“LA NOUVELLE REVUE”
1879-1899
“La Nouvelle Revue _devait être le foyer, de l’idée, de la
revanche et le lien de réunion de la France régenerée_.”—Léon
Daudet.
“_La Nouvelle Revue_ ... was to be the organ of the young Republic
in periodical literature.”—Richard Whiteing.
Intensity is a dominant note of Mme. Adam’s nature. It characterises
alike her hatred and her loves, her preferences and her prejudices.
While, as Gambetta remarked, she lets her rancour run dangerously near
ferocity,[344] she treasures her friendships as the most precious
gifts of the gods. Nothing pleases her better than to help her
friends. “The surest way to my friendship,” she declares, “is to ask
me to render some service.”
Sitting next to Edmond de Goncourt at one of Alphonse Daudet’s
dinner-parties, she said, “I have a hundred friends ... and that is
about the number I need.... I am always grateful to people who make
demands on me. It is my life.... My energy loves to be serviceable.”
She has ever been ready to wear herself out in the cause of the
unfortunate, _pour s’intéresser aux pauvres diables_, as her friend
Léon Daudet expresses it. I find in one of her letters to me this
sentence: “_Chacune de vos lettres m’attache maternellement à vous;
c’est ainsi que j’aime le plus_.” In another letter she expresses this
very characteristic sentiment: “_C’est tout de suite ou jamais avec
moi. Vous avez senti qu’avec vous c’était tout de suite._” At a glance
she has always decided whether she likes or dislikes a person. If the
former, then she gives her confidence absolutely and completely. But
woe to the unhappy wight whom she finds in any fundamental matter
unworthy of that confidence. “I don’t envy any one who is Mme. Adam’s
enemy,” said Changarnier. “But,” replied Jules de Lasteyrie, “I do
envy any one who is her friend.”
In everything which concerns the welfare of her friends Mme. Adam
takes the deepest interest. I shall never forget her solicitude for
my safety in my numerous war-time Channel crossings. Immediately the
_Sussex_ went down, she wrote asking if I knew any one who was on
board. As the submarine menace grew more serious, whenever I returned
to England she would bombard me with letters and postcards clamouring
to be assured of my safety: “_Chère amie, ecrivez-moi vite que vous
êtes bien arrivée_”; then another card: “_Chère, très chère amie, je
vous supplie de m’envoyez ce simple mot sur une carte ‛arrivée.’_”
Finally, after the torpedoing of a French man-of-war and the loss
of the crew of six hundred, she writes: “_Il ne faut plus venir en
France sans une nécessité absolue, car je crois que les affreux Boches
ajouteront des crimes à leurs crimes_.” In another letter she had
written: “_Le dieu teuton demande des crimes journaliers_.”
Some of the most entrancing pages of Mme. Adam’s _Souvenirs_ tell
the story of her literary friendships with Victor Hugo, Gustave
Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet. It was in friendship that she found her
greatest consolation at the time of Adam’s death. Gambetta was with
her when the doctor gave up all hope of his recovery. “I shall return
this evening,” said her friend, “and many of us will come.” Her
husband during his last days liked to know that she was receiving as
usual.[345]
As the breach between Mme. Adam and Gambetta widened, her salon
underwent a change. Its mistress, disappointed with politics, turned
more and more to her artistic and literary friends. “If in politics
there is much to sadden me,” she wrote,[346] “I have my literary
consolations.” Coquelin was now to be found frequently at her
receptions, so were the Alsatian painter, Henner, the battle-painter,
Detaille, and Carolus Duran.
“My salon is quite changed,” she writes, “but it is no less lively
than of yore. Conversation has gained in brilliance what it has lost
in weight.”[347] Artists, authors, sculptors, musical composers were
delighted to meet one another; and the politicians who still visited
her were pleased to _se dépolitiquer_.
In this transformed salon there gradually materialised an idea which
Mme. Adam had long cherished.
Even before the war it had more than once been suggested to the
Adams that they should found a review. George Sand, while she was
visiting Bruyères, had tried to induce her host and hostess to start
a fortnightly magazine which might rival _La Revue des Deux Mondes_,
from the tyranny of whose editor, Buloz, she was suffering much.
“Adam,” she argued,[348] “has been a journalist, you are literary.
He with his critical gift and sound common sense would be an ideal
editor, you with your zeal and your passion for admiring would
discover new talent; you would revel, as I have always done, in the
joy of bringing others into notice.”
But Adam was too much of a politician to entertain the idea of
inaugurating a publication which should have a strong literary as well
as political strain. After Adam’s death, however, George Sand’s words
often recurred to his widow.
