Each winter Mérimée and Juliette Adam became better friends. He paid her one of the compliments she appreciated most when he told Dr. Maure that she had made him understand fraternity.[132]

She enjoyed his conversation immensely. “A talk with Mérimée,” she writes, “is always full of surprises,[133] so wide is his knowledge and of a quality so superior.” His eclecticism delighted her. He belonged to no school, but was ready to appreciate anything that appealed to him, modern or ancient, idealist or realist, romantic or classical. His bête noir was exaggeration. He was artistic to the finger-tips. He detested the photographic method of treating life and nature. “Every artist at the beginning of his life,” he would say, “must, I admit, be carried away by passion, by rapture, but before long he must deny himself any ecstasy which might cloud his imagination and dim his vision of reality; he must retain of his passion only so much as is necessary for its description.”

Mérimée, like Juliette’s friend Flaubert, was a heroic worker. He would not hesitate to rewrite a page ten times. A term erased seemed to him but “a jumping-off place from which to reach le mot juste.” Mme. Adam highly prized the lessons he gave her on style.

In general conversation he was not at his best. However interesting the subject might be, he was ill at ease if the speaker did not appeal to him. He would assume a frigid manner. On the other hand, if the speaker pleased him, he would hasten to pour forth all the treasures of his accumulated reflections.

The events of the summer of 1868, and the troubles of L’Avenir National, an opposition newspaper founded in 1865, edited by Peyrat, and in which Adam had a large financial interest, had prevented Juliette and her husband from taking any honeymoon immediately after their marriage. Now, in the spring of 1869, accompanied by Alice, they took their postponed wedding-tour to Italy. They visited Florence, then the capital of the Italian kingdom, Milan, Turin and Genoa. Furnished with useful introductions by Thiers and other friends, they met many interesting people, Cairoli, the Marquis Alfieri, Nino Bixio, the Garibaldian soldier, whose brother Alessandro had been so intimate a friend of Adam. At Florence they rejoiced to meet again the Italian exiles whom they had known in Paris. Mme. Adam, while admiring the intense patriotism of the Italians, was grieved to perceive how Napoléon’s papal policy had alienated them from France. At the meetings of the Italian Chamber, the opposition’s violent attacks on France cut her to the heart.

“C’est pour Adam et moi une grande tristesse,” she writes. “Quoi! tout le sang versé, nos sacrifices, notre amitié, notre dévouement, notre enthousiasme, à nous, républicains, qui nous à fait accepter un armistice dans notre lutte contre l’Empire, n’ont servi qu’à nous faire une ennemi violente de l’Italie.”[134]

Juliette was glad to see her last novel, L’Education de Laure, displayed in the book-shops of Milan. Driving home, along the Corniche Road, in company with Nino Bixio, they had a memorable journey, to which we shall refer later.

Arriving in Paris in April, they found the capital in the throes of preparing for the general election, fixed for the 23rd and 24th of May—the third election held since the establishment of the Empire, the two previous had been in 1857 and 1863. But this, remarks Mme. Adam, was the first election which had been held since the granting of liberty of public meetings and of the Press, two reforms which had resulted from Ollivier’s establishment of what is known as l’Empire Libérale.

Juliette in her salon on the Boulevard Poissonnière found herself quite as much in the movement as she would have been in the Rue de Rivoli. From her windows she saw, or imagined she saw, all manner of wonderful happenings: strange meetings and consultations after midnight between policemen and les blouses blanches, those socialists, the mistrusted tail of the radical party, whom Gambetta, in his famous Belleville speech, was accused of humouring. His more moderate friends thought he had promised too much: tariff and tax reform, election of all Government functionaries, suppression of standing armies. “You must cut off this tail of yours,” remonstrated his anti-socialist supporters. “Cut off my tail,” said Gambetta gaily, “not as long as I live. I will tie a white sash round it and lead it into society.”[135]

Gambetta, at the head of les Jeunes was opposing at Belleville Hippolyte Carnot, that vieille barbe as the heroes of 1848 were called. Baucel, another of les Jeunes in another Paris constituency, was successfully opposing Ollivier himself; and the founder of l’Empire Libérale was driven to a provincial constituency in the Department of Var. So unpopular was the minister in the capital that his public meeting at Le Châtelet became a riot, during which the famous beer-house Dréher was sacked before the police could effectually intervene.

The election cries of the opposition were “Away with personal government,” “Away with a standing army and substitute a national militia.” With the latter neither Juliette nor her husband were in agreement. Jules Simon in their salon represented this party. And when Adam argued against him, upholding a standing army, maintaining that without it a nation is lost, Nefftzer intervened saying, “You are right both of you. We must have a standing army and a national militia to defend the country against the German invasion which is approaching.”[136]

Though many of her friends were standing as candidates, Madame Adam’s salon continued to be well frequented all through the election. The guests, however, came later and went away earlier. Occasionally some one would disappoint her. Jules Ferry, for instance, in one of the most adroit of notes excused himself at the last moment.

“Madame,” he wrote,[137] “je n’appartiens plus ni à mes amis, ni à moi-même, ni aux choses gracieuses de la vie.... Or voici qu’une réunion d’électeurs apparaît à l’horizon, un peu plus farouche que votre salon. L’électeur est un maître, vous le savez, et nous ne sommes pas sur un lit de roses; vous m’excuserez donc et vous me permettrez si ce mercredi soir m’est enlevé, de vous porter mes excuses un matin.”

At the request of their friends the Adams, as will be seen, had changed their day from Friday to Wednesday. Throughout the election Juliette had been full of hope. And the result did not disappoint her. For, although the Government maintained a majority in the House, the opposition had won a striking moral victory. The forces of the opposition now led by Gambetta in the Chamber, had shown their growing power. Many of its candidates, Rochefort, for example, though defeated, had obtained a large number of votes. The Empire was visibly tottering. Napoléon, ill and irresolute, was driven to grant the reformers concession after concession.