Wednesday, December 24, 2014

The Invasion


Make no mistake about it: I love my three children, their two spouses and one significant other, and my two granddaughters. But when they descend upon me en masse, they can stretch those infrangible bonds of filial affection to frightening lengths, like bungee jumpers leaping into the unknown.

The problem is twofold. First I live alone, a condition abhorrent to many, but quite comfortable to me. And I have lots of company -- besides my lovely life partner, recognizable to loyal followers of these musings by the acronym JSG, at whose home about one mile from my own I spend many pleasant hours. According to the most recent demographic statistics available (2013), twenty-seven percent of Americans occupy one-person households, up from seventeen in 1970, with the male percentages rising from six to twelve. The trend is a global one; the comparable overall figure in Sweden is 47%, in Japan 32%, and in Canada 28%.

Is it conceivable that growing economic independence in all age groups is enabling a form of domesticity for which many may have subconsciously yearned but which was not financially viable -- because it was imperative in previous generations that individuals and family members share living expenses? (My eighty-nine-year-old mother contends that there is a primal urge also at work here: the revolution in sexual mores, which has rendered marriage, even cohabitation, irrelevant.) While I acknowledge that for a majority of people constant companionship is a given, I submit that for a sizable segment of the population solitude can be equally satisfying.

I am not the first person -- nor will I be the last -- to catalog any number of perquisites enjoyed by the soloist: rising and retiring at any hour of the day or night; eating whatever and whenever one pleases (although if he can't cook, his options are severely limited, mainly to idiot-proof microwavables); reading for several hours without feeling guilty for ignoring one's mate; engaging in a few vulgar habits better left to the reader's imagination; and walking around the house (or doing any of the aforementioned) naked. Also, when one is alone, he can't do anything wrong -- as opposed to, well, not doing anything right.

An almost empty house -- consisting of one resident and a bare minimum of furnishings and adornments, other than a sprawling library -- is the primary element of danger. Compounding it with a personality type compulsively averse to clutter (but not necessarily grit and grime, since he rarely lifts a broom, mop, or rag) and to any disruptions in his daily routine (early-morning workout, cereal and a banana for breakfast, nine hours in his office or visiting a Schewel store, a quiet dinner at home or with JSG, a few hours immersed in a book, and an occasional social outing) is a recipe for serious queasiness, once the final seasoning of family members is sprinkled in.

And yet, what else is 3800 square feet with five bedrooms, four-and-a-half baths, two family rooms, and a swimming pool good for, other than to play hide-and-seek with oneself? And especially if he is a proud parent and grandparent blessed with the finest brood he could ever hope for, and far better than he deserved, considering he ascribed to and practiced a philosophy of child-rearing by absenteeism. I'll graciously concede to their mother all credit for the mature, independent, and amiable adults who emerged from a nest shredded by divorce.

Around 5:00 PM Wednesday, the first squad rolls in from Ithaca, New York: my daughter Sara, her husband Nate, and their daughter, Lia, all packed into their 2008 Subaru Impreza Outback, along with all the paraphernalia required to transport, sustain, and entertain an eighteen-month-old toddler for six days away from home, including portacrib, toys and picture books, shrunken utensils, and plastic cups with lids. Ithaca is a long way from Lynchburg, about eight-a-half-hours in the best of non-holiday and adults-only conditions, which is why Sara and Nate decided to bivouac one night in Winchester at the Lauberge Provincale Bed and Breakfast, where they encountered an untimely Shenandoah snowstorm.

What I viewed at the time as an unlikely career shift -- Sara's enrolling in a nursing program at the University of Pennsylvania after four years teaching biology at private secondary schools -- proved to be as providential as my entering the family furniture business many decades ago; in retrospect, it was even foreshadowed by her semester abroad assignment to a remote hospital in Cameroon, although I suspect her motivations at the time were refining her French and deploying her National Outdoor Leadership skills.

She tackled her new profession with the same unbridled enthusiasm and total commitment she has regularly demonstrated in her relentless pursuit of adventure: camping in the wilderness for weeks at a time; running the Philadelphia Marathon with her boy friend, who presented her a ring at the finish line; and cycling the mountains of Thailand on her honeymoon. While fully devoted to her patients as a nurse practitioner employed by a hospitalist group at the Cayuga Medical Center, she's retained the critical eye that has always made her wary of incompetent authority figures. A frequent topic of conversation between the two of us is our shared disillusionment with our health care system, the waste, inefficiencies, overutilization, and misaligned incentives of which she now witnesses every day.

Even at her furious pace, Sara has a hard time keeping up with her husband Nate, who, like a mild-mannered Clark Kent, sans spectacles, transforms himself into super-Nate faster than one can utter the words "caped crusader." His Ph.D degree in computer science seems a mere footnote to a curriculum as extensive as the dissertation I perused in his apartment years ago, searching in vain for one comprehensible sentence: securing private and public grants for his Cornell graduate students' research projects; crisscrossing the globe to present papers and attend conferences, including an elite gathering by invitation only of thirty international scholars; running a leisurely twenty miles Saturday afternoon as a warm-up for an upcoming marathon in India; blazing through a three-hundred-page book, King Leopold's Ghost, during a few spare moments over the weekend; and, last Thanksgiving, preparing a tasty vegetable, cheese, and pastry hors d'ouevre after cycling from the Wintergreen turn-off at Rt. 151 to my sister's cabin at the summit of Devil's Knob (in thirty-degree weather).

In a high-energy environment like that, what's eighteen-month-old Lia to do but follow her leaders? She's not astride that bicycle yet, but she chugs up and down my long hallways like her crib bunny on the loose. From her one-hundred-word vocabulary, she likes to enunciate "oushide," then ramble to the door and point a provocative finger toward the wide open spaces. I doubt she'll ever be the bibliophile her "Abba" (or "father" in Hebrew, the name I've chosen to be called) is, but she will sit still long enough to plow through a picture book or two. If she's sufficiently well-mannered to feed herself yoghurt with a spoon, she's quick to scatter her peas and macaroni across the table when she's done. She can count, sort of, responding to Nate's prompt of odd numbers with the next consecutive even one, until he gets to "seven," when she leapfrogs to "nine." All decked out in her favorite colors -- purple, pink, and blue -- and sitting on her front stoop, she beams at me with a mischievous grin every morning from the photograph propped on the bookcase beside my bed.


Sara gets her to sleep in time to make a quick grocery store run (since my bachelor's stockpile is limited to cereal, soy milk, peanut butter, beer, and veggie burgers), and then joins me at the train station to welcome our New York City contingent: my older son David and his partner Mary, soon-to-be a mother herself, in February. "It's a boy," and somewhat of a surprise, as Mary's child-bearing window is closing rapidly, though even I am not so indiscreet as to disclose any statistical details. His name has been chosen, but remains a secret -- in order, I suspect, to deflect any unsolicited advice -- as does the ticklish question as to whether a marriage is in the offing, probably for the same reason.

It will be interesting to see how my forty-year-old firstborn adapts to the fatherhood which will wreak havoc upon a lifestyle both carefree and orderly and upon a temperament I've always regarded as perpetually young at heart; it's a judgment which I submit is applicable to all who follow their adolescent dreams into the entertainment industry. Since even Hall of Fame athletes must eventually hang up their cleats, who among us can forever play the games that so captivated us as innocents -- other than actors, performers, filmmakers, and their ilk -- and be rewarded for it to boot? As I see it, David has never let loose the video camera which he picked up (and I bought for him) thirty years ago at the Schewel store on Timberlake Road; he's only traded it for more sophisticated versions.

His forte is reality t.v., and since striking out on his own in 1997, he's compiled an impressive resume as an editor and an executive producer that features such varied fare as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Extreme Makeover, Oddities, Chasing Tail (not the two-legged species, but deer on Long Island), and Guntucky (about a combination gun store and firing range with simulated heavy weaponry shooting experiences). Premiering soon is Hotel Amazon, which depicts the trials and tribulations (some contrived for dramatic effect) of two entrepreneurs developing a resort in the remote jungles of Peru and which required my son to assume the unlikely persona of an intrepid Theodore Roosevelt during two ten-day site visits.

Mary is a willowy blonde who savors her morning Starbucks and her evening vodka gimlets (when she's not pregnant). As a marketing executive with Showtime, she's been on her share of junkets, including several trips to Las Vegas to cover championship boxing matches. She's got an eye for fashion and a flair for design, gradually making over David's wardrobe and his furnishings as their relationship progressed.

When they reached a point where neither her apartment nor his co-op was big enough for two, they hired a consultant to advise them how best to spruce up his place in order to expedite a sale. After they had spent a considerable amount on fees, construction, painting, and commissions, their realtor brought them a buyer: the next door resident, who wanted to remove the adjoining wall and double his own space. Sometimes it pays to know your neighbor, even in New York City.

How quickly one forgets what it's like to have a full house. David tries to heat up some leftover pizza in the toaster oven and melts cheese all over the tray. Tap water with ice -- always good enough for me -- doesn't suit my kids, who insist on giving the cold water dispenser on my refrigerator such a strenuous workout that I'm sure the whole thing is going to break down. Within an hour, every glass in my cabinet is pulled out, sipped from once, and abandoned. I have to run my dishwasher more times in three days than I normally do in a month. Awakening at 2:00 AM to take care of the usual business, I don't have to stumble around in the dark since every lamp is lit, although I do have to be careful not to trip over an obstacle course of littered shoes. My Keurig machine is locked permanently in the "power" and "heating" settings. In fact, so roiled am I by all this tumult that I fail to place my mug under the spigot and spill coffee all over my countertop.

And the third wave hasn't even arrived yet.

Coming from Washington, D.C., my younger son Matthew, his wife Patricia, and their six-month-old daughter Ana Maria, will be joining us the next day at Wintergreen, a sensible arrangement since feeding interruptions can easily expand their three-hour drive into five. A feathery four pounds, eleven ounces at birth, Ana has been on a reverse crash diet since then, and has ballooned into the healthy fiftieth percentile.

A native of the Dominican Republic, her mother is intent on raising her as a bi-cultural, primping her in her own inimitable style (Ana tiptoed into her first Halloween as a frilly ballerina); accentuating her delicate features with sparkling miniature earrings and a beribboned headband, each day of the week marked by its own color; and maintaining a one-way non-stop conversation with her in Spanish. Meanwhile, Ana scrutinizes her strange new surroundings with measured placidity, and practices rolling over.


If Matthew, like Sara, soured on teaching after a short stint, at least he can claim to have mined one jewel from his labors: Patricia, who was engaged in the same bilingual elementary school program as he (although in a different North Carolina school district) and whom he met at a conference. I think her father, Don Julio, an aristocrat, historian, physician, and professor, was initially apprehensive about what species of ugly American she might bring home -- until he met my 6'2" gentle giant, who could converse in Spanish with him on baseball and Latin American history and hold his own with his sons trading ripostes and swilling vodka. Once Julio blessed this Jewish-Catholic union, he celebrated it with a Dominican extravaganza, treating two-hundred-fifty guests to an endless midnight buffet, a pulsating rock band, and a professional dancing troupe.

