FOOTNOTES:
[356] Souvenirs, VII. 419.
[357] Ibid., VI. 312.
[358] Ibid., 324.
[359] See ante, 189.
[360] L’Heure Vengeresse des Crimes Bismarckiens, 100.
[361] Vol. XII. 143.
[362] Souvenirs, VII. 204.
[363] Article in Le Gaulois, February 20, 1916.
[364] The Russian Revolution has but served to strengthen Mme. Adam’s friendship for Russia. In a letter which appeared on April 4, 1917, in the Gaulois and other French papers, she writes, “Mon activité passionnée servira jusqu’à mes derniers jours la Russie slave, les Yougo-slaves, la cause Tchèque.”
[365] Souvenirs, VI. 166.
[366] Ibid., 440.
[367] See Le Matin, 29 December, 1915.
[368] See Sir Sidney Lee’s article on King Edward in the Dictionary of National Biography.
[369] Souvenirs, VII. 15, 16, 146.
[370] See Tardieu, La France et Ses Alliances, 46.
[371] Ibid., p. 99.
[372] Signed at first for five years, it was renewed in 1887 for another five years, in 1891 for six or twelve, in 1902 for another six or twelve; and, as we know, it endured for the longer term, until 1914.
[373] Souvenirs, VII. 373.
[374] Ibid., 380.
[375] Souvenirs, VII. 421.
[376] See article, The Birth of an Alliance, contributed by Mme. Adam to The Daily Chronicle, 18 May, 1916.
[377] De Goncourt, Journal, VI. 200.
[378] Souvenirs, VII. 165.
[379] See her picturesque article on “Montenegro” in La Nouvelle Revue, 1898.
[380] See The Daily Chronicle, 23 September, 1916, Mme. Adam’s article “Teuton and Slav,” where she quotes these remarkable letters in full.
[381] La Nouvelle Revue, XVI. 459.
[382] Ibid., XII. 897.
[383] Ibid., XVII. 496, 736, 739.
[384] Ibid., XVI. 978.
[385] La Nouvelle Revue, Vol. I. Series 2, December 9, 1899. “L’impérialisme de Lord Rosebery est le même que celui de M. Chamberlain d’une nuance de près. L’un veut aggrandir à tout prix l’Angleterre, accaparer tout ce qui peut être accaparé, et cela par tous les moyens: Lord Rosebery veut conserver tout ce qui aura été accaparé par M. Chamberlain.”
[386] Ibid., Vol. I. Series 2, 254.
[387] While the first quotations in this paragraph occur in Mme. Adam’s letters to me, the last sentence is taken from her Preface to L’Heure Vengeresse des Crimes Bismarckiens.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE ABBESS OF GIF
“... a Soul whose master-bias leans
To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes.”—Wordsworth.
“La vieillesse ... cet âge heureux on l’on n’est plus qu’amie, mère et grand’mère.”—Juliette Adam, Souvenirs, III. 211.
The editing of La Nouvelle Revue had, as we have seen, revolutionised Mme. Adam’s life. It had put an end to her salon and to her Mémoires. It had also prevented her from wintering in the South of France. Only at rare intervals could she find time to spend a few weeks at her beloved Bruyères. As time went on and as family, as well as business, ties multiplied in the north, Bruyères was more and more neglected, then entirely forsaken, and finally sold.
Now, in order to be near her work, and also to be near her daughter and her daughter’s children, she exchanged her villa on Le Golfe Juan for a picturesque country house, L’Abbaye de Gif, in Seine et Oise. This new abode is but an hour’s train journey from Paris. It also borders on the lands of that famous convent, Port Royal des Champs. With the spirit of the great Port Royalists, of Pascal and of Racine, Mme. Adam communes as she writes. It was in the Abbey of Gif that some of the nuns from Port Royal took refuge when their settlement was broken up and their lands confiscated by Louis-Quatorze. Now the present Abbess of Gif, as her friends like to call Mme. Adam, sitting up in her Abbey tower far on into the night, watching the white mist rising from the valley, beholds in it forms which seem to her the sisters of Old France beckoning la grande Française away from her early paganism.
