Such an expenditure of energy could not possibly continue indefinitely without a breakdown. There came a time when the doctor offered the alternative of rest or death. But Mme. Adam has always been one of those who would willingly die at her task. She prefers to wear out rather than to rust out. The doctor found his warning unheeded, consequently he changed his tactics. When he threatened her with the loss of her good looks, she immediately gave way. Leaving the review in the hands of a competent editor, she took several months’ rest; and when she returned to her directorship it was no longer to work with the feverish energy of yore. By that time she was surrounded by a band of talented and zealous helpers, les jeunes whom she had discovered and to whom she could entrust much of the personal supervision which in earlier years had devolved upon her alone. One of these lieutenants was M. Léon Daudet, the son of her friend Alphonse, and to-day editor of L’Action Française. In his book, L’Entre-deux-Guerres, published in 1915, M. Daudet draws to the life la grande Française, whom for a quarter of a century he has been proud to call ma chère patronne.
He illustrates Mme. Adam’s social tact in the story he tells of a dinner-party at his father’s house. That evening the guests were the Duc d’Aumale, M. de Freycinet, the General de Gallifet, Magnard, editor of the Figaro, the ill-fated Calmette, who was to succeed him, and about twenty others. Henry James used to say that French dinner-parties always somewhat resemble a session of the Convention. And at this party the noise of debate waxed especially high, for the talk fell on a subject still delicate: the Commune. And the discussion might well have culminated in more than one of the invited sending his representatives next morning to some fellow-guest, had not Mme. Adam skilfully smoothed down the angles of controversy and finally led the conversation on to less dangerous ground.
Fulfilled beyond her greatest expectations were Mme. Adam’s hopes that her review might serve young writers and French literature by revealing new talent. For it was in the pages of this magazine that French readers first became acquainted with many of les jeunes who to-day occupy the very first rank. Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget, Marcelle Tinayre and Anatole France are some of those who in La Nouvelle Revue first began to climb the ladder of fame. Here appeared Pierre Loti’s first novel, Le Mariage de Loti, followed by Le Roman d’un Spahi and Fleurs d’Ennui. Those Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine, which many regard as Paul Bourget’s most valuable contribution to French letters, Mme. Adam had the honour of publishing in 1884, as well as several of the same author’s early novels: L’Irréparable, Deuxième Amour, Cruelle Enigme, Crime d’Amour, which all appeared in the early eighties. Many years later, in 1898, advised by Alphonse Daudet, who had read the manuscript, Mme. Adam introduced to her readers the first novel of that gifted woman writer, Marcelle Tinayre.
One of Mme. Adam’s first meetings with Anatole France was in 1879, when they travelled together to a party given by La Société des Gens de Lettres in Edmond About’s park at Malabry. Then, as we may well imagine, Mme. Adam was so charmed by the gifted young French author that she enrolled him among les jeunes of her review; and in the next year appeared in its pages Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, followed two years later by Le Petit Bonhomme, which was to be published in volume under the title of Pierre Nozière.
Mme. Adam and Anatole France remained friends until the Dreyfus affair. Then, like so many other friends, they parted company. Mme. Adam’s nationalism involved antagonism to the Jews, whom she believed incapable of espousing the cause of any race but their own. It involved also a belief that the army can do no wrong. Hence she regarded as final the court-martial’s condemnation of Alfred Dreyfus. Anatole France, on the other hand, who was at that time le grand homme of a famous Semitic salon, became a fervent Dreyfusard. The Affaire resulted in a curious reshuffle in French social and political life. M. France found himself ranged with some who had once been his enemies. One of these was Émile Zola. In the past, his gross realism had outraged the classical and aristocratic taste of M. France as much as it had that of Mme. Adam. But now, battling in a common cause, these two former foes found one another by no means antipathetic. While reconciled with old enemies, however, M. France found himself parted from old friends; not from Mme. Adam only, but from one who had been a close comrade of his earlier literary career, from Paul Bourget. With Pierre Loti and with her whom they were both proud to call their intellectual mother, M. Bourget took the nationalist side. He also, disappointed with the Republic’s failure to realise his ideals, was turning Romewards. We may regard him, with Mme. Adam, as the first fruits of that Catholic revival which was to be the dominant note of French intellectual society in the early twentieth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[344] Souvenirs, VII. 87.
[345] Souvenirs, VI. 470.
[346] Ibid., VII. 241.
[347] Ibid., 331.