In everything which concerns the welfare of her friends Mme. Adam takes the deepest interest. I shall never forget her solicitude for my safety in my numerous war-time Channel crossings. Immediately the Sussex went down, she wrote asking if I knew any one who was on board. As the submarine menace grew more serious, whenever I returned to England she would bombard me with letters and postcards clamouring to be assured of my safety: “Chère amie, ecrivez-moi vite que vous êtes bien arrivée”; then another card: “Chère, très chère amie, je vous supplie de m’envoyez ce simple mot sur une carte ‘arrivée.’” Finally, after the torpedoing of a French man-of-war and the loss of the crew of six hundred, she writes: “Il ne faut plus venir en France sans une nécessité absolue, car je crois que les affreux Boches ajouteront des crimes à leurs crimes.” In another letter she had written: “Le dieu teuton demande des crimes journaliers.”
Some of the most entrancing pages of Mme. Adam’s Souvenirs tell the story of her literary friendships with Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet. It was in friendship that she found her greatest consolation at the time of Adam’s death. Gambetta was with her when the doctor gave up all hope of his recovery. “I shall return this evening,” said her friend, “and many of us will come.” Her husband during his last days liked to know that she was receiving as usual.[345]
As the breach between Mme. Adam and Gambetta widened, her salon underwent a change. Its mistress, disappointed with politics, turned more and more to her artistic and literary friends. “If in politics there is much to sadden me,” she wrote,[346] “I have my literary consolations.” Coquelin was now to be found frequently at her receptions, so were the Alsatian painter, Henner, the battle-painter, Detaille, and Carolus Duran.
“My salon is quite changed,” she writes, “but it is no less lively than of yore. Conversation has gained in brilliance what it has lost in weight.”[347] Artists, authors, sculptors, musical composers were delighted to meet one another; and the politicians who still visited her were pleased to se dépolitiquer.
In this transformed salon there gradually materialised an idea which Mme. Adam had long cherished.
Even before the war it had more than once been suggested to the Adams that they should found a review. George Sand, while she was visiting Bruyères, had tried to induce her host and hostess to start a fortnightly magazine which might rival La Revue des Deux Mondes, from the tyranny of whose editor, Buloz, she was suffering much. “Adam,” she argued,[348] “has been a journalist, you are literary. He with his critical gift and sound common sense would be an ideal editor, you with your zeal and your passion for admiring would discover new talent; you would revel, as I have always done, in the joy of bringing others into notice.”
But Adam was too much of a politician to entertain the idea of inaugurating a publication which should have a strong literary as well as political strain. After Adam’s death, however, George Sand’s words often recurred to his widow.
She first communicated her idea to Flaubert. That consummate master of literary style had never made much money by his books. Mme. Adam, who had been his friend for years, was seriously distressed by his financial embarrassments, which he had vainly tried to conceal from her. His pride rendered him one of the most difficult people to help. But Mme. Adam, with his friends Taine, Tourguénieff, and others, succeeded in persuading Jules Ferry, then President of the Chamber, to appoint Flaubert librarian of the Arsenal Library. It was when he came to thank Mme. Adam for her kindness in this matter that she broached to him the subject of a magazine, in which he should be “the master of masters,” if he would agree to contribute one article a month.[349]
“What!” he exclaimed in horror; “like that—by the yard, so much a line!”