She first communicated her idea to Flaubert. That consummate master
of literary style had never made much money by his books. Mme. Adam,
who had been his friend for years, was seriously distressed by his
financial embarrassments, which he had vainly tried to conceal from
her. His pride rendered him one of the most difficult people to help.
But Mme. Adam, with his friends Taine, Tourguénieff, and others,
succeeded in persuading Jules Ferry, then President of the Chamber, to
appoint Flaubert librarian of the Arsenal Library. It was when he came
to thank Mme. Adam for her kindness in this matter that she broached
to him the subject of a magazine, in which he should be “the master of
masters,” if he would agree to contribute one article a month.[349]
“What!” he exclaimed in horror; “like that—by the yard, so much a
line!”
“No,” she replied, “so much the word, the letter! For anything by
Flaubert is gold, it is rubies.”
“That is enough,” he interrupted. “When I have completed my revision
of _L’Education Sentimentale_, of which I am publishing a new edition,
I will finish _Bouvard et Pecuchet_, and you shall have that.”
“You will swear it?”
“I swear it.”
Flaubert was greatly taken with the idea of the new venture. He
demanded a place in the review for his young disciple, Guy de
Maupassant. Littré, too, approved of the enterprise. He agreed to
write articles on philosophy. But Girardin was appalled at the
capital such an undertaking would require. Mme. Adam was known to
be wealthy, her husband having left her a considerable fortune.
Nevertheless, so many other similar enterprises—_La Revue Nationale_,
_La Revue Germanique_, _La Revue de Paris_—had foundered miserably,
having failed to hold their own against the veteran _Revue des Deux
Mondes_. Girardin had grave doubts as to the possibility of success.
Nevertheless, he thought it an excellent idea to replace the waning
influence of her salon by that of a review in which she could say
anything and criticise everything. He advised her to found a company,
in which she should take half the shares; and he himself promised to
become a shareholder.
Gambetta Mme. Adam found far from encouraging. “Whatever is this mad
idea of founding a review?” he exclaimed.
“Nothing is more serious,” she replied. “As republican politics
seem to have resolved themselves into nothing more nor less than a
distribution of rewards, my political salon has ceased to interest me.
It is about to be transformed into a literary salon with the solid
support of a review.”
“You won’t carry on your review for six months,” he retorted.... “You
don’t know what you are undertaking. How could a woman ever possess
enough authority, knowledge, energy, and business faculty to direct a
review?” Gambetta carefully ignored the famous _Revue Internationale_,
founded and successfully edited for some years by Napoléon I.’s
great-niece, Mme. Ratazzi, better known by her _nom de guerre_ of
“Baron Stock.”
“My dear friend,” replied Juliette Adam, “will you take the trouble
to remember this? I shall carry on my review for twenty years, and I
shall introduce to my readers twenty new authors.”
The question of the title puzzled her for some time. Then she writes—
“_Tiens, j’ai trouvé mon titre_ La Nouvelle Revue. _Ce titre me plaît
et plaît à tous. Je l’ai tant cherché, et il est venu tout seul._”
Her old friend Laurent Pichat, one of those who had always recommended
Adam, “that millionaire in wisdom and moderation,” as he called him,
to found a review, threw himself heart and soul into the project. “You
cannot have too many contributors,” he said.
It was chiefly among the young authors and writers that these
contributors were recruited. “Our review,” they called it, for them
it was founded. One of its main objects was to give the chance to the
young and the unknown which _La Revue des Deux Mondes_ denied them.
But, as we have seen, many of Mme. Adam’s old friends were also to
be represented in its pages: Challemel-Lacour, Spuller, and her
fellow-Hellenists Saint-Victor and de Ronchaud. Nothing pleased her
more than the interest taken in it by M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, a new
acquaintance whom she owed to Girardin.
Another of her great acquisitions was Alphonse Daudet, the writer
who to her seemed more essentially French than any other author of
that day. She considered him the equal of Balzac and Flaubert. She
had hardly dared to hope for his collaboration. All the greater,
therefore, was her joy when he assured her that any project destined
to help forward young writers might count on his support. And Daudet
was not one to give his name alone. As long as he lived the editress
of _La Nouvelle Revue_ found in him one of her most trusted supporters.
But the course of editing, like that of true love, does not always
run smooth; and Mme. Adam had her disappointments. One of these was
Taine’s refusal to collaborate. On the 29th of March, 1879,[350] he
wrote excusing himself on account of bad health and absence from
Paris. Though he was by no means devoted to _La Revue des Deux
Mondes_, he reminded the new editress that when an attempt had been
made fifteen years earlier to give that journal a rival, it had been
calculated that such a project could not be realised in less than six
years, and would necessitate an expenditure of a million of francs.
