“I swear it,” she replied.
In taking that oath Mme. Adam was sincere. Despite their disagreement on such vital matters, she valued highly Gambetta’s friendship. Nevertheless, each pursuing so widely divergent a road, it was inevitable they should drift apart. The one great disagreement was magnified by a thousand minor differences. She, who had first made him un homme du monde, grew appalled to observe his increasing passion for luxury, for ostentation; his susceptibility to the flatteries of fashionable women who gathered round him; his neglect of the simple folk from whom he had sprung; his financial and amorous embarrassments.[319] Now that Adam was no longer at hand to extricate him from the latter, she did what she could. But it was obvious to Gambetta that he had forfeited her approval. Their meetings too often passed in mutual recrimination. Mme. Adam’s disappointment in her former hero was accentuated by a series of events: first, when on MacMahon’s fall in 1877, Gambetta, instead of, as she hoped, becoming President of the Republic, accepted the office of President of the Chamber; again, when in 1879, as President of the Council, he roused immense opposition by the irony of appointing as Minister of Public Worship so pronounced an agnostic as Paul Bert; finally, when after a few months in this highest political eminence to which he ever attained, he was defeated on a motion for electoral reform, and went out of office.
By that time Mme. Adam and Gambetta had ceased to correspond. They met but seldom.
Of the mystery which surrounds his death in the December of 1882 she refuses to talk. “We never speak of those things,” she said sadly, when one day at Gif I referred to them. Equally silent is Mme. Adam about that veiled figure dominating the background of Gambetta’s later years, that Mlle. L. L——, who never missed one of Gambetta’s speeches in the Assembly, whose letters Gambetta used to read to Mme. Adam in the early years of their friendship.[320]
With her innate cheerfulness she now prefers to dwell on the early years of her friend’s career, when as an ardent young Bohemian meridional he was first making his appearance in her salon, or when at the height of his fame he kept his state at her evening parties, remaining in an ante-room apart and there receiving in solemn conclave those whom, as likely to help him in his political designs, his hosts thought it desirable he should meet. In those days he was still living with his old Aunt Tata in Paris, and in affectionate intimacy with his parents and sister in the south. His sister’s sons are to-day as dear to Mme. Adam as if they were her own. Of one of them, Léon, the younger, who is now a cavalry officer at the front, she relates with pride that he has sworn to be the first to ride into reconquered Strasbourg.
FOOTNOTES:
[288] See Marcel Sembat, Faites un Roi ou faites le Paix (1915), passim.
[289] Souvenirs, V. 2.
[290] Ibid., IV. 316.
[291] Mr. Britling Sees it Through, 378.