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By Root 1645 0

been alive at the time, they would have been for Dreyfus, without having any clearer idea of what the Affair had been about than Comtesse Edmond de Pourtalès or the Marquise de Galliffet, other luminaries already extinct at the date of their birth. For on the night of the fog the noblemen of the café, who were in due course to become the fathers of these retrospectively Dreyfusard young intellectuals, were still bachelors. Naturally the idea of a rich marriage was present in the minds of all their families, but none of them had yet brought such a marriage off. Still only potential, this rich marriage which was the simultaneous ambition of several of them (there were indeed several “good matches” in view, but after all the number of big dowries was considerably below that of the aspirants to them) merely tended to create among these young men a certain amount of rivalry.

As ill luck would have it, Saint-Loup remaining outside for a few minutes to explain to the driver that he was to call for us again after dinner, I had to go in alone. Now, to begin with, once I had ventured into the turning door, a contrivance to which I was unaccustomed, I began to fear that I should never succeed in getting out again. (Let me note here for the benefit of lovers of verbal accuracy that the contrivance in question, despite its peaceful appearance, is known as a “revolver,” from the English “revolving door.”) That evening the proprietor, unwilling either to brave the elements outside or to desert his customers, nevertheless remained standing near the entrance so as to have the pleasure of listening to the joyful complaints of the new arrivals, all aglow with the satisfaction of people who had had trouble getting there and been afraid of getting lost. The smiling cordiality of his welcome was, however, dissipated by the sight of a stranger incapable of disengaging himself from the rotating sheets of glass. This flagrant sign of ignorance made him frown like an examiner who has a good mind not to utter the formula: Dignus est intrare. As a crowning error I went and sat down in the room set apart for the nobility, from which he came at once to root me out, with a rudeness to which all the waiters immediately conformed, and showed me to a place in the other room. This was all the less to my liking because the seat was in the middle of a crowded bench and I had opposite me the door reserved for the Hebrews which, since it did not revolve, opened and closed every other minute and kept me in a horrible draught. But the proprietor declined to move me, saying: “No, sir, I cannot disturb everybody just for you.” Presently, however, he forgot this belated and troublesome guest, captivated as he was by the arrival of each newcomer who, before calling for his beer, his wing of cold chicken, or his hot grog (it was by now long past dinner-time), must first, as in the old romances, sing for his supper by relating his adventure as soon as he entered this asylum of warmth and security where the contrast with the perils just escaped engendered the sort of gaiety and sense of comradeship that create a cheerful harmony round the camp fire.

One reported that his carriage, thinking it had got to the Pont de la Concorde, had circled the Invalides three times, another that his, in trying to make its way down the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, had driven into a clump of trees at the Rond-Point, from which it had taken three-quarters of an hour to extricate itself. Then followed lamentations about the fog, the cold, the deathly silence of the streets, uttered and received with the same exceptionally jovial air that was attributable to the pleasant atmosphere of the room which, except where I sat, was warm, the dazzling light which set blinking eyes already accustomed to not seeing, and the buzz of talk which restored their activity to deafened ears.

The new arrivals had the greatest difficulty in keeping silence. The singularity of the mishaps which each of them thought unique set their tongues on fire, and their eyes roved in search of someone to engage in conversation.