Almost as strongly as of his abandonment of la Revanche did Mme. Adam disapprove of Gambetta’s virulent anti-clerical policy. She began to agree with Mérimée, who, though an agnostic, feared lest so-called free-thinkers might prove as intolerant as the Church. “Do you think,” he had said, referring to the anti-clericals of those imperial days,[324] “that these men, if they were in the Government would ever give you liberty? They are the sons of Robespierre, Saint-Just and Marat. If ever they come into power, they will follow the example not merely of the Terrorists but of the Church in its darkest days. For they themselves, the fanatics of anti-clericalism, they are a church, smaller than the other but equally dogmatic.”
In his first speeches after the war Gambetta had declared himself in favour of strict liberty of opinion. But, finding the Republic’s enemies too often in close alliance with the Church, he had become embittered against the Catholic party.
Thirty years later Combes’ bitter attack on the Church was to arouse in many a free-thinker Catholic sympathies. In like manner Gambetta’s extreme anti-clericalism helped to make a Catholic of Mme. Adam. Towards the end of his life he tended more and more to throw in his lot with the extreme anti-clericals led by Paul Bert, who, adapting to the moment Peyrat’s famous phrase, le cléricalisme c’est l’ennemi,[325] declared le cléricalisme c’est le phylloxera.
That wily deist Spuller did not neglect this further opportunity of stealing a march on his rival.[326] He encouraged Mme. Adam in the idea that by waging war against the Church Gambetta was playing Bismarck’s game, and helping the Chancellor to carry on in France the Kulturkampf he was conducting with so much vigour in Germany. Had not Gambetta himself admitted that the Kulturkampf had changed the whole aspect of the struggle against the Church![327] In France, he had come to regard the separation between the Church and State as an almost necessary condition of any durable alliance with the Italian kingdom. “As long as we remain the eldest daughter of the Church,” he said to Mme. Adam,[328] “the papacy will rely upon our support, and this will inevitably endanger our friendly relations with Italy.”
Gambetta’s attitude in these vital matters was certainly changing his friend’s religious point of view. She was beginning to feel that she could no longer, as in 1866, describe herself as a pagan and an anti-clerical.[329] Then to oppose the Church had been to oppose the Empire. Now it seemed to her that to oppose the Church was to unite with Bismarck. The Catholic traditions of her country were beginning to appeal to her. “I remembered,” she writes,[330] “how for centuries Catholic France had been superbly patriotic, how for centuries the association between God and the King, God and la patrie, had perhaps been more essential than I had ever believed.”
Already she had travelled far from the days of the siege of Paris, when, in admiration of the nuns’ fearlessness during the small-pox epidemic, she had reflected, “Ought not my philosophy to give me as much courage as they derive from their religion?”[331]
By a strange contradiction Mme. Adam’s passion for revenge was carrying her towards a religion whose Founder had refused to countenance such a sentiment. But in wending her way Romewards she was obeying not so much the dictates of reason as ancestral voices, impulses arising from her subconscious self, beckonings from that Catholic past which is never far removed from any child of France.
The years 1876 and ’77 were dark years for Juliette Adam. They had reft from her George Sand, her father, Dr. Lambert, and then her husband. Dr. Lambert had died early in 1876, while his daughter was at Bruyères. Mme. Sand’s death occurred on the 8th of June. In the August of the following year, it fell to Mme. Adam’s lot to perform a melancholy mission. George Sand, shortly before her death, had expressed a wish that her study should remain under lock and key for one year, at the end of which it should be opened by her son Maurice and Juliette Adam. For this purpose Mme. Adam went to Nohant, where she found awaiting her a strange and sorrowful experience. When the seal was broken, there was the study just as George Sand had left it, with a partly finished manuscript on the desk, with the arm-chair half turned round as when its occupant had risen from it for the last time. During those moments the spirit of the departed seemed to come very near to her friend.
By that time Mme. Adam was a widow. Her husband had died in the previous May. Throughout her bereavement, there was no one to whom she turned more willingly for consolation than to Adam’s friend Thiers. He never tired of hearing her talk about her husband, whom he had known long and intimately, and whom he had never failed to appreciate. But three months after Adam’s death, Thiers followed him to the grave.
“Blow after blow falls upon me,” writes Mme. Adam. “Thiers’ loss creates another blank in my life.”