“The final result of the elections,” writes Mme. Adam,[220] “is heartrending. The majority is reactionary, nominated in order to make peace. Country gentlemen and capitulards will vote it. It is the chamber Bismarck desired. He assisted at its nomination. He presided over the elections. In certain towns did not the Prussians themselves distribute the voting papers on behalf of the reactionary candidates? Bismarck is determined that the war shall end. Germany has had enough of it.... Coblentz has returned under another form. Only now it is at home and not abroad that Frenchmen have made a compact with the enemy. Old valiant France is dying, is dead.”
Mme. Adam was now at Bruyères. Her husband had been nominated as candidate for a Paris constituency and for Les Alpes Maritimes. Contrary to his wife’s advice he had insisted on leaving his Paris election to look after itself while he went to Nice. He had started on the 2nd of February, leaving Juliette, as she pathetically puts it, en tête-à-tête, avec la pensée de ma pauvre chère France vaincue, mutilée, broyée.[221]
A few days after her husband’s departure, to her grief and loneliness was suddenly added the most agonising apprehension. She read in the newspaper that her husband’s train carrying twenty thousand kilos of gunpowder had been blown up. Hastily gathering together a few valuables, which, considering the disordered state of the capital, she dare not leave in Paris, she was about to start for the south, when a friend arrived with the welcome news that her husband was alive though seriously injured. A few hours later, accompanied by her dear little friend Bibi, Rochfort’s eight-year-old son, who was staying with her at the time, Mme. Adam was in the train. The journey was terrible. Constantly she was confronted with Prussian soldiers, who insisted on seeing her papers. “Ils me demandent d’un ton rude mon laissez-passer. Celui qui me le rend touche ma main. Je frissonne comme au contact d’une bête venimeuse,”[222] she writes.
Arrived at Cannes, she is disappointed to find instead of Adam at the station a note brought by the coachman, explaining that her husband’s electoral duties detained him at Nice, but that he will be home for dinner. This disappointment, at the end of a long, fatiguing journey, exasperated her. “I would have gone back to Paris at once if I could,” she writes.
And Adam, when he returned, was treated to one of those drames de famille which Juliette herself had so often witnessed in her youth. The scene, as Mme. Adam describes it in her Souvenirs, might strike the reader as somewhat brutal. But one must read between the lines, and remember Juliette’s overwrought condition. Then it is easy to see how it came about; how at that moment the sight of Adam’s poor scarred face, recalling how he had been on the brink of death, would make his wife furious to think of his disregard of her entreaties and his persistence in undertaking that disastrous journey.
“How could you have gone off like that, leaving me the sole guardian of our fortune?” she cried. “Why must you insist on pursuing this visionary Nice candidature, risking failure in Paris, where, but for me and Rochefort, you would never have been elected?” Fortunately Adam thoroughly understood his wife. Realising the strain already put upon her nerves, he indulged in no self-justification, but assumed the only possible attitude—one of lamb-like submission. Nevertheless, her agitation distressed him, and two big tears coursed slowly down his lacerated face.
“I am in favour of his being pardoned,” sententiously pronounced the comical little Bibi. Bibi’s advice was taken; and “nous dînons appaisés,” writes Mme. Adam. After dinner her husband told the story of his miraculous escape.[223]
In a few days when his wounds had somewhat healed he left for Bordeaux. There the Assembly had already held its first meeting. Its initial act had been to nominate Thiers President of the Republic, or, to be more exact, chef du pouvoir executif de la République Française. In spite of his three-and-seventy years le petit bourgeois was still in the perfection of health and vigour. He could still say to the friends who gathered round him: C’est nous qui sommes encore les jeunes aujourd’hui.“ Chateaubriand used to call Thiers the ”heir of the future“ (l’héritier de l’avenir). That future had now arrived. During his retirement from public affairs in the early days of the Empire it had been prophesied of him that only a great national disaster would draw him from his obscurity. Now that the disaster had occurred, everyone turned to le petit grand homme as the only man in France capable of confronting Bismarck and facing all the growing difficulties of an almost desperate situation. It was to those difficulties that the third Republic owed its proclamation. For at first sight it seems incredible that an assembly in which monarchists had a substantial majority should decree a Republic. But neither legitimists nor Orleanists desired to assume the terrible responsibilities which would obviously devolve on the new ministers: to restore the monarchy under such circumstances, when the new king’s first act would be to sign the dismemberment of France, would be to discredit for ever the monarchical régime.
Thiers, though holding himself aloof from all parties and adopting no label save one, “La France,” was said to have Orleanist leanings. That is probable. Nevertheless, he realised that only a republic was feasible, because, as he said, “it is the form of government which divides us least.”[224]
Mme. Adam, although at this time of her life she was no admirer of Thiers, refrains from inveighing against the presidency of her husband’s friend. She felt under no such constraint, however, with regard to the chief ministers of his cabinet: Jules Favre, who continued Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Ernest Picard, Minister of the Interior. “Deux clairvoyances, deux compétences rares ... comme insuffisance,”[225] she writes. She knew them both well. They were both habitués of her salon. She could never forgive Favre for having negotiated the capitulation of Paris. And she is not alone in censoring the terms of that surrender. Neither our Ambassador in Paris, Lord Lyons, nor Labouchère,[226] had a high opinion of Favre’s diplomatic gifts. “He is too much led away by his feelings,” wrote Lord Lyons to Lord Granville.[227] “He is essentially an orator rather than a statesman,” was Labouchère’s opinion. “When he went to meet Bismarck at Ferrières he was fully prepared to agree to the fortresses in Alsace and Lorraine being rased; but, when he returned, the phrase ni un pouce du territoire, ni une pierre des fortresses occurred to him, and he could not refrain from complicating the situation by publishing it.”[228] M. Gabriel Hanotaux[229] marvels to think how a man whose intelligence was so mediocre, whose character was so weak, could ever have risen to a position of such authority.