The Proud Tower (38 page)

Nevertheless
Les Preuves
had shaken him. To answer certain of Jaurès’ charges, he ordered yet another examination of the documents, this time by an officer not previously involved in the case. Working at night by the light of a lamp this officer noticed that the writing paper of the crucial Panizzardi letter was gummed together from two halves of the same brand of paper ruled in lines of faintly different colors. Colonel
^*
Henry had used the blank parts of two real letters from Panizzardi to construct his document. The crucial letter was a forgery. Alerted by this find, the investigating officer looked further, was led down dark warrens of discrepancies and dutifully reporting his discoveries, laid ruin in the lap of the Minister of War.

Cavaignac, conqueror of the Affair, saw the whole of the case he had presented to the Chamber and the country shattered like glass. Its crux was a fraud; the statement on which he had won national acclaim was a fraud. For a man of his principles, to hush up the discovery was impossible; he had to face the tragedy of being wrong. Not being of the Army made it easier. He ordered the arrest of Colonel Henry, who was taken to Cherche Midi where Dreyfus had been lodged. That night, August 31, 1898, Colonel Henry committed suicide with the razor they had left for him.

Army officers, when they heard the news, were aghast; some wept. It was a stain on the Army’s honor “worse than Sedan,” said one. Léon Blum, vacationing in Zurich, opened the door of his hotel room at 10
P.M.
to the porter who brought the news. “I don’t think that ever in my whole life have I felt an equal excitement.… The immense, the infinite joy that rushed through me had its sources in the triumph of
reason.
The truth had actually won.” This time, at last and for certain, it seemed to the Dreyfusards they had accomplished their task. In a sense they had, for the truth was now disclosed. To impose it was another matter.

Cavaignac resigned and within two weeks his successor, the sixth Minister of War since Dreyfus’ arrest, also resigned. The Government, surrendering to what was now unavoidable, submitted the case to the Cour de Cassation (literally, “Court of Breaking”), whose task was to decide whether a given verdict should be upheld or broken. The action, taken as mistrust of the Generals, caused another War Minister to resign. Awaiting the Court’s decision whether or not to accept the case, Paris boiled with excitement. If the Court took the case, the Secret File must come under civilian review, which the Army was committed to prevent. In England the sober
Spectator
thought the logic of the situation must lead to an Army coup d’état. In Paris the royalists and wild men of the Rightist leagues, hoping to provoke exactly that, spread rumors of a plot, called meetings, sent out their hired bands to shout in the streets. It was Déroulède’s longed-for hour.

An irrepressible agitator, a poet and a deputy, long-legged and long-nosed like Don Quixote, Déroulède saw windmills to charge in every aspect of the Republic. A veteran of 1870, he had founded his Ligue des Patriotes in 1882 to keep alive the spirit of
revanche.
It bore the legend “1870–18—–” with the second date left significantly blank and a motto of noble meaninglessness,
France Quand Même.
Déroulède wrote patriotic verse, loathed the royalists as much as the Republic and had “the political vision of a child.” To foment a crisis he now joined forces with Jules Guérin, active head of the Anti-Semitic League, which was receiving a subsidy from the Duc d’Orléans, who hoped to ride in on the tail of the crisis. Tension grew when a strike of 20,000 construction workers on the site of the Exposition of 1900 caused the Government to bring in troops to occupy the railroad stations and patrol the boulevards. Word spread of a coup planned for the reopening of the Chamber on October 25. Déroulède and Guérin called for a huge protest meeting in front of the Palais Bourbon to demonstrate “confidence in the Army and abhorrence of traitors.”

The Socialists, or a part of them, suddenly discovered the Republic was worth saving. However dedicated to overthrow of the existing system, they did not want it overthrown by the Right. Besides, they were discovering from their local committees that their neutrality in the Affair was compromising them with some of their constituents. “Because we seem to oppose all forms of bourgeois republicanism,” wrote a party worker from the provinces, “many people take us for the allies of monarchist reactionaries.”

