The question of the title puzzled her for some time. Then she writes—
“Tiens, j’ai trouvé mon titre La Nouvelle Revue. Ce titre me plaît et plaît à tous. Je l’ai tant cherché, et il est venu tout seul.”
Her old friend Laurent Pichat, one of those who had always recommended Adam, “that millionaire in wisdom and moderation,” as he called him, to found a review, threw himself heart and soul into the project. “You cannot have too many contributors,” he said.
It was chiefly among the young authors and writers that these contributors were recruited. “Our review,” they called it, for them it was founded. One of its main objects was to give the chance to the young and the unknown which La Revue des Deux Mondes denied them.
But, as we have seen, many of Mme. Adam’s old friends were also to be represented in its pages: Challemel-Lacour, Spuller, and her fellow-Hellenists Saint-Victor and de Ronchaud. Nothing pleased her more than the interest taken in it by M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, a new acquaintance whom she owed to Girardin.
Another of her great acquisitions was Alphonse Daudet, the writer who to her seemed more essentially French than any other author of that day. She considered him the equal of Balzac and Flaubert. She had hardly dared to hope for his collaboration. All the greater, therefore, was her joy when he assured her that any project destined to help forward young writers might count on his support. And Daudet was not one to give his name alone. As long as he lived the editress of La Nouvelle Revue found in him one of her most trusted supporters.
But the course of editing, like that of true love, does not always run smooth; and Mme. Adam had her disappointments. One of these was Taine’s refusal to collaborate. On the 29th of March, 1879,[350] he wrote excusing himself on account of bad health and absence from Paris. Though he was by no means devoted to La Revue des Deux Mondes, he reminded the new editress that when an attempt had been made fifteen years earlier to give that journal a rival, it had been calculated that such a project could not be realised in less than six years, and would necessitate an expenditure of a million of francs.
Mme. Adam hoped to carry out her design in two years, and with an expenditure of five hundred thousand francs. On this basis and before the summer of 1879 was over, the company had been formed. In June, Mme. Adam had left her Paris flat for a house in the Parc de Séchan at Montmorency. But on a lower floor of the Maison Sallandrouze she established the office of the review. All through July, August and September she was busy buying paper, negotiating with printers, making all the preparations for her first number, which was to appear on the 1st of October.
Her salon—all that was left of it, for she had little time for receiving visitors either at Montmorency or at La Maison Sallandrouze—was becoming more and more le Salon de la Nouvelle Revue. “Je suis tout à la littérature,” she writes.[351] On her editor’s desk were accumulating piles and piles of MSS.—poems, plays, stories, novels, political articles.
There was no lack of contributors. “Les adhésions me viennent en foule,” she writes.[352] “All those who are suffering from disillusionment, who are indignant to see our politicians prefer their personal interests to the national cause, come to me.” On the whole, she displayed in her choice of contributors a certain eclecticism. Among her earliest collaborators we find women as well as men, Protestants as well as Catholics, not only Frenchmen but foreigners, the Russian novelist Tourguénieff, the Spanish statesman Castelar, the Hungarian general Turr, the Italian publicist Gioia, the Turk Abdul-Hakk, while English letters were represented by Sidney Colvin. Sarcey and Théodore Reinach were to contribute literary articles, Theuriet, François Coppée, Lecomte de Lisle poetry, General Gallifet and Paul Marchand military articles, Joseph Reinach political. Science was represented by Camille Flammarion and Stanislas Meunier, history by Thierry and Gebhart, mythology by Elie Reclus, fiction by Erckmann-Chatrian, and others whose names are to-day less known.