If Patricia has taken an indefinite leave-of-absence from her pedagogical duties, Matthew's recent promotion to editor of the niche magazine, Inside U. S. Trade, where he was hired as a reporter two years ago -- prevailing over one hundred other applicants -- has meant long hours meeting publication deadlines, on-the-job management training as he adjusts to being the "boss," and no abatement in a rigorous travel schedule that has taken him to Brunei, Bali, Singapore, and, a few weeks ago, Sydney, Australia, in pursuit of international trade commission conferees.

He's been sighted at congressional hearings, diplomatic press conferences, and CNN panels, earned a reputation as a shrewd investigator and interviewer who easily penetrates obfuscation and evasion, and established himself as an expert in a field as esoteric as the calculation of import duties. While I'm sure they may be riveting to the Assistant Undersecretary of the Department of Commerce, two paragraphs under Matthew's byline are enough to send me scrambling to the sports pages.

Our annual family reunion reminds me of Thanksgivings past, not all sixty-six of them, of course, but several that became traditions for a number of years. When I was a youngster -- and up until I entered college -- my two siblings and I would pile into my parents' wood-paneled station wagon, and the five of us would motor to Roanoke -- it seemed so far at the time; the Old Forest Road/Rt. 221 intersection was truly in the country -- where my father's cousin and her husband hosted a multitude of Schewels at their modest mid-century colonial residence.

In a smoke-filled den, several older gentlemen would be engrossed in a high-stakes gin rummy game. From the rear of the house could be heard the clanging of pots and pans and the idle chatter of females (and their black hired help) toiling away. In time they would rotate into the living room, where my father, as usual, held center stage regaling his audience with a joke or tall tale. On balmier days touch football would erupt in the front yard, although my speed, skill, and competitiveness were much inferior to that of my more coordinated kinfolk.

The highlight of these holidays was a group excursion to the VMI-VPI football game at Victory Stadium; the acronym of the latter institution, as defunct as the long-ago demolished venue, has been so expunged from the chronicles of Virginia Tech that it is remembered by only a handful of nostalgic baby-boomers, as is the contest itself, which at the time was the season's grand finale, matching the state's fiercest rivals and two titans of the old Southern Conference.

Back then I was probably more of a football fan than I am today, which isn't saying much, since now I despise the sport; I suspect my father was even less enamored, and dragged us both along in the spirit of camaraderie. Since we had no particular allegiance to either team, we were always in a quandary as to whom to root for, most often landing on the side of VMI, a decided underdog in the waning years of the series, as its foe ramped up its program. On cold and windy afternoons we left at halftime. My motivation for persisting was to catch a glimpse of (and even exchange a word or two with) a girl whom I had met through a Jewish youth organization -- during the game, we parked our cars in her father's junkyard -- and whom I had a crush on; like so many others, it would go unrequited.

After our extended family broke apart -- for reasons too convoluted and unpleasant to recount -- my father conceived a glorious plan to host all his children, their spouses, and his grandchildren for the long weekend at the Sonesta Beach Resort in Key Biscayne, Florida, although he never failed to attribute the hefty funding of these getaways to its proper source: income from my deceased grandparents' trusts. We went to South Florida because my mother's mother was still living in an apartment in Miami Beach, but I can only guess why he chose this particular property. Perhaps on a previous trip he had struck up a friendship with one or more of the staff there -- wherever he went, he always had a burning need to be recognized -- or he may have just been hoping to encounter one of his favorite celebrities, Richard Nixon, who was rumored to haunt the premises.

We sat around the pool, tested the ocean waters, polished our tans -- mainly so we could show them off when we got home -- caught up on our reading (at least I did), overindulged three times a day, and discovered the pleasures of a warm-weather Thanksgiving. I figured a twenty-mile run in eighty-degree heat and ninety-percent humidity would be good training for an upcoming marathon, so I ventured halfway across the causeway to the mainland, feeling like a champion before barely staggering home.

No trip to the Gold Coast was complete without a meal at the world-famous Joe's Stone Crab restaurant, even though we had to stand in line for at least an hour before we could be seated. One evening my mother spotted a gentleman slipping the maitre d' a fistful of cash and rocketing to the head of the pack; I don't know how much it cost my father, but, like magic, our waiting days were over. It was all wasted on me, since the thought of crunching and swallowing a crab shell didn't really titillate my palate; I was probably the only person in the place who opted for the mahi mahi.

Thirty years later I'm still pounding the pavement, although at a much diminished frequency, speed, distance, and gracefulness. Four days ago, Sunday, I'm cruising comfortably down Rivermont Avenue, reveling in my total recovery from the fractured fibula that hobbled me for six weeks back in June, when a grossly protuberant section of the sidewalk conspires with a senescent inability to lift one's legs more than a few inches off the ground to pitch me violently forward. Even though I jerk my my hands out in front to break the fall, both knees strike the pavement, the left one with brutal impact. Bruised and bloodied, I regain my footing, limp along for a few hundred yards, and -- of course -- jog the remaining three-and-a-half miles of my circuit. Within a couple of hours, my knee is purple, bulging like a softball, and too painful to permit me to contract it fully.

Since my ankle episode cost me about $800 in orthopedic devices and examinations, I decide to shun, at least temporarily, the greedy jaws of the health care digestive system and consult Dr. Internet. Barely able to walk, I initially fear the worst: a sprain, even a tear, of either the anterior or posterior cruciate ligament. Then, miraculously, on Wednesday, the pain dissipates, the swelling subsides, and the range of motion is almost one-hundred percent -- just in time for the Thanksgiving morning HumanKind (formerly Presbyterian Home) five-kilometer Turkey Trot.

Sara and Nate were the first to enlist back in 2011; the next year, after JSG, her daughter Annie, and I signed on, Sara added insult to injury by not only trouncing me by several minutes but also by announcing that she had done it while three months pregnant. Now she needs a baby sitter, and convinces David that this is as good a time as any to inaugurate parenthood.


The course is not an easy one -- none in Lynchburg is -- east on Main Street for five blocks, up the imposing Thirteenth Street hill, along Church Street to Fifth, across the John Lynch Bridge and back, and then following Church Street to Thirteenth Street before looping down Main to the finish. I think I'm in trouble when, in the midst of the city's fittest three thousand, it takes me a minute to get to the starting line; I know it for a fact when I spot first Nate and then Sara streaking toward me when I'm only halfway across the bridge. Amazingly, my twenty-eight-and-a-half minutes are good enough for third in my age group, all but two of whom must have been burdened by more creaking parts than my gimpy knee.

The cold dawn drizzle -- which abated just as the 9:00 AM race commenced -- is a sure harbinger of harsher conditions atop Devil's Knob, where the temperature is always ten degrees cooler than at the base. By the time we reach the summit, around 1:00 PM -- eleven of us, JSG, her three children, Mary, Sara, Nate, David, Nanee, Lia, and me, all shoehorned into JSG's minivan and my Genesis sedan -- the falling snow has accumulated to four inches, making the uphill climb treacherous and parking along the narrow road problematic. We risk it, though Donna's son, Jordan, warns that the Wintergreen's finest, always on the lookout for lawbreakers, are likely to ticket, or worse, tow us (which I find hard to believe, even assuming they're working today). If he's a habitual crisis monger, Jordan's also in his emergency response mode; he's cleared the driveway, and hops in his Jeep to shuttle Nanee down the steep incline to the house.

This affair is quality time par excellence, especially for the next generation, who reacquaint themselves with each other after long hiatuses (other than their Facebook connections which, not being a subscriber, I tend to ignore), as twenty-two of us, confined to a single large living and dining area, sit, stand, meander, mingle, chat, chuckle, gossip, drink, snack, feast, and even steal a guilty glance at a muted football game.

Jordan, hunkering down for the Apocalypse, flourishes his newest rifle magazine in one hand and his sharpest blade in the other. Julie, an instantly mature freshman at Loyola of Baltimore, regales us with her latest exploits on the tennis court, which has kept her too busy to contribute her superb culinary skills to today's banquet. Bert, full-time graduate student, part-time Schewel salesman, shares a worrisome tale about a whistle-blowing incident. Hannah models her latest body art, hints at a future in nail decoration, and bemoans the plight of the Palestinians. Esther, having fled her boring birthplace (and Schewel employment) for the marvels of Manhattan, quietly surveys the scene, while visions of mathematical equations dance in her head. The three G's, George, Gus, and Annie (plus one girl friend, Sawyer), mirror their mother's gleaming smile and maintain their "cool" amidst all this familial frenzy.

Two popular activities of past conclaves are noticeably forgone: a rousing game of "Apples to Apples," either because the cards have been lost or it's suddenly regarded as too juvenile; and an after-meal hike along the golf course, too daunting without snowshoes for even this hardy bunch, for which I am extremely grateful.

But there's a new happening, borne of last year's quirky Hebrew calendar, which uprooted Hanukkah from its traditional proximity to Christmas and replanted it adjacent to Thanksgiving, a serendipitous convergence which inspired David to append to the festivities a "Secret (Ecumenical) Santa" gift exchange. Thus, even though Hanukkah has reverted to form, we haven't; the large square cocktail table in the middle of the room is overflowing with colorful bags and packages just waiting to delight (one hopes) their surprised recipients.

David, the proverbial camp counselor, having assigned each person his or her mate, is insistent we proceed by the rules: a name on a tag is read; seductive wrappings are torn away; exclamations of great joy are heard; and only then is the identity of "Santa" revealed. But because my offerings to Nanee are rather obscure, I am compelled to foil his best-laid plans, peremptorily to declare myself, and to explain each of them: two bottles of wine (which she despises); a half-liter of Chivas Regal (which she swears by, and in fact has already sampled, since she left hers at home); a gift card to Starbucks, where she's never been; and $100 in cash, her own special gift of choice to one and all on every occasion (and for which she profusely thanks me, seriously, since she likes money, and this is a first).

And then, one by one, all secrets are laid bare: Things That Matter, by Charles Krauthammer, to Jack from Donna, who remembers his second most revered conservative oracle (after Rush Limbaugh); super non-stick frying pans, to George and Gus from the ever-practical JSG; high-tech running/cycling attire, to Nate from Patricia; a gift certificate for a five-star Baltimore restaurant, to Donna from Nate, which she can use when visiting Julie; a gorgeous bracelet, to Esther from Nanee, whom Patricia claims as her Santa for next year; and the Downton Abbey Season Five DVD (arriving January 25th) to yours truly, who forgets to ask whom it's from, evoking an outcry from Matthew, "Don't you even want to know?"

Meanwhile, Jack has been back and forth to the basement, attending to the turkey nestled in the deep fryer purchased a few years ago just for this annual ritual. Finally, it's ready, tender, moist, plucked, sliced, and spread out on the counter, along with its customary consorts: salad, stuffing, a trio of mashed potato, sweet potato, and bean casseroles, and lo and behold, gravy. Having forgotten some ingredient, Jack sent me an SOS, but thirty minutes after I had left home; apparently, he located a store in the vicinity where a suitable substitute could be obtained. And if we're not already sinfully satiated, a surfeit of desserts awaits us: two pumpkin pies, one pecan, and a huge bowl of banana pudding, homemade by a devoted friend, who presented it to us at a rendezvous at Clifford on our way here.