Mme. Adam hoped to carry out her design in two years, and with an
expenditure of five hundred thousand francs. On this basis and before
the summer of 1879 was over, the company had been formed. In June,
Mme. Adam had left her Paris flat for a house in the Parc de Séchan
at Montmorency. But on a lower floor of the Maison Sallandrouze she
established the office of the review. All through July, August and
September she was busy buying paper, negotiating with printers, making
all the preparations for her first number, which was to appear on the
1st of October.
Her salon—all that was left of it, for she had little time
for receiving visitors either at Montmorency or at La Maison
Sallandrouze—was becoming more and more _le Salon de la Nouvelle
Revue_. “_Je suis tout à la littérature_,” she writes.[351] On her
editor’s desk were accumulating piles and piles of MSS.—poems, plays,
stories, novels, political articles.
There was no lack of contributors. “_Les adhésions me viennent
en foule_,” she writes.[352] “All those who are suffering from
disillusionment, who are indignant to see our politicians prefer their
personal interests to the national cause, come to me.” On the whole,
she displayed in her choice of contributors a certain eclecticism.
Among her earliest collaborators we find women as well as men,
Protestants as well as Catholics, not only Frenchmen but foreigners,
the Russian novelist Tourguénieff, the Spanish statesman Castelar,
the Hungarian general Turr, the Italian publicist Gioia, the Turk
Abdul-Hakk, while English letters were represented by Sidney Colvin.
Sarcey and Théodore Reinach were to contribute literary articles,
Theuriet, François Coppée, Lecomte de Lisle poetry, General Gallifet
and Paul Marchand military articles, Joseph Reinach political.
Science was represented by Camille Flammarion and Stanislas Meunier,
history by Thierry and Gebhart, mythology by Elie Reclus, fiction by
Erckmann-Chatrian, and others whose names are to-day less known.
The first number appeared, as announced, on the 1st of October, 1879.
It received an excellent welcome.
The main object of the review was avowedly nationalist, to glorify
France. “With all my heart and soul,” writes the editor,[353] “I am
determined to make my review a credit to French letters, a reflection
of republican disinterestedness, patriotism and dignity. What should I
do ... did I not feel that I am about to create a work which shall be
essentially republican and liberal?”
Disappointed by the Government’s abandonment of the policy of
a territorial _revanche_, Mme. Adam set her heart on realising
_la revanche intellectuelle_. The more she thought of gathering
together all the talents, the more forcibly was she impressed by the
intellectual vigour, the scientific, literary and artistic superiority
of her country. “_Notre France est grande_,” she exclaims. “But every
one plunders her, and no one dreams of making her wealth known. This
is what I shall do.”
Gambetta, realising how far they had drifted apart, betrayed not a
little anxiety as to the political line she was likely to follow.
“Shall you be as hostile to me as you are to my policy?” he asked.[354]
“The home truths that I can no longer tell you in my salon I shall
certainly tell you in my review,” she replied.
“Why, this is practically a declaration of war,” he exclaimed.
“No, it is a proclamation of independence.”
In her opening address to her readers she did not fail to appear as
_la grande désabusée_. Disappointed with party politics, she looked
forward to a time when party strife should cease and politics rise
into the serene air of social science. For the next twenty years
of her life Juliette Adam, or Juliette Lamber, as she still signed
herself, was to live her life in _La Nouvelle Revue_. Henceforth
her editorial duties absorbed her too completely to permit of her
taking notes of conversations and keeping the diary which she has
reproduced in her _Souvenirs_.[355] The last of her seven volumes of
reminiscences closes with the inauguration of _La Nouvelle Revue_.
Not content with a nominal editorship, Mme. Adam worked
conscientiously in her office, herself reading most of the MSS. sent
in. Methodically planning out her time, she rose early to read MSS.,
receive contributors, dictate to secretaries. She saw her milliner
at breakfast, dispatching the meal and her orders together. To avoid
wasting precious moments in trying on her own garments, she would
criticise their fit on a dummy, another famous _mannequin d’osier_,
moulded exactly to her shape. Then her work would be resumed until it
was time for the afternoon drive and dinner, followed by a party or
the play. The small hours of the morning often found her again at her
desk.
