Mme. Adam has never been one who could completely cut herself off from Paris. Though she seldom goes to Paris now, Paris comes to her. And in her salon at Gif she keeps alive _cette causerie française_, which, alas! tends to disappear from the salons of the metropolis. In the hurly-burly of modern life that leisurely talk which alone, writes Mme. Adam, _entretient les vitalités de notre esprit_ grows more and more impossible. Before the war conversation was already a lost art. “When I begin to talk in a modern drawing-room,” says Mme. Adam, “I am told to be silent because I am interrupting a game of bridge, or because some one is going to dance the tango.” And even on those rare occasions when conversation was permitted, it was found that the dull weight of the Germanic spirit, then permeating French intellectual society, had extinguished the sparkle of French talk, had blunted the rapier of French irony. The professor with his monologue had insinuated himself into French drawing-rooms, silencing those scintillating interruptions, forbidding the smart give-and-take of brilliant repartee. “We are told,” protests Mme. Adam, “that our conversation is not _documenté_.” _La causerie française_, banished from the salon, was taking refuge in the club and the café. Has not Mme. Adam’s own _fils adoptif_, Léon Daudet, lately written:[391] “_Le café est l’école de la franchise et de la drôlerie spontanée, tandis que le salon est en général l’école du poncif et de la mode imbécile_”? But of Mme. Adam’s salon Daudet makes a notable exception. Of the Sunday and Tuesday afternoons at Gif he has painted a vivid picture,[392] to which may be added not a few interesting features. While of yore to the Sundays and Tuesdays of Gif Paris came by carriage or train, to-day it comes by automobile. Motorists have everything made easy for them: they are provided with a clear road-plan printed on a neat little card indicating the route from the Suresne Gate of the Bois de Boulogne as far as the spot where, but a few miles from their destination, friendly sign-posts begin to point _à l’Abbaye de Gif_. Before the war, on fine Sunday afternoons, on the terrace of Gif, might be found assembled sometimes as many as fifty persons, Royalists and Republicans, generals and admirals, bishops and deputies, academicians and journalists, among whose conflicting opinions their hostess’s tact and cordiality contrived to keep the peace in a marvellous manner.