Allocating seating for the ride home, I'm counting on one additional in Matthew's car (also a Genesis, my old one, circa 2008), when I hear that he, Patricia, and Ana are planning to spend the night at Donna's. That doesn't make much sense until someone whispers the real reason: Patricia doesn't trust Matthew on these slippery, winding roads in the foggy darkness. She will go only if I take the wheel. Now that's the consummate irony; obviously, she hasn't read my blog "Car Talk," which detailed a harrowing legacy of wrecked vehicles, nor heard JSG and my ex-wives elaborate on my eccentric driving habits.

Before the advent of Ana and Lia, taking the clan out to eat was the simple recourse for one who subsists on frozen foods. But nap time, feeding schedules, equipment transport, and the irrepressible energy of an eighteen-month-old pose severe complications.

Friday we run a lunch tag team to the Cavalier, where, besides enjoying beer, burgers, dogs, and spicy fries, Lynchburg expatriates like David and Sara can usually reconnect with fellow travelers home for the holiday. Saturday midday everyone scatters, a problem of sorts, since David wants to head to Roanoke to film an adult cheer-leading team; it's for a pilot he's been trying to sell to a network for ten years. When Nanee reneges on loaning him her car (which rarely budges from her garage), what's a father to do but hand over his? She makes amends that night, however, treating us all, plus Donna's foursome, to some exquisite Boonsboro Country Club cuisine, as both sets of parents cheerfully lug along their babies, who exhibit their best behavior. Sunday morning JSG invites the stragglers to her house for a smoked salmon, eggs, and bacon brunch.

That leaves Friday's dinner. Nate says his favorite restaurant is King's Island, which he's never actually been to, but only experienced vicariously through the accolades bestowed on it by us natives. We're close to touch-toning for carry-out when the mood abruptly shifts, and a chef materializes from the woodwork; who else but Super-Nate, with Mary in a supporting role? Faster than a speeding bullet, he rips through Kroger, and within thirty minutes my kitchen looks like it's been churned by a tornado: pots boiling; pans sizzling; platters baking; long-neglected bowls, knives, mixers, and measuring cups exhumed; real food in various stages of preparation strewn over every surface. So incongruous is this scene that Sara deems it worthy of commemoration and snaps a photo.

Similarly, my dining room is awakened from its own somnolence. Yes, buried in my massive buffet and hutch are a dainty tablecloth on permanent loan from Nanee and enough china, silver, and crystal for all eight of us (three couples plus Nanee and me). No sooner is the table set than a sumptuous feast is laid before us: mixed greens with cherry tomatoes, apricots, and Nate's special dressing; pasta shells in a creamy mushroom sauce; grilled asparagus; roasted chicken; toasted French bread; and fresh berries baked in a crust. And to top it off, the kids wouldn't even let me help clean up.

In fact, as the last car -- bearing Matthew, Patricia, and Ana -- pulls out of the driveway around 2:00 PM Sunday, what minor lingering evidence of the invasion is easily tidied up: three beds stripped and remade; one load of sheets and towels laundered and dried; the den hastily vacuumed (before the maids conduct a thorough housecleaning on Tuesday); the dishwasher cycled one more time; and a lonesome sock and three tiny stuffed animals ferreted out and stored in a safe place until such time as their rightful owners return to claim them.

Which I hope won't be too far off. Because, as I make a final inspection of my vacant house, I'm missing them. It's much too quiet here.
























Thursday, November 20, 2014

A House Divided


By February 23, 1898, three trials had evolved from the discovery that a traitor in the French Army was selling information to German diplomats; each had yielded a verdict that, backed by the full weight and influence of the General Staff, was inevitable yet problematic, as the reliability of the evidence became increasingly suspect.

December 23, 1894: Thirty-five year old Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, is convicted of having composed the telltale bordereau recovered from the German embassy and is sentenced to life imprisonment on a remote South American island.

January 12, 1898: Commandant Walsin Esterazy is acquitted of the same crime, despite an unsavory history of deceit, depravity, and indebtedness, and a handwriting, according to most observers, identical to that of the bordereau.

Six weeks later: A jury finds novelist Emile Zola guilty of libel, since he could never prove that Esterhazy's judges had exonerated "on command" a defendant whom they knew to be a spy; the accusation was as true as all the others Zola had fired from his explosive pen denouncing the government and the military establishment for malfeasance and miscarriage of justice.

Zola's J'Accuse ignited a civil war in the salons of Paris.

A cadre of journalists from La Revue Blanche began gathering signatures from well-known academics, writers, scientists, poets, and artists for petitions first condemning "the violation of judicial norms in the 1894 trial and the iniquities surrounding the Esterhazy affair" and second requesting "the preservation of legal guarantees for ordinary citizens." (Bredin, p. 276)

Publishing the former in L'Aurore under the title "Manifesto of the Intellectuals," Georges Clemenceau thus popularized what had been an obscure, pejorative term applied by their adversaries to men of letters and science who had the audacity to opine on public issues. One distinguished critic raged that "to designate as something in the order of a noble caste people living in laboratories and libraries is . . . one of the most ridiculous foibles of our era." (Bredin, pp. 276-277)

If the pro-Dreyfus faction ("Dreyfusards") were trumpeting their autonomy and defending justice and law, the anti-Dreyfusards had their own legion of intellectual mouthpieces who rallied in support of the established order, the Church, the Army, and res judicata. (Bredin, p. 278)

It was a house divided; almost everyone succumbed to the madness, certain in his heart that "France could be saved only by damning Dreyfus or rescuing him," and ultimately becoming so consumed by the battle that in time the fate of the victim faded into irrelevancy. (Lewis, p. 221)

"The struggle was now against institutions, against hierarchy, against military authority, and against the Catholics as much as it was for Alfred Dreyfus dying on Devil's Island . . . At stake was a moral cause, a society in which justice and equality would reign." (Bredin, p. 284)

Similarly, the anti-Dreyfusards had nearly forgotten their traitor, depersonalizing him into a symbol of all the social and intellectual types who threatened the stability and unity of their country: Jews, Protestants, socialists, liberal priests, emancipated women, and striking workers. (Bredin, p. 284)

Activism in the world of letters would reverberate far beyond the printing presses and Parisian parlors. If in February 1898 the bureaucrats and legislators were uniformly anti-Dreyfusard, by the end of the year they had begun to realign themselves. By elaborating for the first time in French history the role of intellectuals in the body politic, Zola had revealed their capacity to influence the nation's governors. (Bredin, p. 285)

The Dreyfusards' elation in June 1898 at the elevation to Prime Minister of Henri Brisson -- a distinguished republican whom his colleagues in the Chamber of Deputies regarded as an antidote to the reactionary right -- promptly vanished when he rewarded the Nationalists who had voted for him by appointing Godefroy Cavaignac Minister of War. Like one of his predecessors, Auguste Mercier, Cavaignac was tall, solemn, arrogant, and ambitious, passionately anti-Dreyfusard, steadfastly loyal to the Army, and domineering enough to rule the cabinet. (Lewis, pp. 238-239)


Cavaignac's rigorous examination of the Secret Dossier (which now housed three hundred documents) confirmed for him that the Army's case was ironclad. If he harbored doubts about the handwriting of the bordereau, which resembled that of Esterhazy, he resolved the dilemma by theorizing that, since the bordereau contained gunnery information which only Dreyfus would have been privy to, the pair had collaborated. (Chapman, p. 211)

Determined to bury the Affair forever, on July 7 Cavaignac strode to the rostrum and announced to the Chamber, "I am completely certain of Dreyfus's guilt" -- acknowledging, however, that an officer whom he did not mention by name, the true author of the bordereau, had been acquitted in error and would be "stricken tomorrow with the punishment he deserves." (Chapman, p. 212; Bredin, p. 309)

Then, attesting their "material and moral authenticity," he produced three documents: the April 1894 letter written from Schwarzkopppen to Panizzardi in which he spoke of receiving "master plans of Nice" from "scoundrel D"; the letter of 1896 in which Commandant Henry had changed the date to March 1894 and the identification of a person bringing Panizzardi "a number of interesting things" from P to D; and the decisive proof, the forgery to which Henry had attached Panizzardi's "My dear friend" salutation and "Alexandrine" signature. Finally, Cavaignac claimed possession of an affidavit from Captain Lebrun-Renault's verifying Dreyfus's confession. (Lewis, p. 232)

When he fell silent, the entire Chamber rose in acclamation. A motion was overwhelmingly ratified to have the speech printed at public expense and posted in the thirty thousand communes of France. (Lewis, p. 232)

Two days later the valiant Colonel Georges Picquart -- the former head of Counter-intelligence who had fingered Esterhazy as the real culprit and had been demeaned and demoted by his superiors for his efforts to bring the truth to light -- wrote to Prime Minister Brisson (and communicated to the press) that "the two documents dated 1894 cannot be applied to Dreyfus and the one dated 1896 has every appearance of being a forgery." (Bredin, p. 316)

Cavaignac was furious. He ordered Picquart arrested on the grounds of divulging official secrets, and stunned the Prime Minister's Cabinet by threatening to file suit before the High Court of the Senate against a host of prominent Dreyfusards -- among them Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, Socialist leader Jean Jaures (who had written his own open letter to the Minister of War refuting his evidence and conclusions), Georges Clemenceau, and Mathieu Dreyfus. The Cabinet, seeking to disprove Picquart and Jaures and to validate their War Minister, initiated an expert review of the Secret Dossier. (Lewis, p. 233)

Indeed, it was already in progress; as instructed by Cavaignac, Captain Louis Cuignet had been meticulously sifting through the file for the past month. On August 13, scrutinizing the faux Henry for the first time, Cuignet noticed two shocking peculiarities. "The heading and the signature appeared on paper whose lines were bluish gray; the body of the letter on fragments whose lines were pale violet." Nor did the measurement of the graph lines match. The principal piece condemning Dreyfus -- which Cuignet's friend, Commandant Henry, claimed to have obtained from the German embassy -- was a forgery, and it was placarded all over France. (Bredin, p. 324)

On August 30, Cavaignac summoned Henry to his office, and interrogated him in the presence of Chief of Staff Boisdeffre and Deputy Chief of Staff Gonse. Henry initial response was to lie, to deny any tampering or fabrication, until gradually his "remonstrations weakened, contradicted themselves, and finally collapsed." After an hour of intense badgering, when challenged with, "So this is what happened. You received in 1896 an envelope with a letter of no significance. You destroyed the letter and you manufactured the other," he weakly conceded, "Yes." (Lewis, p. 237; Chapman, p. 224)


When asked who had put the idea in his head, Henry explained: "My superiors were worried and I wanted to calm them. I said to myself: 'Let's add just a sentence; if we had a piece of evidence in this situation, we're in! Nobody knew anything about it . . . I acted solely in the interests of my country.' " (Lewis, p. 237)

Chief of Staff Boisdeffre took a sheet of paper from the Minister's desk and resigned, stating his trust in his Chief of Counter-intelligence was no longer justified. (Bredin, p. 328)

