What that quarter was Mme. Adam knew perfectly. Gambetta, it seemed to her, over-rated Bismarck’s power and influence. Her friend, she thought, was inclined to reduce the whole of French policy to the mere expectation of a day when from the Omnipotent, from the quarter “whence they were least expected,” France might receive propositions.[309]
Mme. Adam suspected Gambetta of being influenced in this direction by a certain salon which he had begun to frequent. With a few exceptions, those of Duclerc, de Reims and Gambetta, there were no people who, after Bismarck, were more bitterly hated in Mme. Adam’s circle than Count Henckel de Donnersmarck and his wife, the widow of the Vicomte de Païva. Mme. Adam believed that la Païva, as she called her, had been Bismarck’s spy before the war; and it was rumoured that her husband, the Vicomte, on discovering it, had hanged himself. Count Donnersmarck was certainly on the best of terms with the German Chancellor, who after the surrender of Metz had made him its Prefect. The holding of such an office was in itself enough to make the Count detested in Paris. Nevertheless, finding Metz too hot for him, with brazen effrontery he returned to the French capital and to the mansion in the Champs Elysées, which before the war he had built on the site of the Jardin des Fleurs, and which has now been converted into the Travellers’ Club. The rumour that he had advised Bismarck to demand five milliards war indemnity instead of three did not increase the cordiality of his reception. And one of Mme. Adam’s friends, Xavier de Feuillant, so she tells us, horsewhipped him up the Champs Elysées.[310] Other Frenchmen, however, deemed it politic to cultivate the acquaintance of one who was in Bismarck’s confidence. And it was apparently in order to ascertain Germany’s real attitude towards France that politicians like Thiers and journalists like Émile de Girardin accepted invitations to the magnificent dinner-parties at Païva House.
To Mme. Adam such breaking of bread at an arch-enemy’s board was nothing short of the basest treachery. She wrote to her friend de Reims, who had visited the Donnersmarcks,[311] that if he continued to frequent Bismarck’s agent she would break with him for ever and deliver him up to Xavier Feuillant, who would treat him as he had done Henckel.
Imagine her horror, therefore, when Spuller told her that Gambetta, above all people, had actually dined at la Païva’s table. Spuller swore her to secrecy. She could not, therefore, unburden her mind in those torrential reproaches to which she was now in the habit of treating her former hero. But after Spuller had left her she gave way to despair. “I felt something die within me,” she writes.[312]
Yet another blow was in store for her; and again it was Spuller’s hand that was to inflict it. That Spuller who had been and was still thought to be Gambetta’s devoted friend, his right hand, his shadow, his Achates, should thus have sowed discord between Mme. Adam and Gambetta seems unaccountable until one considers that, while Spuller was a fervent deist, Gambetta was constantly inclining more and more to the extreme anti-clerical side, and to so-called atheists, represented by such politicians as Paul Bert. Further, after Edmond Adam’s death in 1877,[313] if rumours may be credited, both Spuller and Gambetta aspired to marry his widow.[314] Adam himself, in view of his wife’s impulsive temperament, and well aware how numerous would be the suitors who, after his death, would solicit her hand, on his death-bed exacted from her a promise not to remarry for three years. The promise was unnecessary. Mme. Adam, who has always believed in a life after death, feels that she and her husband have not been finally parted. Nous continuerons à vivre notre vie tous les deux,[315] were some of the last words she spoke to him. And in that belief she has continued faithful to his memory for forty years.
It was after Adam’s death that Spuller committed what one cannot help regarding as a treacherous betrayal of Gambetta’s confidence. He made a communication to Mme. Adam which for ever destroyed her belief in Gambetta as l’Homme de la Revanche. On the 23rd of December, 1877, Spuller wrote from Paris to Mme. Adam at Bruyères[316] that Gambetta was contemplating an interview with Bismarck at Varzin. Let us say at once that, as far as we know, the interview never took place. But that Gambetta ever should have entertained the idea was enough for Mme. Adam. Apparently the scheme had originated with Count Henckel and Prince von Hohenlohe,[317] then German Ambassador in Paris. They had communicated it to Thiers shortly before his death. He had passed it on to Gambetta.
A few weeks after she had received Spuller’s letter, Gambetta visited Mme. Adam at Bruyères. He was on his way from a conference at Rome with the Italian Prime Minister, Crispi, well known to be Bismarck’s fervent admirer and staunch supporter. Mme. Adam determined, without betraying Spuller’s confidence, to reproach her friend with his politique bismarckienne. And in the last volume of her Souvenirs[318] she relates that memorable conversation in which she took him to task not alone for his abandonment of la Revanche, but also for his bitter anti-clerical policy.
They had been wandering along the shore till they found themselves on the point which forms the extremity of the Baie des Anges. There they sat down on a rock. Against it, at their feet, the waves were beating persistently.
Half joking, half in earnest, Mme. Adam said to Gambetta, “That sighing wave for ever repulsed by the rock is I.”