The Socialist leaders, sending out notices by
pneumatique
, called an emergency meeting of their several groups to organize a united front in face of the peril, and such seemed the urgency of the moment that they succeeded in forming a joint, if temporary, Committee of Vigilance. Following proper revolutionary procedure, it decided to hold meetings every night and call upon the people for mass demonstrations. Clashes with the Rightist leagues, riots, even civil war loomed. In awful anxiety the Dreyfusard League for the Rights of Man called upon all Republicans to disdain fracas in the streets, but Jaurès saw Socialist opportunity: “Paris is trembling with resolve … the proletariat is organizing.” Warned, however, by Guesde that to provoke an outbreak would be playing the game of the Generals, who were believed to be waiting for a riot to seize power, the Committee of Vigilance had second thoughts. Socialists would provoke nothing, it announced. “Revolutionary groups are ready to act or abstain, according to the circumstances.”

So certain were the royalists of “the day” that André Buffet,
chef de cabinet
for the Duc d’Orléans, telegraphed the Pretender that his presence in nearby Brussels on October 24 was “indispensable.” The Duke, who was hunting in Bohemia, replied, “Should I come at once or can I wait here? Urgent business.” Adamant, Buffet wired back, “Approach frontier necessary,” but the Duke, better advised, stayed away.

The day came, crowds surrounded the Chamber, filled the Place de la Concorde and nearby streets, slogans were shouted, red flags waved. “It seemed like the eve either of a new Commune or of a coup by a dictator.” The atmosphere was threatening: troops and police were everywhere. The day passed, however, and the Republic still stood, for the Right lacked that necessary chemical of a coup—a leader. It had its small, if loud, fanatics; but to upset the established government in a democratic country requires either foreign help or the stuff of a dictator. As Clemenceau had harshly said when Boulanger shot himself on the grave of his mistress, inside the “Man on Horseback” was only “the soul of a second lieutenant.”

Events rushed on. On October 29 the Cour de Cassation announced it would accept the case and begin its inquiry,
VICTOIRE
! proclaimed
l’Aurore
in the same type as
J’ACCUSE
! Revisionists hailed the decision as re-establishing civil power over the military. Then the Court demanded the Secret File. The Minister of War refused and resigned. The Government fell. For the next seven months the Court became the focus of the battle. From this point on, the Right was on the defensive and the Affair entered its period of greatest frenzy. The Court was excoriated by the Nationalist press as the “sanctuary of treason,” a “branch of the synagogue,” the “lair of Judas,” a “combination of Bourse and brothel.” The judges were variously “hirelings of Germany,” “valets of the synagogue” and “rogues in ermine.” Pressures of all kinds were exerted, both sides were accused of corrupting the judges, and the Nationalists succeeded in forcing the case out of the Criminal Chamber, which was considered too favorable, to the united Court of three chambers, which was considered more susceptible to pressure.

A Dreyfusard tempest raged at the same time over Picquart. To keep him from testifying before the Cour de Cassation the Army had transferred him to Cherche Midi preliminary to a court-martial. The League for the Rights of Man organized public protest meetings every night, in the provincial cities as well as in Paris. Jaurès’ name and prestige drew 30,000 to a meeting in Marseilles. He, Duclaux the scientist, Anatole France, Octave Mirbeau and Sebastian Faure were the favorite speakers. Workers and bourgeois, students and professors, working women and Society women crowded the halls and overflowed onto the sidewalks, applauded the famous orators and marched together to shout “
Vive Picquart!
” under the prison walls of Cherche Midi. Signatures for a protest on Picquart came in this time not by hundreds but by thousands, including thirty-four members of the Institut de France, a measure, as Reinach said, of the distance covered by truth on the march. Among the new names were Sarah Bernhardt and Hervé de Kerohant, editor of
Soleil
, formerly against Revision, who signed the protest as “Patriot, Royalist, Christian.” The historian and Academician Ernest Lavisse felt strongly enough to act, and as his gesture of personal protest, resigned his chair at St-Cyr.

Even the Anarchists, hitherto resolutely contemptuous and indifferent, were swept into the cause. Formerly they had denounced the Dreyfus “parade,” in the words of their newspaper,
Le Père Peinard
, as a “bunch of dirty types” led by Clemenceau and by “the old exploiter Scheurer-Kestner, the toad Yves Guyot [editor of
Le Siècle
], the hideous Reinach, three malefactors who helped to concoct the
lois scélérates.
” Now, however, when their bourgeois enemies cried out the sufferings of the two martyred prisoners of Devil’s Island and Cherche Midi, the Anarchists did the same for their own martyrs sent to forced labour in French Guiana. With a new interest in these cases the League for the Rights of Man succeeded in obtaining pardons for five of them.