Imprisoned in Mont-Valerian, Henry took up his own pen. He solicited a visit from General Gonse, and protested disingenuously to his wife, "My letter is a copy and there is no touch of forgery." At three o'clock in the afternoon in the stifling heat he took off his clothes, stretched out on his bed, and slit his throat. Three hours later an orderly bringing his supper found the bloody corpse. (Chapman, p. 226)

Having risen from his peasant origins to the General Staff and earned the respect and confidence of gentlemen, perhaps Henry feared that, by living, he might cause irrevocable harm to the honor of the Army he loved. (Lewis, p. 240)

Upon hearing of Henry's suicide, Esterhazy shaved off his mustache, boarded a train for Mauberge, and crossed the Belgian border on foot. From Brussels he fled to London and settled under the name of de Becourt. (Bredin, p. 336)

The next domino to fall was Minister of War Cavaignac. Obstinately adhering to his warped paradigm, he was left with no choice but to step down when his colleagues in the Cabinet voted over his objections to consider Lucie Dreyfus's request for a reopening of her husband's case. (Lewis. p. 241)

The anti-Dreyfusards transformed Commandant Henry into a martyred patriot. In a series of articles entitled "The First Blood," Charles Maurras, an obscure poet and journalist, advanced the fanciful thesis that Henry had acted with "intellectual and moral nobility" for the public good and that his "unlucky forgery will be acclaimed as one of the finest deeds of war." (Chapman, p. 228)

La Libre Parole launched a national subscription campaign on behalf of Madame Henry and her children; its goal was to safeguard the reputation of the "French officer killed, murdered by the Jews." Week after week it published the names of the donors, who numbered 25,000 and filled a seven hundred page book, and the sums collected, which totaled 130,000 francs. (Bredin, p. 350)

Virulent anti-Semitic commentaries accompanied many contributions. Poverty, exploitation, and unemployment were blamed on the Jews. Lumped together with Protestants, Freemasons, republicans, and intellectuals, they were perceived as agents of social upheaval and polluters of moral values who ranked no higher on the biological ladder than insects, toads, reptiles, and monkeys. Among the remedies proposed for eradication of this scourge were vivisection, roasting, massacre, and "converting their flesh to mincemeat." (Bredin, pp. 352-353)

On September 26, Prime Minister Brisson's Cabinet voted (by a majority of two) to forward Lucie Dreyfus's application to the High Court of Appeals, specifically the Criminal Chamber (there were also a Civil Chamber and a Petitions Chamber), which was presided over by the courageous and incorruptible Justice Louis Loew. Four weeks later the jurist assigned to investigate, Maitre Alphonse Bard, presented his findings. In a masterly report that weighed every shred of available evidence and adduced the truth with inflexible logic, he concluded that revision was justified and that the Criminal Chamber should hear the case in plenary session. (Lewis, pp. 248, 253)

By now the country had a new Prime Minister and Minister of War. In Central Africa at Fashoda, futilely attempting to block access to the south, a French force of two hundred under Captain Jean Baptiste Marchand stood face-to-face with Lord Kitchener's 30,000-strong Anglo-Egyptian Army. In Paris an odor of insurrection permeated the streets as several hundred laborers walked off the site of the upcoming World's Fair; shortly they were joined by 20,000 construction workers and a union of railway employees. (Bredin, pp. 342-343)

To maintain order Cavaignac's successor, General Charles Chanoine, summoned to Paris 70,000 troops, whom militant nationalists and anti-Dreyfusards embraced as potential allies. On October 25, Chamoine marched to the Chamber, proclaimed Dreyfus's guilt, and abruptly resigned. With that, the majority center abandoned Prime Minister Brisson, and he followed suit. (Lewis, pp. 251-252)

If Chanoine had hoped his betrayal of Brisson would drive his panicked countrymen into the protective clutches of the Army and halt the revisionist movement, he was quickly disillusioned. With the Republicans in the Senate and the Chamber insistent on sustaining the supremacy of civilian government, President Felix Faures invited Charles Dupuy, who had been Prime Minister at the time of Dreyfus's conviction, to return to the office. Attuned to the political winds, Dupuy recalled a former Minister of War but a private citizen who had been in retirement for six years, Charles de Freycinet, to the post. (Bredin, p. 359)

Meanwhile, the parade of familiar figures before the Criminal Chamber of the High Court proceeded apace. Four War Ministers -- Mercier, Billot, Cavaignac, Chanoine -- all affirmed Dreyfus's guilt. Mercier attempted to prove it. "He admitted that he had secured no confession from Dreyfus through Du Paty, but he accepted Lebrun-Renault's statement. Asked why, in that case, he had not made a report, he answered, 'It was a closed case. It could not be foreseen that a whole race would later line up behind Dreyfus.' Asked about the communication of the Secret Dossier at the trial, he claimed that since Mme. Dreyfus's application had not mentioned this, the matter was irrelevant, and he refused to say yes or no." (Chapman, pp. 239-240)

"Colonel Picquart, removed from prison, told in detail all that he knew. His calmness, his precision, and his moderation, in contrast with the passions agitating the previous witnesses, made a deep impression on the magistrates." (Bredin, p. 360)

One of the seven judges in the 1894 court-martial, Martin Freystaetter, now believed the verdict was wrong; he testified that one of the critical documents, the scoundrel D letter, had never been discussed in open court. (Lewis, p. 262)

Esterhazy was granted safe-conduct to give his deposition. He lamented having been deserted by his cowardly and ungrateful superiors; as for the bordereau, since the first court-martial had attributed it to Dreyfus and the second had absolved him, he had nothing more to add. (Chapman, p. 251)

Anticipating defeat, the anti-Dreyfusards devised a daring strategy. Unofficial polling of the thirty-three members of the Civil and Petitions Chambers suggested that they strongly opposed revision and that, sitting with the Criminal Chamber, they would outvote its sixteen judges. The accusation by Civil Court Judge Quesnay de Beaurepaire that Justice Loew had interviewed and coached Colonel Picquart before his testimony, coupled with the nearness of national elections, gave the anti-Dreyfusards the wedge they needed. They pressured Dupuy into introducing a bill on January 28, 1899, requiring adjudication by the united branches of the High Court rather than the Criminal Chamber in cases of treason. (Lewis, p. 262)

Such a dispossession of a high court just days before its expected judgment was unheard of and in defiance of the law. In the Chamber of Deputies, Renault-Morliere, a former appellate attorney, charged his colleagues, "You are killing in this nation the very idea of justice." In the Senate, celebrated sage Rene Waldeck-Rousseau attacked "the suspect and feeble measure as a violation of legal principle and an outrage to conscience." (Bredin, pp. 371-372, 377)

The bill became law on March 1, and effectively canceled the Criminal Court's February 9th nullification of Dreyfus's 1894 conviction. The legal drama now had to replayed before the entire High Court of Appeals. (Lewis, p. 262)

It took three months. On May 29, the Court heard the arguments of counsel: Manau, the Procureur-General; Ballot-Beaupre, the rapporteur; and Henri Mornard, for Lucie Dreyfus. All three concluded that the bordereau had been written not by Dreyfus but by Esterhazy, but, bowing to the wishes of the Dreyfuses -- who wanted Alfred's name cleared by his peers -- and a majority of the judges, conceded that a new element had emerged -- the secret transmittal of the "scoundrel D" letter -- which mandated a retrial. (Chapman, pp. 262-264)

Thus, on June 3, the Chief Justice read to a silent assemblage: "The Court hereby rescinds and annuls the verdict rendered on December 28, 1894, against Alfred Dreyfus, and sends the accused before the Court-Martial at Rennes." A special ship, the Sjax, was dispatched to bring home to France the man who had been imprisoned on Devil's Island for more than four years. (Lewis, p. 267)

En route he would topple yet another administration. The death of Felix Faure on February 16 had enabled Dreyfus sympathizer Emile Loubet to ascend to the presidency. One day after the High Court's decision, while attending the steeplechase at Auteil, he was loudly derided by a crowd of rowdy royalists, then physically assaulted by one brandishing a walking stick. A week later, as thousands of citizens marched in homage to Loubet, the Chamber of Deputies "resolved to support only those governments intent on defending vigorously the institutions of the Republic and maintaining public order." By a vote of 296 to 159, Charles Dupuy was repudiated. (Bredin, p. 387)

Hoping to unite the disparate sects of republicanism -- Socialists, Progressives, and Radicals who were now bereft of leaders and policies -- Loubet appealed to the soft-spoken yet prestigious Rene Waldeck-Rousseau, "a parliamentarian whose intelligence, seriousness, and integrity were widely recognized." He would govern for three years, "almost by himself, keeping his president . . . at a distance and demanding of his ministers an unprecedented degree of submission." (Bredin, pp. 391, 393)


He made an exception only for his old friend General Gaston de Galliffet, whom he named Minister of War in order mollify the Army. Galliffet was tall, haughty, flamboyant, and caustic. If the republicans loathed him for his bloody suppression of the Paris communes in 1871, their fears were assuaged by his commitment to Dreyfus's innocence and his scorn for "conspiring generals." (Chapman, p. 272; Bredin, p. 396)

After three weeks at sea, the debilitated, emaciated Alfred Dreyfus arrived at the military prison at Rennes, where he was reunited with his loyal wife Lucie. "Hands entwined, mute, they cried. 'Their feelings were too intense to be expressed by human speech,' Dreyfus said simply." (Lewis, p. 274)

His team of attorneys -- the elderly, tactful, conservative Edgar Demange and the youthful, fiery, aggressive Fernand Labori -- came to prepare him for his trial. "Of all the literate persons on the planet, Dreyfus was probably the most ignorant of the Affair. From Demange he heard the name Esterhazy for the first time. He learned of Picquart's discovery of the petit bleu and of the Army's attempt to conceal the document. He strained to comprehend Zola's tempestuous intervention, Henry's suicide, Boisdeffre's resignation . . . the mustering of the intellectuals and politicians for and against him, and the worldwide passion aroused by his plight." (Lewis, p. 274)


The court convened on August 7, Colonel Albert Jouast presiding. The entrance of the accused evoked a gasp from the spectators; in his decrepit condition, he was a disappointing icon for the tumultuous firestorm that had rent the nation's fabric: "a little old man -- an old, old man of thirty-nine, a small-statured, thick-set old man in the black uniform of the artillery" who had the "gait of an Egyptian mummy," wrote one journalist. (Chapman, p. 288; Lewis, p. 281)

Colonel Jouast's opening interrogation was brutal, harsh, and adversarial. If Dreyfus tried to expound upon his one-word "No" or "Never" replies, Joust sharply reprimanded him: "That is unnecessary talk. Do you deny or don't you?" (Bredin, pp. 405-406)

When handed the bordereau, Dreyfus spurned it and insisted, "I am innocent. I have tolerated so much for five years, my Colonel, but one more time, for the honor of my name and that of my children, I am innocent." He lost his composure only once. When confronted with his putative confession, he lashed out: "It's iniquitous to condemn an innocent man! I never confessed anything! Never!" (Bredin, p.405, Lewis,p. 283)

In fact, his stoicism provoked one partisan to complain, "What was needed was an actor, and he was a soldier." (Bredin, p. 406)

