After a moment’s silence, Jumage went on:
“You see, Lucien, you are slandered because of your position. You can summon your slanderers before a jury. But I don’t advise you to do so. They would be acquitted.”
“That is most probable,” said Monsieur Bergeret. “Unless I walk into court in a plumed hat, a sword at my side, spurs on my boots, and an army of twenty thousand paid hooligans at my heels. Then my plea would be heard by judge and jury. When Zola was found guilty by the jury of the Seine in respect of the very moderate letter which he addressed to a President of the Republic who was ill-prepared to read it, their deliberations took place amid bestial cries, hideous threats, an unendurable clatter of ironmongery, amid all the phantoms of error and untruth. I have not so terrific an apparatus at my disposal, therefore it is more than probable that my defamer would be acquitted.”
“You cannot, however, remain indifferent to insults. What do you intend to do?”
“Nothing. I am satisfied. I would just as soon be subjected to the insults of the Press as to its praise. Truth has been served in the newspapers by her enemies as well as by her friends. When a mere handful of men, mindful of the honour of France, denounced the fraudulent condemnation of an innocent man, the Government and public opinion treated them as enemies. But they spoke out. And by their speech they proved themselves the stronger. You know how fervently the majority of the newspapers worked against them. But in spite of themselves they were serving the cause of truth, and by publishing the false documents——”
“There haven’t been so many false documents as you think, Lucien.”
“They made it possible to prove their falsity. Error had been scattered broadcast, and could no longer collect her scattered forces, and finally nothing was left save that which had sequence and continuity. Truth has a faculty of linking facts together which error does not possess. It formed, in the face of insult and impotent hatred, a chain that could not again be broken. We owe the triumph of our cause to the liberty, the licence of the Press.”
“But you are not victorious,” cried Jumage. “Neither are we defeated! Quite the contrary! The opinion of the whole country is against you. I regret to say it, but you and your friends are unanimously execrated, dishonoured, spat upon. We defeated? You are joking. The whole of France is with us.”
“And you are defeated from within. If I took appearances into consideration I might think you victorious, and despair of justice. There are criminals who go unpunished. Prevarication and perjury are publicly approved as praiseworthy actions. I have no hope that the enemies of truth will own themselves vanquished. Such an effort is possible only to the highest type of mind.
“There is very little change in the general state of mind. The ignorance of the public is still almost complete. There have been none of those sudden changes of opinion on the part of the crowd which are so amazing when they occur. Nothing striking or even noticeable has happened. Nevertheless the time is past when a President of the Republic could degrade, to the level of his own soul, justice, the honour of the country, and the alliances of the Republic, the power of whose ministers depended upon their understanding with the enemies of the very institutions of which they were the guardians. A season of brutal hypocrisy when contempt for intelligence and hatred of justice were at one and the same time a popular opinion and a State doctrine. A time when those in power upheld the rioters, when it was a crime to cry ‘Vive la République!’ Those days are already remote, as though they had sunk into the limbo of the past and were plunged into the darkness of the age of barbarism.