reveillé de l’horrible cauchemar patriote fanatique_.”[245] “_Votre patriotisme_,” wrote her friend General Gallifet,[246] “_est peint sur vos traits et pétille dans votre conversation_.” The Commune had taught her to regard socialism and internationalism as, after Germany, her country’s most formidable enemies. Her horror when her father proposed to marry her to a working man had shown that in those early days she was not free from a certain class prejudice. An ardent republican, she had believed in fraternity but not in equality. For her as for Plato the ideal state would be governed by the _élite_. Socialism she had ever abhorred. And as the years went on, she came to have less and less faith in the masses. During those disturbed months which preceded the war, when, looking down from her window on the Boulevard Poissonnière, she saw Paris workmen (_les blouses blanches_) holding nightly conferences with policemen, she had no doubt of their being _agents provocateurs_. That the Commune’s excesses should confirm and aggravate this suspiciousness was inevitable. Her father’s sympathy with the revolutionists caused her unspeakable grief. Dr. Lambert, after sending Alice to Bruyères, had returned to Paris, where he remained to witness and to approve the insurrection. Nothing could ever induce him to blame the communards. He had welcomed the movement as the dawn of social regeneration. And for the crimes of the rebels he held Thiers and his government responsible. How painful for Mme. Adam was all conversation with her father at this time will readily be imagined. Closely associated with the communards throughout had been members of “the Internationale,”[247] that vast cosmopolitan organisation, inspired by Karl Marx and instituted in London in 1862. “The Internationale” had given its support to the Central Committee which ruled Paris, and it had fully approved of the message sent to the German commander assuring him that the German army had nothing to fear from the insurrection.[248] Indeed, it seemed to Mme. Adam that the Germans had everything to gain from the civil strife then rending France, and that the Communards were simply playing Bismarck’s game. Had they not purged of danger and disorder other European capitals by gathering into Paris from London, Rome, Vienna, and Berlin, anarchists whose railway fares “seemed to fall like manna from heaven!”[249]