Produced by Clarity, Christian Boissonnas and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) MADAME ADAM [Illustration: Affectueusement juliette adam (1915)] MADAME ADAM (JULIETTE LAMBERT) _LA GRANDE FRANÇAISE_ FROM LOUIS PHILIPPE UNTIL 1917 BY WINIFRED STEPHENS AUTHOR OF “FROM THE CRUSADES TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION,” “FRENCH NOVELISTS OF TO-DAY,” “MARGARET OF FRANCE,” ETC., ETC. _WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS_ NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED, BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. 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.