Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [143]
At once every chattering voice was stilled, every mouth closed, people seemed to hold their breath as with one movement every head in the audience turned toward a small door in the wall on the right. Every gaze fastened on it with a kind of shrinking awe as if fearful to look upon a ghost. For the accused was a ghost, whom no one in the room had laid eyes on for almost five years, whom no one there beyond his family, lawyers and original accusers had ever seen at all. For five years he had been present in all their minds, not as a man but as an idea; now he was going to walk through the door and they would look on Lazarus. A minute passed, then another while the waiting people were gripped in silence, an agonized silence, “such a silence as never before could have overtaken a crowd.”
The door opened, two guards were seen; between them came forward a thin, worn, desiccated figure, a strange shred of humanity, seeming neither young nor old, with a shrunken face and dried-out skin, and a body looking almost hollowed out but holding itself erect as if not to falter in the last few yards between the door and the witness box. Only the pince-nez familiar from the pictures had not suffered. A movement of “horror and pity” passed through the watchers, and the look bent on him by Picquart whose life he had changed beyond repair was so intense it could be felt by the people in between. Others present whose careers he had changed or broken—Clemenceau, Cavaignac—saw him for the first time.
For four and a half years Dreyfus had hardly spoken or heard a spoken word. Illness, fever, tropical sun, periods of chains and brutality when the frenzy in France was reflected by his gaolers, had enfeebled him. He could barely speak and only slowly understand what was spoken to him. Mounting the three steps to the tribune he staggered momentarily, straightened himself, saluted with impenetrable face, raised his gloved hand to take the oath, removed his hat, revealed the hair turned prematurely white. He remained a statue. He knew nothing of the Affair, the battle of the press, the duels and petitions, riots, street mobs, Leagues, trials, libel suits, appeals, coups d’état; nothing of Scheurer-Kestner, Reinach, the arrest of Picquart, the trial of Zola, the court-martial of Esterhazy, the suicide of Colonel Henry, the attack on the person of the President of France. During the trial, the impression he made on many was unfavorable. Rigidly determined to allow nothing to show that would appeal to pity, he antagonized many who came prepared to pity. G. A. Henty who came like most of the English, believing him to have been framed, left voicing doubts. “The man looked and spoke like a spy … and if he isn’t a spy I’ll be damned if he oughtn’t to be one.” Henty spoke for the last romantics who expected abstract concepts like Justice to be unequivocal and people who behaved oddly to be spies.
In the end it was not the impression Dreyfus made that determined the outcome any more than it was he who made the Affair: it was the dilemma Mercier had formulated long ago and it was General Mercier among the hundreds of witnesses who dominated the trial. Cold in authority, haughty in self-assurance, he took full responsibility for the original order withholding the Secret File from the defence, which he said was a “moral” decision. When on the witness stand he refused to answer questions he did not like; when not on the stand he intervened