The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [151]
He also had problems with French military men over the Dreyfus affair. It had always seemed likely to him that the unfortunate Jewish officer, condemned six years ago for treachery and sent to Devil’s Island, was innocent. With the fury of his supporters, and the investigations of the brave, and the suicide of his principal accuser, it became a certainty that he himself had been horribly betrayed. Last year, a decrepit shadow of a man, he had been brought back and retried. And found guilty again. This had appalled Cain as much as it had appalled Dreyfus’s French supporters. Dreyfus had now been offered a pardon, to avoid an international incident, or national violence in the streets, on the occasion of the Exposition. That was rich, Cain thought, a pardon for a crime he had never committed.
Tensions ran high between the French and the English. The French published wicked caricatures of the Widow at Windsor, resembling a demented and malign spider or witch with bulging eyes. There was talk of international tension leading to a war between France and Great Britain. Cain smiled at the fierce dedication of a vase by Gallé, mounted in silver, bearing a ragged flamboyant iris in appliqué, and a quotation from Zola on Dreyfus. “Nous vaincrons. Dieu nous menè.” A similar vase had been presented to La Bernhardt, who was also a passionate Dreyfusard.
Julian had arranged to meet his father in the Bing Pavilion, and went early, so he could saunter with Tom through its delights. Julian was suspicious of English aesthetes. Wilde he found silly and sordid, without knowing his work very well, and Aubrey Beardsley delighted and alarmed him with glimpses of a malign naughtiness which he liked to see but did not wish to share. He did not know, at nineteen, who he was going to be, and was acutely aware of this. But he was not going in for mascara, pot pourri, and green chrysanthemums. Like Kaiser Wilhelm and Prosper Cain, Julian secretly liked the mixture of opulence and severity in a well-cut military uniform. But he had no intention of joining the army, that was one thing he knew. At the Exposition he discovered a European self who needed to think precisely about the new European elegance. He found his velvet jacket sitting more sharply on his shoulders. He thought he might buy new shoes.
Siegfried Bing, from Hamburg, had introduced Japanese art to French connoisseurs, and had a gallery in the rue de Provence where he showed very modern paintings—not only the Impressionists, but the Symbolists and the dreamers. His pavilion was a make-believe small mansion. It was later transported to Copenhagen. This was another aspect of the Exposition that resembled Russian fairytales of flying houses, or Arabian tales of palaces transported overnight to lands beyond the oceans and deserts. This sense was in turn made more intense by the Palace of Mirrors, which from inside was a false infinity of exotic Middle Eastern vistas, in which you yourself were endlessly repeated from every angle, over and under, advancing and receding, or hanging in the void. And as well as that, there was the Upside Down Palace, in which, as in a tale for small children, you could plod across the ceiling and stare up/down on the tables and chairs. On its façade was a fresco showing two darkly slender young females with black-gloved fingers, fine waists, rounded small buttocks visible under their clinging garments, and swirling skirts or peacock tails. They stood in front of a fairytale house in a forest. They looked back invitingly over their shoulders. Julian was unprepared for Tom’s comment, which was to regret that his mother couldn’t see them, she would have liked them so much.