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By Root 1101 0

the human conscience, a dilemma worthy of Corneille: whether to sacrifice country or justice.” The presence of Colonel Picquart in a box and of Colonel du Paty de Clam in the orchestra brought the audience to a peak of excitement. Picquart after his first arrest had just been discharged from the Army, and came to the theatre as the guest of Edmond Rostand, whose Cyrano de Bergerac, produced a few months earlier, had raised him to the height of celebrity. For a decade French theatregoers had languished under the skepticism, symbolism and Ibsenism of the Théâtre Libre. “We needed reassurance, ideals, panache,” wrote a critic, “and then came Cyrano! Our thirst was assuaged.” Cyrano’s spirit was there that night.

When the character representing Picquart in the play confronted his opponent, the audience exploded before he could be heard. “The whole theatre shook from floor to roof.” The usual Vive!’s and A bas!’s reached a fury in which someone was moved to cry, “A bas la patrie!” and a thirteen-year-old Anarchist in the balcony squealed, “Down with Christianity!” Rolland thought to himself, “My ideas are lost, but no matter, the play doesn’t count. The real spectacle is there in the audience. This is history being acted!”

The carnage continued next day. Echo de Paris and La Presse dismissed their drama critics, the Collège Stanislas canceled a reception for Mme Rostand, and two papers opened a campaign to boycott Cyrano, whose popularity, however, proved stronger than its author’s association with Picquart. In his diary Rolland wrote, “I would rather have this life of combat than the mortal calm and mournful stupor of these last years. God give me struggle, enemies, howling crowds, all the combat of which I am capable.”

It was the same sentiment Péguy voiced: boredom with peace. Others shared it. That summer, Senator Ranc recalled, one was constantly expecting some surprise attack. “One day we would be warned not to sleep at home for fear of assault by anti-Semitic gangs, the next for fear of arrest by the police. It was exciting; one felt alive; nothing is so good as a time of action, and combat in the consciousness of a cause.”

From the day early in the Affair when Joseph Reinach announced to the guests at Mme Emile Straus’s salon that Dreyfus had been wrongfully convicted, the polarization of the salons began. Heretofore they had linked the worlds of fashion and intellect, bridged the sharp political divisions between classes and coteries. They were to France what the country-house party was to England. They were the market-place of ideas, the stock exchange of social and political favors united by one absorbing concern: who would obtain the next seat in the Academy, who would don the dark-green uniform and, watched by the elite of Paris, deliver his eulogy of the defunct Immortal whose place he was taking? Now they began to pull apart into separate units, frustrating the unifying and mixing process that had been their greatest contribution.

As a rule each salon had its grand homme. Mme Aubernon, doyenne of the hostesses, began with Dumas fils and finished with D’Annunzio. Mme Emile Straus, on the other hand, the beautiful Geneviève of the liquid black eyes and ardent glance, attracted too many to concentrate on one. Daughter of the composer Halévy and widow of Georges Bizet before she married Straus, leaving disconsolate a train of adorers, she had assembled at her salon the soul and salt of Paris before the ravages of the Affair. Henri Bergson the philosopher, Réjane the actress, Lord Lytton when he was British Ambassador, Professor Pozzi the surgeon, Henri Meilhac, the librettist of Offenbach’s operas, Jules Lemaître, Marcel Prévost, Forain, Proust, and the Princesse Mathilde, who held her own salon on Wednesdays, all came to her Saturday afternoons on the Boulevard Haussmann, bringing still hot the happenings of the Chamber, the Quai d’Orsay, the theatres and the editorial offices. After Reinach’s announcement, Lemaître left, allowing himself from then on to adorn only the right-wing salon of the Comtesse de Loynes.