A fine house, but an unlovely garden. A gaunt tree or two; four or five gritty, stony flower-beds; in a corner, a dried-up, dilapidated old well. But this waste of a garden suited M. Guérin’s purposes,—which were sinister.
“If my enemies attack me here, I shall shoot them dead and bury them beneath this very window—by that tree, in that flower-bed.”
“Oh!” I expostulated.
“Or I shall throw their infamous bodies into that well,” continued M. Guérin, again pointing out of the window. “I am prepared; I am ready. You see this gun? Then look at those revolvers. All are loaded.”
A long, highly polished gun rested in a corner at M. Guérin’s elbow. Curiously then I glanced at a collection of revolvers that bristled murderously on the wall, and next at Jules Guérin, a powerfully built man, with massive shoulders, a square chin, lurid green eyes, a fierce moustache, and a formidable block of a head on which a soft grey hat of enormous dimensions was tilted jauntily on one side. Thus, although he sat in his study before a vast, business-like writing-table, Jules Guérin wore his hat, or rather his sombrero, and also an overcoat; but then (as he explained) he might be called out at any moment to take part in a political brawl, or to chastise a journalist, or to arrange a duel—even to dig the grave of an enemy; and so was dressed ready to sally forth anywhere, and with ferocious designs upon anyone, at the shortest notice. Vehemently, he puffed at a cigarette. Now and again he pulled at his fierce moustache. As he spoke he gesticulated, thumped the writing-table savagely, and, when he thumped, the ink-bottles and penholders leapt and danced, and the gun in the corner trembled.
“Downstairs I have twenty clerks and assistants. All are armed with revolvers; all are devoted; and thus my enemies are their enemies. And so if the brigands attack us, into the earth with them, or into the well, or into——”
“But who are these enemies?” I interrupted. “These brigands?”
“The Government—Lépine, Chief of the Police—Loubet, President of the Republic—a hundred other traitors and assassins,” cried M. Guérin. “But the garden is waiting for them. I desire that this garden shall be their cemetery.”
Of course, an impossible ambition. But so incoherent, so chaotic was the state of mind of the Anti-Semites fourteen years ago, that I refrained from suggesting that it was highly improbable President Loubet or his Ministers would invade M. Guérin’s bit of waste ground up there in the rue Condorcet. Nor was my host a man to stand ridicule. A flippant word from me, and he would have shown me the door. So I listened patiently to his wild, savage denunciations of the Jews—of Captain Dreyfus in particular, who was lying (burnt up with fever, broken and battered in everything except determination) in his cell on the Devil’s Island; whilst here, in Paris, the Cour de Cassation was deliberating whether there was sufficient “new” evidence to justify the prisoner being brought back to France and given a new trial. Rumours were flying about to the effect that the Court had already made up its mind to order the revision. Thus, fury of the Anti-Dreyfusards; frenzy of the Anti-Semites, and, in their newspapers, the statements that the Cour de Cassation had been “bought” by the Jews; that the Jews, being the masters of France, had “sold” the country to Germany; and that, therefore, the only thing to do with the Jews was to hang them on the lamp-posts of Paris. Particularly bloodthirsty and barbarous was M. Guérin’s weekly journal, L’Anti-Juif, which stood on the floor, in three or four stacks, of this extraordinary study. In it were published the name and address of every Jewish tradesman in Paris. Each column was headed with exhortation: “Français, N’achetez Rien Aux Juifs.” Then, hideous cartoons depicting the flight of the Jews along the boulevards and their panic and agony—and their massacre.