For some years, while she had been gradually coming to perceive the danger which threatened from German aggression, Mme. Adam had been growing more and more suspicious of the internationalist movement. With the Germanising tendencies of Renan, Gaston Paris and other members of her circle she had no sympathy whatever. After the war she could not refrain from regarding all internationalists as traitors to their country.[250] Any sympathy with Germany appeared to her as nothing short of treason, and treason of the deepest dye. The bonds of friendship which united her to George Sand were strained almost to breaking-point when her friend wrote that she desired peace “not for the sake of France alone but for the sake of Germany, and in order to avert the ruin of two civilisations.” “This is one of my most cruel sorrows,” wrote Mme. Adam. “A gulf has opened between me and the friend whom I adored. Never shall we understand one another again. She ... has reverted to the old humanitarianism of 1848. She, like my friend Arlès Dufour, permits herself to be moved by pity for the Germans.” Had Mme. Sand witnessed with Juliette all the horrors of the siege, could she have maintained that serenity which from henceforth she never wearied of preaching to her young friend? “Do not let us be nervous and agitated,” she writes, “but reasonable, for in that direction alone lies the path of duty.”[251] In those days it seemed to Mme. Adam that this sweet reasonableness was only possible for those who had remained aloof from the struggle; and between them and herself who had lived in the heart of the inferno there was a wide gulf fixed. How wide she realised painfully when, worn and wan, after that terrible railway journey from Paris, she was greeted by her friends at Cannes with the words, “Are you not glad to be at Bruyères once more?” “Glad!” She was aghast at that word. Yet it accorded well with their smiling faces and their perfect health. “But are you pleased that the war is over?” they persisted. “And our defeat?” she cried. “Do you not realise that it is going to tear out our very flesh?” And she dismissed them abruptly, horrified to find “French people so detached from France.”[252] Later she wrote: “The pure southern sky has never been defiled by the smoke of German bivouacs. For the people of Provence the war has been a blood-stained book, but one the pages of which they have hardly turned over.”[253] With Mme. Adam it was very different. For _la grande Française_ “the terrible year” stands out as the one ineffaceable landmark, dominating the whole of her subsequent career. FOOTNOTES: [219] M. Gabriel Hanotaux’s numbers are slightly different; but the main point is that a substantial balance remained on the side of the Monarchists. See _Histoire de la France Contemporaine_, I. 39. [220] _Souvenirs_, V. 23. [221] _Souvenirs_, IV. 341. [222] _Ibid._, V. 5. [223] _Souvenirs_, V. 12, 13. [224] Hanotaux, _op. cit._, I. 64 _et passim_.