Gambetta, realising how far they had drifted apart, betrayed not a little anxiety as to the political line she was likely to follow. “Shall you be as hostile to me as you are to my policy?” he asked.[354] “The home truths that I can no longer tell you in my salon I shall certainly tell you in my review,” she replied. “Why, this is practically a declaration of war,” he exclaimed. “No, it is a proclamation of independence.” In her opening address to her readers she did not fail to appear as _la grande désabusée_. Disappointed with party politics, she looked forward to a time when party strife should cease and politics rise into the serene air of social science. For the next twenty years of her life Juliette Adam, or Juliette Lamber, as she still signed herself, was to live her life in _La Nouvelle Revue_. Henceforth her editorial duties absorbed her too completely to permit of her taking notes of conversations and keeping the diary which she has reproduced in her _Souvenirs_.[355] The last of her seven volumes of reminiscences closes with the inauguration of _La Nouvelle Revue_. Not content with a nominal editorship, Mme. Adam worked conscientiously in her office, herself reading most of the MSS. sent in. Methodically planning out her time, she rose early to read MSS., receive contributors, dictate to secretaries. She saw her milliner at breakfast, dispatching the meal and her orders together. To avoid wasting precious moments in trying on her own garments, she would criticise their fit on a dummy, another famous _mannequin d’osier_, moulded exactly to her shape. Then her work would be resumed until it was time for the afternoon drive and dinner, followed by a party or the play. The small hours of the morning often found her again at her desk. Such an expenditure of energy could not possibly continue indefinitely without a breakdown. There came a time when the doctor offered the alternative of rest or death. But Mme. Adam has always been one of those who would willingly die at her task. She prefers to wear out rather than to rust out. The doctor found his warning unheeded, consequently he changed his tactics. When he threatened her with the loss of her good looks, she immediately gave way. Leaving the review in the hands of a competent editor, she took several months’ rest; and when she returned to her directorship it was no longer to work with the feverish energy of yore. By that time she was surrounded by a band of talented and zealous helpers, _les jeunes_ whom she had discovered and to whom she could entrust much of the personal supervision which in earlier years had devolved upon her alone. One of these lieutenants was M. Léon Daudet, the son of her friend Alphonse, and to-day editor of _L’Action Française_. In his book, _L’Entre-deux-Guerres_, published in 1915, M. Daudet draws to the life _la grande Française_, whom for a quarter of a century he has been proud to call _ma chère patronne_.