But Juliette longed to share her husband’s dangers. Alice, after weeks of agonising suspense, had been restored to her. “Alice and Bibi might well,” she wrote to Adam, “be left in the care of M. and Mme. Arlès Dufour,” le père and la mère, as Juliette called them, who were still at Bruyères. For was it not the place of a deputy’s wife to be at his side in the city which had elected him? Banished from Adam and from her friends her exile was intolerable. But her husband replied that he could not endure the anxiety of her presence in Paris; that while he was obliged to be at Versailles the thought of her in the revolted city, a prey to the horrors of that terrific insurrection, would drive him mad. “My only strength,” he continued, “arises from the thought that you are far from the terrible events which threaten us. Our friends think it is the end of the world. But I am resolved, even in this cataclysm, not entirely to despair. In all the darkness and chaos, I seem to discern a ray of hope. As for us, deputies of a capital in insurrection, our situation becomes terrifically difficult. I am on the boulevard this evening. But shall I be to-morrow? Every one is trying to persuade me to abandon my daily journey, which is so likely to be interrupted either at Paris or at Versailles.”
While feeling that no reproach was too bitter to bring against the leaders of the Commune, against those who, under the conqueror’s very eye, had let loose the rabid hounds of civil war, with Paris and the rank and file of Parisians Mme. Adam never ceased to sympathise. “Most of the Communards,” she writes, “... are possessed by the madness of defeat, a madness which I understand, for I have suffered from it myself at the close of the siege. In that madness there is no cowardice. It consists rather in a passionate desire to assert, no matter where and how, the courage one has acquired, the courage which traitors have neglected to utilise.”[242]
The correspondence between the Adams throughout these weeks shows husband and wife in complete agreement. It also reveals great moderation and a desire to see both sides of many difficult questions.
It was not until the last days of May, as we have said, that Mme. Adam returned to Paris, to a Paris desolated by two bombardments, by ferocious street-fighting and by the madness of a defeated mob, raging throughout the days and nights of a hideous week of explosions and incendiarism. Mme. Adam returned to find the blackened ruins of the Tuileries, the smoking ashes of the Hôtel de Ville, a heap of stones in the square where the Vendôme Column had stood.
In the lives of many strong personalities there comes a crisis, a parting of the ways, when in a convulsion of the whole being character and disposition receive a new orientation. For how many is not such a crisis presented by the present war! In the religious world such a revolution is described as conversion. This crisis came to Mme. Adam through national humiliation and the civil strife which followed the catastrophe of 1870. La patrie’s defeat had planted deep in her nature an antagonism which will doubtless endure to the end. Henceforth we shall find accentuated more and more strongly in her character and disposition the irreconcilable note. She had always been emphatic. She was born to be as fervent a hater as she was an ardent lover. For her there had never been many open questions. Now in every cause she espouses she holds the position of à l’outrance. The iron of national defeat and civil war had entered into her soul. On the 30th of October, 1870, on learning the loss of Le Bourget Fort, she had written:[243] “I cannot describe the vexation, the discouragement, the wrath, the moral perturbation which possess me.” On so patriotic and fervent a nature as hers these experiences could not fail to imprint an indelible mark. Her patriotism, as we have repeatedly seen, had always been ardent. Je prétends être Français plus que personne was her own sentiment put into the mouth of the Picard weaver in her first novel, Mon Village. After the war, growing with national disaster,[244] her patriotism became a consuming fire. Of herself she might have written the words she penned of Edmond About: “il s’est reveillé de l’horrible cauchemar patriote fanatique.”[245] “Votre patriotisme,” wrote her friend General Gallifet,[246] “est peint sur vos traits et pétille dans votre conversation.”
The Commune had taught her to regard socialism and internationalism as, after Germany, her country’s most formidable enemies. Her horror when her father proposed to marry her to a working man had shown that in those early days she was not free from a certain class prejudice. An ardent republican, she had believed in fraternity but not in equality. For her as for Plato the ideal state would be governed by the élite. Socialism she had ever abhorred. And as the years went on, she came to have less and less faith in the masses. During those disturbed months which preceded the war, when, looking down from her window on the Boulevard Poissonnière, she saw Paris workmen (les blouses blanches) holding nightly conferences with policemen, she had no doubt of their being agents provocateurs. That the Commune’s excesses should confirm and aggravate this suspiciousness was inevitable.
Her father’s sympathy with the revolutionists caused her unspeakable grief. Dr. Lambert, after sending Alice to Bruyères, had returned to Paris, where he remained to witness and to approve the insurrection. Nothing could ever induce him to blame the communards. He had welcomed the movement as the dawn of social regeneration. And for the crimes of the rebels he held Thiers and his government responsible. How painful for Mme. Adam was all conversation with her father at this time will readily be imagined.
Closely associated with the communards throughout had been members of “the Internationale,”[247] that vast cosmopolitan organisation, inspired by Karl Marx and instituted in London in 1862. “The Internationale” had given its support to the Central Committee which ruled Paris, and it had fully approved of the message sent to the German commander assuring him that the German army had nothing to fear from the insurrection.[248] Indeed, it seemed to Mme. Adam that the Germans had everything to gain from the civil strife then rending France, and that the Communards were simply playing Bismarck’s game. Had they not purged of danger and disorder other European capitals by gathering into Paris from London, Rome, Vienna, and Berlin, anarchists whose railway fares “seemed to fall like manna from heaven!”[249]
For some years, while she had been gradually coming to perceive the danger which threatened from German aggression, Mme. Adam had been growing more and more suspicious of the internationalist movement. With the Germanising tendencies of Renan, Gaston Paris and other members of her circle she had no sympathy whatever. After the war she could not refrain from regarding all internationalists as traitors to their country.[250] Any sympathy with Germany appeared to her as nothing short of treason, and treason of the deepest dye. The bonds of friendship which united her to George Sand were strained almost to breaking-point when her friend wrote that she desired peace “not for the sake of France alone but for the sake of Germany, and in order to avert the ruin of two civilisations.”
“This is one of my most cruel sorrows,” wrote Mme. Adam.“ A gulf has opened between me and the friend whom I adored. Never shall we understand one another again. She ... has reverted to the old humanitarianism of 1848. She, like my friend Arlès Dufour, permits herself to be moved by pity for the Germans.”