The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [42]
The Princesse Mathilde didn’t leave the avenue d’Iéna until 7 o’clock.
It was a good turn-out for the brothers. According to the paper it was a cold and bright evening with a fullish moon. The avenue d’Iéna is wide, with plane trees sweeping down the centre, and I imagine the carriages for the brothers’ party blocking the road, and the gypsy music coming from their apartments. I imagine Louise, red-gold and Titian-like in mauve velvet, walking the few hundred yards up the hill to her vast faux-Renaissance mansion and her husband.
A ‘very brilliant five o’clock’ would have been difficult to give the following year. In 1894, as the painter J. E. Blanche put it, ‘the Jockey club deserted the table of the Princes of Israel’.
It was the start of the Dreyfus Affair, twelve years that convulsed France and polarised Paris. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer on the French General Staff, was accused of being a spy for Germany on the forged evidence of a slip of paper found in a waste-paper basket. He was court-martialled and found guilty, though it was quite clear to the Army General Staff that the evidence was fabricated. Dreyfus was cashiered in front of a howling crowd demanding his execution. Toy gallows were sold on the streets. He was sent to Devil’s Island to serve life-imprisonment in solitary confinement.
The campaign to have him retried began almost immediately, provoking an intense and violent anti-Semitic backlash; the Jews were seen to be overthrowing natural justice. Their patriotism was impugned: by supporting Dreyfus they were proving that they were Jewish first and foremost, and French only second. Charles and his brothers, still Russian citizens, were typical Jews.
Two years later evidence emerged that another French officer, Major Esterhazy, was behind the forgery, but Esterhazy was exonerated on only the second day of his military trial, and Dreyfus was reconfirmed in his conviction. Additional forgeries were produced to back up the sham. Despite Zola’s impassioned plea to the President, ‘J’accuse . . . !’, published in the newspaper L’Aurore in January 1898, Dreyfus was brought back in 1899 and reconvicted for a third time. Zola was convicted of criminal libel and fled to England. It was not until 1906 that Dreyfus would finally be cleared.
There were seismic splits into bitter Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard camps. Friendships were curtailed, families separated and salons where Jews and veiled anti-Semites used to meet became actively hostile. Amongst Charles’s artist friends, Degas became the most savage anti-Dreyfusard, and stopped speaking to Charles and to the Jewish Pissarro. Cézanne, too, was convinced of Dreyfus’s guilt, and Renoir became actively hostile to Charles and his ‘Jew art’.
The Ephrussi family were Dreyfusard by faith and by inclination – and simply by living in the public eye. In a letter written to André Gide in the febrile spring of 1898, a friend recounts hearing a man catechising his children outside the Ephrussi house in the avenue d’Iéna. Who lives here? ‘Le sale juif !’ The dirty Jew! Ignace was followed back home from the Gare du Nord after a late dinner in the country, by inspectors of the police who had mistaken him for the exiled Zola. ‘Five agents,’ reported the anti-Dreyfusard Le Gaulois on 19th October 1898, ‘spent the night in surveillance. Inspector Frecourt arrived in the afternoon to convey the summons to court to M. Zola, whom he believed was taking refuge chez Ephrussi . . . When he dares to return M. Zola will not escape the vigilant eye of the police.’
And it was a family battle: Charles and Ignace’s niece Fanny, the adored daughter of their late sister Betty, had married Theodore Reinach, an archaeologist and Hellenist from a prominent Jewish family of French intellectuals. And Theodore’s politician brother Joseph was the principal mover in Dreyfus’s defence – and the later author of the magisterial Histoire de l’affaire Dreyfus. Reinach became a lightning conductor for anti-Semitism: much of Drumont’s ire was directed