With great respect,
A. Bebel
While we were in Berlin a great service in honor of Egidy was held (January 29). It was inspiring and elevating.
The next day there was a public meeting called by the Berlin Peace Society, at which Dr. Hirsch, Schmidt-Cabanis the writer, and I made addresses.
In response to an invitation from the Countess Gurowska we went from Berlin for a fortnight’s visit at Château Montboron in Nice. I was to speak both at Cannes and at Nice about the approaching conference. We were met at the railway station at Nice by our hostess’s husband and General Türr. It was just at the time of the great carnival, and the two gentlemen took us to the city hall, where we had a fine view of the battle of flowers. The following day we were again invited to the city hall to witness the burning of Prince Carnival, a figure constructed of straw.
The reception rooms of the hall were crowded with distinguished guests, and among others I met Madame Juliette Adam. “You must come to-morrow to the Baroness’s lecture,” said a gentleman of our group to her. “To a lecture on peace? I?” cried the editor of La Nouvelle Revue. “Certainly not, I am for war.” I was drawn into a discussion with her, in which I defended my side in a low voice, she hers in a wrathful tone well suited to the subject discussed.
The same evening I made the acquaintance of a very sympathetic Frenchman, M. Catusse, who had just been appointed consul general for France in Sweden. He proved to be a warm fellow-champion. Our conversation—as was the case with almost all conversations at that time—turned upon the Affaire. And then he told me the following: His wife kept a diary. On one page in it, during the year 1894, it was noted that an officer who had been sitting next her at a banquet, and who had followed the trial and had the day before been present at the degradation of Alfred Dreyfus, said to her after dinner, Hier nous avons condamné un innocent (“Yesterday we punished an innocent man”).
My lecture, which I delivered under the chairmanship of General Türr, won me enthusiastic applause from a very large cosmopolitan audience. Many of the Russians who were present asked to be presented to me in order to express their appreciation; among others an elderly lady clad in deep mourning, who announced that she was the mother of Marie Bashkirtseff, that young genius who died so prematurely.
The next day I saw her in her own home, and found that it was a sort of memorial temple to the departed; on all the walls there was nothing but pictures painted by Marie Bashkirtseff, or representing Marie herself at all periods of her life and in the most varying phases, always full of beauty and charm. Neither could the sorrowful mother speak of anything else than of her famous daughter.
A few days later I gave a lecture in Cannes. Luncheon on the Arche de Noé; Italian singers on board; magnificent weather; guests Count Rochechouart, the mayor, the president of the Nautical Club, Türr, and another gentleman—I do not remember his name—with a brutal face. The table talk turns on Dreyfus.