, fiction by Erckmann-Chatrian, and others whose names are to-day less known.
The first number appeared, as announced, on the 1st of October, 1879. It received an excellent welcome.
The main object of the review was avowedly nationalist, to glorify France. “With all my heart and soul,” writes the editor,[353] “I am determined to make my review a credit to French letters, a reflection of republican disinterestedness, patriotism and dignity. What should I do ... did I not feel that I am about to create a work which shall be essentially republican and liberal?”
Disappointed by the Government’s abandonment of the policy of a territorial revanche, Mme. Adam set her heart on realising la revanche intellectuelle. The more she thought of gathering together all the talents, the more forcibly was she impressed by the intellectual vigour, the scientific, literary and artistic superiority of her country. “Notre France est grande,” she exclaims. “But every one plunders her, and no one dreams of making her wealth known. This is what I shall do.”
Gambetta, realising how far they had drifted apart, betrayed not a little anxiety as to the political line she was likely to follow.
“Shall you be as hostile to me as you are to my policy?” he asked.[354]
“The home truths that I can no longer tell you in my salon I shall certainly tell you in my review,” she replied.
“Why, this is practically a declaration of war,” he exclaimed.
“No, it is a proclamation of independence.”
In her opening address to her readers she did not fail to appear as la grande désabusée. Disappointed with party politics, she looked forward to a time when party strife should cease and politics rise into the serene air of social science. For the next twenty years of her life Juliette Adam, or Juliette Lamber, as she still signed herself, was to live her life in La Nouvelle Revue. Henceforth her editorial duties absorbed her too completely to permit of her taking notes of conversations and keeping the diary which she has reproduced in her Souvenirs.[355] The last of her seven volumes of reminiscences closes with the inauguration of La Nouvelle Revue.
Not content with a nominal editorship, Mme. Adam worked conscientiously in her office, herself reading most of the MSS. sent in. Methodically planning out her time, she rose early to read MSS., receive contributors, dictate to secretaries. She saw her milliner at breakfast, dispatching the meal and her orders together. To avoid wasting precious moments in trying on her own garments, she would criticise their fit on a dummy, another famous mannequin d’osier, moulded exactly to her shape. Then her work would be resumed until it was time for the afternoon drive and dinner, followed by a party or the play. The small hours of the morning often found her again at her desk.
Such an expenditure of energy could not possibly continue indefinitely without a breakdown. There came a time when the doctor offered the alternative of rest or death. But Mme. Adam has always been one of those who would willingly die at her task. She prefers to wear out rather than to rust out. The doctor found his warning unheeded, consequently he changed his tactics. When he threatened her with the loss of her good looks, she immediately gave way. Leaving the review in the hands of a competent editor, she took several months’ rest; and when she returned to her directorship it was no longer to work with the feverish energy of yore. By that time she was surrounded by a band of talented and zealous helpers, les jeunes whom she had discovered and to whom she could entrust much of the personal supervision which in earlier years had devolved upon her alone. One of these lieutenants was M. Léon Daudet, the son of her friend Alphonse, and to-day editor of L’Action Française. In his book, L’Entre-deux-Guerres, published in 1915, M. Daudet draws to the life la grande Française, whom for a quarter of a century he has been proud to call ma chère patronne.
He illustrates Mme. Adam’s social tact in the story he tells of a dinner-party at his father’s house. That evening the guests were the Duc d’Aumale, M. de Freycinet, the General de Gallifet, Magnard, editor of the Figaro, the ill-fated Calmette, who was to succeed him, and about twenty others. Henry James used to say that French dinner-parties always somewhat resemble a session of the Convention. And at this party the noise of debate waxed especially high, for the talk fell on a subject still delicate: the Commune. And the discussion might well have culminated in more than one of the invited sending his representatives next morning to some fellow-guest, had not Mme. Adam skilfully smoothed down the angles of controversy and finally led the conversation on to less dangerous ground.
Fulfilled beyond her greatest expectations were Mme. Adam’s hopes that her review might serve young writers and French literature by revealing new talent. For it was in the pages of this magazine that French readers first became acquainted with many of les jeunes who to-day occupy the very first rank. Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget, Marcelle Tinayre and Anatole France are some of those who in La Nouvelle Revue first began to climb the ladder of fame. Here appeared Pierre Loti’s first novel, Le Mariage de Loti, followed by Le Roman d’un Spahi and Fleurs d’Ennui. Those Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine, which many regard as Paul Bourget’s most valuable contribution to French letters, Mme. Adam had the honour of publishing in 1884, as well as several of the same author’s early novels: L’Irréparable, Deuxième Amour, Cruelle Enigme, Crime d’Amour, which all appeared in the early eighties. Many years later, in 1898, advised by Alphonse Daudet, who had read the manuscript, Mme. Adam introduced to her readers the first novel of that gifted woman writer, Marcelle Tinayre.
One of Mme. Adam’s first meetings with Anatole France was in 1879, when they travelled together to a party given by La Société des Gens de Lettres in Edmond About’s park at Malabry. Then, as we may well imagine, Mme. Adam was so charmed by the gifted young French author that she enrolled him among les jeunes of her review; and in the next year appeared in its pages Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, followed two years later by Le Petit Bonhomme, which was to be published in volume under the title of Pierre Nozière.
Mme. Adam and Anatole France remained friends until the Dreyfus affair. Then, like so many other friends, they parted company. Mme. Adam’s nationalism involved antagonism to the Jews, whom she believed incapable of espousing the cause of any race but their own. It involved also a belief that the army can do no wrong. Hence she regarded as final the court-martial’s condemnation of Alfred Dreyfus. Anatole France, on the other hand, who was at that time le grand homme of a famous Semitic salon, became a fervent Dreyfusard. The Affaire resulted in a curious reshuffle in French social and political life. M. France found himself ranged with some who had once been his enemies. One of these was Émile Zola. In the past, his gross realism had outraged the classical and aristocratic taste of M. France as much as it had that of Mme. Adam. But now, battling in a common cause, these two former foes found one another by no means antipathetic. While reconciled with old enemies, however, M. France found himself parted from old friends; not from Mme. Adam only, but from one who had been a close comrade of his earlier literary career, from Paul Bourget. With Pierre Loti and with her whom they were both proud to call their intellectual mother, M. Bourget took the nationalist side. He also, disappointed with the Republic’s failure to realise his ideals, was turning Romewards. We may regard him, with Mme. Adam, as the first fruits of that Catholic revival which was to be the dominant note of French intellectual society in the early twentieth century.