• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 554 0

Yet Esterhazy was acquitted and Picquart was imprisoned. Instantly a large part of the population called for a retrial of Dreyfus. On January 13, 1898, the writer Emile Zola published an open letter, “J’accuse,” directed against the army’s general staff; Zola was tried and found guilty of besmirching the reputation of the army. He was forced to flee to England. Then in September 1898 it was proved that the only piece of evidence against Dreyfus in the secret military dossier had been faked by Joseph Henry, who confessed his misdeed and committed suicide. At last the government ordered a retrial of Dreyfus. Public opinion was bitterly divided between the leftist Dreyfusards, who demanded “justice and truth,” and the anti-Dreyfusards, who led an anti-Semitic campaign, defended the honor of the army, and rejected the call for a retrial. The conflict led to a virtual civil war. In 1899 Dreyfus was found guilty again, although this time under extenuating circumstances—and the president pardoned him. Only in 1906 was Dreyfus fully rehabilitated, named an officer once again, and decorated with the Legion of Honor. Interestingly, Theodor Herzl, the Paris correspondent for a Viennese newspaper, was so overwhelmed by the virulent anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair that he was inspired by the prophetic idea of a Jewish state.

In defending Dreyfus, Proust not only angered conservative, Catholic, pro-army aristocrats, but he also alienated his own father. In writing about the 1890s in Remembrance of Things Past, Proust remarks that “the Dreyfus case was shortly to relegate the Jews to the lowest rung of the social ladder.” Typically, the ultraconservative Gustave Schlumberger, a great Byzantine scholar, could give in his posthumous memoirs as offensive a description of his old friend Charles Haas (a model for Proust’s character Swann) as this: “The delightful Charles Haas, the most likeable and glittering socialite, the best of friends, had nothing Jewish about him except his origins and was not afflicted, as far as I know, with any of the faults of his race, which makes him an exception virtually unique.” It would be misleading to suggest that Proust took his controversial, pro-Dreyfus stand simply because he was half-Jewish. No, he was only obeying the dictates of his conscience, even though he lost many highborn Catholic friends by doing so and exposed himself to the snide anti-Semitic accusation of merely automatically siding with his co-religionists.

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871, to well-to-do middle-class parents. His mother was Jeanne Weil, a twenty-one-year-old Parisian, daughter of Nathé Weil, a rich stockbroker. Her great-uncle Adolphe Crémieux was a senator and received a state funeral; he was also president of the Universal Israelite Alliance. Her mother, Adèle, was (like the Narrator’s grandmother in Remembrance of Things Past) a cultured woman who loved, above all other literature, the letters of Madame de Sévigné, one of Louis XIV’s courtiers and a woman who was almost romantically in love with her own daughter (the one-sided Sévigné mother-daughter relationship inspired Thornton Wilder when he wrote The Bridge of San Luis Rey). This intense intimacy was in fact characteristic of Marcel and his own mother, who were inseparable, who fought frequently (usually over his laziness and lack of willpower) but always fell into each other’s arms as soon as they made up. Mother and son shared a love of music and literature; she could speak and read German as well as English. She had a perfect memory and knew long passages from Racine by heart; her dying words were a citation from La Fontaine: “If you’re not a Roman, at least act worthy of being one.” Marcel inherited her taste for memorizing poetry and knew long passages from Victor Hugo, Racine, and Baudelaire. Most important, Marcel and his mother both loved to laugh—gently, satirically—at the people around them, and in her letters to him she sends up the other guests at a spa or hotel with the same spirit of wickedly close observation and good-natured if prickly