He told me that many people in the Club would probably not speak to him when they returned, for his having accepted the portfolio at such a time. “They will turn their backs on me probably,” he said. “Mais,” he added, with a chuckle, “ils ne se permetteront pas une impertinence.” He used to tell me many interesting things. He said the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life was Georgiana, Lady Dudley, at one of the early Paris Exhibitions, and after her, Madame de Castiglione. I never knew whether he had believed in the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus, but I knew he was determined the case should end somehow and by a verdict which should bring about an apaisement.
The General was a picturesque and striking figure, not tall nor imposing, but carved, as it were, in some enduring granite-like substance, with steely eyes, a quick, rather hoarse, jerky utterance, and a very direct manner, a little alarming to a newcomer, owing to its abrupt frankness, and his way of saying what he thought in the most pointed, Gallic manner. His illustrations, too, and his confessions were sometimes startling.
In conversation he leapt over all conventions, with the same gaiety and gallantry that had made him say at Sedan: “Tant que vous voudrez, Mon Général.” In the early days of the case he had been strongly in favour of revision.
When the verdict of the Court of Rennes was announced, and Dreyfus subsequently pardoned, a curious thing happened. Although the topic had been raging daily for years to the exclusion of everything else, exciting everywhere the fiercest passions, and dividing every family in France, estranging friendships, and breaking careers, the very moment the decision was made known, the topic dropped from the minds of men instantly and finally, as though it had never existed.
My own point of view, which I sometimes found was shared by others, was that I believed Dreyfus to be innocent, but I loathed the Dreyfusards. Commenting on this, Andrew Lang wrote to me: “People like us, who hate vivisection and anti-vivisectionists, who believe Dreyfus was innocent and loathe Dreyfusards (though anti-Dreyfusards were really worse), have no business on this foolish planet.”
I often went to the play, and the chief enjoyment I derived was from what Sarah Bernhardt did in those days, about most of which I shall deal with separately. She must have a chapter to herself. Of the rest I remember but little except a revival of La Belle Hélène with its enchanting tunes, and some funny songs at Montmartre; Réjane in Zaza and La Robe Rouge, and a terrifying play at the Théâtre Antoine called En Paix, about a man who is shut up in a lunatic asylum, when he is sane, and who ends by going mad. This play was said not only to have been founded on fact, but to have been written by a man whose brother had been shut up in a private lunatic asylum by some conspiring greedy relations.
The man whose brother was thus treated went to Law, but without avail, so as a last resource he wrote a play in which he exposed the facts, which were briefly these: A greedy family wish to get one of their members out of the way. They say he is mad and get him sequestered in a mad-house. He has a just brother who tries to get him released, but the brother finds himself faced with the obstinacy of professionalism when he declares the sequestered man is not mad; the lunatic experts say he does not understand the intricacies of the disease, and when he loses his temper, the doctors say: “You, too, are showing signs of the family madness.” The man who is shut up is quick tempered; a sojourn with lunatics sharpens his temper, and the play ends by his being dragged out by sinister-looking warders, crying out: “A la douche!” I could not sleep after seeing this spectacle, which lost nothing in the realistic interpretation of actors such as Antoine and Gémier.
In September, I went for a short time on leave, and stayed at Lynton, North Devon, with the Cornishes in a delightful little house called the Chough’s Nest. It was a warm, soft windy Devonshire September. Hubert and I bathed in the great breakers. We had wonderful teas in the valley, and followed the staghounds on Exmoor. We talked of all the books under the sun, and I wrote a poem in blank verse which was afterwards published in the Anglo-Saxon Review.
Later in the autumn, I stayed a few days at a château near Fontainebleau, and saw the forest in all the glory of its autumn foliage, with the tall trees ablaze, like funeral torches for the dying year; and the gardens of the château, and the splendid rooms seemed more melancholy than ever, as though the ghosts of the kings and queens of France were there unseen; and, looking at the gorgeous raiment of the fading forest, I thought of Mary Stuart putting on her most splendid robes on the morning of her execution, and mounting the scaffold in flaming satin.
“And all in red as of a funeral flame,