France from Behind the Veil: Fifty Years of Social and Political Life

by Princess Catherine Radziwill

It has been said that she was an irreconcilable enemy of Germany. In a certain sense this was true, but there was no preconceived hatred in her feelings. She detested Germans because she had seen them trampling her unfortunate country under their feet, because she had owed to them some of the bitterest hours she had had to go through in her life. Yet she had no aversion to German culture, and could recognise the great qualities of the German race, qualities which, perhaps, gave her even more reasons to detest it. She was above everything else just. Her character had too much real greatness about it ever to give way to any mean or petty feeling, even where an enemy was concerned.

When I lived in Paris I used to see her daily. She was then at the height of her beauty and fame, and political men of all shades used to crowd to her receptions, and to bow down before her splendid grace and proud demeanour. She was considered as the real Queen of the Third Republic, and no important political measure was undertaken by any member of the government of that day without her having been consulted about its opportuneness. No one ever regretted having asked her advice or trusted to the clearness of her judgments; nor could any say that she had revealed the slightest fraction of all the secrets of state which had been confided to her.

I do not believe a more discreet person ever lived, and it is a great deal to that immense and so rare quality that she owed the influence she managed to acquire with all, without exception, who came into contact with her. I can talk about it the more easily because on several different occasions I had the opportunity to convince myself personally of her discretion. Most certainly among her many qualities I believe it was the latter that her friends, and among them Gambetta, appreciated the most in her. The great orator had never forgotten that first dinner to which she had asked him, and later on, when the fall of the Empire had drawn them more together, he began, with discretion at first and with impetuosity at last, to consult her and to confide in her all his dreams of glory. She grew not only to like him, but to feel for him a great, deep, true affection, one of those that a woman can only experience when she has reached middle life, known what the storms of the heart mean, and, greatest joy of all, felt what it is to be everything and yet nothing in another man’s life. One can boldly affirm that it was she who made Gambetta what he became in the later years of his life, that it was to her he owed the great development of his fighting qualities, as well as the great dignity of which he gave proofs in so many important questions, a dignity that in those long bygone days, when he had appeared with a flannel shirt at the first dinner given in his honour by Juliette Lambert, no one supposed he could ever attain. Gambetta, who also could very quickly discover the good and the bad sides of the people with whom he was thrown into contact, experienced in time for her a reverence such as he had never imagined he could feel for any woman in the wide world. He not only admired her mind, but he also recognised the great superiority which her culture, apart from everything else, gave her over him, and he soon turned to her to solve all his doubts, and to be advised as to all that he was to do to successfully reach the eminence to which he had aspired from the first day he arrived in Paris, a poor student, with hardly enough money in his pocket to be able to dine every day.

But, strange to say, when one thinks of the exceptional physical advantages and charm of Madame Adam, he never for one single moment allowed himself to pay any banal attentions to her; she perhaps was not quite so devoid of a nearer feeling of attraction towards him.

In truth, Gambetta placed her so high in his thoughts that it had never occurred to him to discover that underneath the adviser and counsellor, to whom he turned for comfort and encouragement at almost every instant of his life, there could exist a fair, beautiful woman with a womanly heart and womanly feelings. He did not realise that, in associating herself with his dreams and his ambitions, she also associated with them, perhaps even unknown to herself, her own future and her own existence. Perhaps this misunderstanding, which circumstances and not their own will had created between them, influenced their relations towards the end of the life of Gambetta, but, let it be said to the honour of Madame Adam, she never allowed the ignorance of her charms in which her friend indulged to influence her friendship for him, and, with a strength of character such as very few women would have been capable of, she sacrificed herself to his future and only thought of his successes. She tried to persuade herself of the fact she had contrived long ago to impress upon others, i.e. that she was living only for her child and for her country, and that she was above everything a great patriot, “une grande française,” and nothing else.

