by Marissa Moss
“I’m too old and tired to be chased out of my home again,” Zola grumped.
Looking around at all the Chinese porcelain, the statuettes, including some by Degas, the piles of books and papers, I could understand why the thought of moving was exhausting.
My gaze dropped from the mantelpiece full of precious objects to the fireplace itself. It was caked with soot, and suddenly I remembered that the last time I’d been here, I’d seen Madame talking to a chimney sweep. Had she paid off the chimney sweep to somehow clog the chimney so that Zola would suffocate? When she talked about Zola dying, she meant because of her, not because of me. Anyway, the chimney didn’t look safe and I said so to Zola.
“It’s fine. Don’t worry. The chimney has been cleaned already this year, as it is every year,” said Zola. “Forget about some old soot—I want to know what Americans are saying about Dreyfus, what they think of us French. I fear we are despised as brutes by everyone now.” Zola shook his head sadly. “Hard to believe that the country that enshrined the Rights of Man so publicly after the French Revolution could have fallen so low.”
We talked about Dreyfus, the press, the furious mobs, the future of France, but no more mention was made of moving. Or of the chimney.
The light was dimming through the windows. It was time to go, but I was afraid to leave Zola. “I know it’s been difficult,” I said, “but I want to thank you—for Dreyfus, for France, for all of us. You’ve spoken out against a monstrous injustice and changed how people think about human rights. You’ve shown how one person can make a difference.”
“You exaggerate!” Zola waved away my words.
“No, it’s true. I admire your courage and convictions.” I took his hand. “I hope we’ll meet again.”
“I’m sure we will.”
But I was just as certain we wouldn’t. Somehow this visit felt final. And really, what more was there to do? Finally, thanks to “J’Accuse,” there was broad public support for tolerance and fairness against prejudice and corruption. Wasn’t that the change Mom wanted? It was definitely a change I wanted, and I was proud I’d had even a small part in it.
Leaving the house, I glanced up at Zola’s roof. Maybe I’d imagined the chimney sweep. Maybe everything would be okay.
I crossed the street, drawn to an odd stone marker I hadn’t noticed before. Maybe before it had been unremarkably drab, but now it glowed eerily. Was I supposed to touch it? Even without the glow, it was a strange stone slab with a circular wreath at the top. I read the inscription on it and realized it was meant to mark the Paris Meridian. It had to be part of some kind of astronomical instrument, which made sense if it was a touchstone.
I tried to pull my hand away, but as if moving on its own, it reached out slowly toward the marker. If I left, I wouldn’t be able to check on Zola. I wanted to stay, not find a touchstone. But I couldn’t help myself. The throbbing stone drew my hand like a magnet. I touched the cool grainy surface. The glow shimmered and deepened, coiling me up in pitch blackness and blinding light, a dizzying whirlpool of time.
I was back in the cemetery, by Zola’s grave. I collapsed on the marble, sobbing.
“I tried to save you, really I did! I’m so sorry!” I wailed.
“What’s the matter?” Dad asked. “Who were you trying to save?”
“Zola!” I guessed this time they hadn’t noticed I was gone at all, so I explained where I’d been and how I’d left Zola even though Madame might try to kill him. “I thought I’d made a difference, but it wasn’t enough—Zola might still die and I didn’t bring Mom home.”
“Maybe not this time, but next time,” Dad said.
“Will there really be a next time?” I asked.
“There has to be a next time, because Mom is still gone. And Madame Lefoutre is still out there.”
“Next time, you’ll time-travel instead of me, Malcolm,” I sniffled. “And I bet you’ll be a lot better at it.”
Malcolm shrugged. “I think you did great. I couldn’t have done better. And it wasn’t your job to save Zola. You don’t even know if he was killed. But you do know you made a difference for Dreyfus.”
Dad put his arm around me. “You did much more than that. You made a difference for all of us. ‘J’Accuse’ started people thinking about the importance of human rights in a way that hadn’t happened before. Maybe you didn’t prevent the collapse of the French government and whatever else Mom was afraid of, but you helped Zola strike that match. You helped light a fire that still burns bright.”
I smiled, leaning into his familiar smell of shaving cream and cotton. “I guess I did.”
We took the metro back to the Marais, but instead of going to our hotel, we made a quick stop at an Internet café. I had to know what happened to Zola.
He died a few years after I’d last seen him, so if Madame was responsible, she didn’t kill him right away. But reading how he died, I knew that she had something to do with it. The chimney was blocked, some said by accident, but others thought it was sabotaged by political protestors angry at Zola’s defense of Dreyfus. Zola suffocated from carbon monoxide poisoning, and I didn’t doubt for a second that it was intentional.
“At least it didn’t happen right after I left,” I said. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“No matter when it happened, it wouldn’t be your fault,” Dad argued. “You’re not responsible for other people’s actions.”
“Even if it was because of the article I encouraged Zola to write?”
“You can’t think like that!” Malcolm objected. “If you worry about how crazy people will react when you do the right thing, you’ll never do anything! Zola had to write ‘J’Accuse.’ He had to get people thinking about what kind of government they really wanted, what kind of army.”
“Come on,” Dad said. “We’ve spent enough time in Paris in front of computer screens. We still owe Malcolm his choice since we never went there the day of the Eiffel Tower like we said we would.”
“Where was that?” I asked.
“The Museum of Jewish Art and History,” Malcolm said. “A happy subject for a change, right?”
The museum turned out to be a few blocks from our hotel, housed in an old private mansion. As soon as we walked through the gate into the courtyard, I felt a jolt of recognition. I’d only seen him once, that time at the racetrack. And there had been the horrible caricatures in the newspaper that turned his likeness into a devil. Here he was again, Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Dreyfus, proud in his uniform, holding his broken sword high in a salute through the ages.
