The most serious of the charges brought against Mme. Adam is that of being _un génie démolisseur_. To those who make this accusation we would reply that it reveals a complete misunderstanding of Mme. Adam’s mind and temperament. It is true that her recollections show _la grande Française_ to be also _la grande Désabusée_, disappointed with the imperfect realisation of those high republican ideals held up before her youthful mind by her revolutionary father and his comrades of 1848. But that one in whom hopefulness and optimism had ever predominated should now give way to despair, that one so passionately patriotic should ever completely lose faith in _la patrie_, is impossible. Even in the days when she saw, to her sorrow, _la patrie_ forgetting _la Revanche_ and pursuing what seemed to her the disastrous dream of colonial dominion, she could still write: “_L’esprit ailé de l’avenir s’est posé aux confins de notre horizon; il nous apparaît là-bas, là bas, mais clairement_.”[396] M. Léon Daudet believes that her great strength, _sa principale force_, resides in the fact that she has never despaired.[397] In the most desperate of situations she is always convinced that _il y a toujours dans un coin une petite chance que l’on n’a pas entrevue_. And what is this _petite chance dans un coin_ which, when the war is over and Frenchmen have time to think about domestic politics, Mme. Adam believes may deliver _la patrie_ from the evils of political corruption and maladministration, the existence of which cannot be denied by the most fervent admirers of France? Mme. Adam’s opinion is that these serious flaws in the body politic proceed largely from over-centralisation. With her fellow-nationalist, Charles Maurras,[398] Mme. Adam advocates decentralisation. She would like to see the revival of the old provincial assemblies. When, in Alsace, France comes into her own again, might not that ancient institution, the Alsatian Landschutz, respected by the autocratic Louis XIV and even to a certain extent by the despotic German, serve as a model for similar assemblies throughout the French provinces? Thus might provincial France be delivered from the octopus of Paris. Enthusiastic for “her Paris” as Mme. Adam has ever been, she nevertheless realises that the hereditary virtues of France are best exemplified in the provinces. With the literary movement of “regionalism” initiated by Taine, continued by Mistral and Maurice Barrès, she has ever sympathised. Her own early novels are redolent with the breath of her native Picardy, her later books with the spirit of that gay Provence which is the land of her adoption.