The years 1876 and ’77 were dark years for Juliette Adam. They had reft from her George Sand, her father, Dr. Lambert, and then her husband. Dr. Lambert had died early in 1876, while his daughter was at Bruyères. Mme. Sand’s death occurred on the 8th of June. In the August of the following year, it fell to Mme. Adam’s lot to perform a melancholy mission. George Sand, shortly before her death, had expressed a wish that her study should remain under lock and key for one year, at the end of which it should be opened by her son Maurice and Juliette Adam. For this purpose Mme. Adam went to Nohant, where she found awaiting her a strange and sorrowful experience. When the seal was broken, there was the study just as George Sand had left it, with a partly finished manuscript on the desk, with the arm-chair half turned round as when its occupant had risen from it for the last time. During those moments the spirit of the departed seemed to come very near to her friend. By that time Mme. Adam was a widow. Her husband had died in the previous May. Throughout her bereavement, there was no one to whom she turned more willingly for consolation than to Adam’s friend Thiers. He never tired of hearing her talk about her husband, whom he had known long and intimately, and whom he had never failed to appreciate. But three months after Adam’s death, Thiers followed him to the grave. “Blow after blow falls upon me,” writes Mme. Adam. “Thiers’ loss creates another blank in my life.” Her buoyant cheerfulness, however, her unquenchable hopefulness, her innate optimism would not permit her to remain long a prey to grief and melancholy. If earthly things disappointed her, if she failed to find here below the fulfilment of her hopes, the realisation of her dreams, then she would look elsewhere. She refused to be altogether disappointed. With Jean Jacques Rousseau she felt that she had wept too much in this life not to believe in another. Henceforth she began to dwell more and more on that other world, of faith in which her paganism had never succeeded in depriving her. With her the unseen had ever been vividly present.