It is with mixed emotions that I record my own personal recollections of the late Henri Rochefort. They go back fourteen years, to the lurid, delirious summer of 1899, when Jules Guérin, the leader of the Anti-Semites, evaded arrest by shutting himself up in Fort Chabrol; when Dreyfus, bent, shattered, almost voiceless, was enduring the anguish of a second court-martial; when the boulevards were being swept of tumultuous manifestants every night by the Republican Guard.
Rochefort was living in a little villa at the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne: a retreat for a sage, a poet, a dreamer; the very last abode, one would have thought, for the most thunderous figure in French public life. By rights, Rochefort the Ferocious should have been living in a vast boulevard apartment overlooking the nightly Anti-Dreyfusard uproar. But there he was (when first I met him) in that innocent maisonnette—in dressing-gown and slippers, amidst flowers, pictures and frail china—actually playing with a fluffy toy lamb, of the kind hawked about for two francs on the terraces of the Paris cafés. It was only his snowy white hair, brushed upwards, that made him picturesque. Pale, steely blue eyes, that lit up cruelly, evilly at times; a face seamed, sallow and horse-like in shape; a harsh, guttural voice; large, yellowish hands, with long, pointed finger-nails.
Upon the occasion of my first visit to the innocent maisonnette, there was no cause for agitation. The toy lamb was the attraction. A tube was attached to it, and at the end of the tube was a bulb which, when pressed, made the lamb leap. Again and again, Rochefort the Lurid set the lamb leaping. I too lost my heart to the lamb, and also made it frisk. Amidst all this irresponsibility, my host was pleased to pronounce me “sympathetic” and “charming,” not like the “traditional” Englishman with the bull-dog, the aggressive side-whiskers and long, glistening teeth. Rochefort saw me to the garden door; Rochefort actually plucked me a rose; Rochefort’s parting words were a cordial invitation to visit him and his lamb again soon. So was I amazed to find myself described in his very next article as “a sinister brigand, in the pay of the Jews; in fact, one of those diabolical bandits who are devastating our beloved France.”
... A week later I approached him, and mildly protested, as he was sitting on the terrace of the Café de la Paix, drinking milk and Vichy water, sucking his eternal lozenges—and still playing with the lamb.
“Bah, that was only print,” came the reply. “Let us resume our game with the lamb.” As he made it leap about deftly amongst the glasses on the marble-topped table, passers-by, recognising his Luridness, stopped, stared and smiled at the spectacle. “That’s the great Rochefort,” said the maître d’hôtel to an American tourist: and stupefaction of the States. Rising at last, and stuffing the lamb into his pocket, Rochefort remarked: “I must go off and do my article, but you sha’n’t be the brigand. I feel amiable to-night.”
Next morning appeared the notorious, atrocious article demanding that walnut shells—containing long, hairy spiders—should be strapped to the eyes of Captain Dreyfus.
What was the reason of Rochefort’s abominable campaign against the martyr from the Devil’s Island? Since he styled himself a democrat, the champion of liberty and justice, the enemy of tyranny, one would have expected to see the fierce old journalist fighting vigorously for Dreyfus. The fact is, Rochefort was a mass of contradictions: an imp of perversity: at once brutal and humane; gentle and bloodthirsty; simple and vain; the most chaotic Frenchman that ever died. Search his autobiography, in three portly volumes: not once do you find him resting, smiling or reflecting—he is all thunder and lightning, an everlasting storm. Exile, duels, fines and imprisonment—wild, delirious attacks upon the Government of the day. No one escaped; for fifty years, in the columns of the Figaro, the Lanterne, the Intransigeant, and finally, in the Patrie, Rochefort pursued presidents and politicians with his unique, extravagant vocabulary. M. Jaurès, the Socialist leader, was “a decayed turnip”; M. Georges Clemenceau, “a loathsome leper”; M. Briand, “a moulting vulture.” As for M. Combes, to the guillotine with him, and into the Seine with M. Delcassé, and a rope and a boulevard lamp-post for M. Pelletan. Then President Loubet was “the foulest of assassins”; President Fallières, “the fat old satyr of the Élysée”; and Madame Marguerite Steinheil, “the Black Panther.”
For the life of me I could trace nothing of the “panther” in Madame Steinheil during the ten terrible days that she sat in the dock of the dim, oak-panelled Paris Assize Court. As for her “blackness,” Rochefort was referring to her clothes.
“Heavy crape bands round the accused woman’s black dress, stiff crape bows in the widow’s cap, a deep sombre border to the handkerchief which she clenched tightly, convulsively, in her black-gloved hand... under her eyes, dark, dark shadows, which turned green as the trial tragically wore on.”[7] Impossible, one might have thought, not to sympathise with this prisoner who, with all her follies and faults, was certainly not the murderess of her husband and mother.
But what cared Rochefort for evidence and arguments? Leaning forward in his seat in the Press-box, his sallow face distorted with fury, he fixed the “Tragic Widow” with his steely, cruel eyes. (“I think he was trying to hypnotise me—certainly to terrify me,” relates Madame Steinheil in her Memoirs.) Again and again he cracked his lozenges, gesticulated angrily with his large yellow hands. During the adjournments, he held forth violently in the corridors of the Law Courts. Not only was Madame Steinheil the murderess of her mother and husband, but she was also the assassin of President Félix Faure. She poisoned him in the Élysée, at the instigation of the Jews, who knew that so long as Faure remained President there would be no revision of the Dreyfus affair. So, a triple murderess—and “crack, crack” went the lozenges. Later, when it became certain that Madame Steinheil would be acquitted, Rochefort declared that judge and jury had been “bought,” and that the Government had all along protected the “Black Panther.” His hands were trembling, the sallow face had turned livid, when at one o’clock in the morning the jury filed into the dim, stifling court and delivered their verdict: “Not Guilty” on all counts. How Rochefort scowled at the cries of “Vive Madame Steinheil!” and “Vive la Justice!” How he sneered when the barristers cheered, applauded and flung their black képis into the air! With what disgust he listened to the bravoes from the journalists and the public at the back of the court. When Madame Steinheil fainted, and was being carried out of the dock by the Municipal Guards, Rochefort’s ruthless hatred made the compassion of the public loathsome to him. Shaking, speechless with rage, he roughly pushed his way out of court, cracking his lozenges with such savagery that he must have very nearly broken his teeth.