Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [124]
The gratin were not hospitable; some families however wealthy “never offered so much as a glass of lemonade to their friends.” The men considered themselves the only ones of their sex who knew how to dress or make love and exchanged tributes from the famous courtesans. They took their orders from the ranking members of their class and were ardently Anglophile in manners and customs. The Greffulhes and Breteuils were intimates of the Prince of Wales, le betting was the custom at Longchamps, le Derby was held at Chantilly, le steeplechase at Auteuil and an unwanted member was black-boulé at the Jockey Club. Charles Haas, the original of Swann, had “Mr” engraved on his calling cards.
At the château of the Duc de Luynes at Dampierre, an English visitor found a veneer of modernity in the automobiles, the billiard room, the London clothes of the men and the chatter of women, “but under this thin glaze a deadness of the Dead Sea. All the books are safe under lock and key in the library outside the house. In the house there is no book, no newspaper, no writing paper and only one pen.” Two sisters—the Duchesses de Luynes and de Brissac—and their friend, the Comtesse de Vogüé, all on the point of becoming mothers, were “splendid creatures,” very easy to get on with if one talked of nothing but sport. The host was Lord Chamberlain to the current Pretender. Their kind “are children, arrested in intelligence, who hate Jews, Americans, the present, the past two centuries, the Government, the future and the fine arts.”
Under the law of the Republic all Pretenders to the throne lived in exile. Bonapartist hopes were lodged in Prince Victor Napoleon, grandson of Jerome Bonaparte, while legitimist allegiance went to a grandson of Louis-Philippe, the Comte de Paris, of whom Thiers said, “From a distance he looks like a Prussian, from close up like an imbecile.” On his death in 1894 he was succeeded by his son, the Duc d’Orléans, a hare-brained young man who in 1890 had dashingly appeared in France with declared intent to “share the French soldier’s gamelle [mess],” that is, to do his military service. Being equally celebrated for his romance with the prima donna, Nellie Melba, he was irreverently known thereafter as “Gamelba,” a name coined by Rochefort. Before the Affair, his cause seemed moribund; but in the Affair the royalists found a new rallying point, new hope and excitement and in the anti-Semites, new partners and energy. Anti-Semitism became the fashion, although with certain unwanted effects on Society, for parvenus were able to force their way in by virtue of the degree of warmth with which they espoused the new cause. “All this Dreyfus business is destroying society,” complained the Baron de Charlus, and the Duchesse de Guermantes found it “perfectly intolerable” that all the people one had spent one’s life trying to avoid now had to be accepted just because they boycotted Jewish tradesmen and had “Down with Jews” printed on their parasols.
Important neither in government nor in culture, the gratin were important only in providing the background, motive, stimulus and financial backing to reaction. In the Affair the only serious leader to emerge from their class was de Mun. It was he who forced the Government to prosecute Zola for libel of the Army in his public letter, J’Accuse, and thus brought on the trial which made the case a national, no longer containable, issue. Had the Government had its way it would have taken no action, for discussion and testimony and above all cross-examination were to be avoided. But led by de Mun, the Right in its wrath demanded revenge and his authority exercised a spell. When no one from the Ministry of War was present in the Chamber to reply to Zola’s attack,