Such an expenditure of energy could not possibly continue indefinitely
without a breakdown. There came a time when the doctor offered the
alternative of rest or death. But Mme. Adam has always been one of
those who would willingly die at her task. She prefers to wear out
rather than to rust out. The doctor found his warning unheeded,
consequently he changed his tactics. When he threatened her with the
loss of her good looks, she immediately gave way. Leaving the review
in the hands of a competent editor, she took several months’ rest; and
when she returned to her directorship it was no longer to work with
the feverish energy of yore. By that time she was surrounded by a band
of talented and zealous helpers, _les jeunes_ whom she had discovered
and to whom she could entrust much of the personal supervision which
in earlier years had devolved upon her alone. One of these lieutenants
was M. Léon Daudet, the son of her friend Alphonse, and to-day
editor of _L’Action Française_. In his book, _L’Entre-deux-Guerres_,
published in 1915, M. Daudet draws to the life _la grande Française_,
whom for a quarter of a century he has been proud to call _ma chère
patronne_.
He illustrates Mme. Adam’s social tact in the story he tells of a
dinner-party at his father’s house. That evening the guests were the
Duc d’Aumale, M. de Freycinet, the General de Gallifet, Magnard,
editor of the _Figaro_, the ill-fated Calmette, who was to succeed
him, and about twenty others. Henry James used to say that French
dinner-parties always somewhat resemble a session of the Convention.
And at this party the noise of debate waxed especially high, for the
talk fell on a subject still delicate: the Commune. And the discussion
might well have culminated in more than one of the invited sending his
representatives next morning to some fellow-guest, had not Mme. Adam
skilfully smoothed down the angles of controversy and finally led the
conversation on to less dangerous ground.
Fulfilled beyond her greatest expectations were Mme. Adam’s hopes
that her review might serve young writers and French literature by
revealing new talent. For it was in the pages of this magazine that
French readers first became acquainted with many of _les jeunes_
who to-day occupy the very first rank. Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget,
Marcelle Tinayre and Anatole France are some of those who in _La
Nouvelle Revue_ first began to climb the ladder of fame. Here appeared
Pierre Loti’s first novel, _Le Mariage de Loti_, followed by _Le
Roman d’un Spahi_ and _Fleurs d’Ennui_. Those _Essais de Psychologie
Contemporaine_, which many regard as Paul Bourget’s most valuable
contribution to French letters, Mme. Adam had the honour of publishing
in 1884, as well as several of the same author’s early novels:
_L’Irréparable_, _Deuxième Amour_, _Cruelle Enigme_, _Crime d’Amour_,
which all appeared in the early eighties. Many years later, in 1898,
advised by Alphonse Daudet, who had read the manuscript, Mme. Adam
introduced to her readers the first novel of that gifted woman writer,
Marcelle Tinayre.
One of Mme. Adam’s first meetings with Anatole France was in 1879,
when they travelled together to a party given by La Société des Gens
de Lettres in Edmond About’s park at Malabry. Then, as we may well
imagine, Mme. Adam was so charmed by the gifted young French author
that she enrolled him among _les jeunes_ of her review; and in the
next year appeared in its pages _Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard_,
followed two years later by _Le Petit Bonhomme_, which was to be
published in volume under the title of _Pierre Nozière_.
Mme. Adam and Anatole France remained friends until the Dreyfus
affair. Then, like so many other friends, they parted company.
Mme. Adam’s nationalism involved antagonism to the Jews, whom she
believed incapable of espousing the cause of any race but their
own. It involved also a belief that the army can do no wrong. Hence
she regarded as final the court-martial’s condemnation of Alfred
Dreyfus. Anatole France, on the other hand, who was at that time _le
grand homme_ of a famous Semitic salon, became a fervent Dreyfusard.
The _Affaire_ resulted in a curious reshuffle in French social and
political life. M. France found himself ranged with some who had
once been his enemies. One of these was Émile Zola. In the past, his
gross realism had outraged the classical and aristocratic taste of
M. France as much as it had that of Mme. Adam. But now, battling in
a common cause, these two former foes found one another by no means
antipathetic. While reconciled with old enemies, however, M. France
found himself parted from old friends; not from Mme. Adam only, but
from one who had been a close comrade of his earlier literary career,
from Paul Bourget. With Pierre Loti and with her whom they were
both proud to call their intellectual mother, M. Bourget took the
nationalist side. He also, disappointed with the Republic’s failure
to realise his ideals, was turning Romewards. We may regard him, with
Mme. Adam, as the first fruits of that Catholic revival which was
to be the dominant note of French intellectual society in the early
twentieth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[344] _Souvenirs_, VII. 87.
[345] _Souvenirs_, VI. 470.
[346] _Ibid._, VII. 241.
[347] _Ibid._, 331.
[348] _Souvenirs_, III. 227.
[349] _Ibid._, VII. 321.
[350] _Souvenirs_, VII. 365.
[351] _Souvenirs_, VII. 404.
[352] _Ibid._, 366.
[353] _Ibid._, 392.
[354] _Souvenirs_, VII. 324.
[355] _Après l’Abandon de la Revanche._