For four days the court studied the Secret Dossier in closed session, and found, as had so many who preceded them, no proof of treason, but merely "innuendo, abuse, irrelevance, duplication, and one or two forgeries." (Lewis, p. 283)

The spectacle wore on, as a marathon of witnesses repeated their tired war stories. Former President Casimir-Perier disputed the vicious rumor that he had promised the Dreyfus family an open trial. Cavaignac reiterated the alleged confession. Billot castigated Picquart for wasting secret service funds on frivolous projects. Freycinet was outraged by the thirty-five million francs the Dreyfusard syndicate had imported into France. Gonse refused responsibility for anything, lied to cover his errors, betrayed his associates, and finally admitted he had falsified testimony. Picquart, the defrocked soldier who had been released from prison, "without hesitation or confusion, explained the case for seven hours and a half." Ten handwriting experts contradicted themselves. (Chapman, pp. 289-291)

Two well-known personages did not appear. Esterhazy pled poverty from his London asylum, while Du Paty, armed with medical certificates, stuck to his sickbed. (Chapman, p. 292)

The most dominating presence -- and the most devastating to Dreyfus -- was Minister of War Mercier. He now regarded himself as the nation's savior by virtue of his resourceful conduct back in 1894. He titillated his listeners with gossip implying that the Kaiser himself was actively involved in espionage and had personally corresponded with his master spy, Captain Dreyfus. His most sensational revelation was that on the evening of January 6, 1895, he, the President of the Republic (Casimir-Perier, who ridiculed the tale), and the Prime Minister had waited four and a half hours at the Elysee in excruciating suspense to learn if peace or war would ensue from an exchange of notes. (Chapman, p. 292)

"Mercier droned on, mechanically removing document after document from his leather portfolio for the clerk to read to the court," acknowledging and justifying the Secret Dossier passed to the judges in 1894 while shifting the blame to the deceased Sandherr, obfuscating, distorting, and inventing facts to reinforce his entrenchment -- until finally, after four hours, he turned to Dreyfus and said: "I am an honest man and the son of an honest man. If the slightest doubt had crossed my mind, I would be the first to declare and to say before you, to Captain Dreyfus, that I was mistaken in good faith." Dreyfus rose and cried, "That's what you ought to do. It's your duty." (Lewis, p. 287; Chapman, p. 294)

Mercier had thrown down the gauntlet. The court-martial must choose either him or Dreyfus. (Chapman, p. 294)

When it came time for each side to give its summation, the Dreyfusards believed that their best chance for an acquittal was to muzzle the irrepressible Labori. Three weeks earlier he had narrowly escaped death from an assassin's bullet -- it had missed his spine by a millimeter and stopped just short of a lung -- but was now prepared to deploy his considerable theatrical talents to emphasize the travesty of Zola's trial, to elucidate the motive of Henry's suicide, and to flourish the incontrovertible proof of Esterhazy's guilt. (Lewis, p. 296)

But he acquiesced to the wishes of his client, and deferred to his partner. Demange spoke for seven hours, persuasively, respectfully, eloquently. His plea was "a masterpiece of logic and clarity . . . solid, clear, prudent, moderate, imbued with honesty, common sense, and compassion," wrote two observers, yet perhaps too patronizing for Labori, who cringed at the words, "I am sure doubt will at least have entered your minds, and doubt is enough for you to acquit Dreyfus," because, for him, there could be no doubt. (Bredin, p. 425)

That same day, September 9, after deliberating ninety minutes, the tribunal returned to the courtroom. "Scarcely able to master his voice," Colonel Jouast delivered the verdict -- by a majority of five to two, guilty of treason with extenuating circumstances. Instead of life, Dreyfus was sentenced to ten years confinement, five of which he had already served. (Chapman, p. 298; Lewis, p. 297)

Prime Minister Waldeck-Rousseau may not have been surprised, but he was surely distressed. He yearned for a resolution that would put an end to the Affair, satisfy justice, reconcile Frenchmen, and restore public tranquility. Even if Dreyfus's petition for an appeal were accepted, a third court-martial, in the words of Galliffet, "would condemn him six to one, a fourth unanimously," so intransigent was the Army. (Bredin, pp. 429-430)

 The only means of extrication was a pardon, and an immediate one, so as to avoid its being perceived as an act of pity. But would Dreyfus even accept a pardon which would entail a dual sacrifice: his personal honor for his freedom and his advocates' universal principles for expediency? And would not his own clemency predestine a general amnesty for all the military officials who had been embroiled in the controversy? (Bredin, pp. 430-431)

In the end he yielded -- sensitive to the anxieties of his wife and children and recognizing that the precarious state of his health might prevent his surviving further incarceration. Granted his freedom on September 19, 1899, he pledged, "Liberty is nothing without honor. From this day forward I will continue to seek amends for the shocking judicial wrong of which I am still a victim." (Lewis, p. 303)

"As a deportee Dreyfus could cause displeasure to no one. As a free man, he accumulated the rancor of many." For most Dreyfusards, he was at best a neutral, emotionless hero, at worst an egocentric, aloof ingrate. (Bredin, p. 436; Lewis, p. 304)

The idealist Charles Peguy wrote bitterly, "We might have died for Dreyfus, but Dreyfus would not have died for Dreyfus" -- which was a variation of Theodore Herzl's "One can't even guarantee that he would have been on the side of the victim if someone else had suffered the same fate in his place." (Lewis, p. 304)

Labori was even more vituperative, excoriating his client as beneath the cause he embodied and incapable of fulfilling the role to which he was destined. He wrote: "Alfred Dreyfus . . . may . . . prefer his freedom to his legal honor. But in doing so . . . he is acting purely as an individual, not as a member of the human collective, in solidarity with his fellow men. However great the role he may have played, he is no longer representative of anything." (Bredin, pp. 436, 448-449)

Georges Picquart never forgave Dreyfus for the pardon which facilitated amnesty for Mercier and other criminals. Waldeck-Rousseau introduced the bill in the Chamber in January 1900 and nurtured it to passage almost twelve months later. In nullifying charges against Du Paty, Esterhazy, and Mercier, it denied Picquart, who had been disgraced by accusations of forgery and dereliction of duty, any opportunity of judicial exoneration. (Lewis, p. 309)

On April 6, 1903, Socialist leader Jean Jaures rose in the Chamber of Deputies, ostensibly to argue against the seating of a young Nationalist. Within minutes the Affair was rekindled, as Jaures recounted the cabals of generals, ministers, leagues, and clerics, and unveiled startling new evidence that might allow the case to be reopened: the photograph of a bordereau referring to Dreyfus and annotated by Kaiser Wilhelm himself which Mercier at Rennes had claimed to have in his possession. The Chamber declined to take action, but the Minister of War, Louis Andre, ordered an administrative inquest. (Bredin, p. 461)

Assisted by his aide-de-camp, Major A. L. Targe, Andre embarked upon his task with resolute thoroughness. The two immediately confirmed two forgeries: (1) the letter by Panizzardi in which Henry had changed "P . . . had brought him many interesting things" to "D . . . had brought him many interesting things"; and (2) another letter discussing railroad information in which Henry had torn off the original date (March 28, 1895, when Dreyfus was already on Devil's Island) and replaced it with August 1894. Archivist Gribelin, who worshiped Henry, nonetheless confessed how his boss augmented Picquart's expense account in order to implicate him for squandering funds. (Bredin, pp. 461-462)

Based on Andre's report, which was submitted on October 19, the Minister of Justice solicited from Alfred Dreyfus and his attorney, Henri Mornard, a request for a revision of the Rennes court-martial. On December 25, Public Prosecutor Manuel Baudouin was assigned to present the case to the Criminal Chamber of the High Court of Appeals. "Baudouin worked with extreme diligence, became fully acquainted with the immense file, and was gradually persuaded of Dreyfus's innocence." (Bredin, pp. 462-465)

For eight months, from March to November 1904, the Criminal Chamber plodded through the mountain of paper, then summoned once more to the stage all the veterans of the drama -- those who were still alive -- and a few ingenues. Nearly all recited verbatim their well-rehearsed scripts, although for some the fire was diminished. (Lewis, pp. 315-316, Bredin, p. 467)

Mercier clung to Dreyfus's guilt and dismissed the annotated bordereau as "a completely inexact fable." Gonse denied everything and sought refuge in amnesia. Du Paty, clearly unstable, finally surrendered the original draft of the commentary he had prepared in 1894. Picquart's deposition was his usual precise mastery of the facts. Madame Bastian -- half-witted, illiterate, anti-Semitic -- added comic relief as she bemoaned the loss of her job at the German embassy and her livelihood. (Lewis. p. 316; Bredin, p. 467)

Finally, a committee of artillery experts swore that no gunner could have written the bordereau and that the famous secret manual was in fact not confidential. And two mathematicians and a scientist debunked Alphonse Bertillon's system of handwriting analysis and established Esterhazy as the author of the bordereau. (Chapman, p. 347)

On November 19, 1904, in accordance with the dispossession law of 1899, the Criminal Chamber forwarded the case to the Combined Chambers of the High Court. Beset by international and domestic crises that would eventually turn him out of office -- a conflict with Germany over Morocco, protests by peasants and the Army over implementation of Separation of Church and State laws, worker strikes -- Prime Minister Maurice Rouvier prevailed upon the Court to delay its session -- for nineteen months. (Lewis, pp. 316-317)

Beginning June 18, 1906, the united courts met to hear the three reporting judges. On this occasion there was no first-night crowd, only a few family members, lawyers, and journalists. The police were conspicuously absent. (Chapman, p. 350)

Rapporteur Claude Moras asserted that Dreyfus had not written the bordereau and had not confessed, that the annotated bordereau was a myth, and that the Foreign Office version of the Panizzardi telegram (which Henry had doctored) was authentic. Thus revision was justified. (Chapman, p. 350)

Public Prosecutor Baudouin, speaking with passion and vehemence, indicted all who had impeded the work of truth, and asked for annulment without further adjudication. (Bredin, pp. 476-477)

Attorney Mornand was appearing before the High Court on behalf of his client for the fourth time. He argued that, the bordereau having been invalidated, the confession discredited, and the forgeries exposed, no criminal charges remained pending against Dreyfus and thus the prescribed condition for forgoing a new trial had been fulfilled. (Bredin, p. 478)

"On July 12, 1906, Chief Justice Ballot-Beaupre announced the Court's decision: the Rennes verdict was annulled and Dreyfus absolved of all charges by unanimous vote; by majority vote there was to be no referral of the case to a military tribunal." (Lewis, p. 317)

"It had taken twelve years for France to vindicate an innocent man." (Bredin, p. 481)

The following day the Chamber passed two bills reintegrating Dreyfus and Picquart into the Army. Picquart regained all his seniority and became a brigadier general retroactively as of 1903. Dreyfus was awarded the cross of the Legion of Honor and promoted to major and squadron chief, effective on the date of the promulgation of the law. Hence he was deprived of any chance of attaining those higher ranks to which he had always aspired. (Bredin, p. 482)

When, during the debate, Minister of War Mercier, now a Senator, professed that his conscience did not allow an affirmative vote, he was riposted by an early Dreyfusard: "If we desired to extend our need for justice, there is one man who should take the prison cell of the honorable victim whose innocence, after long and terrible sufferings, was yesterday confirmed. That man, sir, is you." (Chapman, p. 353)

