In the warm luminous decline of day, the Luxembourg garden was as
though bathed in a golden dust. Monsieur Bergeret sat on the terrace
between Messieurs Denis and Goubin, at the foot of the statue of
Marguerite d’Angoulême.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I should like to read you an article that
appeared this morning in the _Figaro_. I shall not name the author,
for I think you will recognize him for yourselves. Since chance will
have it so, it gives me all the more pleasure to read it in the
presence of this lovable woman who was a lover of sound doctrine and of
open-hearted men, and who, because she was learned, sincere, tolerant
and pitiful, and sought to deprive the torturers of their victims,
raised against her all the monasteries and all the universities. They
used even to incite the young scapegraces of the College of Navarre
to insult her, and had she not been sister to the King of France they
would have sewed her up in a sack and thrown her into the Seine. She
was a gentle soul, profound yet cheerful. I cannot say whether when
alive she had the coquettish and mischievous expression which she
wears in this statue by a little-known sculptor, by name Lescorné,
but she certainly has not in the hard, sincere pencil drawings of
Clouet’s pupils, who have left us her portrait. I would rather believe
that her smile was often veiled in sadness, and that her lips drooped
sorrowfully when she said: ‘I have borne more than my share of the
burden common to all persons of high estate.’ In her private life she
was anything but happy, and all around her she saw the wicked triumph
amid the applause of the cowardly and ignorant. I believe that in the
days when her ears were not of marble she would have listened with
sympathy to what I am about to read.”
And Monsieur Bergeret, having unfolded his paper, read as follows:
“THE GOVERNMENT.
“To see just where one stood in the Affair one needed, at the
outset, some application, and a certain amount of critical
method, together with sufficient leisure to apply it. So that
we see that the light first dawned upon those who, by the
quality of their minds and the nature of their occupation,
were better adapted than others to the solution of difficult
problems. After this, all that was needed was common sense and
close attention. Common sense is enough to-day.
“We must not be surprised that the general public has held out
so long against the obvious truth. Nothing should surprise
us. There are reasons for everything, and it is our place
to discover these reasons. In the present instance little
reflection is needed in order to perceive that the public
has been utterly and absolutely deceived, and its touching
credulity abused. The Press has largely helped the lie to
succeed. Most of the newspapers have hurried to the assistance
of the forgers, and have published forged or falsified
documents, insults and lies. But we must admit that in most
cases this was done to please their public and respond to
the private opinions of their readers. It is certain that
the battle against truth was in the first place based on the
popular instinct.
“The crowd, by which I mean the crowd of people who are
incapable of thinking for themselves, did not understand; they
could not understand. Their idea of the Army was a simple one.
For them the Army was parade, march past, review, manœuvres,
uniforms, high boots, spurs, epaulets, guns and flags. It also
meant conscription, with beribboned caps, litres of cheap wine,
barracks, drill, the mess, the guard-room and the canteen.
It meant, again, a national trade in pictures, the brilliant
little sketches of our military painters with their spotless
uniforms and nice tidy battle scenes. And finally it was a
symbol of strength and security, of honour and glory. The
officers who rode past on horseback with their swords in their
hands, amid the glitter of gold and steel, to the sound of
music and the roll of drums, how was it possible to believe
that they would shortly be bending over a table, behind locked
doors, _tête à tête_ with anxious agents from the prefecture of
police, handling the eraser and the india-rubber, handling the
gum brush or sprinkling pounce, scratching out or putting in a
name in a document, forging handwritings, to ruin an innocent
man; or thinking out ridiculous disguises for mysterious
appointments with the traitor they had to save?
“What made these crimes seem impossible to the public mind was
that they did not smack of the open air, the early morning
march, the field of manœuvres and the battle-field. They were
all too stuffy, they savoured too much of the office; there was
nothing military about them. And, in truth, all the practices
which were resorted to in order to conceal the judicial error
of 1895, all those infamous documents, all that vile and
rascally trickery, reeks of the office, and a dirty office
at that. All that the four green-papered walls, the china
inkstand surrounded with sponge, the boxwood paper-knife, the
water-bottle on the mantelpiece, the pigeon-holes, and the
leather-seated chair could suggest in the way of ridiculous
imaginings and evil thoughts to these stay-at-homes, these
poor ‘sitters’ as a poet has called them, to vain, poor,
lazy, plotting scribblers, idle even in the accomplishment of
their idle task, jealous of one another and proud of their
occupation; all the equivocal, false, treacherous and stupid
things that can be done with pen and paper in the service of
wickedness and folly, came out of a corner of that building on
which are sculptured battle trophies and smoking hand-grenades.
“The jobs perpetrated in these offices during the space of
four years, for the purpose of burdening a condemned prisoner
with evidence which they had neglected to produce before
his condemnation, and of acquitting the guilty man whom all
accused, who inculpated himself, are so monstrous in their
conception as to baffle the moderate mind of a Frenchman, and
they exhale a spirit of tragic buffoonery most displeasing in a
country whose literature abhors the confusion of styles. These
documents and inquiries must be studied minutely before one
can admit the reality of all these plots and intrigues, these
prodigiously audacious tricks and inept manœuvres, and I can
well understand that the careless, ill-informed public refused
to believe in them even after they were divulged.
