“Listen; for seventeen years you have been absolute masters, you have held France in your power.... Yet you have never dared to place among the national festivals that 2nd of December!... Well, we claim it, that anniversary of the 2nd of December. We claim it for ourselves. We shall never cease to celebrate it. Every year it will be the anniversary of our dead, until the day when the country, once more having become the master, shall exact from you the great expiation in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity.”[128] After a long deliberation the court pronounced sentence, and all the accused were condemned. But few thought of them. Gambetta, though he had failed to obtain his client’s acquittal, was the hero of the hour, for he had brought a more serious indictment against a far greater criminal. Fêted and congratulated on every hand, he was conducted to the famous Restaurant Magny. No false modesty was his. He knew he had dealt faithfully with the tyrants, and he was not ashamed to own it. “_Comme je leur ai dit leur quatre vérités_,” he exclaimed. In Juliette’s salon that night there was wild enthusiasm. Adam and his friends had heard the speech. They repeated passages of it. “You must read it,” Adam said to his wife. “But it will not be the same as having heard it.” “The 13th of November,” writes Juliette, “was a fatal day for the Empire.[129] ... The imperial tree had been sapped by the little Cahors lawyer. It was not that Gambetta’s oratory was so very exceptional. His power lay in making his ardent soul vibrate to the emotion of the crowd.” The Adams had found it well worth their while to postpone their departure for Bruyères in order to be in Paris at such a time. Juliette, on her arrival at her villa, was overwhelmed by the transformation which Adam had worked in it. “_Mon Bruyères_,” she writes, “_est embelli, transformé joliment à l’intérieur, sans avoir perdu quoi que ce soit de sa gracieuse et modeste physionomie_.”[130]