Next to her separation from Alice, the hardest to bear of her personal trials during the siege was being compelled to leave her flat in the Boulevard Poissonnière. On the 11th of October, Adam having been appointed Prefect of Police, he and his wife had to take up their abode in the Préfecture. In the halls and corridors of that gloomy building, what hours of weary waiting for a passport’s stamping have not many of us endured during this war-time! We can well sympathise, therefore, with Mme. Adam’s horror at the idea of spending not hours only, but days, weeks and months within the Préfecture’s lugubrious portals. We can understand her grief at being obliged to exchange her cheerful flat, her “dovecot” on the Boulevard Poissonnière, for _l’affreuse prison_ in the Rue de Jérusalem. To any one with her vivid imagination it was a perfect nightmare merely to watch the going and coming of the prison-vans, lumbering into the courtyard of La Sainte Chapelle, and to hear the cries of “No. 1 for Mazas, No. 2 for Ste. Pélagie.”[191] It was during her residence in the Préfecture that occurred that insurrection of the 31st of October which proved a premonition of the Commune. The popular discontent with the Government, and especially with its President, General Trochu, who was also Governor of Paris, had been growing for some weeks. It was brought to a head by the news that Le Bourget, one of the forts outside the capital, which had been captured from the Prussians on the 28th of October, had been retaken on the 29th. On the 30th, Mme. Adam, on her way to her hospital from a concert in the Cirque Pas de Loup, found the boulevard in an almost revolutionary ferment. The people were exclaiming: “We do not demand successes, but we will not have defeats resulting from our general’s frivolity, carelessness and incapacity.”[192] Later in the evening, when the time came for Juliette to return home, she found the tumult had increased. As she pressed her way through the crowd she felt its sentiments possessing her. “My sorrows mingled with theirs,” she writes, “my patriotism with their patriotism.” As soon as she saw Adam she warned him of the state of Paris. But he knew it better than she, and her warning was unnecessary. There was a dinner-party at the Préfecture that evening. Both at table and afterwards in her salon, the guests, among whom was Rochefort, complained as loudly as the crowd of the Government’s incapacity. Every one found fault with the mismanagement which had resulted in the loss of Le Bourget. Rochefort and Adam were obliged to leave to attend a Cabinet meeting,[193] held to receive the report of Thiers, who had just returned from an official visit to the Great Powers on the subject of an armistice. Adam did not come back to the Préfecture until three o’clock in the morning.