Mme. Adam’s own attitude remained irreconcilably _abstentioniste_. She had no sympathy whatever with those who, like her husband’s friend, Jules Grévy, took the oath to the Empire in order to upset it. “_Prêter un serment qu’on est résolu à ne pas tenir_,” she writes, “_c’est être déloyal et coupable_.”[114] Imagine her horror, therefore, when she found her own husband wavering—first inclined to listen to the arguments of his friend Thiers, and then, on the eve of the 1869 election, announcing that he is going to his native Normandy, there to stand as candidate for the village of Brionne.[115] “And _you_ will take the oath—you?” “Yes; I have thought it well over. Whatever objection you may have to offer has been considered and rejected.” “It seemed,” writes Juliette, “as if a gulf had opened between us. What I could not say to him when he started, I wrote to him.” With her letter she enclosed others from friends who had written expressing their astonishment at his decision. One was from Louis Blanc. “That the young who never witnessed the crime of December should swear allegiance to the murderer I can understand,” he wrote. “But how can one who saw the blood flow, who heard the oath broken, forget, if his heart be kind and loyal?” One morning, shortly after this packet had been dispatched, Mme. Adam received a telegram from Brionne containing one word: “Come.” She and Alice obeyed. They arrived at Brionne on the very day when Adam was to take the oath. “I could not take it,” he said, “without being sure that you approve and that you realise its significance. Have you become any less narrow, any less bigoted, Juliette?”[116] But no, Mme. Adam was as resolute as ever. And her husband, yielding to her arguments, or unwilling to create between himself and his wife an impassable breach, told his electors that he found himself incapable of taking the oath. “The candidate who replaced him,” adds Juliette, “did so well that the electors bore him no grudge. As for me, I am prouder than ever to bear his name.”