Dreyfus left the Army in 1907. He returned to active duty as a lieutenant colonel in 1914, served on the same front at Verdun as his officer son, and retired after the war as a colonel in the reserves. He spent the last years of his life in quiet seclusion writing his memoirs, almost reliving his captivity. His ordeals had ruined his health, shrinking a diligent, ambitious officer into a withdrawn and unoccupied old man. "He retreated into himself," wrote his son, ". . . and scarcely knew any longer how to communicate his emotions to others. He had simply lost the habit of expressing them." He died after a long illness following surgery on July 12, 1935. (Lewis, pp. 319-320)


Dreyfus the man declined to assume the mantle of a Dreyfusard. He never saw or described himself as a hero or martyr. "I was only an artillery officer whom a tragic error prevented from following his course," he told a friend. "Dreyfus as a symbol of justice is not me; that Dreyfus was created by you." (Bredin, pp. 489-491)

His heroism consisted solely of enduring the terrible conditions to which he was subjected, fortified by courage and the invincibility of his convictions: a passionate patriotism, a quasi-religious faith in the virtues of his country, and a belief in the ultimate triumph of truth and justice. (Bredin, p. 495)

If the Affair can be explained as accentuating differences between Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard; between two schools of thought, two systems of values, two ethics; between those who do battle for justice, truth, and freedom and those who fight on behalf of prejudices, established order, recognized organizations, and prior verdicts; between those who make the individual the measure of all things and those who revere entities higher than the individual, such as the Nation, the Army, the Party -- differences that also perpetually agitate human consciousness -- Alfred Dreyfus may have been one of those rare persons in whom such internal contradictions cannot be detected. (Bredin, pp. 532, 541, 543-544)

By his natural disposition, he seamlessly melded both traditions. He was content in every hierarchy in which he found himself. Similarly, without any discord, he made freedom and truth, the virtues of republicanism, his honor and his ideal. "The patriot's nation and the rights of man converged for him, and in him." (Bredin, p. 544)

His unified soul enabled him to mobilize the incredible resources necessary for his survival. Yet, upon his return to civilization and a house divided, the clash of the values he cherished and their bifurcation into irreconcilable hostile forces would enfeeble his body and darken his spirit. They were afflictions from which he would never recover. (Bredin, p. 544)

REFERENCES

Bredin, Jean-Denis. The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus. Trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: George Braziler, Inc., 1986

Chapman, Guy. The Dreyfus Case: A Reassessment. New York: Reynal and Company, 1956.

Lewis, David L. Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1973.





































Sunday, October 26, 2014

I Was Obeying My Conscience


Present almost at the creation, he hovered on the fringes of the Affair until fate would hurl him into the vortex: an instructor at the War College, where he was not impressed by Alfred Dreyfus and scored him mediocre in cartography and field maneuver; Dreyfus's escort to the office of Army Chief of Staff Raoul de Boisdeffre on October 15, 1894, where the thirty-five-year-old captain would be stunned by an accusation of treason; and Boisdeffre's designated witness at Dreyfus's court-martial, where he was convicted, and at his subsequent ceremony of degradation, where he was shorn of his uniform and rank. (Lewis, p. 13)

A native of Alsace, a graduate of the prestigious St. Cyr Military Academy, a distinguished commander in the Algerian and Tonkin campaigns, the director of intelligence on General Gaston de Galliffet's staff, Major Georges Picquart had no peer in the European theater in languages or general military knowledge. "He spoke and wrote Italian, German, English, and Russian fluently. His familiarity with the materiel and organization of foreign armies was dazzling." (Lewis, pp. 134-135)

If he was not a virulent anti-Semite, he harbored typical Alsatian prejudices, disdaining Jews for their lack of social refinement. Observing Dreyfus's braids, epaulettes, and stripes hanging in tatters, he remarked to another officer, "He looks like a Jewish tailor estimating the value of the cloth." (Lewis, p. 133)

But that he was, and always had been, a man of integrity was beyond dispute. When Dreyfus blamed his low mark on his religion, Picquart's response was, "If you are asking, Captain, whether I like Jews, the honest answer, I suppose, would be no. But if you are implying that because of that I might discriminate against you in a professional manner, I can assure you -- never!" (Green, Haaretz)

Comfortably ensconced in the General Staff's Third Bureau of Operations and Training, Picquart had no particular appetite for Counter-intelligence. Yet his stature and reputation made him Boisdeffre's choice to head the Army's Statistical Section in July 1895 when the retirement of the incumbent, Colonel Jean-Conrad Sandherr, the victim of a paralyzing nerve disease, could no longer be postponed. (Bredin, p. 141)

Boisdeffre was concerned that "the Dreyfus Affair was not over. It is only beginning," he told Picquart. "A new offensive by the Jews is to be feared." It was necessary to discover a motive and to keep feeding the file -- the Secret Dossier which had been shown to the judges during the trial and which, Sandherr advised Picquart, could be obtained from Sandherr's assistant, Commandant Hubert-Joseph Henry. (Bredin, p. 141)

Quickly imposing his authority, Picquart initiated a number of reforms that would earn him the approbation of former War Ministers Zurlinden and Cavignac, and of the sitting one, Jean-Baptiste Billot (Mercier had been dismissed by President Felix Faure in January 1895), and a promotion to Lieutenant Colonel. (Chapman, pp. 118-119). Among them was the elimination of subordinate discretion in the handling of incoming documents, including those collected by Madame Bastian from the German Embassy trash bins and passed clandestinely to Major Henry. Henceforth Picquart would examine these materials before anyone else, and then confide them to Captain Jules Lauth for reconstitution and deciphering. (Bredin, p. 142; Lewis, p. 135)

On or around March 15, 1896, Lauth came to his superior with a petit bleu, an express letter issued by the Paris postal department. It was not stamped. Thus the addressee -- Monsieur le Commandant Esterhazy, 27 Rue de la Bienfaisance -- had not received it. The author had ripped it into shreds and tossed into the embassy wastebasket thirty-seven fingernail-size fragments which Lauth had painstakingly reassembled. (Lewis, p. 137)

"It's frightening. Is there still another one?" exclaimed Lauth, aghast at the words he held in his hand. (Bredin, p. 143)

"Sir, Above all I await a more detailed explanation than the one you gave me the other day on the question in abeyance. Consequently, I am requesting you to give it to me in writing so I may judge if I can continue my relations with the R. house or not. Signed, C." (Bredin, p. 143)

The initial "C" was one of the conventional signatures of Maximilien von Schwarzkoppen, military attache to the German Embassy and already known to the Statistical Section as a recipient of classified information from a traitor in the French Army, presumably Alfred Dreyfus. But both Lauth and Picquart recognized that the handwriting was not Schwarzkoppen's; they later deduced that the petit bleu had been written either by another employee at the embassy or by a mistress of Schwarzkoppen who happened to be with him when he decided to sever this sub rosa relationship. (Bredin, pp. 143, 145)

More importantly, just who was this person with whom Schwarzkoppen had been colluding?


Jean-Marie-Auguste, known as Walsin, Esterhazy was the son of one general and the nephew of another, both of whom had been appointed to their commands by Napoleon III. He studied at the Lycee Bonaparte, but withdrew after the fifth form and never received his baccalaureate. By the age of twenty-two, having misspent several years frequenting casinos, music halls, race tracks, and men's clubs, the Count, as he styled himself, drawing on his Hungarian noble ancestry, "was impoverished and without prospect of finding himself a suitable position." (Lewis, pp. 64-65)

He sought respectability in the Army. He began his career in the Papal Legion in 1869, served in the French Foreign Legion, and rose to the rank of captain in the 1870 Loire campaign against the Germans before being demoted -- a lingering source of bitterness. (Bredin, p. 135)

In 1875 he joined the staff of Reunion des Officiers, where he demonstrated considerable literary talent writing articles on all sorts of military subjects and came to fancy himself an expert in the science. The contacts he made there led to an assignment to the General Staff's Second Bureau of Intelligence as a German translator. (Lewis, p. 67)

In 1880 Esterhazy was promoted again to captain and transferred to the 135th Infantry at Cholet, a rather dreary outpost miles from Paris. To further his prospects, he secured a position in the Tunisian expeditionary force where, inserting himself on the secretarial staff, he arranged to be decorated for heroism in a battle at which he had not been present. (Lewis, p. 68)

Everywhere he went, he accumulated debt -- including 36,500 francs borrowed from a cousin and mistress, Madame de Boulancy. Desperate for relief, in 1886 he married Anne de Nettancourt-Vaubecourt, whose 200,000 franc dowry was at least some compensation for her unattractiveness, obtuseness, and base sensuality. She did possess enough sense to obtain a court order in 1888 separating her account from her husband's in order to preserve what little principal had not been dissipated by his reckless profligacy. (Bredin, pp. 154-155)

"Esterhazy was an adventurer without purpose." (Chapman, p. 120) "He did not distinguish truth from lies, and believed everything he said. He would betray whenever it became necessary, and always remained convinced that he was innocent . . . In love with appearances, avid for luxury and even ostentation, perpetually in search of new pleasure, he squandered the money he had and the money he didn't have, the funds of all the women and men on whom he could lean. He lived out of cleverness, schemes, gimmicks, and blackmail, but also out of dreams." (Bredin, p. 157)

By the middle of 1894, shortly before the incident of Dreyfus bordereau, this man of a thousand intrigues had exhausted all his resources.

Consulting the Army Directory, Lieutenant Colonel Picquart learned that Esterhazy belonged to the 74th Infantry Regiment, then stationed in Paris. He asked an old friend in the regiment, Major Cure, his opinion of the fellow.

"Cure replied that Esterhazy was a thoroughly bad officer, a dissolute, a stock market gambler; on the one hand paying little attention to his duties, on the other always trying to get hold of confidential information on guns and gunnery, adding that he had twice gone to firing practices, and a third time at his own expense, and finally that he employed soldiers in his battalion to copy documents. Cure, however, refused to help Picquart procure an example of Esterhazy's handwriting." (Chapman, p. 121)

Meanwhile, Esterhazy was contriving to have himself appointed to the War Ministry, either in the technical division or the intelligence section, and had launched a barrage of correspondence advocating his cause to government and military officials. Although both Chief of Staff Boisdeffre and Minister of War Billot blanched at the thought of another traitor when Picquart disclosed his suspicions -- "I do not want another Dreyfus Affair," said Boisdeffre -- Billot did order his cabinet to transmit all letters received from or on the subject of Esterhazy to the Statistical Section. (Bredin, pp. 150-151)

On August 27, two such pieces crossed Picquart's desk: one written by Esterhazy to Billot's private secretary, the other to a cabinet member. "Picquart read them and grew deeply perturbed. That regular handwriting, with its slant and its precision, seemed familiar to him . . . He opened a drawer and took out a photo of the bordereau [which had been used to convict Dreyfus]. He placed it and the letter written by Esterhazy side by side . . . The handwritings were not similar; they were identical. The evidence struck him like lightening. The bordereau had not been written by Dreyfus; it was the work of Esterhazy . . . 'I was terrified,' he would later say." (Bredin, pp. 151-152)

Picquart asked the section archivist, Felix Gribelin, to bring him the Secret Dossier which had condemned Dreyfus in the eyes of the court-martial. The documents appeared to have little significance, hardly implicating Dreyfus, including the "scoundrel D" letter, which could be referring to someone else entirely. (Bredin, p. 160)

Picquart took his findings in turn to Boisdeffre, Billot, and his immediate superior, Deputy Chief of Staff General Charles-Arthur Gonse.

