Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [120]
To the same degree, Scheurer-Kestner was vilified and the public encouraged to demonstrate on the day he was to make a statement in the Senate. Tall, upright, pale, with high forehead, white beard and the austere air of a Huguenot of the Sixteenth Century, he walked to the tribune with measured step, as if he were mounting a scaffold. Outside in the foggy winter afternoon, crowds filled the Luxembourg Gardens howling against a man of whom they knew nothing. He read his appeal to reason in a slow heavy voice to antagonistic Senators who punctuated his speech with boos and insulting laughter. His reminder that he was the last deputy of French Alsace, which at any other time would have moved them, was met with cold silence, and, when he finished, hostile looks followed his return to the floor. A month later in the annual re-election for officers of the Senate he was defeated for the vice-presidency, the office he had held for nearly the life of the Republic.
His battle aroused the formidable support of Clemenceau, the government-breaker, l’homme sinistre, as the Conservatives called him, fearsome in debate, in opposition, in journalism, in conversation and in duels with pistol or épée. He fought a duel with Paul Déroulède over Panama and with Drumont over the Affair. He was a doctor by training, a drama critic who promoted Ibsen, an old and intimate friend of Claude Monet, whose work, he wrote in 1895, was guiding man’s visual sense “toward a more subtle and penetrating vision of the world.” He commissioned Toulouse-Lautrec to illustrate one of his books and Gabriel Fauré to write music for one of his plays. “Only the artists are on the right path,” he said at the end of his life. “It may be they can give this world some beauty but to give it reason is impossible.”
Out of office and Parliament since Panama, Clemenceau, when persuaded of the facts about Dreyfus by Scheurer-Kestner, saw the shape of a great cause and seized upon it, though not only as a vehicle of political ambition. To Clemenceau the menace of Germany was the dominant fact of political life. “Who”—he demanded, enraged by Esterhazy’s vision of Prussian Uhlans sabering Frenchmen—“who among our leaders has been associated with this man? Who is protecting Esterhazy?… To whom have the lives of French soldiers and the defense of France been surrendered?” After Germany came anti-clericalism. “The French Army is in the hands of the Jesuits.… Here is the root of the entire Dreyfus case.” Every day in l’Aurore he cut and thrust at the issues of the Affair, writing 102 articles on it in the next 109 days, and altogether nearly five hundred over the next three years, enough, when collected, to fill five volumes. Through all rang the bell of justice. “There can be no patriotism without justice.… As soon as the right of one individual is violated, the right of everyone is jeopardized.… The true patriots are we who fight to obtain justice and to liberate France from the yoke of gold-braided infallibility.”
The Dreyfusard cause, too, had its opportunists. Urbain Gohier, an ex-monarchist who now professed to be a Socialist, lashed at the Army in l’Aurore. Its officers were “generals of debacle,” “Kaiserlicks” who knew nothing but “flight and surrender” and brought no victories except over the French; they were “the cavalry of Sodom” with retinues’ of kept women. “One half of France is slinging invective at the other,” worriedly wrote the French-born Princess Radziwill, née de Castellane, from Berlin. Married to Prince Anton Radziwill, the Prussian member of an international family of Polish origin who “loves to talk English while his brother, a Russian, talks French,” she had dedicated herself to a goal of Franco-German rapprochement. “No one can see how it will finish,” her letter continued, “but it cannot go on like this without real moral danger.”
The danger was more than moral. Germany watched carefully the internal conflict that absorbed all France’s attention. Her periodic denials of dealings with Dreyfus