Arrived at Cannes, she is disappointed to find instead of Adam at the station a note brought by the coachman, explaining that her husband’s electoral duties detained him at Nice, but that he will be home for dinner. This disappointment, at the end of a long, fatiguing journey, exasperated her. “I would have gone back to Paris at once if I could,” she writes. And Adam, when he returned, was treated to one of those _drames de famille_ which Juliette herself had so often witnessed in her youth. The scene, as Mme. Adam describes it in her _Souvenirs_, might strike the reader as somewhat brutal. But one must read between the lines, and remember Juliette’s overwrought condition. Then it is easy to see how it came about; how at that moment the sight of Adam’s poor scarred face, recalling how he had been on the brink of death, would make his wife furious to think of his disregard of her entreaties and his persistence in undertaking that disastrous journey. “How could you have gone off like that, leaving me the sole guardian of our fortune?” she cried. “Why must you insist on pursuing this visionary Nice candidature, risking failure in Paris, where, but for me and Rochefort, you would never have been elected?” Fortunately Adam thoroughly understood his wife. Realising the strain already put upon her nerves, he indulged in no self-justification, but assumed the only possible attitude—one of lamb-like submission. Nevertheless, her agitation distressed him, and two big tears coursed slowly down his lacerated face. “I am in favour of his being pardoned,” sententiously pronounced the comical little Bibi. Bibi’s advice was taken; and “_nous dînons appaisés_,” writes Mme. Adam. After dinner her husband told the story of his miraculous escape.[223]