ADAM, PAUL (1862–), French novelist, was born in Paris on the 7th of December 1862. He was prosecuted for his first novel, Chair molle (1885), but was acquitted. He collaborated with Jean Moréas in Le thé chez Miranda (1886), and with Moréas and Gustave Kahn he founded the Symboliste, coming forward as one of the earliest defenders of symbolism. Among his numerous novels should be noted Le mystère des foules (2 vols., 1895), a study in Boulangism, Lettres de Malaisie (1897), a fantastic romance of imaginary future politics. In 1899 he began a novel-sequence, giving the history of the Napoleonic campaigns, the restoration and the government of Louis Philippe, comprising La force (1899), L’enfant d’Austerlitz (1901), La ruse (1902), and Au soleil de Juillet (1903). In 1900 he wrote a Byzantine romance, Basile et Sophia.