“You won’t carry on your review for six months,” he retorted.... “You don’t know what you are undertaking. How could a woman ever possess enough authority, knowledge, energy, and business faculty to direct a review?” Gambetta carefully ignored the famous _Revue Internationale_, founded and successfully edited for some years by Napoléon I.’s great-niece, Mme. Ratazzi, better known by her _nom de guerre_ of “Baron Stock.” “My dear friend,” replied Juliette Adam, “will you take the trouble to remember this? I shall carry on my review for twenty years, and I shall introduce to my readers twenty new authors.” The question of the title puzzled her for some time. Then she writes— “_Tiens, j’ai trouvé mon titre_ La Nouvelle Revue. _Ce titre me plaît et plaît à tous. Je l’ai tant cherché, et il est venu tout seul._” Her old friend Laurent Pichat, one of those who had always recommended Adam, “that millionaire in wisdom and moderation,” as he called him, to found a review, threw himself heart and soul into the project. “You cannot have too many contributors,” he said. It was chiefly among the young authors and writers that these contributors were recruited. “Our review,” they called it, for them it was founded. One of its main objects was to give the chance to the young and the unknown which _La Revue des Deux Mondes_ denied them. But, as we have seen, many of Mme. Adam’s old friends were also to be represented in its pages: Challemel-Lacour, Spuller, and her fellow-Hellenists Saint-Victor and de Ronchaud. Nothing pleased her more than the interest taken in it by M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, a new acquaintance whom she owed to Girardin. Another of her great acquisitions was Alphonse Daudet, the writer who to her seemed more essentially French than any other author of that day. She considered him the equal of Balzac and Flaubert. She had hardly dared to hope for his collaboration. All the greater, therefore, was her joy when he assured her that any project destined to help forward young writers might count on his support. And Daudet was not one to give his name alone. As long as he lived the editress of _La Nouvelle Revue_ found in him one of her most trusted supporters. But the course of editing, like that of true love, does not always run smooth; and Mme. Adam had her disappointments. One of these was Taine’s refusal to collaborate. On the 29th of March, 1879,[350] he wrote excusing himself on account of bad health and absence from Paris. Though he was by no means devoted to _La Revue des Deux Mondes_, he reminded the new editress that when an attempt had been made fifteen years earlier to give that journal a rival, it had been calculated that such a project could not be realised in less than six years, and would necessitate an expenditure of a million of francs.