“No,” she replied, “so much the word, the letter! For anything by Flaubert is gold, it is rubies.”
“That is enough,” he interrupted. “When I have completed my revision of L’Education Sentimentale, of which I am publishing a new edition, I will finish Bouvard et Pecuchet, and you shall have that.”
“You will swear it?”
“I swear it.”
Flaubert was greatly taken with the idea of the new venture. He demanded a place in the review for his young disciple, Guy de Maupassant. Littré, too, approved of the enterprise. He agreed to write articles on philosophy. But Girardin was appalled at the capital such an undertaking would require. Mme. Adam was known to be wealthy, her husband having left her a considerable fortune. Nevertheless, so many other similar enterprises—La Revue Nationale, La Revue Germanique, La Revue de Paris—had foundered miserably, having failed to hold their own against the veteran Revue des Deux Mondes. Girardin had grave doubts as to the possibility of success. Nevertheless, he thought it an excellent idea to replace the waning influence of her salon by that of a review in which she could say anything and criticise everything. He advised her to found a company, in which she should take half the shares; and he himself promised to become a shareholder.
Gambetta Mme. Adam found far from encouraging. “Whatever is this mad idea of founding a review?” he exclaimed.
“Nothing is more serious,” she replied. “As republican politics seem to have resolved themselves into nothing more nor less than a distribution of rewards, my political salon has ceased to interest me. It is about to be transformed into a literary salon with the solid support of a review.”
“You won’t carry on your review for six months,” he retorted.... “You don’t know what you are undertaking. How could a woman ever possess enough authority, knowledge, energy, and business faculty to direct a review?” Gambetta carefully ignored the famous Revue Internationale, founded and successfully edited for some years by Napoléon I.’s great-niece, Mme. Ratazzi, better known by her nom de guerre of “Baron Stock.”
“My dear friend,” replied Juliette Adam, “will you take the trouble to remember this? I shall carry on my review for twenty years, and I shall introduce to my readers twenty new authors.”