In the halls and corridors of that gloomy building, what hours of weary waiting for a passport’s stamping have not many of us endured during this war-time! We can well sympathise, therefore, with Mme. Adam’s horror at the idea of spending not hours only, but days, weeks and months within the Préfecture’s lugubrious portals. We can understand her grief at being obliged to exchange her cheerful flat, her “dovecot” on the Boulevard Poissonnière, for l’affreuse prison in the Rue de Jérusalem.
To any one with her vivid imagination it was a perfect nightmare merely to watch the going and coming of the prison-vans, lumbering into the courtyard of La Sainte Chapelle, and to hear the cries of “No. 1 for Mazas, No. 2 for Ste. Pélagie.”[191]
It was during her residence in the Préfecture that occurred that insurrection of the 31st of October which proved a premonition of the Commune. The popular discontent with the Government, and especially with its President, General Trochu, who was also Governor of Paris, had been growing for some weeks. It was brought to a head by the news that Le Bourget, one of the forts outside the capital, which had been captured from the Prussians on the 28th of October, had been retaken on the 29th. On the 30th, Mme. Adam, on her way to her hospital from a concert in the Cirque Pas de Loup, found the boulevard in an almost revolutionary ferment. The people were exclaiming: “We do not demand successes, but we will not have defeats resulting from our general’s frivolity, carelessness and incapacity.”[192] Later in the evening, when the time came for Juliette to return home, she found the tumult had increased. As she pressed her way through the crowd she felt its sentiments possessing her. “My sorrows mingled with theirs,” she writes, “my patriotism with their patriotism.”
As soon as she saw Adam she warned him of the state of Paris. But he knew it better than she, and her warning was unnecessary. There was a dinner-party at the Préfecture that evening. Both at table and afterwards in her salon, the guests, among whom was Rochefort, complained as loudly as the crowd of the Government’s incapacity. Every one found fault with the mismanagement which had resulted in the loss of Le Bourget. Rochefort and Adam were obliged to leave to attend a Cabinet meeting,[193] held to receive the report of Thiers, who had just returned from an official visit to the Great Powers on the subject of an armistice. Adam did not come back to the Préfecture until three o’clock in the morning.
The news that he brought was of the gravest. The Prefect of the Police placed no reliance whatever on the repeated assurances of the Governor of Paris that he would maintain order. Juliette had long since lost all faith in that polished, placid person, of whom every one said, c’est un homme très distingué. She would have preferred an energetic corporal.[194] She had no faith in the famous “plan.” It had never been confided to any one; but already it was being ridiculed by the besieged in the following couplets, sung up and down Paris streets—
“Je sais le plan de Trochu,
Plan, plan, plan, plan, plan.
Mon Dieu! quel beau plan!
Je sais le plan de Trochu;