While feeling that no reproach was too bitter to bring against the leaders of the Commune, against those who, under the conqueror’s very eye, had let loose the rabid hounds of civil war, with Paris and the rank and file of Parisians Mme. Adam never ceased to sympathise. “Most of the Communards,” she writes, “... are possessed by the madness of defeat, a madness which I understand, for I have suffered from it myself at the close of the siege. In that madness there is no cowardice. It consists rather in a passionate desire to assert, no matter where and how, the courage one has acquired, the courage which traitors have neglected to utilise.”[242] The correspondence between the Adams throughout these weeks shows husband and wife in complete agreement. It also reveals great moderation and a desire to see both sides of many difficult questions. It was not until the last days of May, as we have said, that Mme. Adam returned to Paris, to a Paris desolated by two bombardments, by ferocious street-fighting and by the madness of a defeated mob, raging throughout the days and nights of a hideous week of explosions and incendiarism. Mme. Adam returned to find the blackened ruins of the Tuileries, the smoking ashes of the Hôtel de Ville, a heap of stones in the square where the Vendôme Column had stood. In the lives of many strong personalities there comes a crisis, a parting of the ways, when in a convulsion of the whole being character and disposition receive a new orientation. For how many is not such a crisis presented by the present war! In the religious world such a revolution is described as conversion. This crisis came to Mme. Adam through national humiliation and the civil strife which followed the catastrophe of 1870. _La patrie’s_ defeat had planted deep in her nature an antagonism which will doubtless endure to the end. Henceforth we shall find accentuated more and more strongly in her character and disposition the irreconcilable note. She had always been emphatic. She was born to be as fervent a hater as she was an ardent lover. For her there had never been many open questions. Now in every cause she espouses she holds the position of _à l’outrance_. The iron of national defeat and civil war had entered into her soul. On the 30th of October, 1870, on learning the loss of Le Bourget Fort, she had written:[243] “I cannot describe the vexation, the discouragement, the wrath, the moral perturbation which possess me.” On so patriotic and fervent a nature as hers these experiences could not fail to imprint an indelible mark. Her patriotism, as we have repeatedly seen, had always been ardent. _Je prétends être Français plus que personne_ was her own sentiment put into the mouth of the Picard weaver in her first novel, _Mon Village_. After the war, growing with national disaster,[244] her patriotism became a consuming fire. Of herself she might have written the words she penned of Edmond About: “_il s’est