Previous chapters of this book will have shown how completely in accord with Mme. Adam’s passionate, patriotic and energetic disposition was this persistent advocacy of _la Revanche_. Retaliation was in her blood. Even as a child, whenever she or any one else received an injury or suffered an injustice her first thought had been that some one must be made to pay for it. She had never been able to take any wrong lying down. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, was her motto; and nothing appeared to her so humiliating as the Christian doctrine of resignation. After the war her desire for retaliation grew into a consuming passion. “I suffer acutely,”[289] she writes, “from that malady of defeat, that perpetual pain which maddens a Frenchwoman who has been conquered at every turning of the roads of Alsace, of Lorraine, who has been crushed at Sedan, deceived and surrendered at Paris.” That suppressed combativity (_combativité rentrée_),[290] which on the capitulation of Paris she felt well-nigh bursting her head and her heart, pursued her from February 1871 until August 1914. Mme. Adam argued like Mr. Wells’ Letty when she believed her husband, Teddy, to be dead.[291] “You see, if he is dead, then Cruelty is the Law, and some one must pay me for his death. Some one must pay me.... I shall wait for six months after the war, dear, and then I shall go off to Germany.... And I will murder some German. Not just a common German, but a German who belongs to the guilty kind....” On much the same lines did Mme. Adam reason when the iron of defeat entered into her soul—she, too, would exact payment, not for any personal wrong, but for a national injury; she would murder some German, not only of the guilty but of the guiltiest kind, the arch-criminal himself—none other than Bismarck. Only she would murder him not with the sword, but with a weapon in the handling of which she was more expert—with her pen. With this object, as we have said, she founded, with the fortune her husband left her, _La Nouvelle Revue_. In the pages of this magazine, in a series of powerful articles entitled, “Letters on Foreign Politics,” she pursued unceasingly the Man of Iron, revealing his hidden designs, disclosing his plots, and warning France against the snares he was perpetually laying for her.