“.... _Pour le Pape—Je suis catholique, apostolique et romaine. Revenue aux croyances de ma grand’mère.... Vous comprendrez que je n’ai pas, si tardive croyante, le droit de discuter les actions du St. Père. Mais mes vœux étaient pour le Cardinal Rampolla, que l’Autriche détestait et que la France eut tant aimé! Là encore je dois me taire. Vous pouvez seulement dire à quel point mes vœux accompagnaient le Cardinal Rampolla, que j’avais la fierté de connaître._” [Illustration: (1885)] We have seen how Mme. Adam’s father had brought her up in communion with the Hellenic soul; how in Mme. d’Agoult’s salon she delighted to fraternise with those enthusiastic Hellenists, de Ronchaud, Paul Saint-Victor, and Louis Ménard. After her rupture with Mme. d’Agoult, and throughout all the vicissitudes of the intervening years, this _Grecque ressuscitée_, as Victor Hugo used to call her, had never ceased, whenever she met her Hellenic friends, with them to live and move and have her being in the world of ancient Greece. Together they dreamed of seeing established in France what they described somewhat vaguely as “the Athenian Republic.” Together they welcomed the advent of those young poets, “the incomparable Parnassians,” whom Ménard fathered, François Coppée, Sully Prudhomme,[334] Hérédia, Alphonse Daudet, Baudelaire, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Anatole France and Lecomte de Lisle. Mme. Adam had been delighted when Gaston Paris brought to her salon that wonderful Sully Prudhomme, who from a workman in Creusot’s factory had developed into a poet, scholar and philosopher.[335] Volume by volume, as they appeared, she devoured Lemerre’s edition of the Parnassians’ collected works, becoming every day, she writes, _sauf quelques réserves_, a convinced admirer and an ardent propagandist of the new school of poets.[336] The reserve she referred to was this: she could not bring herself to admire the marmoreal immobility cultivated by the Parnassians. “_Ils ne rêvent pas comme moi_” she writes,[337] “_de draperies flottantes au vent qui souffle du golfe de Phalère ou du mont Hymette: ils veulent le pli statuaire, moi je l’aime vivant_.” One, who attended Mme. Adam’s reception when her salon was at the height of its political influence, tells how eager she was to withdraw from political discussion whenever an opportunity offered of talking about Greece and things Greek.