Juliette ADAM. Signed autograph manuscript on Alsace

  
Signed autograph manuscript (between 1904 and 1936); 8 pages in-8 (200 x 155) on draft paper, written on the rectos only, accompanied by a card addressed to the Abbey of Gif (Seine and Oise). Her activities as a salonnière made her one of the key figures in the French literary scene of the 19th century. A friend of George Sand, she published the first novels of Paul Bourget, Octave Mirbeau... Before lending her support to Pierre Loti, Alexandre Dumas fils, and Léon Daudet.

In this text, which celebrates liberated Alsace, she reveals a more political facet of her character. The activist awakens to celebrate this martyr province of the Great War to which she directly addresses: "For the second time, since your liberation, I come to you, our Alsace! I give to my life, so old! The unequaled joy of seeing you freed from the yoke that was as cruel to our defeated souls as it was to you, imprisoned.

In a moving tribute published in the August 25, 1936 edition of the newspaper L'Action Française, titled M. Juliette Adam is dead, the journalist recalled her involvement in the battle for Alsace and Lorraine: "The victory of 1918 and the return to the motherland of the two lost provinces for which she had fought so hard during the interwar years were for her a great joy.

This testimony helps to better understand the soaring expressions that punctuate this text: "O sentinel of our most protective border, O guardian of our Gallo-Roman intellectuality since 1871, I have prayed, I have begged God for victory to return to us, and the majority of the invaders of Alsace after so many long years have been expelled from our homes by this victory. But has too much remained, does one not return one by one to help denounce our fatal divergences created by the enemy occupation and by time? Certainly, the great Alsatian soul had not for an instant ceased to be French in all its sublime fidelity. The card accompanying the manuscript is on the letterhead of the Abbey of Gif (Seine and Oise), a property acquired by Juliette Adam in 1904, where she lived until her death in 1936. In this letter accompanying the manuscript, she mentions the complicated status of Corsica as an echo to her text on Alsace.