CHAPTER XIII
GAMBETTA’S EGERIA
1871-1878
“Adam et moi, nous n’avons pas d’autre espoir, pas d’autre culte que Gambetta. Il est pour nous la personnification même de la France, l’expression vivante et agissante de notre relèvement, de nos certitudes républicaines et nationales.”—Juliette Adam.
Mme. Adam’s attitude towards Gambetta passed through three phases. During the war she regarded him as the incarnation of national defence, after the defeat of 1871 as l’Homme de la Revanche; finally, when la Revanche was delayed she grew first impatient and then disappointed with her former hero. It is with the two first of these phases that we shall deal in this chapter.
As we have seen, Gambetta had already been admitted to Mme. Adam’s salon before the war. But from the opening of the siege until a year after the peace they met but seldom if at all. After Gambetta’s courageous balloon ascent from Paris, and his safe, if hazardous, landing in a wood near Montdidier, all through those darkest days of l’Année Terrible, Juliette Adam derived almost her only consolation and hope from Gambetta’s dispatches. The energy he was deploying in his country’s service made her pulse throb with confidence and courage. The news brought by carrier pigeon into the besieged capital of the armies he was creating—Faidherbe’s in the north, Chanzy’s on the Loire, Bourbaki’s in the east—seemed almost to compensate for the indecision and inaction of the defenders of Paris.
“On the 24th of November,” she wrote,[254] “this morning, I am mad with joy, mad with hope. I read and read again Gambetta’s dispatch to Jules Favre. I bless the great patriot who sends it to us. If Gambetta, a republican, were to save our France! When others doubt him and his valour, I do not doubt.”
“Why, we have an army on the Loire two hundred thousand men strong! In a week we shall have another hundred thousand: two hundred thousand recruits are clamouring to be on the march. At last!... Long live France! ... and she will live, our patrie française. It will not be so easy to tread upon her. Frenchmen will be found to defend her, to prevent the invader from pillaging, from defiling her from one end of the land to the other. It seems to me that all Paris should thank Gambetta. I write to him.”
And when the superb movement of French energy, with which Gambetta alone had been able to inspire the provinces, seemed to Juliette Adam to have been nullified by the capital’s submission, she followed her hero more fervently than ever in his advocacy of war to the bitter end. She deplored the mistrust and suspicion with which the other members of the September Government regarded ce fou furieux, as they called him. She deplored his resignation on the 5th of February, 1871, of the office of Minister of the Interior.