Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [130]
A new recruit, small but wickedly effective, in the form of a four-page weekly of caricatures called Psst!, was brought out by Forain and Caran d’Ache, who composed it sitting together at a table in the Café Weber. Caran d’Ache drew comic strips of inspired simplification. Forain was an artist whose sharp views of Parisian society were incisive and brilliant in black and white, although his oils evoked Degas’ deadly comment, “He paints with his hands in my pockets.” His cover design of a Prussian officer standing behind a dark and cynical figure representing the Syndicate and manipulating in front of its face the mask of Zola, compressed in one picture all the elements of the Affair as the Nationalists saw it. Reinach, the favored target of Psst!, was usually pictured as an orangutang in a top hat with heavily Jewish features going repeatedly to Berlin to confer with spike-helmeted Prussians. Scheurer-Kestner and other Revisionists appear as hook-nosed Jews in bankers’ fur-collared coats, paying out German funds, using the Army képi for a football or picking weeds from the grave of Ravachol as a “bouquet for Zola.” Throughout appears a stalwart wooden soldier, standing straight and brave, unwincing among the villains, forever valiant—the Army. The Intellectual is a lanky figure with oversized head, the star of David on his brow and carrying a pen bigger than his body, who registers his “disgust with everything French.” The only variation in subject is the occasional appearance of “Oncle Sam” as the “New Gargantua” making a meal of Spain, Hawaii, Porto Rico and the Philippines.
The Affair pervaded life at all hours and places. Going to a new dentist, Léon Blum found a young man with the manner and bearing of a cavalry officer who suddenly said as his patient sat down, “All the same, they will not dare touch Picquart!” Gaston Paris, the scholarly medievalist and Academician, concluded an erudite article on Philip the Good with a stirring invocation to justice which at once categorized him. Paul Stapfer, doyen of the Faculty of Letters at Bordeaux, was suspended because in a funeral oration for a colleague he made a discreet allusion to the Revisionist opinions of the deceased. A tempest blew up in the Légion d’Honneur when it “suspended” Zola and succeeded in angering both the military members who had demanded his ouster and those members who were his partisans. Anatole France and others removed the red ribbon from their coats. At the cafés. Nationalists and Revisionists sat at different tables on opposite sides of the terraces. Whole villages took sides. A resident of Samois, fourteen miles from Paris, said everyone in his village was Dreyfusard while at Francoville, three or four miles away, everyone almost without exception was anti-Dreyfusard.
In February, 1898, at the Dîner Bixio, a dining club of the elect who met for the pleasure of each other’s conversation, the Affair found everyone “troubled and grieved”; in March the Marquis de Galliffet said he would not go out or visit on account of it; in May conversation turned for a while to the question, “Did the Americans blow up the Maine themselves?” otherwise talk was only of the Affair; in November everyone was depressed: “I cannot remember a dinner so black,” wrote one member in his diary.
The opening night of Romain Rolland’s play Les Loups was a battlefield. He had written it in six days to show the world that France was torn by “one of the most redoubtable problems that can engage