Rather than expressing indignation that an innocent man had suffered shame and imprisonment, as Picquart had expected, Boisdeffre listened impassively, agitated only by the news that the Secret Dossier had not been destroyed, as had been ordered. (Bredin, p. 167)

Billot initially shared Picquart's consternation, and was astounded to learn of the existence of the Secret Dossier. Upon further reflection (and possibly a visit from Boisdeffre), he retreated, and invoked the doctrine of "military solidarity." A full-scale review of the Dreyfus case, he contended, risked humiliating both the Chief of Staff and the Military Governor of Paris, the revered and "untouchable" General Felix Saussier, who had authorized the original investigation. (Lewis, pp. 145, 148)

As for Gonse, whom Picquart despised, his advice was to keep the Dreyfus and Esterhazy affairs separate. When the newspaper L'Eclair published an article summarizing the text of the bordereau and revealing that secret papers had been delivered to the judges, Picquart implored Gonse to act before the truth emerged and overwhelmed them all. (Bredin, p. 163; Chapman, p. 129)

"What is it to you if that Jew is on Devil's Island?" retorted Gonse. When Picquart, appalled, replied, "But General, he's innocent," Gonse insisted, "If you don't say anything, no one will know." (Bredin, p. 168)

Picquart lashed back, "What you are saying is abominable. I do not know what I will do. But in any event, I will not take this secret to the grave with me." Then he turned and left the room. (Bredin, p. 168)

Fearful of how Picquart's tenacity might be consummated, Boisdeffre, Gonse, and Commandant Henry, now Picquart's deputy in the Statistical Section, decided the time had come to discipline him. They convinced Billot that Picquart was the source of the poisonous leaks exploited by L'Eclair and that his obsession was causing him to neglect other important duties. On November 14, Billot summoned Picquart to his office, and dispatched him on an inspection tour of intelligence operations that would take him progressively to Chalons-sur-Marne, the Alps, Grenoble, Briancon, and, by March 1897, the Tunisan-Libyan border. (Lewis, pp. 156, 161-162)

Furthermore, Commandant Henry would not be leaving matters to chance. Anxious to win the approval of his superiors, apprehending a reopening of the case that would spell disaster for the General Staff, conscious of the flimsiness of the underpinnings, he undertook an imaginative reconstruction, if not fabrication, of key evidence. (Chapman, p. 131)

First, in a note sent in March 1894 from Italian attache Panizzardi to German attache Schwarzkoppen, he altered the phrase "Will you please come to me tomorrow morning, for P has brought me some interesting things" to read, "Will you please come to me tomorrow, for D has brought me some interesting things." (Chapman, p. 133)

Next he lifted from the file two innocuous letters from Panizzardi to Schwarzkoppen which both contained the salutation "My dear friend" and the signature "Alexandrine." He removed the blank portion on each letter below the signature and with the help of a forger wrote a message on each in Panizzardi's hand. (Chapman, p. 134)

The first composition read: "Here is the material. I paid as arranged (180) on your account. It is agreed for Wednesday at 8:00 PM at Laurent's. I have invited three from the Embassy, but only one is a Jew. Don't fail to show up." (Chapman, p. 134)

The second, and most incriminating, read: "I have read that a Deputy is going to pursue questioning about Dreyfus. If Rome is asked for new explanations, I will say that I never had any relations with the Jew. If they ask you, say the same, for no one must ever know what happened to him." (Bredin, p. 172)

Using transparent adhesive, Henry then attached to each forgery one of the two salutations and signatures he had snipped from the original letters. But he made two mistakes. (Chapman, p. 134)

First, there were no Jews in the Italian Embassy in June 1894, the spurious date he assigned to the first note. (Lewis, p. 158)

Second, although the papers on which the original letters had been written appeared identical, the first was imprinted with blue graph lines, the second with mauve graph lines. Not observing this, Henry transposed his forgeries, taping the blue body to the mauve salutation and signature and the mauve body to the blue salutation and signature. Moreover, the size of the graph squares was not exactly the same. The second forgery, because of both its egregious content and fatal flaw, became known as the faux Henry. (Chapman, p. 134; Bredin, p. 173)

When, from his African exile, Picquart protested to Henry that his mail from France was being opened, he was rebuked for prejudice against Esterhazy and disloyalty to Counter-intelligence. Anticipating that his days on the General Staff were numbered, he prepared a detailed report on everything he knew, and, on a visit home in June, entrusted it to his attorney Louis Leblois under the proviso that it be divulged only upon his specific instructions or his death. (Lewis, p. 164)

But Leblois could not abide by his promise. Acquainted with Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, the vice-president of the Senate, and his doubts about Dreyfus's guilt, on July 13 he visited the senator at his home and showed him Picquart's affidavit, swearing him to secrecy. Scheurer-Kestner insisted that Picquart must reconsider. "Your friend is plainly an honest man," he said. "But his honesty must not stop midway." (Bredin, p. 183-185)


Leblois refused, cautioning, "All these people will defend themselves, and we know that they have no scruples." (Bredin, p. 185)

While bound by his pledge, Scheurer-Kestner would not be intimidated or restrained. He publicly reiterated his misgivings about the case, and hinted that he had proof of Dreyfus's innocence -- an assertion that nudged the General Staff conspirators further down their path of deceit. (Bredin, p. 186)

Gonse pressured Captain Lebrun-Renault of the Garde Republicaine into repeating his account of Dreyfus's confession to him an hour before his degradation, which had never been confirmed, nor had Lebrun-Renault ever entered it in his logbook. (Lewis, p. 167)

In order to substantiate further the dogma of Dreyfus's guilt, Gonse and Henry then took the ill-advised step of enlisting as an accomplice the very person whom Picquart had fingered as the true culprit. Keeping their own hands clean, they called on their dependable servant, the architect of Dreyfus's arrest, Major Du Paty de Clam, to draft a letter to Esterhazy over the pseudonym "Esperance," alerting him that the Dreyfus family had obtained through Picquart letters denouncing him as the author of the bordereau. (Lewis, p. 168)

It was rank treachery: the Deputy Chief of Staff and the head of the Intelligence Service, assisted by a superior officer, informing a German spy that he was in danger of being exposed. (Lewis, p. 168; Bredin, p. 190)

Du Paty, acting under direction from Gonse and Henry, met with Esterhazy several times over the next few months. He told Esterhazy that Dreyfus's guilt was certain and that he would have resolute defenders against any accusations as long as he obeyed their orders. (Chapman, p. 150)

In order to impugn Picquart -- to establish that he was nothing more than an agent of the "syndicate" dedicating to reversing the Dreyfus conviction and embarrassing the General Staff -- Henry, through Du Paty, suggested to Esterhazy that he send two telegrams to Picquart. The first, signed "Speranza," read in part: "To be feared that the whole works is discovered. Take the document back; don't write anything." The second was more explicit: "They have proof that the [petit] bleu was fabricated by Georges." It was signed "Blanche," referring to Blanche de Comminges, a cousin of Picquart's, whose salon he frequented. (Lewis, p. 173)

After concocting the telegrams, Henry of course had them intercepted. They were evidence that Picquart's friends were seeking to warn him that his deceptions had been discovered. (Bredin, p. 208)

At this point, chance intervened, spoiling the General Staff's clever machinations. On November 7, while strolling the boulevard, a banker named De Castro purchased a facsimile of the bordereau -- one of thousands printed and plastered throughout Paris by Mathieu Dreyfus as part of his ongoing crusade to clear his brother's name. De Castro recognized the handwriting as that of one of his consistently overdrawn depositors, which he promptly reported to Mathieu. (Lewis, p. 175)

On November 17, Mathieu wrote to Minister of War Billot identifying Esterhazy as the author of the "unsigned, undated" document which was the "sole basis for the indictment against his unfortunate brother." When the newspaper Le Figaro, having been provided a copy by Mathieu, published the text, Billot, while staunchly adhering to the court-martial's verdict before the Chamber of Deputies, had no choice but to order an investigation of Esterhazy. (Lewis, p. 177)

The officer commissioned to whitewash Esterhazy, General Georges de Pellieux, chief of the Paris Military Police, did not disappoint. After interviewing all the interested parties -- Senator Scheurer-Kestner; Mathieu Dreyfus; General Boisdeffre, who produced the bogus "telegrams" damning Picquart; General Gonse, who flourished the faux Henry; and Esterhazy, who floated the idea that Picquart had forged the bordereau by tracing his handwriting -- Pellieux concluded that there were no grounds to prosecute Esterhazy. (Lewis, p. 178)

The Council of Ministers was not satisfied; it wanted Picquart -- who had been recalled to Paris -- interviewed. Pellieux's subsequent interrogation was so malevolent and accusatory -- he spoke of Picquart's "grave errors" and refused to allow him to discuss the bordereau -- that Picquart left the encounter fully expecting to land in jail before he reached home. (Lewis, p. 179)

Pellieux could not even be swayed from his prescribed course by the surfacing of a packet of correspondence, over a decade old, between Esterhazy and his spurned mistress, Madame de Boulancy.

