“‛I no longer love war,’ said Skobeleff. ‛No, I love it no longer; I have waged it too often,’ he added, as if replying to his own inmost thought. ‛No victory is worth all it costs of energy, of strength, of public money and of men. Yet there is a war for which I should ever be ready, and which I should never deem too costly. It is a holy war. Sooner or later the devourers of the Slavs must be themselves devoured. On that day, I see it, I will it, I predict it, Germany will be devoured by the Slavs, the Latins, the Franks.’” Mme. Adam and her new friend had far too much in common for their friendship to cease with her departure from Petrograd. He followed her to Paris. There he visited her salon. They agreed to work together, to unite all their forces in order to oppose what Skobeleff described as _le système d’enveloppement bismarckien_. But their hopes were disappointed by Skobeleff’s early death at the age of thirty-nine. Shortly before he died he said to one of his compatriots: “Carry on my work, and do not neglect to bring into all your plans our friend in Paris.” Mme. Adam is one of those who lay at Bismarck’s door the sudden passing of this brilliant soldier and irreconcilable Germanophobe. But the Chancellor has enough crimes accredited to him without this. A distinguished French journalist, who knew Skobeleff, and in many ways greatly admired him, wrote to me recently: “I do not believe he was assassinated by orders from Bismarck. I know too much of his death to believe that. _Mais les défauts de ses propres qualités l’ont conduit à une mort rapide._” The effect of Skobeleff’s influence on Mme. Adam was to render truer than ever the words of her friend, Mme. Novikoff: _elle a la Russie au cœur_.[375] Now with all her heart and soul she began to work for a Franco-Russian Alliance. It was precisely this alliance that Bismarck feared. Mme. Adam’s persistent advocacy of it in the columns of _La Nouvelle Revue_, and the numerous charges on which she never ceased to indict the Chancellor, provoked him on one occasion to cry out: “Is there no one who can silence _cette diablesse de femme_?” The German Ambassador at Paris is said to have repeated this question to M. Jules Ferry, then Prime Minister. “Only one person,” he replied, “and he unhappily is dead: her husband, Edmond Adam.” Ferry, however, Mme. Adam has told me, desiring to obtain German support or acquiescence in his policy of colonial expansion, and wishful, therefore, to please the German Government, did ask her to discontinue her Germanophobe articles. “Only if you imprison me,” she replied. “And what an honour! To be imprisoned for attacking Bismarck.”