Mme. Adam suspected Gambetta of being influenced in this direction by a certain salon which he had begun to frequent. With a few exceptions, those of Duclerc, de Reims and Gambetta, there were no people who, after Bismarck, were more bitterly hated in Mme. Adam’s circle than Count Henckel de Donnersmarck and his wife, the widow of the Vicomte de Païva. Mme. Adam believed that la Païva, as she called her, had been Bismarck’s spy before the war; and it was rumoured that her husband, the Vicomte, on discovering it, had hanged himself. Count Donnersmarck was certainly on the best of terms with the German Chancellor, who after the surrender of Metz had made him its Prefect. The holding of such an office was in itself enough to make the Count detested in Paris. Nevertheless, finding Metz too hot for him, with brazen effrontery he returned to the French capital and to the mansion in the Champs Elysées, which before the war he had built on the site of the Jardin des Fleurs, and which has now been converted into the Travellers’ Club. The rumour that he had advised Bismarck to demand five milliards war indemnity instead of three did not increase the cordiality of his reception. And one of Mme. Adam’s friends, Xavier de Feuillant, so she tells us, horsewhipped him up the Champs Elysées.[310] Other Frenchmen, however, deemed it politic to cultivate the acquaintance of one who was in Bismarck’s confidence. And it was apparently in order to ascertain Germany’s real attitude towards France that politicians like Thiers and journalists like Émile de Girardin accepted invitations to the magnificent dinner-parties at Païva House. To Mme. Adam such breaking of bread at an arch-enemy’s board was nothing short of the basest treachery. She wrote to her friend de Reims, who had visited the Donnersmarcks,[311] that if he continued to frequent Bismarck’s agent she would break with him for ever and deliver him up to Xavier Feuillant, who would treat him as he had done Henckel. Imagine her horror, therefore, when Spuller told her that Gambetta, above all people, had actually dined at la Païva’s table. Spuller swore her to secrecy. She could not, therefore, unburden her mind in those torrential reproaches to which she was now in the habit of treating her former hero. But after Spuller had left her she gave way to despair. “I felt something die within me,” she writes.[312]