Her exuberant Celtic imagination had projected itself into the spirit world. She believes that her grandmother appeared to her after her death, and that many important events of her life have been prophesied to her by some soothsayer, palmist or somnambulist. She herself used to tell fortunes; and, at the close of her evening receptions, to a few favoured guests, Gambetta, Girardin, Spuller, for example, who liked to linger after the rest had gone, she would predict the future by cutting cards. But her own soothsaying must not be taken too seriously. For she admits she was glad to take this opportunity of telling some home truths, and giving to her friends useful advice which, administered in any other way, might have offended them. Gambetta was frequently the recipient of such counsel. The cards, for instance, warned him that by a meeting as “diabolical as that of Christ’s temptation on the mountain” he was risking the loss of his prestige.[332] He was also enjoined to beware of women and their advice. Some would dash him into the abyss of ruin, he was told, while others would raise him on to dizzy heights no less dangerous. He was bidden to be a lover and a friend, but to choose only men for his confidants. Refusing to recognise in such warnings anything but the advice of the fair necromancer herself, Gambetta replied mischievously, “You are rather hard on yourself. But perhaps it is in order that you may be still harder on others.” In the past, the main object of Mme. Adam’s adoration had been _la patrie_. So it will continue to be until the end. In her pagan days, after _la patrie_, she had adored the gods and heroes of Greece and Rome. They had represented to her the ideals of a civilisation which she regarded as the highest and most complete to which humanity has yet attained. When Mme. Adam became a Christian the gods and heroes of antiquity made way for Christ and His Saints, and for Mme. Adam’s patriotic soul first among the latter is Jeanne d’Arc.[333] For even now _la patrie_ remains enthroned in the first place in her hierarchy. Indeed, she has returned to the Catholic Church chiefly because thus she hopes best to fulfil her mission as a patriotic Frenchwoman. “I believe,” she said to me, “that a true French patriot can no more escape being a Catholic than can a truly patriotic Turk escape being a Mussulman.” Nevertheless, that it may not always be easy to reconcile patriotism and religion is suggested by the following letter, which Mme. Adam wrote in reply to my inquiry as to her views of the reputed pro-German attitude of the present Pope— “_Abbaye de Gif_, “14.ii.16.