After the signing of this agreement, Adam, having, with considerable difficulty, secured the evacuation of the Hôtel de Ville by the invaders and the re-establishment of order, returned to the Préfecture at half-past five on the morning of November 1st.
Barely had the Prefect thrown himself on his bed and begun to enjoy the sleep which for two nights had been denied him, when his wife, who was writing in the adjoining room, heard her husband’s bedroom door violently opened. This early morning visitor was a member of the Government, M. Picard, who came to demand the arrest of the rebel leaders. Picard and certain of his colleagues, who had contrived to escape from the besieged Hôtel de Ville, and who were, therefore, absent at the time of the Convention’s signing, refused to hold themselves responsible for it. Adam, however, rather than break his pledged word, sent in his resignation. Negotiations continued throughout the day. The Prefect was implored to reconsider his decision; but he was deaf to all entreaties. His wife, who was lunching with Mme. Dorian when she first heard the news of her husband’s resignation, thoroughly approved of his action, deploring the treachery of the Government and its inevitably disastrous effect upon the people.
The question arose as to what should be the attitude of Dorian himself. He, as well as Adam, had undertaken that the leaders of the insurrection should go free. He, like Adam, was a man of unimpeachable honour. But his position was somewhat different. As Minister of Public Works he was entrusted with the all-important task of providing with munitions the army defending Paris. In his exercise of this function he had displayed marvellous ingenuity, energy and organising power. He had transformed the goldsmiths of Paris into engineers. He had commandeered every possible assistance. He had seemed to create guns out of nothing.[201]
“Twenty thousand shells are to-day being turned out,” wrote Mme. Adam, “in a city where, according to the Ministry of War, all the materials for munitions were exhausted.”
Here was Dorian, the right man in the right place: a minister who, if his colleagues had only possessed half his brains and energy, might possibly have saved Paris. What was he to do? His dignity dictated resignation. But though modesty itself, he was not blind to his own worth. He knew what he and he alone could do for his country, and for the country he cared far more than for his personal dignity. That day at lunch his wife, his son, and his beautiful daughter, Aline Dorian, one of the most ardent of patriots, and his daughter’s husband, Paul Ménard, all entreated him to resign.[202] With tears in his eyes and without the slightest hesitation, he replied: “When I left my home and my foundries to come to Paris, I was prepared for every sacrifice. When I consented to enter the Government of Defence, I vowed to the Republic’s service my fortune, my life, and yours, Ménard, and yours, Charles. You tell me that I ought to reserve my honour. I do not consider that my honour is in question. Rather it is the honour of others which is at stake. It is my dignity that is attacked. I feel it. Nevertheless I will go so far as to make that sacrifice. I have carved out my own part in the national task which we are all performing. I found cannon. If I ceased to do so, then I am persuaded not another cannon, not a single bullet more would be manufactured.”
Dorian continued in office. Adam, as we have said, resigned; and after three weeks’ residence in her prison house, Juliette awoke on the morning of the 3rd of November to find herself back again in her “dovecot” of the Boulevard Poissonnière.
One of the privations of her sojourn across the water had been that she saw less of her friends. The Rue de Jérusalem was too far out of their beat. Now, sauntering along the boulevard, coming away from dinner at Brébant’s opposite, the Adams’ friends had only to climb their staircase on Wednesday or Friday evenings to find them at home and surrounded by interesting friends. Of this restored privilege the former frequenters of Mme. Adam’s salon were not slow to avail themselves. “Ah! que le salon du Boulevard Poissonnière est autrement fréquenté que celui de la Préfecture,” exclaims Juliette. On the 8th of November she writes: “This evening we have the whole Dorian family, for whom our friendship increases every day, also Eugène Pelletan, Rochefort, who had resigned after the 31st of October, Chenevard and Louis Blanc.”
As the siege dragged on and viands grew scarcer and scarcer, Mme. Adam was often hard put to it to provide dinners for her guests. They were dîners de guerre, which, of course, means guère de dîner.
“I invited our friends to dinner,” writes Mme. Adam on the 23rd of December. “But our dinners are now veritable picnics.” Jourdan, a well-known journalist, provided the butter, Peyrat the last box of Albert plums in Paris, another guest a little box of kidney beans, yet another had sent the joint—it was part of an interesting cow which for two months had been stabled in a salon. A few weeks later such a luxury as beef became quite unknown. Juliette for her New Year’s dinner-party considered herself lucky to be able to put before her friends a joint of elephant. It was part of the famous Castor from the Jardins d’Acclimation. The trunk of Castor’s twin, Pollux, which an English butcher of the Boulevard Haussman had temptingly displayed in a setting of camel kidneys, helped to furnish forth the war dinner-tables of Labouchère and Edmond de Goncourt. The Daily News correspondent found it tough and oily, une pièce de résistance, but not in the usual sense of the term.