“_L’âme de la France est-elle donc catholique, et ne peut-on être en contact absolu avec elle que par le catholicisme et sa plus pure tradition?_”—Ibid. “Something is dying within me” (_quelque chose agonise en moi_) Mme. Adam had written at the close of her most memorable talk with Gambetta in 1878. That something was not only her faith in her friend’s determination to achieve _la Revanche_, it was also her hope for the establishment of an ideal Republic. To her mind the Republic, for the sake of whose stability Gambetta had found it necessary to sacrifice _la Revanche_ and to enter into an understanding with Bismarck, was not worth having. “One does not make use of a Bismarck,”[321] Mme. Adam had said to her friend. “Who knows?” was his rejoinder. “Perhaps it will be he who will give us the Republic.” “Then it would be fatal to us,” she replied. And that this Republic was proving fatal to liberty and fatal to her hopes she was becoming more and more fully convinced. “It is disenchanting us all, alarming us all,” she wrote. “It is disappointing our dreams of greatness at home and showing itself incapable of any effort towards heroism and greatness abroad.”[322] From the time of her rupture with Gambetta until the Great War, Mme. Adam was indeed what one of her contemporaries has most happily called her, _la grande désabusée de la troisième république_.[323] Almost as strongly as of his abandonment of _la Revanche_ did Mme. Adam disapprove of Gambetta’s virulent anti-clerical policy. She began to agree with Mérimée, who, though an agnostic, feared lest so-called free-thinkers might prove as intolerant as the Church. “Do you think,” he had said, referring to the anti-clericals of those imperial days,[324] “that these men, if they were in the Government would ever give you liberty? They are the sons of Robespierre, Saint-Just and Marat. If ever they come into power, they will follow the example not merely of the Terrorists but of the Church in its darkest days. For they themselves, the fanatics of anti-clericalism, they are a church, smaller than the other but equally dogmatic.” In his first speeches after the war Gambetta had declared himself in favour of strict liberty of opinion. But, finding the Republic’s enemies too often in close alliance with the Church, he had become embittered against the Catholic party. Thirty years later Combes’ bitter attack on the Church was to arouse in many a free-thinker Catholic sympathies. In like manner Gambetta’s extreme anti-clericalism helped to make a Catholic of Mme. Adam. Towards the end of his life he tended more and more to throw in his lot with the extreme anti-clericals led by Paul Bert, who, adapting to the moment Peyrat’s famous phrase, _le cléricalisme c’est l’ennemi_,[325] declared _le cléricalisme c’est le phylloxera_.