In one letter, Esterhazy's acrid pen had confessed "that these people [i.e., the French] are not worth the bullets to kill them, and all the little despicableness of the drunken women which the men give themselves up to confirms me deep down in my opinion . . . If someone came to me this evening to tell me that I am going to be killed as a captain in the Uhlans tomorrow while sabering the French, I should be perfectly happy." (Lewis, p. 179)

Pellieux was unshaken. Either accepting Esterhazy's contention that the scribblings were Jewish forgeries or excusing them as the typical rantings of an embittered career soldier, he ruled him culpable of nothing more dastardly than puerile rascality. (Lewis, p. 182)

In view of the publicity emanating from the controversy, the General Staff officers now feared that Esterhazy's exoneration would provoke widespread outrage and not accomplish their ultimate goal: to put the whole matter behind them once and for all. They embraced a plan broached by Esterhazy's lawyer, Maurice Tezenas; observing the damage the Boulancy scandal was inflicting on his client, he recommended to Esterhazy that he apply to Billot for a court-martial. Based on Pellieux's report, he would certainly be acquitted, as well as rehabilitated and safe. (Chapman, p. 164)

On December 4, Pellieux's second finding of "No Case" was duly rejected, and the government, in the person of President Felix Faure, ordered a military inquiry into the evidence against Dreyfus and Esterhazy. (Chapman, p. 165)

That same day, armed with Pellieux's double-barreled artillery, Prime Minister Jules Meline rose to address the Chamber of Deputies. "His Esprit Nouveau program -- a program appeasing the Right and favoring the rich -- was succeeding because of the support of the Catholics, Nationalists, and powerful agriculturalists and industrialists in the Chamber, none of whom cared anything about one Jew clinging to life on a tropical island -- especially when his case imperiled the Army . . . The Prime Minister was convinced that he had to defend the hope and glory of France -- the Army -- or risk being driven from power." Not to do so "would be an act of treason more heinous than that alleged against Esterhazy." (Lewis, pp. 183-184)

"From the tribune, the Prime Minister ridiculed the misinformation of Senator Scheurer-Kestner, spoke of secret documents justifying Dreyfus's condemnation, explained . . . that after two meticulous investigations, not one shred of proof against Esterhazy existed," and declared that a third "would undoubtedly provide irrefutable confirmation in the near future." (Lewis, p. 185)

He then committed one of the more memorable blunders in the annals of the Palais Bourbon, proclaiming "il n'y a pas d'affaire Dreyfus" (there is no Dreyfus Affair). There was one, of course, and in a few weeks it would achieve such notoriety as to be abbreviated simply as "The Affair." (Lewis, p. 185)

The responsibility for preparing the government's summary of evidence devolved upon retired Major A. Ravary, who perfunctorily emulated his predecessor. There was some minor suspense as four experts pored over the bordereau and the Boulancy letters before concluding that "the former was a poor copy of Esterhazy's handwriting and the latter might equally be the work of a forger." (Chapman, p. 175)

Now Esterhazy and the government could safely enact the charade of a court-martial which would cleanse him of any stain of dishonor. (Lewis, p. 191)

The court of seven officers presided over by General Luxer convened on January 10, 1898, in the same room where Dreyfus had been tried. Acceding to the War Office's argument that national security demanded a closed session, the judges ruled that military witnesses and handwriting experts would be heard in camera. (Chapman, pp. 175-176)

Thus the public was excused during the testimony of the one person capable of fitting together all the puzzling pieces of the bordereau and the petit bleu. As soon as Picquart implicated Mercier, Boisdeffre, and Billot, General Pellieux rudely violated protocol by interrupting and reprimanding him. Luxer treated Picquart with such contempt that one of the other magistrates remarked, "I see that Colonel Picquart is the true defendant. I request that he be permitted to present all the explanations necessary to his defense." (Bredin, p. 240)

Afterward, accosted by Mathieu Dreyfus, Picquart succinctly elucidated the basis of his heroism. "You have no reason to thank me," he said. "I was obeying my conscience." (Bredin, p. 241)

During his interrogation, Esterhazy was perfectly at ease, relishing his role as a "slandered warrior," although intermittently his bravura faltered under weight of irrelevant verbosity. "The ladies, the soldiers, the hirelings of Counter-intelligence who had packed the courtroom applauded as he stepped down." (Bredin, p. 240; Lewis, p. 194)

The Minister of War having made his feelings known on three occasions, the verdict was never in doubt. While a five-hour plea by Maitre Tezenas on behalf of his client lent substance to the illusion of impartiality, it took the judges only three minutes to absolve Esterhazy of all wrongdoing by a vote of 7-0. Their decision was greeted with cries of "Long live the Army" and "Death to the Jews." (Bredin, p. 240)

The next day Colonel Picquart was arrested and imprisoned at Mont-Valerian. In the Senate, Scheurer-Kestner was stripped of his vice-presidency. (Bredin, p. 242)

Too confident of a favorable outcome, Dreyfus's supporters -- now so numerous and vocal they were christened "Dreyfusards" -- were despondent. They would be reinvigorated by a ferocious outcry from the powerful voice which Scheurer-Kestner had recruited to their cause back in November: that of the renowned novelist Emile Zola. Once he learned all the improbable details, Zola imagined the Affair as literature with stupendous possibilities -- "a trilogy of types: the innocent victim over there with a tempest in his skull; the scot-free traitor here with his own internal tempest while another man pays for his crime; and the genius of truth, Scheurer-Kestner, silent but active." (Lewis, pp. 188-189)


Unlike his compatriots, Zola understood that matters had reached a point where legal options were no longer viable and that the only recourse was an appeal to the citizenry at large. "With total scorn for considerations of prudence, without any ethical or judicial precautions, what was needed was to deliver to the public a striking text which would summarize the Affair at the risk of simplification and bring to light the crimes of the General Staff." (Bredin, p. 245)

Infuriated by Esterhazy's acquittal, Zola locked himself in his study at Medan, and spent two days composing a fiery screed to the President of the Republic, Felix Faure. On the morning of January 13, it appeared in a special edition of L'Aurore under a provocative title attributed to the newspaper's political editor, Georges Clemenceau: J'Accuse. By evening, 200,000 copies had been sold. (Bredin, p. 247)


"J'Accuse is a unique document. Like similar works of Spinoza, Milton, Voltaire, and Hugo, it pitted the man of letters against the prejudices of his society when government and public opinion were indifferent to morality and justice . . . and irrevocably altered his role in France and Western society." (Lewis, p. 197)

Zola began by charging that "a court-martial has but recently, by order, dared to acquit one Esterhazy -- a supreme slap at all truth, all justice!" He recalled the absurd and malign travesty against Dreyfus, convicted on one accusation, the bordereau, on which not all experts were in agreement. (Lewis, pp. 197-198)

He blamed Lieutenant Colonel Du Paty as the one "who is first and most of all guilty of the fearful miscarriage of justice." He praised the bravery and patriotism of Mathieu Dreyfus, Scheurer-Kestner, and Colonel Picquart. He assailed the generals who, in spite of what the researchers proved and wishing to avoid at all cost a revision of the Dreyfus verdict, refused to act to save an innocent man. (Lewis, pp. 198-199)

Now, however, he heralded, "truth is on the march," and, having been "buried underground" for so long, is set to erupt with explosive force. (Lewis, p. 200)

Zola concluded with this stirring peroration:

"I accuse Colonel Du Paty de Clam of being the diabolical agent of the judicial error . . . I accuse General Mercier of having made himself an accomplice in one of the greatest crimes in history . . . I accuse General Billot of having had in his hands the decisive proofs of innocence of Dreyfus and of having concealed them . . . I accuse General de Boisdeffre and General Gonse of being accomplices in the same crime, the former no doubt through religious prejudice, the latter out of esprit de corps . . .

"I accuse the War Office of having led a vile campaign in the press . . . in order to misdirect public opinion and cover up its sins . . . I accuse, lastly, the first court-martial of having violated all human rights in condemning a prisoner on testimony kept secret from him." (Lewis pp. 200-201)

Acknowledging himself liable to slander, Zola challenged the government to prosecute him. (Lewis, p. 201)

Turmoil in Parliament, rallies in the streets of Paris, a clamorous international press --  all demanded retaliation. On January 13, Billot delivered to the Minister of Justice his complaint against Zola and Monsieur Perrenx, the manager of L'Aurore. Shrewdly crafted, it confined the charge to a single sentence, and one patently impossible for Zola to prove: that the court-martial had acquitted "on command" a criminal whom they knew to be guilty. (Chapman, p. 180)

Zola's trial opened on February 7, 1898, in the Palais de Justice. The presiding judge was Jules Delegorgue, an obsequious civil servant who allowed a raucous crowd of  "magistrates, barristers, journalists, politicians, soldiers, and society women," to invade the courtroom and and cheer and agitate with impunity. (Lewis, pp. 202-203)

For four days the army brass paraded to the witness stand -- Boisdeffre, Mercier, Du Paty, Henry, Pellieux -- each one swearing to the same scripted message: Dreyfus was guilty; Esterhazy innocent. When pressed for details, however, they were evasive and reticent, and sought immunity behind pleas of "prior verdict" and state secrets. (Bredin, pp. 260-261)

On February 11, Colonel Picquart stood in the box, tall, thin, supple, and erect in his blue uniform braided in gold. "With tranquil courage and frequent intervals of silence, his voice at times choking, he related for more than an hour, amidst general fascination, how he had discovered Esterhazy's treason and all that had followed. He spoke with moderation of the subterfuges and then of the hatreds of which he had been a victim without voicing any complaint but expressing, nevertheless, his sadness at having been expelled from the Army." (Bredin, p. 263)

Thus Picquart burned his bridges; his former colleagues would show no mercy. Colonel Henry testified that while passing his open office door he had observed Picquart showing the Secret Dossier to his attorney with the "scoundrel D" letter protruding from the file. Picquart replied that to make that identification from such a distance was impossible. Henry stepped toward Picquart and stated forcefully, "This isn't open to discussion -- especially when a person is used to seeing a document. I maintain what has been said and still do. Colonel Picquart has lied about this!" (Lewis, pp. 205-206)

Pellieux appeared to score a triumph on the 17th. When Picquart pointed out errors in the bordereau that indicated it must have been written not by an officer of the General Staff but by someone unfamiliar with artillery terminology and unaware that apprentices had been relieved of attending maneuvers, Pellieux seized the floor. (Lewis, p. 206)

"You want to truth," he cried. "Then let's have it . . . At the Ministry of War . . . they have absolute proof of the guilt of Dreyfus! And I have seen this proof! A letter arrived at the Ministry of War whose origin cannot be contested and which says . . . 'There is going to be an interpellation concerning the Dreyfus Affair. Never disclose the relations we had with the Jew.' " (Bredin, p. 266)

But was not this revelation of the existence of the faux Henry forgery a dangerous indiscretion? "Boisdeffre and Gonse knew or suspected that the document . . . was not authentic. And their entire effort until then had consisted in making use of it in testimony without ever producing it," lest the defense have the opportunity to discredit it. "No doubt Pellieux was acting alone, carried away by his convictions" and irritated by the General Staff's refusal to exhibit the conclusive proof of Dreyfus's treason. (Bredin, p. 267)

The next morning, in order to justify the continued sequestration of that proof, Boisdeffre not only confirmed Pellieux's deposition, he raised the debate to a higher plane. He told the jury, "You gentlemen . . . are the nation. If the nation has no confidence in its Army's leaders, in those responsible for national defense, they are ready to leave the task to others." (Chapman, p. 195)


It was a significant moment. By casting into the turbulent waters the honor of the Army and the defense of the nation, the Chief of Staff was commanding his fellow Frenchmen to accept the military virtues of Order, Expediency, and Discipline as taking precedence over the republican ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Civilian Sovereignty. (Bredin, p. 269; Lewis, p. 207)

On February 23, the jury unanimously found Zola and Perrenx guilty as charged. They were fined three thousand francs each. Zola was sentenced to a year in prison, the maximum penalty, Perrenx to four months. (Lewis, p. 209)

Zola's electric entrance onto the stage and the impassioned trial, intensive press coverage, and spontaneous demonstrations that ensued signified a new direction for the Dreyfus Affair. Henceforth, as Zola had envisioned, it would be conducted in the court of public opinion. (Bredin, p. 275)

But would justice prevail, and, if so, would it happen soon enough to rescue the destitute convict languishing near death on Devil's Island?

REFERENCES

Bredin, Jean-Denis. The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus. Trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: George Braziler, Inc., 1986.

Chapman, Guy. The Dreyfus Case: A Reassessment. New York: Reynal & Company, 1956.

Green, David. "The Other Hero of the Dreyfus Affair." Haaretz, October 27, 2014.

Lewis, David L. Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1973.