“On the 24th of November,” she wrote,[254] “this morning, I am mad with joy, mad with hope. I read and read again Gambetta’s dispatch to Jules Favre. I bless the great patriot who sends it to us. If Gambetta, a republican, were to save our France! When others doubt him and his valour, I do not doubt.” “Why, we have an army on the Loire two hundred thousand men strong! In a week we shall have another hundred thousand: two hundred thousand recruits are clamouring to be on the march. At last!... Long live France! ... and she will live, our _patrie française_. It will not be so easy to tread upon her. Frenchmen will be found to defend her, to prevent the invader from pillaging, from defiling her from one end of the land to the other. It seems to me that all Paris should thank Gambetta. I write to him.” And when the superb movement of French energy, with which Gambetta alone had been able to inspire the provinces, seemed to Juliette Adam to have been nullified by the capital’s submission, she followed her hero more fervently than ever in his advocacy of war to the bitter end. She deplored the mistrust and suspicion with which the other members of the September Government regarded _ce fou furieux_, as they called him. She deplored his resignation on the 5th of February, 1871, of the office of Minister of the Interior. Gambetta’s colleagues accused him of ruling France by terror, and endeavouring to make himself a dictator. To the statesman whom Bismarck regarded as the most superb organiser in Europe, no portfolio was assigned in the government Thiers was forming at Bordeaux. So completely out of sympathy with the National Assembly and its monarchical majority did Gambetta find himself that, after the signing of the preliminaries of peace and after he had taken part in that memorable protest of the Alsace-Lorraine deputies against the session of those provinces, he resigned his seat and for some months withdrew from political life. On his return to it, in the summer of 1871, he found his friends, the Adams, in Paris, and Juliette once more the mistress of a brilliant and influential political salon. No sooner had she re-established herself in the Maison Sallandrouze than her friends began to gather round her once more. The social life of the metropolis was gradually being resumed. But it took at least a year before anything like the old brilliance revived. The first sign of that revival was when Parisian women began to care about clothes. “_Les femmes du siège_,” writes Mme. Adam, “_qui ne savaient plus ce que c’était que s’habiller, s’occupaient à nouveau de leurs robes_,” of course she adds, “_moi la première_.”[255]