“And yet it is very true that at the end of a corridor in a
Ministerial building, on thirty square yards of waxed flooring,
a few military bureaucrats, some of them idle and crafty,
others excited and unruly, betrayed justice and deceived a
great people by their wicked, fraudulent documents. But if this
Affair, which was above all the Affair of Mercier and the
bureaux, has revealed a villainous morality, it has also raised
up some noble characters.
“For even in this very office there was one man unlike the
rest. His mind was broad, shrewd and lucid, his character
noble, his heart patient, abundantly human and invincibly
gentle. He was rightly looked upon as one of the most
intelligent officers in the Army. And although the singularity
of a spirit of too rare an essence might have been a
stumbling-block, he had been the first among the officers of
his age to be appointed lieutenant-colonel, and everything
foretold for him the most brilliant future in the Army. His
friends understood his rather quizzical indulgence and his
genuine kindliness. They knew him to be endowed with an
unusual sense of beauty, apt to feel keenly all that was best
in music and literature, and to live in the ethereal world of
ideas. Like all men whose inner life is deep and meditative,
he developed his great moral and intellectual faculties in
solitude. This tendency to retire within himself, together
with his natural simplicity, his spirit of renunciation and
sacrifice, and the beautiful sincerity which sometimes seems to
grace the minds of those most conscious of universal suffering
and evil, combined to form in him the type of soldier known or
dreamed of by Alfred de Vigny, the quiet hero of daily life who
imparts some of his own nobility to the humblest tasks which he
undertakes, and to whom the accomplishment of routine duty is
the familiar poetry of life.
“This officer, who was appointed to the second committee of
investigation, found one day that Dreyfus had been condemned
for the crime of Esterhazy. He informed his superior officers.
They tried, quietly at first, and then by threats, to put a
stop to his investigations, which, in proving the innocence
of Dreyfus, would reveal their own crimes and errors. He knew
that it meant ruin if he persevered. He persevered. With quiet
reflection, slow and sure, with calm courage, he continued his
work of justice. He was removed. He was sent to Gabès, and to
the Tripoli frontier, on some wicked pretext, for no other
reason than to get him murdered by the Arab brigands.
“Having failed to kill him, they set to work to dishonour
him, to ruin him by the profusion of their slanders. With
treacherous promises they tried to keep him from speaking
at the Zola trial. He spoke, with the unruffled calm of the
just man, with the serenity of a mind that knew neither fear
nor desire. There was no exaggeration in his speech and no
weakness; only the words of a man who was doing his duty on
that day as on all other days, without thinking for a moment
that there was a singular courage in the act. Neither threats
nor persecution caused him to hesitate for a moment.
“Many have said that in order to accomplish the task which he
had set himself, to establish the innocence of a Jew and the
crime of a Christian, he had to get the better of clerical
prejudices, to conquer a hatred of the Jews ingrained in him
since his early youth, when he was growing to manhood in that
land of Alsace and of France which gave him to the Army and the
country. Those who know him best know that he heeded nothing
of the kind, that he was incapable of any sort of fanaticism,
that his ideals were never those of a sectary, that his great
intelligence placed him above petty hatreds and partialities;
in short, that his soul was free.
“This inward liberty, the most precious of all liberties, his
persecutors could not take from him. In the prison to which
they sent him, whose stones, in the words of Fernand Gregh,
formed the pedestal of his statue, he was free, freer than
they. His wide reading, his calm, benevolent speech, and his
letters, full of serene and noble thoughts, bear witness (I
know) to the freedom of his soul. Those others, his persecutors
and calumniators, were the real prisoners—the prisoners of
their lies and their crimes. People who saw him behind the
bolts and bars testify to the fact that he was quiet, smiling
and indulgent. When the great mental revolution took place
during which those public meetings that united thousands of
scholars, students and working-men were organized, while
petitions covered with signatures demanded an end to the
scandal of his imprisonment, he said to Louis Havet, who went
to see him: ‘I am much more easy in my mind than you.’ I think,
however, that he suffered. I think he suffered intensely at
the thought of so much baseness and treachery, of so monstrous
an injustice, of that epidemic of crime and madness, of the
execrable fury of the men who were deceiving the crowd, and
the pardonable fury of the ignorant mob. He, too, saw the aged
woman bearing with saintly simplicity the faggots for the
torture of the innocent. How could he do other than suffer,
when he found that men were worse than his philosophy had
pictured them, less courageous and less intelligent when put
to the test than the psychologists imagined in their quiet
studies? I believe he suffered inwardly in the secret places
of his silent soul, veiled as by the Stoic’s cloak. But I
should be ashamed to pity him. I should be too much afraid lest
that murmur of human pity should reach his ears and offend
the rightful pride of his heart. Far from pitying him, rather
will I say that he was happy; happy because on the sudden day
of trial he was ready and without weakness; happy because
unforeseen circumstances permitted him to give to the full the
measure of his great soul; happy that he proved himself to
be an honest man, heroic in his simplicity; happy because he
stands for ever as an example to soldiers and to citizens. Pity
is for those who have failed. To Colonel Picquart we can offer
nothing less than admiration.”
Having come to an end of his reading, Monsieur Bergeret refolded his
newspaper. The statue of Marguerite of Navarre was all rosy-pink. In
the west the harshly brilliant sky clothed itself as with a suit of
mail, a network of clouds like bars of red copper.