• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1036 0

like water. Le Temps, Olympian and responsible, led all the rest. Its outsize pages were read by everyone in public life, its reviews decided the fate of a play, its editorials on foreign affairs written by André Tardieu were of such influence that the German Foreign Minister, Von Bülow, remarked, “There are three Great Powers in Europe—and M. Tardieu.” Only Le Temps in its eminence remained above the battle, although inclining gradually toward Revision. Figaro, following it in importance, proved vulnerable. Its editor, Fernand de Rodays, after hearing Dreyfus cry out his innocence on the occasion of his military degradation, believed him. Three years later he published the first evidence against Esterhazy as well as Zola’s first articles. Although he was a father and father-in-law of officers, his enraged colleagues of the Nationalist press denounced him as a traducer of the Army and organized a campaign to cancel subscriptions to Figaro. The management succumbed and De Rodays was ousted, an affair of such moment that Paris gossip said he had been paid 400,000 francs to support Dreyfus and the management 500,000 to get rid of him.

The blackmail of the Nationalist press, wrote Zola, who suffered its extremes, afflicted France like a “shameful disease which nobody has the courage to cure.” The mischief-makers were the privately supported organs of special interests or of individual editors who were likely to be men either of rabid principles or none at all. There was Ernest Judet of Le Petit Journal, who led the campaign to smear Clemenceau with the mud of Panama and who, when Clemenceau became Premier in 1906, barricaded his villa at Neuilly as if to defend it against a siege. Devoured by a perpetual terror of Freemasons, Judet carried a loaded revolver and a leaded cane weighing twelve pounds. There was the old royalist, Paul de Cassagnac, who started the fashion in journalism for abuse and insult, and attacked everyone and everything from habit regardless of consistency. There was Arthur Meyer, a converted Jew, son of a tailor, grandson of a rabbi, an ardent Boulangist and royalist who was editor of LeGaulois, which specialized in the doings of the haut monde. It was the paper read by the world of the “Guermantes.” Meyer’s wholehearted adoption of that world’s opinions and prejudices took a certain courage or a thick skin, for he was no Charles Swann who melted into his surroundings, but in appearance resembled the anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews. He nevertheless had married into the Faubourg—a dowerless daughter of the Comte de Turenne—was accepted into the circle of the Duchesse d’Uzès, became friend, adviser and confidant of the late Pretender, the Comte de Paris, and set masculine style by the cut of his morning coat and the fold of his cravats.

Henri, Comte de Rochefort, of l’Intransigeant, was the kind of journalist whose capacity for mischief is unfettered by doctrine: the more unsettled his convictions, the more brilliant and scathing his pen. A constitutional “anti” described by a friend as “a reactionary without knowing it,” a bright-eyed cynic and “aristo” with a pointed white beard and an exuberant laugh, Rochefort combined in his person almost every tendency, no matter how opposite, of the Third Republic. His Adventures of My Life filled five volumes. He had been everything from an antagonist of Napoleon III to an associate of General Boulanger and his daily column was the delight of the most impressionable and excitable portion of the public.

Approached by the early Dreyfusards on the theory that he would relish a challenge to prove innocent a condemned man whom everyone believed guilty, Rochefort had been cordial, but was dissuaded from the adventure by his manager, Ernest Vaughan, on the ground that public opinion would not stand for disrespect of the Army. Rochefort found the other side just as exciting and when Vaughan meanwhile changed his mind, they quarreled, with the historic result that Vaughan departed to found his own paper, l’Aurore, and to provide an organ for the Dreyfusards which they had