RUINS OF THE ABBEY OF GIF IN THE PARK OF MADAME ADAM’S PRESENT HOME
It would be difficult to imagine surroundings more essentially French than those amidst which Juliette Adam spends the evening of her days. High above the large and commodious house, with its spacious salon, filled with memorials of its mistress’s travels, rise in the park the ruins of the Abbey refectory and chapel. The ivy which covers them our Abbess, who has ever been an enthusiastic gardener, tenderly trims with her own hand, despite her fourscore years. Gradually, under her direction, new portions of the ruins are being excavated. Every time one visits Gif one finds some fresh part of the Abbey has been unearthed. Each stone as it is dug up Mme. Adam reveres as a relic of le Grand Siècle. There is not one of those mute memorials of past glory which Mme. Adam’s vivid Gallic imagination does not invest with some special physiognomy; this is like Juno’s sacred owl, that bears the semblance of a Gorgon. “And is not this the image of le Père Eternel?” she said to me, pointing to a rocky fragment in the centre of her bois sacré. I, alas! was afflicted with blindness. I was as dull of comprehension as the mother of the little boy who, asking her son what he was drawing and being told it was God, answered, “But no one knows what He is like,” and was promptly crushed by the answer, “When I have finished they will know.”
In this beautiful country home Mme. Adam practises with a success no less signal than that of her old friend, Victor Hugo, the art of being a grandparent.
Her daughter Alice had married in February 1873 a brilliant young medical student, Paul Segond, who became one of the leaders of the medical profession in France.[388] “Do not marry your daughter into a circle too political,” had been George Sand’s advice. But George Sand’s young friend “Topaz” had married herself; for her mother had suffered too much from a mariage de convenance to wish to impose one on her daughter. Though the bridegroom was no politician, his mother-in-law’s political fervour could not refrain from introducing into the wedding ceremony a political significance. The chief witnesses who signed the marriage register were Louis Blanc, the leader of the old Republicans, and Gambetta, the leader of the new. At the ball in the evening the appearance of the ex-Mayoress of the conquered town of Mulhouse, Mme. Koechlin-Schwartz, wearing in her white hair a tricolour cockade, reminded the guests of the national defeat and of la Revanche. The ex-Mayoress was escorted by her husband the Mayor, whom the Prussians had two years before held as a hostage.
A few weeks before the wedding George Sand, in her New Year’s letter to Juliette Adam, had written: “Who knows whether the year which opens to-morrow may not make you a grandmother?”[389]
“C’est aller vite,” exclaimed her friend. “My daughter will be married in February. But if the year does not bring me the joy of being a grandmother, it may give me the hope of being one. In any case, it will make me the mother of a big son, my daughter’s husband. To have children by my two children! Ah! I should go mad with joy. No persons in the world have I envied so much as Mme. Sand and Mme. Dorian, who are grandmothers. And I, who am much younger than they, I shall see my granddaughters marry and I shall become a great-grandmother. Ah! les superbes chaines enchainantes que celles de la famille! And to think that there are those who would break them! Les malheureux et les misérables!”
Things did not move quite so quickly as George Sand had anticipated. Three years elapsed before Juliette Adam, at the age of forty, could revel in the raptures of grandmotherhood, before she could place in the adorable Moise, the gift of George Sand, Alice’s wee daughter, Pauline. Mme. Sand sent with the cradle a long letter of advice as to the conduct of a grandmother. Juliette had her own views on that subject: on the day of Pauline’s birth she began to powder her hair and to wish henceforth to be taken not so much for a woman of charm as for une femme de valeur.
“At what age did you first begin to love your grandchildren?” asked Victor Hugo, during one of their long talks on the mysteries of grandparentage.
“I loved my first little granddaughter passionately from the very first,” Mme. Adam replied; “as soon as I received her in my apron.”
“Ah! What blessed privileges you grandmothers enjoy!” sighed the mere grandfather. “You who can receive new-born infants in your apron!”[390]
Mme. Adam’s one regret as a grandmother is that her three granddaughters did not marry earlier. Had they only taken to themselves husbands at her own early age, she would by now have been a great-great as well as a great-grandmother.
Nevertheless, it is a numerous petit monde which flocks out to Gif in the Easter and summer holidays to play round the palm-tree from Pierre Loti’s garden in the south, to act charades in the rustic theatre, to partake of goutte in the cabaret with its quaintly frescoed walls, and to awake with their merry laughter the shades of those gay damsels of la Vieille France, Mlle. de Sévigné and Mlle. Marie Racine, who in the days of le Grand Monarque were educated within the Abbey walls.
“Ah! que c’est beau, que c’est Français,” we exclaim with an eminent French artist, as we gaze down from the terrace of Gif over the broad, fertile valley, with its white ribbon of a road winding up from the little railway station, to the low distant hills fringed with those graceful, feathery trees which Corot loved to paint. Here, at the arched Abbey gate, stands the Abbess herself, receiving her guests with the stateliness of une grande dame, a winning smile lighting up her grey eyes and illuminating her clear-cut features.
