(Madame Edmond Adam, née Juliette Lamber)

AS the founder of the Nouvelle Revue and an essayist on moral, political, and social topics, Madame Adam is perhaps the best representative France has given the world of the “New Woman.” Since the death of her second husband in 1877, she has devoted a large share of her attention to politics, and her salon has been a rendezvous for the more advanced Republicans of Paris. She was born at Verberie, October 4th, 1836, and, by a number of works published under her maiden name of Juliette Lamber, gave promise of the masculine quality of intellect which appears in her later writings. Her first husband, M. La Messine, dying in the early years of their married life, she married a second husband, M. Edmond Adam, prefect of police in Paris, whom also she survives. Among her works are a “Life of Garibaldi,” “Studies of Contemporaneous Greek Poets,” and a considerable number of essays and social studies, some of which were published in the Nouvelle Revue in a series said to be by various hands, but having the common signature, “Paul Vasili.”

  Intellectually, Madame Adam is a product of the same moral forces which produced Baudelaire in France and Swinburne in England. She stands for the belief, peculiarly characteristic of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, that the old standards, whether Greek, Gothic, Hebrew, or Christian, have been superseded by the moral laws and artistic canons of a new cycle. The reaction towards the Scott school of Romantic fiction during the last five years seems to have distracted the public mind from problems with which Madame Adam and her generation were so largely concerned.