Forthwith, at the invitation of another deputy of the left, Jules Favre, the crowd followed Favre himself and Gambetta to the Hôtel de Ville. There at half-past four the Republic was proclaimed and the Government of National Defence declared. Its President was General Trochu, Governor of Paris and Minister of War. Of the fourteen members, all deputies either for Paris or the department of Seine, nine were the Adams’ personal friends. Gambetta was Minister of the Interior, Ernest Picard of Finance, Jules Simon of Education, Jules Favre of Foreign Affairs, Dorian of Public Works. Garnier-Pagès, Pelletan, Emmanuel Arago and Rochefort were all ministers without portfolios.[182] When the Revolution broke out Rochefort was in prison on a charge of high treason, based on his attacks on the Empire in his paper La Lanterne. On the afternoon of the 4th, he was liberated by the crowd and brought in triumph to the Hôtel de Ville.
“The end of that day was splendid,” writes Juliette.[183] “A fresh breeze blew from the old river of Paris on to the assembled multitude. Once again the Hôtel de Ville had become le Louvre superbe des révolutions. The last rays of the setting sun gilded that people’s palace, played upon its windows, causing them to sparkle with a brilliance far surpassing the glitter of all the diamonds in the imperial crown.”
The Revolution had passed without the shedding of a drop of blood, without a single deed of violent disorder. The forecast of a working man, whom Juliette had overheard that afternoon, had come true. “Ah, well!” he had exclaimed, looking round on the crowd,[184] “we are all here—we, the robbers, les partageux, the assassins! Here we are on this fine Sunday. And there will be no robbery and no assassination.... Every one is pleased, even the omnibus company; for not one of their ‘buses has been held up and they have not lost a threepence.”
Indeed, there was universal rejoicing. Confidence and determination shone on all faces. Old friends met in the street and embraced one another. The fall of that oppressive régime established on the 2nd of December brought intense relief. On the day after the Revolution, George Sand wrote to Mme. Adam from Nohant a letter of fervent rejoicing: “Quelle grande chose,” she exclaims, “quelle belle journée au milieu de tant de désastres! Je n’espérais pas cette victoire de la liberté sans résistance.”[185] Even with the enemy advancing to their gates Parisians breathed again, realising that henceforth it was for la patrie and not for a dynasty that they would fight.
Search as we will among the numerous records of those memorable hours, penned by those who lived through them, we shall find none describing more vividly than these forty pages of Mme. Adam’s Souvenirs, the talk, the incidents and the movements of that vast crowd, thronging the Paris streets, all swayed by the excitement of a revolution. For la grande Française, as Mme. Adam was later to be called, never lives more intensely than when in a crowd. “Je vis d’une autre existence dès que je me mèle à la foule,” she writes.[186]
The gladness of that September evening, however, was but a rift in the clouds now rapidly enveloping Paris. The Prussians were expected to reach the capital on Thursday, the 8th of September. They did not arrive until the 19th. In the interval, Mme. Adam took a hasty night journey to Granville, in order that Alice might have a glimpse of her mother before she was shut up in the besieged city. After waiting five hours in a queue at the Gare Montparnasse, she obtained tickets for herself and her maid, and caught one of the few trains running. Adam feared that she might not be able to return. But after spending a few hours with her family, whom she was not to see again for many months, she tore herself away and entered the Paris train, which was said to be the last. Indeed, whether it would continue as far as Paris seemed doubtful. Juliette and her maid, who, with three fellow-travellers and a dog, were the only passengers bound for that destination, were, however, promised by the driver that, if compelled to abandon his train, he would take them on his engine into Paris. This was unnecessary, for, to the immense joy of Adam, who had almost ceased to hope for his wife’s return, the whole train steamed into the Gare Montparnasse.
This was on the 11th of September. During the following days Juliette was busy stocking her larder ready for the siege.
“Je vais, je trotte, pour compléter mes provisions,” she writes. “Il faut tant de choses! Tout peut manquer a un moment donné, jusqu’au sel, jusqu’au poivre, jusqu’à la moutarde. Je déploie dans mes recherches tout mon génie domestique. Je ne rève que mouton d’Australie, Liebig, jambon, légumes Chollet, épicerie, comestibles. Mes poches, ma robe, mes bas, mes mains, sont toujours encombrés quand je rentre. Si je découvre une conserve nouvelle, je rève à l’étonnement qu’elle causera dans trois mois, aux amis que j’inviterai à la manger! Verrai-je des héros surgir dans mon entourage: au lieu de leur tresser des, d’orner leur maison de guirlandes, je leur offrirai une bouteille de jeunes carottes confites, un sac de choux frisés: il faut qu mon héros ait accompli les plus grands exploits pour que je lui présente un fromage tête de mort de Hollande.”[187]
All Juliette’s friends were similarly employed. “Le fanatisme de la provision nous possède tous!” she exclaims, on meeting a Member of Parliament loaded with boxes of sardines.
Having furnished her larder, Mme. Adam next volunteered to nurse the wounded, who were pouring into Paris. Her father’s lessons in anatomy, her grandfather’s lessons in the dressing of wounds, now stood her in good stead. She was appointed to install in the Conservatoire de Musique a private hospital with fifty beds. Henceforth the provisioning and equipping of this hospital and the others which she organised later became her chief concern. “I hold out my hand to every one; I beg, I write, I do everything to get money,” she says. It was a grand day when the hospital workers, well provided with bags, bottles and baskets, were permitted to penetrate into the Tuileries, now given back to the nation, and to replenish their stores from the imperial larder. Lists had been made out of the viands to which each hospital was entitled: macaroni for the Conservatoire de Musique, sausages for the Picpus Hospital, kidney beans for the Théâtre français, oil for the Grand Orient, jam for all.