Her three best novels, _Laide_, _Grecque_ and _Païenne_, are inspired throughout by these Hellenic sympathies. In a delightful article on _Le Néo-Hellenisme_,[338] Jules Lemaître, that most eminent of French critics since Sainte-Beuve, bestows high praise on this trilogy of novels, which he describes as “a rare effort of sympathetic imagination.” Nevertheless, though in all sincerity Mme. Adam strove hard to attain to the Greek point of view, a mind so essentially actual as hers could not fail to introduce a certain modernity into her portrayal of what seemed to her the Greek atmosphere and temperament. As Lemaître points out, in these novels every passion, every impression, every phrase, is obviously three thousand years older than a line of Homer, twenty-four centuries older than a line of Sophocles. Mme. Adam, with her antipathy to everything Gothic, Teutonic and mediæval, may try to cultivate a dislike of romanticism, she remains notwithstanding, and her criticism of the Parnassians quoted above proves it, a romanticist, the child of Chateaubriand and Mme. de Staël. She may try to ignore the Middle Ages, but she cannot suppress them. And Jules Lemaître may well inquire whether “if the whole Middle Ages had not groaned and bled beneath the Cross Mme. Juliette Lamber would be able to rejoice so rapturously in her Greek gods.” For the vague paganism of that day depends for its very existence on the Christianity of which it was the negation. The paganism of Mme. Adam and her friends was provoked by the Christian’s enmity to all things carnal. It was a protest in favour of that _joie de vivre_, of that physical beauty, of those natural joys which the mediæval Christian had condemned as the works of the devil. When life’s joyfulness began to fade, Mme. Adam, like so many others, turned to Christianity. She had always, as she had confessed to Littré at Mme. d’Agoult’s dinner-party,[339] had the will to believe. “Would you know how and why I became a Catholic, then you must read _Chrétienne_,” said Mme. Adam. And indeed this novel describes her conversion from paganism to Christianity. Here we see how that adoration of Greece, which she owed to her father’s upbringing had ceased to be a living inspiration, how it had been relegated to the past. That old conflict of her childhood between her father’s paganism and her grandmother’s Christianity recurring, resulted in her grandmother’s influence gradually alienating her soul from Greece, and transforming into a mere literary preference what was once a religious inspiration.