She still believed in the Republic at that period of life when I first met her. She still hoped that it would bring to her beloved France the peace and the prosperity she so passionately desired for it. Later on, however, she was destined to experience in that hope, too, some of the greatest disappointments of her whole life. For a woman with high ideals and a great moral aim, as was the case with her, nothing could be harder to bear than the slow realisation that she had nursed a false ideal, the conviction that she had worshipped at a wrong altar. And yet this great trial was not spared to her who had already suffered so much. Little by little the scales had fallen from her eyes, and she discovered that personal ambitions, personal greed, and personal intrigues flourish just as much and just as well, and perhaps even more, under a republic than under a monarchy. She saw that humanity remains unchangeable, whilst things undergo many transformations, that bad passions never die, and that good and virtuous people are always the victims of those who are their inferiors in moral worth.

I remember one evening that I happened to be alone with Gambetta, at about the time that he became Prime Minister, we discussed together Madame Adam. He spoke of her with feelings not only of reverence, but also with an admiration the more remarkably expressed in that it was done without the usual enthusiasm which he generally displayed when talking about things or people who were near to his heart. He told me that but for her he would certainly never have reached to the political eminence on which he found himself. We were old friends, and I could allow myself to touch upon delicate subjects with him; so I ventured to ask him whether the beauty of Juliette Lambert had ever made an impression on him. He replied without the slightest hesitation that he had never thought about it, so perfectly superior she had appeared to him, intellectually, and so entirely he had put her upon a pedestal whence he had never once thought that she could come down. I asked him then brutally why the thought of the great things he could have achieved together with her, had he made of her the companion of his life, had never struck him. Gambetta looked at me very closely, then after a few moments of silence softly said: “I would never have dared to allow my thoughts to rest upon that idea, I know myself but too well, and I would not have had the courage to make her unhappy. Believe me, that woman would never suffer more from anything than from the loss of her illusions, and she sees in me the man she has created, not the man that in reality I am.”

I have often thought of these words, of the great Republican leader, especially when in later years, long after he had entered into eternal rest, I saw Madame Adam once again on my return to Paris after a long absence. A great transformation had taken place in her. She had witnessed that loss of her illusions to which her friend had referred, and suffered from it just as he had foreshadowed. She had seen her beloved France not able to come out of the mesh of intrigues and miseries into which the man who by the force of events had become ruler had entangled France, and she had realised that her conception of a Republic, such as she had dreamt of, was an impossibility; that it is not by changing its form of government a nation rises to greatness and glory. She had been obliged to assist, powerless to avert it, the destruction of all the plans which she had made together with those men who had been her friends, and among whom so many had become her adversaries, according as the gulf of the opinions that had come to divide them had grown broader and broader. She had experienced that grief which is so very acute to a warm, womanly heart such as hers, of finding that she had no longer the power to influence those who formerly had cherished the same high ideals that in that beautiful world her imagination had conjured she had placed before everything else.

Death, too, had robbed her of much that she had leaned upon, both in France and abroad; she had undergone those fiery trials out of which noble souls emerge greater, nobler, more valiant and splendid than before, but under the weight of which vulgar natures are destroyed. After all these moral struggles and inward battles she had acquired even more courage, more indulgence, more charity, and more faith in the Infinite, and in an Eternity to which perhaps she had not given much attention in the days of her youth, when the world was at her feet and sovereigns bowed before her inimitable grace. To these consolations her tired, weary soul turned when everything else had failed her. The transformation that has taken place in the personality of Juliette Lambert is one of those phenomena that, when met with, remains always the subject of the deepest admiration on the part of those who have watched the change come about, and have followed its various phases.

Politics, that used to be the all-engrossing subject in the life of Madame Adam, have now dropped to the second plane, and purely intellectual subjects engross her more. Her affection for her beloved France, though it remains still the one absorbing passion of her life, is no longer expressed by the old wild desire to see France revenged upon her enemies. Her patriotism has assumed proportions that give it more earnestness, more steadfastness, and thus it makes the greater impression on others, and carries an authority that passion, when expressed violently, can never attain. She has obliged strangers to respect her patriotism, and to see her in that graver, sober light which alone is worthy of the great patriot that she has always been, of the woman who in success as well as in disaster has never despaired of the resources of her country, nor of its power to arise, stronger and more powerful than it was before, out of disaster and ruin, and, worse evil than any other, out of the intrigues of unscrupulous men who want to use her, in order to further their own greed or their own gain.