of 1871. More fortunate than the great British soldier who spent his
veteran days in warning his countrymen of the ordeal to come, Madame
Adam, now in her eighty-first year, may yet hope to see the banners of
the Allies crowned with victory, the black wreaths on the statue of
Strasburg in the Place de la Concorde changed to garlands of rejoicing.

There have been dark days in these forty-five years, times when, even
to herself, the struggle for _la patrie_ seemed almost a forlorn hope.
It was so at the time of the Berlin Congress in 1878, when, after his
visit to Germany, Gambetta abandoned the idea of _la revanche_. It was
so in 1891, when she realised that the influence of Paul Déroulède's
Ligue des Patriotes had ceased to be a living force in public opinion,
when France had become impregnated with false doctrines of
international pacifism and homeless cosmopolitanism, when (as she wrote
at the time) there were left of the faithful to wear the forget-me-not
of Alsace-Lorraine only "a few mothers, a few widows, a few old
soldiers, and your humble servant." But never, even in the darkest of
dark days, was the flame of her ardent patriotism dimmed. After her
breach with Gambetta, determined not to be defeated by the Government's
abandonment of a vigorous anti-German policy of preparation, she
founded the _Nouvelle Revue_, to wage war with her brain and pen
against Bismarck and the ruler of Germany. The objects with which she
created that brilliant magazine, as explained by herself to Mr.
Gladstone in 1879, were threefold--"to oppose Bismarck, to demand the
restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, and to lift from the minds of young
French writers the shadow of depression cast on them by national
defeat." The fortnightly "Letters on Foreign Politics" which she
contributed regularly to the _Nouvelle Revue_, for twenty years were
not only persistently and violently anti-Teuton: they became a powerful
force in educating public opinion in France to the necessity for an