It would be difficult to imagine surroundings more essentially French than those amidst which Juliette Adam spends the evening of her days. High above the large and commodious house, with its spacious salon, filled with memorials of its mistress’s travels, rise in the park the ruins of the Abbey refectory and chapel. The ivy which covers them our Abbess, who has ever been an enthusiastic gardener, tenderly trims with her own hand, despite her fourscore years. Gradually, under her direction, new portions of the ruins are being excavated. Every time one visits Gif one finds some fresh part of the Abbey has been unearthed. Each stone as it is dug up Mme. Adam reveres as a relic of _le Grand Siècle_. There is not one of those mute memorials of past glory which Mme. Adam’s vivid Gallic imagination does not invest with some special physiognomy; this is like Juno’s sacred owl, that bears the semblance of a Gorgon. “And is not this the image of _le Père Eternel_?” she said to me, pointing to a rocky fragment in the centre of her _bois sacré_. I, alas! was afflicted with blindness. I was as dull of comprehension as the mother of the little boy who, asking her son what he was drawing and being told it was God, answered, “But no one knows what He is like,” and was promptly crushed by the answer, “When I have finished they will know.” In this beautiful country home Mme. Adam practises with a success no less signal than that of her old friend, Victor Hugo, the art of being a grandparent. Her daughter Alice had married in February 1873 a brilliant young medical student, Paul Segond, who became one of the leaders of the medical profession in France.[388] “Do not marry your daughter into a circle too political,” had been George Sand’s advice. But George Sand’s young friend “Topaz” had married herself; for her mother had suffered too much from a _mariage de convenance_ to wish to impose one on her daughter. Though the bridegroom was no politician, his mother-in-law’s political fervour could not refrain from introducing into the wedding ceremony a political significance. The chief witnesses who signed the marriage register were Louis Blanc, the leader of the old Republicans, and Gambetta, the leader of the new. At the ball in the evening the appearance of the ex-Mayoress of the conquered town of Mulhouse, Mme. Koechlin-Schwartz, wearing in her white hair a tricolour cockade, reminded the guests of the national defeat and of _la Revanche_. The ex-Mayoress was escorted by her husband the Mayor, whom the Prussians had two years before held as a hostage. A few weeks before the wedding George Sand, in her New Year’s letter to Juliette Adam, had written: “Who knows whether the year which opens to-morrow may not make you a grandmother?”[389]