Some on the Right could no longer keep their heads turned from the truth. Mme de Greffulhe, goddess of the
gratin
, becoming secretly convinced of Dreyfus’ innocence, wrote to the Kaiser asking to visit him to ascertain if the Germans really had employed Dreyfus as a spy. The only answer she received was a large basket of orchids. Proust chronicles the change in his character, the Prince de Guermantes, who confesses to Swann that after Colonel Henry’s suicide he has begun to read
Le Siècle
and
l’Aurore
secretly every day. He and his wife, unknown to each other, have asked the Abbé to say a mass for Dreyfus and his family, and discovered to each other’s astonishment that the Abbé too believes him innocent. Meeting the maid on the staircase carrying breakfast to the Princesse and concealing something under the napkin, the Prince discovers it to be
l’Aurore.

Below the trapped obstinacy of the Generals, some in the Army were deeply troubled. “Just among ourselves with no outsiders present,” an officer said to Galliffet while riding in a train, “we are not as anti-Revisionist as people think. On the contrary we too would like to see the light and see the culprits punished so that if wrongs have been committed the Army will not bear the responsibility.” He felt that if Picquart were tried and convicted public opinion would turn against the Army.

The Army’s cup of bitterness was filled when in the same week that the Cour de Cassation began its inquiry the order was given withdrawing Colonel Marchand from Fashoda. Jaurès lashed at the imperialist adventure as a crime of capitalism which had frivolously imperiled peace without preparing for the consequence of challenging England. As if his already strong intuitive perceptions had been sharpened by the Affair, he wrote with foreboding, “Peace has been left to the whim of chance. But if war breaks out it will be vast and terrible. For the first time it will be universal, sucking in all the continents. Capitalism has widened the field of battle and the entire planet will turn red with the blood of countless men. No more terrible accusation can be made against this social system.” In his time it was still possible to suppose the fault lay in the system, not humanity.

The Affair continued in its frenzy. When Reinach wrote a series of articles in
Le Siècle
accusing Colonel Henry of having had a “personal interest” in ruining Dreyfus, Drumont persuaded Mme Henry to sue him for libel and opened a public subscription in her behalf which became the rallying point for Nationalists of every degree. A banner reading “For the Widow and Orphan of Colonel Henry against the Jew Reinach” was stretched across the windows of the offices of
La Libre Parole
on the Boulevard Montmartre and lit up at night. Within a month fifteen thousand persons had contributed 130,000 francs. Their names and comments provided a history of the Right—of that or any time. Five hundred francs, the top sum, was subscribed by the Countess Odon de Montesquiou, née Bibesco, and thirty sous by a lieutenant “poor in money but rich in hate.” There were all varieties of hate, chiefly for Jews, expressed in suggestions for skinning, branding, boiling in oil, burning with vitriol, emasculation and other forms of foul or physical punishment. There was hate for foreigners and intellectuals and even a “500-year-old hate for England” but there were many who gave their francs out of love or pity for the widow and child. An abbé contributed for “defence of eternal law against Judaeo-Christian deceit,” a music professor for “Frenchmen against foreigners,” a civil servant “who wants God in the schools,” an anonymous donor “ruined by a Jew after six months of marriage,” a workingman as “the victim of the anarchist capitalists Jaurès and Reinach.” There were innumerable “true patriots” and one “Frenchman sick at heart.” There were
Vive!
’s for Drumont, Rochefort, Déroulède, Guérin, Esterhazy, the Duc d’Orléans,
l’Empereur, le Roi
, the Heroes of Austerlitz and Jeanne d’Arc. Reinach was the chief target; Dreyfus received hardly a mention. General Mercier subscribed a hundred francs without comment; the poet Paul Valéry three francs “not without reflection.”

Suddenly and strangely on top of all the excitement, the President of France, Félix Faure, died. The public sensed something unexplained and the truth in fact was too embarrassing to be told. Proud of his amatory prowess, President Faure died in the performance thereof in a ground-floor room of the Elysée. An aura of something hushed up was added to the atmosphere already charged with aggression and suspicion.