Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [135]
But as de Mun had said, between the two sides there was no room for freedom. “You can hardly imagine how tormented I am!” Jaurès said to Péguy. “Our enemies are nothing—but our friends! They devour me because they are all afraid of not being elected. They pull at the back of my coat to keep me from going to the tribune.” Shaking them off, Jaurès refused to remain silent and did indeed lose his seat in the election of May, 1898, although more because of industrialist opposition in his district than because of the Affair. Turning instead to La Petite République for a platform, as Clemenceau had to l’Aurore, he wrote a daily political column. When he began Les Preuves class hatred was so rooted in Socialist tradition that in order to rally the Left in the fight for justice it was necessary to de-class Dreyfus. “He is no longer an officer nor a bourgeois,” Jaurès wrote. “In his misery he has been skinned of all class character.… He is simply a living witness to the crimes of Authority.… He is nothing less than mankind itself.” He tore into the evidence, took up each one of Cavaignac’s arguments and documents, separated rumor and blackmail, tracked down forgery. The impact of his logic and his strenuous seriousness revived the Dreyfusards. Cavaignac was enraged. At a dinner of the Cabinet he proposed to arrest all the leading Revisionists on a charge of conspiracy against the state and named Mathieu Dreyfus, Bernard Lazare, Ranc, Reinach, Scheurer-Kestner, Picquart, Clemenceau; Zola and others. When one of his colleagues asked sarcastically, Why not the lawyers too, Cavaignac replied, “Of course,” and added Labori and Dreyfus’ lawyer, Demange.
Nevertheless Les Preuves had shaken him. To answer certain of Jaurès’ charges, he ordered yet another examination of the documents, this time by an officer not previously involved in the case. Working at night by the light of a lamp this officer noticed that the writing paper of the crucial Panizzardi letter was gummed together from two halves of the same brand of paper ruled in lines of faintly different colors. Colonel * Henry had used the blank parts of two real letters from Panizzardi to construct his document. The crucial letter was a forgery. Alerted by this find, the investigating officer looked further, was led down dark warrens of discrepancies and dutifully reporting his discoveries, laid ruin in the lap of the Minister of War.
Cavaignac, conqueror of the Affair, saw the whole of the case he had presented to the Chamber and the country shattered like glass. Its crux was a fraud; the statement on which he had won national acclaim was a fraud. For a man of his principles, to hush up the discovery was impossible; he had to face the tragedy of being wrong. Not being of the Army made it easier. He ordered the arrest of Colonel Henry, who was taken to Cherche Midi where Dreyfus had been lodged. That night, August 31, 1898, Colonel Henry committed suicide with the razor they had left for him.
Army officers, when they heard the news, were aghast; some wept. It was a stain on the Army’s honor “worse than Sedan,” said one. Léon Blum, vacationing in Zurich, opened the door of his hotel room at 10 P.M. to the porter who brought the news. “I don’t think that ever in my whole life have I felt an equal excitement.… The immense, the infinite joy that rushed through me had its sources in the triumph of reason. The truth had