“‘Yes, but they were actually our brethren, they were so near to us, the Slavs of Bosnia and Herzegovina are not so intimately related to you.’
“‘Not these Slavs! Why, they are our brethren,’ he said in a tone which thrilled me through and through. ‘Pray do not let us argue about the relative acuteness of our suffering. Russia waged war in order to deliver the Slavs beyond the Danube from the Turkish yoke.... And now she cannot permit Austria’s yoke to be substituted for Turkey’s. The former is also more oppressive, for it tyrannises not merely over the individual’s person, but over his conscience....’
“‘Austria,’ I argued, ‘has for some years been hardly responsible for her action in the East. It is Germany who is urging her to dominate over the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula, and to conquer them both by force of arms and by diplomacy.’
“‘Germany!’ he repeated, and into that one word he breathed all the fire of his hatred.
“The preachers of the Crusades must have looked like that apostle of the Slavs.
“‘I no longer love war,’ said Skobeleff. ‘No, I love it no longer; I have waged it too often,’ he added, as if replying to his own inmost thought. ‘No victory is worth all it costs of energy, of strength, of public money and of men. Yet there is a war for which I should ever be ready, and which I should never deem too costly. It is a holy war. Sooner or later the devourers of the Slavs must be themselves devoured. On that day, I see it, I will it, I predict it, Germany will be devoured by the Slavs, the Latins, the Franks.’”
Mme. Adam and her new friend had far too much in common for their friendship to cease with her departure from Petrograd. He followed her to Paris. There he visited her salon. They agreed to work together, to unite all their forces in order to oppose what Skobeleff described as le système d’enveloppement bismarckien. But their hopes were disappointed by Skobeleff’s early death at the age of thirty-nine. Shortly before he died he said to one of his compatriots: “Carry on my work, and do not neglect to bring into all your plans our friend in Paris.” Mme. Adam is one of those who lay at Bismarck’s door the sudden passing of this brilliant soldier and irreconcilable Germanophobe. But the Chancellor has enough crimes accredited to him without this. A distinguished French journalist, who knew Skobeleff, and in many ways greatly admired him, wrote to me recently: “I do not believe he was assassinated by orders from Bismarck. I know too much of his death to believe that. Mais les défauts de ses propres qualités l’ont conduit à une mort rapide.”
The effect of Skobeleff’s influence on Mme. Adam was to render truer than ever the words of her friend, Mme. Novikoff: elle a la Russie au cœur.[375] Now with all her heart and soul she began to work for a Franco-Russian Alliance. It was precisely this alliance that Bismarck feared. Mme. Adam’s persistent advocacy of it in the columns of La Nouvelle Revue, and the numerous charges on which she never ceased to indict the Chancellor, provoked him on one occasion to cry out: “Is there no one who can silence cette diablesse de femme?” The German Ambassador at Paris is said to have repeated this question to M. Jules Ferry, then Prime Minister. “Only one person,” he replied, “and he unhappily is dead: her husband, Edmond Adam.” Ferry, however, Mme. Adam has told me, desiring to obtain German support or acquiescence in his policy of colonial expansion, and wishful, therefore, to please the German Government, did ask her to discontinue her Germanophobe articles. “Only if you imprison me,” she replied. “And what an honour! To be imprisoned for attacking Bismarck.”
Keeping closely in touch with her Russian friends Mme. Adam was overjoyed as the years went on to find sympathy with France growing in Russia. At first it had existed only among Russian Revolutionaries. But it began to spread to the conservatives, and finally to the Czar, Alexander III, himself. Then came the glorious days of Cronstadt and Toulon. When the French squadron, under Admiral Gervais, entered Cronstadt harbour, on the 25th of July, 1891, Mme. Adam was in an ecstasy to hear with what immense enthusiasm it had been received. When, in the following August, the Treaty of Alliance between France and Russia was signed, Count Ignatieff, the ex-Minister of Interior, sent her a telegram beginning: “To you is due the honour of having predicted the sentiments which unite French and Russian hearts,” and ending with the wish that “the bond which unites our two countries may endure for ever.”[376]