Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [129]
On its first appearance the Protest of the Intellectuals had 104 signers and within a month 3,000, among them André Gide, Charles Péguy, Elisée Reclus, Gabriel Monod, scholars, poets, philosophers, doctors, professors and one painter, Claude Monet, from sympathy with Clemenceau. The only political action of Monet’s life, his signature caused a quarrel with Degas and they did not speak again for years. Now almost blind, Degas used to have La Libre Parole read to him each morning, and regarded with contempt the arrivistes of the Republican era. “In my time,” he said disdainfully, “one did not arrive.”
Artists and musicians, though on the whole politically indifferent, tended if anything toward the Nationalist camp. Debussy sat with Léon Daudet’s circle at the Café Weber in the Rue Royale. Puvis de Chavannes was another Nationalist sympathizer.
Professors and teachers from the Sorbonne, the Ecole Normale, the Faculty of Medicine, the secondary schools and provincial universities, signed; many were opposed, many refrained for fear of reprisals. “If I sign,” said a school principal to Clemenceau, “that ass Rambaud [the Minister of Education] will send me to rot in the depths of Brittany.” The distinguished scientist Emile Duclaux, successor to Pasteur, signed immediately, saying that if they were afraid of revision in the laboratory, truth would never be reached except by accident. Following his lead, scientists entered the Affair and some suffered for it. Professor Grimaux of the Polytechnic, who both signed and testified at Zola’s trial, was removed from the chair of chemistry. Heated arguments arose as to whether such great masters as Hugo, Renan, Taine or Pasteur would or would not have signed. Pupils and teachers were at odds, students divided, committees were formed for and against, especially in the provinces where the faculties were under Catholic influence.
Like an ice floe cracking, the intellectual world split over the Protest, and as the Affair progressed, the two halves spread wider and wider apart. Former friends passed each other in silence and any words they might have said “would never have carried across the worlds that lay between them.” When Pierre Louÿs, author of Aphrodite, took the opposite side from his friend Léon Blum, without further communication they never saw each other again. When the Protest was being circulated, three journalist friends of Léon Daudet tried to persuade him, appealing for three hours over lunch to “my patriotism, my intelligence, my heart.” Before the Affair he had dined at the home of the Laboris, where Madame sang the songs of Schumann and no evening could have been more delightful; “he robust and eloquent, she full of talent, charm and good will.” He was welcome too in the charming house on the Pont-de-l’Arche of Octave Mirbeau, who owned Van Gogh’s “Field of Iris” and where Madame welcomed one with “affectionate and sumptuous hospitality” and the cuisine was incomparable “from the butter to the wine, from the cooking oil to the soup.” After the Affair the word “Nationalist” was to Mirbeau a synonym for “assassin,” and Democracy was to Daudet “the poisoned terrain.” Soon after Zola’s trial Daudet was writing weekly diatribes of unexampled ferocity for La Libre Parole and Le Gaulois.
Maurice Barrès, the brilliant novelist who combined literature with a political career, was another whom his friends expected to be a Revisionist. Léon Blum asked for his signature feeling perfectly certain of him, but Barrès said he wanted to think it over and when he wrote it