Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [132]
Mme Arman de Caillavet’s Sunday salon on the Avenue Hoche where Anatole France was the permanent star was the Revisionist center. Clemenceau, Briand, Reinach, Jaurès and Lucien Herr were regulars. Mme Arman wanted only writers and politicians and snubbed the nobility except for Mme de Noailles, who was a Dreyfusard and would appear “like an Oriental princess descending from her palanquin … to set ablaze the torrent of her words by the fire of her glance.” Anatole France’s books lay on all the tables and the Master himself stood in the midst of a crowd coming and going and gathering around him while he discoursed on a chosen theme, interrupting himself to greet arriving guests, bowing to left and right, introducing one to another, bending to kiss the hand of a pale feline figure wrapped in chinchilla, and keeping up the flow of his talk on the poetry of Racine, the paradox of Robespierre or the epigrams of Rabelais.
The Affair superseded Rabelais. At Mme Aubernon’s, where guests of both camps were still invited, discussions that touched upon it immediately became impassioned. “This petition of the so-called ‘Intellectuals’ is preposterous and impertinent,” declared Ferdinand Brunetière, editor of the magisterial Revue des Deux Mondes. “They have coined the name to exalt themselves above others as if writers, scientists and professors were better than anyone else.… What right have they to meddle in a matter of military justice?” Victor Brochard, Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Sorbonne, replied heatedly, “Justice is based not on courts but on law.… To convict a man on evidence not shown to him is not only illegal; it is judicial murder.… Today it is not the Generals or Rochefort or the brawlers of La Libre Parole or Esterhazy or your Duc d’Orléans who represent the French conscience. It is we, the intellectuals.”
Headquarters of the Right was the salon of Mme de Loynes on the Avenue des Champs Elysées, where Jules Lemaître reigned. After an initial career as a demi-mondaine she had married the elderly Comte de Loynes, become a recognized power in the making of Academicians and, in the course of time, governess, mother, sister and presumably mistress to Lemaître, although some unkind gossip said their friendship was platonic. Her guests met at dinner on Fridays in a room furnished in plush with a nude marble Minerva on the mantel and what Boni de Castellane described as a “shoddy” Meissonier on the wall. Lemaître, the celebrated drama critic of the Journal des Débats, was an immensely prolix writer who could turn his hand to plays, poetry, short stories, critical essays, biographies and assorted speeches, political pieces, opinion and polemics. His works, when ultimately collected, filled fifty volumes. Though essentially dilettante in spirit, he had saved the French theatre in a famous cry of alarm in the Revue des Deux Mondes from being inundated by the heavy waves rolling in from the north—Ibsen, Hauptmann, Sudermann and Strindberg—and had duly entered the portals of the Academy. The fruits of democracy and manhood suffrage he found disillusioning. “The Republic cured me of the Republic,” he wrote; “life had already cured me of romanticism.” Disenchanted as well with “literary games,” he craved the role of a man of action, the restorative of a cause that not merely fluttered the pages of reviews but moved live men to passion. With ceremony and cheers in Mme de Loynes’ dining room he was named president of the Ligue de la Patrie Française, organized by the Nationalists to unite the intellectuals of the Right against the “enemies of la patrie.” Its Committee included among others de Vogüé, Barrès, Forain, Mistral the poet of the Provençal revival, Vincent d’Indy the composer and Carolus Duran the painter. The Ligue de la Patrie attracted 15,000 to its first meeting and gained 30,000 members in the first month. Lemaître was chosen president in order to have an Academician equal to Anatole France, but, given to mockery and grumbling, he lacked the spirit of a leader and after five minutes