Gambetta’s colleagues accused him of ruling France by terror, and endeavouring to make himself a dictator. To the statesman whom Bismarck regarded as the most superb organiser in Europe, no portfolio was assigned in the government Thiers was forming at Bordeaux.
So completely out of sympathy with the National Assembly and its monarchical majority did Gambetta find himself that, after the signing of the preliminaries of peace and after he had taken part in that memorable protest of the Alsace-Lorraine deputies against the session of those provinces, he resigned his seat and for some months withdrew from political life.
On his return to it, in the summer of 1871, he found his friends, the Adams, in Paris, and Juliette once more the mistress of a brilliant and influential political salon. No sooner had she re-established herself in the Maison Sallandrouze than her friends began to gather round her once more.
The social life of the metropolis was gradually being resumed. But it took at least a year before anything like the old brilliance revived. The first sign of that revival was when Parisian women began to care about clothes. “Les femmes du siège,” writes Mme. Adam, “qui ne savaient plus ce que c’était que s’habiller, s’occupaient à nouveau de leurs robes,” of course she adds, “moi la première.”[255]
Now once again her Wednesday dinner-parties afforded an occasion for grande toilette. On other evenings any of the Adams’ friends, who happened to be passing along the boulevard, were welcome to come up just as they were. Among those evening callers was more than one well-known Englishman. Mr. Richard Whiteing, in his book My Harvest,[256] paints a vivid picture of Mme. Adam’s salon. He signals her out as one of those republican women who were reconstructing the salon on a Republican basis.
The great subjects of discussion on those Wednesday and Friday evenings were Gambetta’s speeches. Long passages from them were recited[257] by Spuller, the deputy who led the most moderate section of Gambetta’s supporters.[258]
Then one day in June the orator himself arrived. He had asked to spend the evening alone with his hosts. Adam had not seen him since the eve of his departure from Bordeaux.
“Cette soirée,” writes Juliette,[259] “a été longue et d’un interêt passionant.” While not entirely approving of their friend’s attitude, of his sympathy with the Commune, for example, the Adams congratulated him on his recent speech at Bordeaux.
“The level-headedness, the wisdom of that speech,” Adam told Gambetta, “confounded your enemies. You may now group around you a party recruited from the left and including a few members of the left centre. Juliette and I will be able to contrive for you a certain understanding with the left centre on the great questions of national policy.”
These words foretold what was to be the rôle of Mme. Adam’s salon in the days of its greatest brilliance. As the rallying ground for the various parties of republican opposition to the reactionary majority in the Assembly, it rendered important service, not only to Gambetta, but also to the President (Thiers) in his difficult task of keeping the peace between the discordant elements of his nondescript and essentially provisional Government. Later, after Thiers’ resignation, during the days of the République Militante between 1873 and 1876, Mme. Adam’s salon continued to hold together various sections of the republican party: the left centre, the extreme left and the republican union, which consisted entirely of Gambetta’s friends. “Our house,” writes Mme. Adam, “became very useful to Gambetta. There he met artists whom he charmed, financiers whom he reassured, political adversaries whom he enrolled.”[260] Sir Sidney Colvin, who[261] in those years was often in Paris for two or three weeks at a time, used generally to go to her evening receptions, of which he has a very distinct recollection. He remembers Mme. Adam as the recognised Egeria of Gambetta, as very cultivated and intelligent. Obviously she had been very beautiful; she was still extremely handsome, and above all things full of graciousness and tact and good-will—the grace and the good-will of a cultivated bourgeoise accustomed to charm and determined to exercise her charm for a cause she had at heart. Sir Sidney used to find it interesting to watch her moving about, the only lady at her receptions, from some old dry doctrinaire of the Dufaure group to some fiery municipal Radical from the south; among deputies of all shades, wide asunder as the poles in tradition and feeling and temperament, and to see her throwing one after another into good humour by sheer womanly cordiality and grace.