Mme. Adam has never been one who could completely cut herself off from Paris. Though she seldom goes to Paris now, Paris comes to her. And in her salon at Gif she keeps alive cette causerie française, which, alas! tends to disappear from the salons of the metropolis. In the hurly-burly of modern life that leisurely talk which alone, writes Mme. Adam, entretient les vitalités de notre esprit grows more and more impossible. Before the war conversation was already a lost art. “When I begin to talk in a modern drawing-room,” says Mme. Adam, “I am told to be silent because I am interrupting a game of bridge, or because some one is going to dance the tango.” And even on those rare occasions when conversation was permitted, it was found that the dull weight of the Germanic spirit, then permeating French intellectual society, had extinguished the sparkle of French talk, had blunted the rapier of French irony. The professor with his monologue had insinuated himself into French drawing-rooms, silencing those scintillating interruptions, forbidding the smart give-and-take of brilliant repartee. “We are told,” protests Mme. Adam, “that our conversation is not documenté.”
La causerie française, banished from the salon, was taking refuge in the club and the café. Has not Mme. Adam’s own fils adoptif, Léon Daudet, lately written:[391] “Le café est l’école de la franchise et de la drôlerie spontanée, tandis que le salon est en général l’école du poncif et de la mode imbécile”?
But of Mme. Adam’s salon Daudet makes a notable exception. Of the Sunday and Tuesday afternoons at Gif he has painted a vivid picture,[392] to which may be added not a few interesting features. While of yore to the Sundays and Tuesdays of Gif Paris came by carriage or train, to-day it comes by automobile. Motorists have everything made easy for them: they are provided with a clear road-plan printed on a neat little card indicating the route from the Suresne Gate of the Bois de Boulogne as far as the spot where, but a few miles from their destination, friendly sign-posts begin to point à l’Abbaye de Gif. Before the war, on fine Sunday afternoons, on the terrace of Gif, might be found assembled sometimes as many as fifty persons, Royalists and Republicans, generals and admirals, bishops and deputies, academicians and journalists, among whose conflicting opinions their hostess’s tact and cordiality contrived to keep the peace in a marvellous manner.
With a merry laugh as gay as the blue sky of France, she would set to play together or to act in a charade journalists and authors who but a few days before had been at loggerheads. To Judet of L’Eclair she would give the opportunity of being revenged at skittles on his antagonist, that abusive Léon Daudet who in L’Action Française was given to denouncing him as ce vain colosse, “outvying in foppishness the goose and the peacock.” She would compel Maurice Barrès to disguise his boredom as he listened to the latest lucubration of his aged fellow-academician, Jean Ricard. She would severely lecture Paul Bourget on the looseness of that unacademical expression cependant que. She would dispel the melancholy of the author of Fantôme d’Orient and Fleurs d’Ennui until, like the gayest of butterflies, he disported himself in the sunshine of her presence. And then, with a wave of her wand, she would summon the whole company to her theatre to help in devising a charade which should render that impossible word autobus set by la Duchesse d’Uzès.
In the quietude of week-days at Gif, and after she had retired from La Nouvelle Revue in 1899, Mme. Adam found time to review the varied episodes of her romantic life, to sort her old papers, to fix her recollections of persons, things and movements, and to arrange and publish them in seven volumes of Souvenirs, which appeared at intervals between 1902 and 1910.[393]
“It may be well,” she writes in her Preface to the first volume, “to fix a departing age before the eyes of those who are hurrying towards an age which is dawning. It is the pleasure and the privilege of old people to tell of yesterday’s happenings, especially if they do not insist upon the superiority of and perpetually draw a moral from that which has disappeared.”
Juliette Adam had from an early age cultivated the excellent habit of keeping a diary, and making notes of the interesting conversations she heard while they were fresh in her memory.[394] Sometimes, in order to make sure of their accuracy, she would revise these notes with friends present on the same occasions. One of her volumes of Souvenirs, Mes Illusions et nos Souffrances pendant le siège de Paris, had appeared earlier, in 1871, first as a serial in the newspaper Le Rappel, and later in volume, with the title Journal du Siège. This part of her diary, originally intended for her daughter, had a great success. When it was appearing in Le Rappel, Mme. Adam’s life-long friend, Henri de Rochefort, was undergoing imprisonment for the part he had played in the Commune. He wrote to her from his prison:[395] “The success of your Siège de Paris here is insupportable. Every one tries to steal my newspaper, and I do nothing but endeavour to recover it. Some of our convicts are actually copying the serial. After the next amnesty you will have the greatest difficulty in the world in escaping nomination as candidate for the chamber of deputies. So exactly have you photographed the physiognomy of Paris that every day, as I read you, I discover things which I had entirely forgotten, and which I see again as I did when they were happening.”
