In everything which concerns the welfare of her friends Mme. Adam takes the deepest interest. I shall never forget her solicitude for my safety in my numerous war-time Channel crossings. Immediately the _Sussex_ went down, she wrote asking if I knew any one who was on board. As the submarine menace grew more serious, whenever I returned to England she would bombard me with letters and postcards clamouring to be assured of my safety: “_Chère amie, ecrivez-moi vite que vous êtes bien arrivée_”; then another card: “_Chère, très chère amie, je vous supplie de m’envoyez ce simple mot sur une carte ‛arrivée.’_” Finally, after the torpedoing of a French man-of-war and the loss of the crew of six hundred, she writes: “_Il ne faut plus venir en France sans une nécessité absolue, car je crois que les affreux Boches ajouteront des crimes à leurs crimes_.” In another letter she had written: “_Le dieu teuton demande des crimes journaliers_.” Some of the most entrancing pages of Mme. Adam’s _Souvenirs_ tell the story of her literary friendships with Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet. It was in friendship that she found her greatest consolation at the time of Adam’s death. Gambetta was with her when the doctor gave up all hope of his recovery. “I shall return this evening,” said her friend, “and many of us will come.” Her husband during his last days liked to know that she was receiving as usual.[345] As the breach between Mme. Adam and Gambetta widened, her salon underwent a change. Its mistress, disappointed with politics, turned more and more to her artistic and literary friends. “If in politics there is much to sadden me,” she wrote,[346] “I have my literary consolations.” Coquelin was now to be found frequently at her receptions, so were the Alsatian painter, Henner, the battle-painter, Detaille, and Carolus Duran. “My salon is quite changed,” she writes, “but it is no less lively than of yore. Conversation has gained in brilliance what it has lost in weight.”[347] Artists, authors, sculptors, musical composers were delighted to meet one another; and the politicians who still visited her were pleased to _se dépolitiquer_. In this transformed salon there gradually materialised an idea which Mme. Adam had long cherished. Even before the war it had more than once been suggested to the Adams that they should found a review. George Sand, while she was visiting Bruyères, had tried to induce her host and hostess to start a fortnightly magazine which might rival _La Revue des Deux Mondes_, from the tyranny of whose editor, Buloz, she was suffering much. “Adam,” she argued,[348] “has been a journalist, you are literary. He with his critical gift and sound common sense would be an ideal editor, you with your zeal and your passion for admiring would discover new talent; you would revel, as I have always done, in the joy of bringing others into notice.”