Sidney used to find it interesting to watch her moving about, the only lady at her receptions, from some old dry doctrinaire of the Dufaure group to some fiery municipal Radical from the south; among deputies of all shades, wide asunder as the poles in tradition and feeling and temperament, and to see her throwing one after another into good humour by sheer womanly cordiality and grace. Indeed, all who have seen Mme. Adam entertaining her guests will agree that she possesses the true salon manner, and that she is mistress of that enviable art of talking so as to make others talk. Had it not been for his admiration of Gambetta, Edmond Adam would have thrown in his lot entirely with that section of the republican party known as the left centre. “As it was,” writes his wife, “he was to serve as a hyphen (_à trait d’union_) between the left centre, the republican union and the extreme left. There were those who thought that Juliette was chiefly responsible for her husband’s sympathies with the extreme wing of the republican party. But this she will not admit,[262] though she does not deny that her special friends were radicals, while Adam’s were moderates. Thiers himself said to Adam one day, “_Quand votre femme rougit, bleuissez”_. And it is obvious that Juliette with her impulsive nature not infrequently lost patience with the _grandes ombres élyséennes_, as she dubbed Laurent Pichat, Victor Hugo, Louis Blanc, and those other _vieilles barbes_ of 1848 who were the mainstay of the left centre. “For them,” she writes, “_République_ is a solemn and pompous word. The young, with Gambetta at their head, are more practical and utilitarian.” They desired a government adapted to the phase of democracy to which France had then attained. Nevertheless, there was nothing commonplace or even opportunist in those bright visions of the future Republic which Gambetta painted in his speeches. “Half smiling,” writes Mme. Adam, “he came straight to my Athenian Republic.[263]... He desired a France withdrawn into herself in order to heal her wounds. But when he spoke of her rôle after this enforced period of retirement, then he had a vision of her future prestige, when the army, chief symbol of the country’s revival, should be strengthened, glorified every day in order to raise _la patrie_ from defeat. Then he saw numberless schools educating the people—the French schoolmaster playing as prominent a part as the German schoolmaster—secularism dissipating all the darkness of clericalism, liberating thought, correcting the errors of the past, until France, grown great by misfortune, astonished the whole world by her resurrection.”