She stayed at the Hôtel de l’Europe. There she was visited by numerous persons of distinction. No one impressed her so much as General Skobeleff, the heroic defender of Plevna. They were well matched, these two passionate patriots—this handsome Western woman, _la grande Française_, and this typical Cossack, this fervent Slav. He was called “the white General,” because it was his custom to wear, in battle, a white coat, which challenged the enemy’s bullets to defile its spotless purity with blood-stains. Alike for the Russian Pan-Slavist and the French _Revancharde_ there was but one device, “the German is the enemy.” No one in Russia did Mme. Adam long more to see than this hero of the Russo-Turkish War. Their meeting, which occurred in the vast yellow drawing-room of the Hôtel de l’Europe in January 1882, she has vividly described in her little book on Skobeleff, first published in 1886, and reprinted in a revised edition in 1916. “We looked at one another,” she writes, “not wishing to make any trivial remarks.... It was of his cause I spoke to him before my own. And this is what he said to me about the Balkan peoples: ‛I assure you they are tyrannised over. They must fill you with pity. For example, in Bosnia, in Herzegovina, the oppressor forces the children to serve in the very army which has slain their fathers and brothers. Into their hands is put a gun all dripping with the blood of Slavs. This thought drives me mad, as it must you when you think of the people of Alsace-Lorraine serving in the Prussian army.’ “‛Yes, but they were actually our brethren, they were so near to us, the Slavs of Bosnia and Herzegovina are not so intimately related to you.’ “‛Not these Slavs! Why, they are our brethren,’ he said in a tone which thrilled me through and through. ‛Pray do not let us argue about the relative acuteness of our suffering. Russia waged war in order to deliver the Slavs beyond the Danube from the Turkish yoke.... And now she cannot permit Austria’s yoke to be substituted for Turkey’s. The former is also more oppressive, for it tyrannises not merely over the individual’s person, but over his conscience....’ “‛Austria,’ I argued, ‛has for some years been hardly responsible for her action in the East. It is Germany who is urging her to dominate over the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula, and to conquer them both by force of arms and by diplomacy.’ “‛Germany!’ he repeated, and into that one word he breathed all the fire of his hatred. “The preachers of the Crusades must have looked like that apostle of the Slavs.