CHAPTER XV
DISILLUSIONMENT
“Petit à petit, la guerre, nos malheurs, la Commune, l’abandon de la revanche, m’auraient détachée du jacobinisme et de la grande Révolution.”—Mme. Adam.
“L’âme de la France est-elle donc catholique, et ne peut-on être en contact absolu avec elle que par le catholicisme et sa plus pure tradition?”—Ibid.
“Something is dying within me” (quelque chose agonise en moi) Mme. Adam had written at the close of her most memorable talk with Gambetta in 1878. That something was not only her faith in her friend’s determination to achieve la Revanche, it was also her hope for the establishment of an ideal Republic. To her mind the Republic, for the sake of whose stability Gambetta had found it necessary to sacrifice la Revanche and to enter into an understanding with Bismarck, was not worth having.
“One does not make use of a Bismarck,”[321] Mme. Adam had said to her friend.
“Who knows?” was his rejoinder. “Perhaps it will be he who will give us the Republic.”
“Then it would be fatal to us,” she replied. And that this Republic was proving fatal to liberty and fatal to her hopes she was becoming more and more fully convinced. “It is disenchanting us all, alarming us all,” she wrote. “It is disappointing our dreams of greatness at home and showing itself incapable of any effort towards heroism and greatness abroad.”[322]
From the time of her rupture with Gambetta until the Great War, Mme. Adam was indeed what one of her contemporaries has most happily called her, la grande désabusée de la troisième république.[323]