MADAME ADAM

PREFACE

La Grande Française [1]

Professor of Energy,” a term first applied to Napoléon I, is a title which has been bestowed on more than one living Frenchman. None has better claim to it than Mme. Adam, La Grande Française, as she has been happily called, the story of whose life, which is now running into its eighty-first year, is told in the following pages.

To write Mme. Adam’s biography is also to write one of the most momentous chapters of French history. For this remarkable woman has lived through the Revolution of 1848, the coup d’état of 1851, the agony of the siege of Paris, the civil war of the Commune, and two invasions of her beloved patrie.

As the mistress of a leading political salon, as the founder and editor for twenty years of an influential fortnightly magazine, La Nouvelle Revue, as for many years the intimate friend of Gambetta, of Thiers, of other French ministers, of the representatives of foreign powers and of such eminent French writers as George Sand, Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Alphonse Daudet, Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget and Maurice Barrès, she has not only kept her finger on the pulse of her great nation, but she has to some extent modulated its heart-beats.

The key to Mme. Adam’s temperament and to all the varied phases of her career is her passionate belief in self-government, in that cause of national independence for which the powers of L’Entente are now engaging in this world-embracing conflict. We may call it a belief, but originally in Mme. Adam’s case it was an instinct born in her and inherited from her father, one of the most ardent of revolutionaries. Mme. Adam is a revoltée to the core. Toujours hors des rangs, Gambetta said of her. In numerous incidents of her childhood her rebelliousness revealed itself. The growth of her reasoning powers, however, led her to submit to discipline, to embrace with fervour—she can never do anything by halves—the republican creed, and to become the irreconcilable adversary of the Second Empire. Then the national defeat of 1871, acting upon what she has described as her combativité rentrée (her suppressed combativeness), turned her passion for self-government into an ardent advocacy of the principle of nationality, into a vehement protest against everything which could in even the remotest manner be suspected of undermining that principle.

Consequently we shall find Mme. Adam loudly lifting up her voice, vigorously wielding her pen most frequently against Prussian aggressiveness, but also against imperialistic ideas, no matter in what shape or form, no matter in what part of the world she can detect them. We shall find her opposing alike the French tendency to colonial expansion and the Austrian Drang nach Osten, Mr. Gladstone’s later policy in Egypt and the Conservative coercion of Ireland, the Magyar domination over the Slav peoples and our war with the Boer Republic in South Africa. We shall find her also ever glorifying the army and navy as the most effective guarantee of national independence.

Nationalism is Mme. Adam’s creed, patriotism her religion. French Nationalists, like Léon Daudet, regard her as having been the strong tower of the French idea (la forteresse de l’idée française) throughout the forty-four years separating the war of 1914 from the war of 1870. If in later years Mme. Adam has renounced her father’s agnosticism and returned to the bosom of the Church, it is primarily because she considers that only by submitting to the Roman obedience can she best continue the traditions of her country.

I am very fortunate, for Mme. Adam has throughout taken a deep interest in this biography. We have discussed it together at length. Despite her multifarious war activities she has found time to write me some forty letters in response to my questions. She has also introduced me to her friend and collaborator in La Nouvelle Revue, Mme. Jeanne Krompholtz, who has kindly furnished me with valuable information.

For the greater part of Mme. Adam’s life, however, from her birth in 1836 down to 1880, my main authority has been her seven volumes of Souvenirs. These living documents, written, many of them, under the immediate impression of the events they record, I have carefully compared with contemporary and more recent writings, indicated by foot-notes throughout these pages. For the quarter of a century and more which has elapsed since the close of Mme. Adam’s Souvenirs I have consulted her numerous other autobiographical works, her contributions to La Nouvelle Revue and to other periodical literature, and also the frequent references to her personally, and to her books, which have appeared from time to time in the French press and elsewhere.

I have to thank Sir Sidney Colvin, who frequently visited Mme. Adam at her salon’s most brilliant moment, in the seventies, for generously bringing forth from the rich treasure-house of his remembrance and for permitting me to incorporate in this book valuable recollections which enhance, confirm and complement impressions derived from other sources.

Had he lived to see this work completed I should have gladly taken this opportunity to thank another of Mme. Adam’s acquaintances and admirers, M. Elie Mercadier, Director in London of L’Agence Havas. For to his lively talk about La Grande Française and her circle I am indebted for many a striking trait and useful suggestion.

Winifred Stephens.

London, 1917.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MADAME ADAM