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By Root 1012 0

de Greffulhe, goddess of the gratin, becoming secretly convinced of Dreyfus’ innocence, wrote to the Kaiser asking to visit him to ascertain if the Germans really had employed Dreyfus as a spy. The only answer she received was a large basket of orchids. Proust chronicles the change in his character, the Prince de Guermantes, who confesses to Swann that after Colonel Henry’s suicide he has begun to read Le Siècle and l’Aurore secretly every day. He and his wife, unknown to each other, have asked the Abbé to say a mass for Dreyfus and his family, and discovered to each other’s astonishment that the Abbé too believes him innocent. Meeting the maid on the staircase carrying breakfast to the Princesse and concealing something under the napkin, the Prince discovers it to be l’Aurore.

Below the trapped obstinacy of the Generals, some in the Army were deeply troubled. “Just among ourselves with no outsiders present,” an officer said to Galliffet while riding in a train, “we are not as anti-Revisionist as people think. On the contrary we too would like to see the light and see the culprits punished so that if wrongs have been committed the Army will not bear the responsibility.” He felt that if Picquart were tried and convicted public opinion would turn against the Army.

The Army’s cup of bitterness was filled when in the same week that the Cour de Cassation began its inquiry the order was given withdrawing Colonel Marchand from Fashoda. Jaurès lashed at the imperialist adventure as a crime of capitalism which had frivolously imperiled peace without preparing for the consequence of challenging England. As if his already strong intuitive perceptions had been sharpened by the Affair, he wrote with foreboding, “Peace has been left to the whim of chance. But if war breaks out it will be vast and terrible. For the first time it will be universal, sucking in all the continents. Capitalism has widened the field of battle and the entire planet will turn red with the blood of countless men. No more terrible accusation can be made against this social system.” In his time it was still possible to suppose the fault lay in the system, not humanity.

The Affair continued in its frenzy. When Reinach wrote a series of articles in Le Siècle accusing Colonel Henry of having had a “personal interest” in ruining Dreyfus, Drumont persuaded Mme Henry to sue him for libel and opened a public subscription in her behalf which became the rallying point for Nationalists of every degree. A banner reading “For the Widow and Orphan of Colonel Henry against the Jew Reinach” was stretched across the windows of the offices of La Libre Parole on the Boulevard Montmartre and lit up at night. Within a month fifteen thousand persons had contributed 130,000 francs. Their names and comments provided a history of the Right—of that or any time. Five hundred francs, the top sum, was subscribed by the Countess Odon de Montesquiou, née Bibesco, and thirty sous by a lieutenant “poor in money but rich in hate.” There were all varieties of hate, chiefly for Jews, expressed in suggestions for skinning, branding, boiling in oil, burning with vitriol, emasculation and other forms of foul or physical punishment. There was hate for foreigners and intellectuals and even a “500-year-old hate for England” but there were many who gave their francs out of love or pity for the widow and child. An abbé contributed for “defence of eternal law against Judaeo-Christian deceit,” a music professor for “Frenchmen against foreigners,” a civil servant “who wants God in the schools,” an anonymous donor “ruined by a Jew after six months of marriage,” a workingman as “the victim of the anarchist capitalists Jaurès and Reinach.” There were innumerable “true patriots” and one “Frenchman sick at heart.” There were Vive!’s for Drumont, Rochefort, Déroulède, Guérin, Esterhazy, the Duc d’Orléans, l’Empereur, le Roi, the Heroes of Austerlitz and Jeanne d’Arc. Reinach was the chief target; Dreyfus received hardly a mention. General Mercier subscribed a hundred francs without comment; the poet Paul Valéry