Gambetta’s attitude towards Russia has puzzled not a few. It must ever be difficult to discover the personal views of so opportunist a statesman. “The real truth about Gambetta’s life, death and opinions will never be known,” said recently one of those with whom he was most intimately acquainted. In his early conversations with Mme. Adam he annoyed her extremely by his mistrust of Russia, which he shared with most French Radicals of that day, and which resulted from Russia’s autocratic Government and her treatment of the Poles. For Mme. Adam, to be the enemy of Germany was to be the friend of Russia. “_Anti-allemande passionnée et violente, j’étais logiquement slavophile_,” she writes.[365] And in one of the numerous quarrels with Gambetta at the time of his proposed interview with Bismarck, she confesses that she darted at him this insult: “You are Prussian, I remain Cossack.” But Gambetta was well inured to such venomous words from his too candid friend; and the patient endurance with which he suffered them speaks volumes both for his equanimity and for Mme. Adam’s powers of fascination. If France must needs emerge from her isolation and form an alliance with some European Power, Gambetta would have preferred that Power to be England rather than Russia. Mme. Adam, animated by her Picard dislike of England, unable to forgive us for standing aloof in 1870, would not hear of an English Alliance. There came a time, however, when Gambetta began to see that both an English and a Russian alliance might be necessary to protect France against German aggression. Dimly foreshadowing the Triple Entente of a quarter of a century later, he began to overcome his dislike of Russia. Writing to Mme. Adam in January 1877,[366] he says in reference to Russia’s alarm at Bismarck’s designs on the Baltic Provinces: “_Le ressentiment est flagrant chez les Russes, il s’agit de l’exploiter_.” Gambetta, however, does not take to himself the credit of originating the idea of the Franco-Russo-British Entente. In his recently published letters to his friend and supporter Ranc,[367] he ascribes this idea to the Prince of Wales (afterwards Edward VII), whom, in February 1878, he met more than once at the Café Anglais. By the Prince’s insight into European politics Gambetta was deeply impressed. In this matter he was far from sharing the views of a recent English writer on King Edward.[368] Was that growing passion for luxury, that love of fashionable life, which Mme. Adam so frequently deplores, casting a spell over Gambetta and warping his judgment so far as to make him attribute to his royal acquaintance opinions which were really his own? We cannot say. But at any rate, in this letter to Ranc, Gambetta describes His Royal Highness as predicting that Russia would find her political aspirations in the Near East thwarted by Austria, that Austria would influence Roumania, that together Austria, Roumania and Turkey would ally themselves against Russia. “What a conflict!”