My Literary Life. By Madame Edmond Adam. (T. Fisher Unwin.
8s. 6d.)—This is a very readable book dealing with one of the most interesting periods in the life of one of the sprightliest of French women, that in which she sought relief in literature from the misery of her unhappy first marriage. But it is not quite satisfactory, being in parts jerky and incoherent. Then, although many of the best-known personages in modern French politics and literature flit over Madame Adam's pages, such as Sainte-Beuve, Gambetta, and Taine, we never seem to get a good photograph, even a passable snap-shot, of any one of them. Undoubtedly her best characters are her female friends,—George Sand, Madame Fauvety, and, above all, Daniel Stern, otherwise the Comtesse D'Agoult. She is almost rapturous in her defence of George Sand, and quotes evidence which, so far as we know, is new of De Musset's views as given in his cups to a friend. Daniel Stern, whom she seems to have been unable to reconcile to George Sand, was, however, her most intimate friend, encouraging her when she began her literary work, which started with a vigorous attack on the "ideas" of Proudhon, and giving her advice—it appears at the end of the present volume—as to the formation of her celebrated salon. Among the most notable non-political figures in this book is Berlioz, whose uncompromising views of Wagner are worth reading from the musical, if not from the personal, point of view.
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