Mme. Adam had distinguished herself among her fellow-countrywomen by the foundation and brilliant editing of La Nouvelle Revue. Now in these seven volumes of recollections, written in a forcible and dramatic style, stamped each one with the hall-mark of sincerity, virility and passionate patriotism, she stood out above all other Frenchwomen. That such striking volumes should create a sensation, that they should cause antagonism as well as admiration, was inevitable.
Ardent republicans of the Gambettist school accused Mme. Adam of injustice towards one who had once been her idol and her friend. A fellow-nationalist, M. Henri Galli, wrote a book, Gambetta et Alsace Lorraine, with the set purpose of proving that Gambetta had not, as Mme. Adam declared, abandoned the policy of la Revanche. The only answer to such a contention is that Gambetta was an opportunist, and that passages from his speeches may be quoted to prove the correctness of both Mme. Adam’s and M. Galli’s points of view. To those who accuse Mme. Adam of having vilified and belittled the Great Tribune, we may reply that she passed over many things, revealing only those matters of his private life which were intimately connected with his public career. Against the attacks made upon her, the author of Mes Souvenirs defended herself ably in the columns of the Figaro and the Gaulois.
The most serious of the charges brought against Mme. Adam is that of being un génie démolisseur. To those who make this accusation we would reply that it reveals a complete misunderstanding of Mme. Adam’s mind and temperament. It is true that her recollections show la grande Française to be also la grande Désabusée, disappointed with the imperfect realisation of those high republican ideals held up before her youthful mind by her revolutionary father and his comrades of 1848. But that one in whom hopefulness and optimism had ever predominated should now give way to despair, that one so passionately patriotic should ever completely lose faith in la patrie, is impossible.
Even in the days when she saw, to her sorrow, la patrie forgetting la Revanche and pursuing what seemed to her the disastrous dream of colonial dominion, she could still write: “L’esprit ailé de l’avenir s’est posé aux confins de notre horizon; il nous apparaît là-bas, là bas, mais clairement.”[396] M. Léon Daudet believes that her great strength, sa principale force, resides in the fact that she has never despaired.[397]
In the most desperate of situations she is always convinced that il y a toujours dans un coin une petite chance que l’on n’a pas entrevue. And what is this petite chance dans un coin which, when the war is over and Frenchmen have time to think about domestic politics, Mme. Adam believes may deliver la patrie from the evils of political corruption and maladministration, the existence of which cannot be denied by the most fervent admirers of France? Mme. Adam’s opinion is that these serious flaws in the body politic proceed largely from over-centralisation.
With her fellow-nationalist, Charles Maurras,[398] Mme. Adam advocates decentralisation. She would like to see the revival of the old provincial assemblies. When, in Alsace, France comes into her own again, might not that ancient institution, the Alsatian Landschutz, respected by the autocratic Louis XIV and even to a certain extent by the despotic German, serve as a model for similar assemblies throughout the French provinces? Thus might provincial France be delivered from the octopus of Paris.
Enthusiastic for “her Paris” as Mme. Adam has ever been, she nevertheless realises that the hereditary virtues of France are best exemplified in the provinces. With the literary movement of “regionalism” initiated by Taine, continued by Mistral and Maurice Barrès, she has ever sympathised. Her own early novels are redolent with the breath of her native Picardy, her later books with the spirit of that gay Provence which is the land of her adoption.
We in England, with our age-long experience of local government, are only too well aware of its drawbacks. But institutions work differently in different countries. And there is no doubt that the over-centralisation of French administration does aggravate the evils of bureaucracy. Of the multiplicity of petty officials Mme. Adam constantly complains in her Souvenirs. Would they be reduced if another of her favourite schemes were carried out? With René Bazin,[399] with her dead hero Skobeleff,[400] and other conservative reformers, she would like to see parliamentary government replaced by an assembly elected separately by and representing the various interests of the different classes, professions and trades throughout the country.
From such an assembly Mme. Adam would not exclude women. All her life, from the days when she wrote her first book[401] to champion George Sand and Daniel Stern, she has been an ardent feminist. In response to my inquiry as to whether she has in any way modified her feminist principles, she writes—
“Callian Var,
”28.xi.16.
