Now once again her Wednesday dinner-parties afforded an occasion for _grande toilette_. On other evenings any of the Adams’ friends, who happened to be passing along the boulevard, were welcome to come up just as they were. Among those evening callers was more than one well-known Englishman. Mr. Richard Whiteing, in his book _My Harvest_,[256] paints a vivid picture of Mme. Adam’s salon. He signals her out as one of those republican women who were reconstructing the salon on a Republican basis. The great subjects of discussion on those Wednesday and Friday evenings were Gambetta’s speeches. Long passages from them were recited[257] by Spuller, the deputy who led the most moderate section of Gambetta’s supporters.[258] Then one day in June the orator himself arrived. He had asked to spend the evening alone with his hosts. Adam had not seen him since the eve of his departure from Bordeaux. “_Cette soirée_,” writes Juliette,[259] “_a été longue et d’un interêt passionant_.” While not entirely approving of their friend’s attitude, of his sympathy with the Commune, for example, the Adams congratulated him on his recent speech at Bordeaux. “The level-headedness, the wisdom of that speech,” Adam told Gambetta, “confounded your enemies. You may now group around you a party recruited from the left and including a few members of the left centre. Juliette and I will be able to contrive for you a certain understanding with the left centre on the great questions of national policy.” These words foretold what was to be the rôle of Mme. Adam’s salon in the days of its greatest brilliance. As the rallying ground for the various parties of republican opposition to the reactionary majority in the Assembly, it rendered important service, not only to Gambetta, but also to the President (Thiers) in his difficult task of keeping the peace between the discordant elements of his nondescript and essentially provisional Government. Later, after Thiers’ resignation, during the days of the _République Militante_ between 1873 and 1876, Mme. Adam’s salon continued to hold together various sections of the republican party: the left centre, the extreme left and the republican union, which consisted entirely of Gambetta’s friends. “Our house,” writes Mme. Adam, “became very useful to Gambetta. There he met artists whom he charmed, financiers whom he reassured, political adversaries whom he enrolled.”[260] Sir Sidney Colvin, who[261] in those years was often in Paris for two or three weeks at a time, used generally to go to her evening receptions, of which he has a very distinct recollection. He remembers Mme. Adam as the recognised Egeria of Gambetta, as very cultivated and intelligent. Obviously she had been very beautiful; she was still extremely handsome, and above all things full of graciousness and tact and good-will—the grace and the good-will of a cultivated _bourgeoise_ accustomed to charm and determined to exercise her charm for a cause she had at heart. Sir