“Ah! What blessed privileges you grandmothers enjoy!” sighed the mere grandfather. “You who can receive new-born infants in your apron!”[390]
Mme. Adam’s one regret as a grandmother is that her three granddaughters did not marry earlier. Had they only taken to themselves husbands at her own early age, she would by now have been a great-great as well as a great-grandmother.
Nevertheless, it is a numerous petit monde which flocks out to Gif in the Easter and summer holidays to play round the palm-tree from Pierre Loti’s garden in the south, to act charades in the rustic theatre, to partake of goutte in the cabaret with its quaintly frescoed walls, and to awake with their merry laughter the shades of those gay damsels of la Vieille France, Mlle. de Sévigné and Mlle. Marie Racine, who in the days of le Grand Monarque were educated within the Abbey walls.
“Ah! que c’est beau, que c’est Français,” we exclaim with an eminent French artist, as we gaze down from the terrace of Gif over the broad, fertile valley, with its white ribbon of a road winding up from the little railway station, to the low distant hills fringed with those graceful, feathery trees which Corot loved to paint. Here, at the arched Abbey gate, stands the Abbess herself, receiving her guests with the stateliness of une grande dame, a winning smile lighting up her grey eyes and illuminating her clear-cut features.
Mme. Adam has never been one who could completely cut herself off from Paris. Though she seldom goes to Paris now, Paris comes to her. And in her salon at Gif she keeps alive cette causerie française, which, alas! tends to disappear from the salons of the metropolis. In the hurly-burly of modern life that leisurely talk which alone, writes Mme. Adam, entretient les vitalités de notre esprit grows more and more impossible. Before the war conversation was already a lost art. “When I begin to talk in a modern drawing-room,” says Mme. Adam, “I am told to be silent because I am interrupting a game of bridge, or because some one is going to dance the tango.” And even on those rare occasions when conversation was permitted, it was found that the dull weight of the Germanic spirit, then permeating French intellectual society, had extinguished the sparkle of French talk, had blunted the rapier of French irony. The professor with his monologue had insinuated himself into French drawing-rooms, silencing those scintillating interruptions, forbidding the smart give-and-take of brilliant repartee. “We are told,” protests Mme. Adam, “that our conversation is not documenté.”
La causerie française, banished from the salon, was taking refuge in the club and the café. Has not Mme. Adam’s own fils adoptif, Léon Daudet, lately written:[391] “Le café est l’école de la franchise et de la drôlerie spontanée, tandis que le salon est en général l’école du poncif et de la mode imbécile”?
But of Mme. Adam’s salon Daudet makes a notable exception. Of the Sunday and Tuesday afternoons at Gif he has painted a vivid picture,[392] to which may be added not a few interesting features. While of yore to the Sundays and Tuesdays of Gif Paris came by carriage or train, to-day it comes by automobile. Motorists have everything made easy for them: they are provided with a clear road-plan printed on a neat little card indicating the route from the Suresne Gate of the Bois de Boulogne as far as the spot where, but a few miles from their destination, friendly sign-posts begin to point à l’Abbaye de Gif. Before the war, on fine Sunday afternoons, on the terrace of Gif, might be found assembled sometimes as many as fifty persons, Royalists and Republicans, generals and admirals, bishops and deputies, academicians and journalists, among whose conflicting opinions their hostess’s tact and cordiality contrived to keep the peace in a marvellous manner.
With a merry laugh as gay as the blue sky of France, she would set to play together or to act in a charade journalists and authors who but a few days before had been at loggerheads. To Judet of L’Eclair she would give the opportunity of being revenged at skittles on his antagonist, that abusive Léon Daudet who in L’Action Française was given to denouncing him as ce vain colosse, “outvying in foppishness the goose and the peacock.” She would compel Maurice Barrès to disguise his boredom as he listened to the latest lucubration of his aged fellow-academician, Jean Ricard. She would severely lecture Paul Bourget on the looseness of that unacademical expression cependant que. She would dispel the melancholy of the author of Fantôme d’Orient and Fleurs d’Ennui until, like the gayest of butterflies, he disported himself in the sunshine of her presence. And then, with a wave of her wand, she would summon the whole company to her theatre to help in devising a charade which should render that impossible word autobus set by la Duchesse d’Uzès.
In the quietude of week-days at Gif, and after she had retired from La Nouvelle Revue in 1899, Mme. Adam found time to review the varied episodes of her romantic life, to sort her old papers, to fix her recollections of persons, things and movements, and to arrange and publish them in seven volumes of Souvenirs, which appeared at intervals between 1902 and 1910.[393]
“It may be well,” she writes in her Preface to the first volume, “to fix a departing age before the eyes of those who are hurrying towards an age which is dawning. It is the pleasure and the privilege of old people to tell of yesterday’s happenings, especially if they do not insist upon the superiority of and perpetually draw a moral from that which has disappeared.”