Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [142]
He needed all these to become Minister of War at the peak of the Affair. Confronting the taunts of the Guesde extremists in the Chamber, he suddenly stood up and barked, “L’assassin, présent!” The din became general. Nationalists, Radicals, Center, were shouting insults and shaking fists. Millerand, a lawyer like Waldeck, with gray hair en brosse, a lorgnon, a neat black moustache and a precise, aggressive manner, was wilting. His moustache trembled and he looked “like a huge cat caught in a downpour.” Galliffet was observed taking down names and explained later, “I thought I’d better invite those chaps to dinner.” Waldeck, trying to speak, stood at the tribune for an hour without being heard for more than ten minutes. He fought desperately and succeeded in establishing the Government by a majority of twenty-six.
Galliffet joined it “without illusions,” he wrote to Princess Radziwill, because of its promise to pacify France, “if that is still possible. The Rightist papers beg me to do another Boulanger and those of the Left want me to cut off the heads of all the Generals who displease them. The public is an idiot. If I touch a guilty general I am accused of massacring the Army; if I abstain I am accused of treason. What a dilemma. Pity me.” Actually, although he found Loubet “too bourgeois,” he was pleased to be a Minister and was very “gay and amusing” at the next meeting of the Bixio. He told a lively story of a rather large but lovely lady of forty-five who visited him at his office to propose a little deal involving 20,000 horses to be bought for the Army. There would be a million in it for him. “A million,” he said to her. “That’s not much considering the twenty-five million I got from the Syndicate as everyone knows. Go to see Waldeck. He is jealous of me because he only got seventeen million.”
Six weeks later, on August 8, 1899, the retrial of Dreyfus by a new court-martial was scheduled to open in the garrison town of Rennes, a Catholic and aristocratic corner of traditionally Counter-Revolutionary Brittany. France quivered in expectation; as each week passed bringing the moment closer, the tension grew. The world’s eyes were turned on Rennes. All the important foreign newspapers sent their star correspondents. Lord Russell of Killowen, the Lord Chief Justice of England, came as an observer. All the leading figures in the Affair, hundreds of French journalists and important political, social and literary figures crammed the town. The Secret File was brought from Paris in an iron box on an artillery caisson. No one anywhere talked of anything but the coming verdict. Acquittal would mean for the Dreyfusards vindication at last; for the Nationalists it would be lethal; an unimaginable blow not to be permitted. As if on order they returned to the theme of the first blackmail: Dreyfus or the Army. “A choice is to be made,” wrote Barrès in the Journal; Rennes, he said, was the Rubicon. “If Dreyfus is innocent then seven Ministers of War are guilty and the last more than the first,” echoed Meyer in Le Gaulois. General Mercier, leaving for Rennes to appear as a witness, issued his Order of the Day: “Dreyfus will be condemned once more. For in this affair someone is certainly guilty and the guilty one is either him or me. As it is certainly not me, it is Dreyfus.… Dreyfus is a traitor and I shall prove it.”
At six o’clock on the