“While with us,” replied Mme. Adam, “the loss of two of our organs is constantly destroying our equilibrium more and more.... Never shall we regain it until we have reconquered Alsace-Lorraine, as Italy has reconquered Lombardy and Venetia. Ah, my friend, how can I tell you my grief at suspecting you more and more implicated with Germany? You, our national defender—you, whose words, whose acts galvanised in her humiliation the France to whom you promised a resurrection, you are false to your mission! You must forgive me, but the cruel words must be spoken: you betray your destiny. Never will Bismarck raise you to that pinnacle of greatness on which you were placed by your fidelity to Alsace-Lorraine. But I wound you.” It argues well for Gambetta’s magnanimity and also for his patriotism that he could hear such reproaches and still remain the friend of her who uttered them. “You cannot wound me, my dear friend,” he replied. “For you speak to me as you must speak—you, an idealist, whom reality does not restrain from arriving at contradictory conclusions.... You follow the dictates of your heart, I of my reason. We must each go our road.” “Mine,” she replied, “is the national road, marked out by the great proud past of my race; yours is a _combinazione_ with a scoundrel.” “Whatever our differences,” replied Gambetta, smiling, “let us promise to remain faithful to our friendship.” “I swear it,” she replied. In taking that oath Mme. Adam was sincere. Despite their disagreement on such vital matters, she valued highly Gambetta’s friendship. Nevertheless, each pursuing so widely divergent a road, it was inevitable they should drift apart. The one great disagreement was magnified by a thousand minor differences. She, who had first made him _un homme du monde_, grew appalled to observe his increasing passion for luxury, for ostentation; his susceptibility to the flatteries of fashionable women who gathered round him; his neglect of the simple folk from whom he had sprung; his financial and amorous embarrassments.[319] Now that Adam was no longer at hand to extricate him from the latter, she did what she could. But it was obvious to Gambetta that he had forfeited her approval. Their meetings too often passed in mutual recrimination. Mme. Adam’s disappointment in her former hero was accentuated by a series of events: first, when on MacMahon’s fall in 1877, Gambetta, instead of, as she hoped, becoming President of the Republic, accepted the office of President of the Chamber; again, when in 1879, as President of the Council, he roused immense opposition by the irony of appointing as Minister of Public Worship so pronounced an agnostic as Paul Bert; finally, when after a few months in this highest political eminence to which he ever attained, he was defeated on a motion for electoral reform, and went out of office. By that time Mme. Adam and Gambetta had ceased to correspond. They met but seldom.