With a merry laugh as gay as the blue sky of France, she would set to play together or to act in a charade journalists and authors who but a few days before had been at loggerheads. To Judet of _L’Eclair_ she would give the opportunity of being revenged at skittles on his antagonist, that abusive Léon Daudet who in _L’Action Française_ was given to denouncing him as _ce vain colosse_, “outvying in foppishness the goose and the peacock.” She would compel Maurice Barrès to disguise his boredom as he listened to the latest lucubration of his aged fellow-academician, Jean Aicard. She would severely lecture Paul Bourget on the looseness of that unacademical expression _cependant que_. She would dispel the melancholy of the author of _Fantôme d’Orient_ and _Fleurs d’Ennui_ until, like the gayest of butterflies, he disported himself in the sunshine of her presence. And then, with a wave of her wand, she would summon the whole company to her theatre to help in devising a charade which should render that impossible word _autobus_ set by la Duchesse d’Uzès. In the quietude of week-days at Gif, and after she had retired from _La Nouvelle Revue_ in 1899, Mme. Adam found time to review the varied episodes of her romantic life, to sort her old papers, to fix her recollections of persons, things and movements, and to arrange and publish them in seven volumes of _Souvenirs_, which appeared at intervals between 1902 and 1910.[393] “It may be well,” she writes in her Preface to the first volume, “to fix a departing age before the eyes of those who are hurrying towards an age which is dawning. It is the pleasure and the privilege of old people to tell of yesterday’s happenings, especially if they do not insist upon the superiority of and perpetually draw a moral from that which has disappeared.”