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By Root 1868 0

than a radiographic plate on which the layman imagines that the patient’s disease is inscribed in so many words, whereas in fact the plate furnishes simply one piece of material for study, to be combined with a number of others on which the doctor’s reasoning powers will be brought to bear and on which he will base his diagnosis. Thus the truth in politics, when one goes to well-informed men and imagines that one is about to grasp it, eludes one. Indeed, later on (to confine ourselves to the Dreyfus case), when so startling an event occurred as Henry’s confession, followed by his suicide, this fact was at once interpreted in opposite ways by the Dreyfusard ministers and by Cavaignac and Cuignet who had themselves made the discovery of the forgery and conducted the interrogation; more remarkable still, among the Dreyfusard ministers themselves, men of the same shade of opinion, judging not only from the same documents but in the same spirit, the part played by Henry was explained in two entirely opposite ways, one set seeing in him an accomplice of Esterhazy, the others assigning that role to du Paty de Clam, thus adopting a thesis of their opponent Cuignet and in complete opposition to their supporter Reinach. All that Bloch could elicit from M. de Norpois was that if it were true that the Chief of the General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, had had a secret communication sent to M. Rochefort, it was evident that a singularly regrettable irregularity had occurred.

“You may be quite sure that the War Minister must (in petto at any rate) have called down every curse on his Chief of Staff. An official disclaimer would not have been (to my mind) a work of supererogation. But the War Minister expresses himself very bluntly on the matter inter pocula. There are certain subjects, moreover, about which it is highly imprudent to create an agitation over which one cannot afterwards retain control.”

“But those documents are obviously fake,” said Bloch.

M. de Norpois made no reply to this, but declared that he did not approve of the public demonstrations of Prince Henri d’Orléans:16

“Besides, they can only ruffle the calm of the praetorium, and encourage disturbances which, looked at from either point of view, would be deplorable. Certainly we must put a stop to the anti-militarist intrigues, but neither can we tolerate a brawl encouraged by those elements on the Right who instead of serving the patriotic ideal themselves are hoping to make it serve them. Heaven be praised, France is not a South American replica, and the need has not yet been felt here for a military pronunciamento.”

Bloch could not get him to pronounce on the question of Dreyfus’s guilt, nor would he utter any forecast as to the judgment in the civil trial then proceeding. On the other hand, M. de Norpois seemed only too ready to expatiate on the consequences of the verdict.

“If it is a conviction,” he said, “it will probably be quashed, for it is seldom that, in a case where there has been such a number of witnesses, there is not some flaw in the procedure which counsel can raise on appeal. To return to Prince Henri’s outburst, I greatly doubt whether it met with his father’s approval.”

“You think Chartres is for Dreyfus?” asked the Duchess with a smile, her eyes rounded, her cheeks bright, her nose buried in her plate of petits fours, her whole manner deliciously scandalised.

“Not at all. I meant only that there runs through the whole family, on that side, a political sense of which we have seen the ne plus ultra in the admirable Princess Clémentine, and which her son, Prince Ferdinand, has kept as a priceless inheritance. You would never have found the Prince of Bulgaria clasping Major Esterhazy to his bosom.”

“He would have preferred a private soldier,” murmured Mme de Guermantes, who often met the Bulgarian at dinner at the Prince de Joinville’s, and had said to him once, when he asked if she was not jealous: “Yes, Your Highness, of your bracelets.”

“You aren’t going to Mme de Sagan’s ball this evening?” M. de Norpois asked Mme de Villeparisis, to cut