That wily deist Spuller did not neglect this further opportunity of stealing a march on his rival.[326] He encouraged Mme. Adam in the idea that by waging war against the Church Gambetta was playing Bismarck’s game, and helping the Chancellor to carry on in France the _Kulturkampf_ he was conducting with so much vigour in Germany. Had not Gambetta himself admitted that the _Kulturkampf_ had changed the whole aspect of the struggle against the Church![327] In France, he had come to regard the separation between the Church and State as an almost necessary condition of any durable alliance with the Italian kingdom. “As long as we remain the eldest daughter of the Church,” he said to Mme. Adam,[328] “the papacy will rely upon our support, and this will inevitably endanger our friendly relations with Italy.” Gambetta’s attitude in these vital matters was certainly changing his friend’s religious point of view. She was beginning to feel that she could no longer, as in 1866, describe herself as a pagan and an anti-clerical.[329] Then to oppose the Church had been to oppose the Empire. Now it seemed to her that to oppose the Church was to unite with Bismarck. The Catholic traditions of her country were beginning to appeal to her. “I remembered,” she writes,[330] “how for centuries Catholic France had been superbly patriotic, how for centuries the association between God and the King, God and _la patrie_, had perhaps been more essential than I had ever believed.” Already she had travelled far from the days of the siege of Paris, when, in admiration of the nuns’ fearlessness during the small-pox epidemic, she had reflected, “Ought not my philosophy to give me as much courage as they derive from their religion?”[331] By a strange contradiction Mme. Adam’s passion for revenge was carrying her towards a religion whose Founder had refused to countenance such a sentiment. But in wending her way Romewards she was obeying not so much the dictates of reason as ancestral voices, impulses arising from her subconscious self, beckonings from that Catholic past which is never far removed from any child of France.