“No, I am no less feminist than in the beginning. I have merely proved as editor for twenty years of an important review ... that a woman may be something besides a housekeeper and a courtisan.[402] I am not a suffragette, because I am an anti-parliamentarian. I desire to see great professional councils, of which, without any alteration in the law, women in France may become members. We have women bankers, women farmers and women traders. A great national council, composed not of the favourites of the licensed victuallers, but of men chosen by provincial councils and of exceptional women, would not present the lamentable spectacle offered by the parliaments of to-day.
“After the war we shall see so many widows, sonless mothers, taking the places of those who are dead. Woman, alas! will have paid dearly for the place to which she has a right, the place which she occupied in the great school of Alexandria and during the Renaissance.”
Among the numerous organisations with which Mme. Adam has associated herself since the war is that excellent movement La Croisade des Femmes Françaises, the object of which is to deny the calumnies circulated by Germans against Frenchwomen, and intended to prove that the typical woman of France is not, as Teutons have asserted, “a doll without morals, without heart, without courage, a creature of mere coquetry, an instrument of perdition.” It was in the early months of the war that this crusade was initiated. Since then it has been rendered superfluous by the heroism, the endurance, the marvellous adaptability of our French sisters, which, eliciting the admiration of the whole world, has proved them veritable queens of womanhood.
THE CASTLE OF VAVEY, RECENTLY CONVERTED INTO A HOME FOR PERMANENTLY DISABLED FRENCH SOLDIERS
Mme. Adam herself, despite her eighty years, engages valiantly in war work, toiling unceasingly in aid of those who have suffered from Teutonic violence. One of the works of mercy which is nearest to her heart is the voluntary effort she has initiated for the provision of a home and sustenance for those warriors of France who have suffered permanent disablement in the defence of their country. For the housing of these heroes Mme. Adam’s friend, le Comte de Rohan Chabot, has placed at her disposal his beautiful château of Vavey, at St. Jean-le-Vieux in the Department of Aisne. The fees Mme. Adam receives for her numerous articles on the international situation, which are now appearing throughout Europe, she consecrates to the prosecution of this good work, in which she is supported by the generals, whom she is proud to call her Fils d’Adoption—General Nivelle, Ex-Commander-in-Chief, General Lyautey, ex-Minister of War, General Marchand of Fashoda fame, Admiral Fournier, Commandant Viaud (Pierre Loti), and many others.
Pages would not suffice to describe all of Mme. Adam’s war activities. One might note in passing her gratification when certain artillerymen of the 21st Army Corps serving at the front had the happy idea of christening with her name, “Juliette Lamber,” one of their guns on the spot where the first Frenchman was killed in the war. Many a distinction has been conferred upon her in her long life. She has been godmother to a newly observed star, a Paris street has been called by her name. But none of these honours has pleased her like this homage rendered to la grande Française by a few brave gunners; not by the officers, she is proud to remark, but by les servants, les poilus.
Marvellous as are her activities, especially for a woman of her years, it is even more by her spirit than by her deeds that Juliette Adam deserves well of her country. For forty-four years she has seen this war coming—she foresaw even the route of the invading forces, maintaining always that they would march through Belgium. She has realised how German aggressiveness “was placing the peace of Europe at the mercy of an incident.” But she has never for a moment doubted that when the struggle came la patrie would be triumphant. With Gambetta she has always believed that, however dark might be la patrie’s horizon, the spirit of France could not be overcast for ever. For this apostle of l’idée française has never failed to read aright the history of her noble land, to behold in it the country of reawakenings and resurrections.
There is hardly a family in France to which the war has not brought the sorrow of bereavement. Mme. Adam’s family is no exception. Lieutenant Madier, her youngest granddaughter’s husband, fell in the Battle of the Marne. He alone of all the officers of his battalion remained alive, when he was seriously wounded in the knee. Refusing to allow his men to bear him to a place of safety, he endeavoured to rise. “I am the only one left,” he cried. “Forward!” Barely had he uttered the word when a shell shattered the dwelling-place of this brave spirit.
Despite the unspeakable sufferings of France, despite her personal sorrows, she whom Gambetta used to call Madame Intégrale has ever flouted the remotest suggestion of a premature peace. When some of the women of the allied countries consented to go to the Hague, there to confer with the women of Germany, Mme. Adam addressed to them in the columns of the Figaro a stern rebuke, explaining at the same time how impossible it was for any Frenchwoman so much as to entertain the idea of taking part in such a conference. The heroic endurance, the unflinching faith of this stalwart woman animated the victors of the Marne, the defenders of Verdun. Now in this, the third year of the war, she is convinced that ultimate triumph cannot long be delayed. “1917,” exclaims la grande Française, “’71 reversed. That blessed date rings like the joy-bells of victory in my old veteran’s ears.”