“It’s Dreyfus,” Malcolm said. “You really did help him.”
“You did too. We all did it together,” I corrected.
“It’s good to see him honored after the suffering he endured.” Dad circled the bronze sculpture slowly. “It’s good to know that some wrongs can be righted.”
I wasn’t sure about that. Dreyfus had lost his health and spent four years on Devil’s Island, but he died an officer of the Legion of Honor, so at least his reputation, his good name, had been returned to him. The statue was a figure of bravery, of determination. I remembered the words Dreyfus had cried during his ritual degradation when the insignias of his rank were torn from his uniform and his sword snapped in two: “I am innocent!”
The statue seemed to be yelling those words into the sky. It vibrated with an energy, a power, that went beyond art. Was it a touchstone? I didn’t want to leave Dad and Malcolm, not yet, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to know if Dreyfus would carry me back to his time and to Mom.
I reached out and touched the cool bronze. No crackling of light, no blurring static. Nothing. The statue felt central to me, alive somehow, but it wasn’t a touchstone, at least not the time-travel kind. I thought of the dictionary definition of the word.
And Dreyfus was definitely that kind of touchstone for me, a t
est for tolerance, for fighting for justice, for what was right. I wanted to hold on to it tightly, but the things that are the most important won’t fit in your hand.
“Let’s go into the museum,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Malcolm. “It’s time to be a regular tourist.”
And it was, but as we walked back to the hotel a couple of hours later, I could tell Dad was somewhere else. “So the question is,” he said, “where should we go next? What part of history do you think Mom will try to change?”
“I haven’t got any more letters from her. I have no idea.”
I supposed we had to wait for a postcard.
And when we got back to the hotel, one was there for us. From Mom.
This note is for the curious reader who wants to know more about Paris, the Impressionists, Émile Zola, and the Dreyfus Affair. Paris in the 1880s and ’90s was a modern city with broad boulevards, wells supplying water, and garbage pickup. Before 1884, rubbish was strewn on the streets in such rancid piles that men took to wearing flowers in their lapels to mask the smell.
Eugene Poubelle, a city administrator, introduced zinc bins to collect trash, which is why a garbage can is “une poubelle” in French. Electric lights were just beginning to be used, as Edgar Degas did in the gallery exhibit he organized. And the Eiffel Tower, built as a temporary structure between 1887 and 1889 for the 1900 World’s Fair, proved to be such a popular emblem of French modernism that it still stands today as a major tourist attraction.
The Impressionists
The last Impressionist Exhibition took place in 1886, the same year Zola wrote The Masterpiece, his novel based on his friend Paul Cézanne. The exhibit of 1881 was the sixth exhibit, and the last one curated by Degas. I conflated his use of electric lights and colored walls with the 1886 exhibit, when Seurat’s La Grande Jatte was displayed. Impressionism began in the 1870s as a modern movement of painting actual life, as opposed to the dull, academic, officially recognized art of mythological or historical subjects. Degas was part of the core group, even though he despised plein air (open-air) painting, which many Impressionists embraced. Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Pissarro, and Cézanne, and later Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh, all painted outdoors, trying to capture light and movement as much as their actual subjects. Although ridiculed by the press at first, by the 1890s Impressionism began to be accepted, with the artists selling their paintings for good prices.
The Dreyfus Affair
The outline of the Dreyfus Affair given in this book is all true. It started in 1894 with a cleaning woman who worked as a spy for the French military at the German Embassy in Paris. There she found an incriminating “bordereau” (memorandum) that listed French military capabilities. In October 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was immediately suspected, being the only Jew in the officer corps, and arrested on the slim evidence that the handwriting supposedly matched his. (Conflicting experts disagreed, with the main proponent a vocal anti-Semite.)
Dreyfus was neither told of the charges against him, nor allowed to contact his family or a lawyer. Appalled by how badly Dreyfus was treated, the director of the prison alerted the Minister of War and the Military Governor of Paris, advocating for Dreyfus but to no avail. The military tried to keep the arrest secret, but news of it leaked out.
At that point, the entire military hierarchy jumped on the case, eager to prove their patriotism and root out Jews from the army. Dreyfus’s brother, Mathieu, hired Edgar Demange, a noted criminal lawyer, devout Catholic, and strong supporter of the military. Demange agreed to take the case but warned Mathieu that if after examining the evidence, he found it incriminating, he would quit, a signal to all France of Dreyfus’s guilt. Mathieu staunchly believed in his brother’s innocence and didn’t hesitate to take that chance.
Upon reading the file offered by the military, Demange told the family that Dreyfus had been accused solely because he was Jewish. He added, “It is abominable. I have never seen such a dossier. If there is justice, your brother will be acquitted.”
The First Dreyfus Trial
The trial lasted three days in November 1894. More than twenty-four witnesses from most of the offices of the military’s General Staff testified against Dreyfus. No one from the high command spoke in his defense. Fewer than a dozen of his fellow officers were willing to risk defending him. Still, even the prosecution witnesses were forced to admit under oath that Dreyfus had always acted honorably. One even called him “incapable of treason.”
The sole evidence was the supposedly matching, yet not quite matching, handwriting. Alphonse Bertillon, the blatantly anti-Semitic expert witness, offered a convoluted theory to explain that the reason the handwriting wasn’t a good match was because Dreyfus had imitated his wife’s and brother’s handwriting to disguise his own. According to Bertillon, this effort to disguise proved that Dreyfus really had written the bordereau and felt guilty for doing so.
Dreyfus wrote in his diary that the arguments against him were so flimsy and histrionic, the arguments for exoneration so clear and compelling, that he expected to be acquitted just as his lawyer had predicted. However as deliberations began, Commandant Charles du Paty, following the orders of General Auguste Mercier, delivered to the judges a secret dossier of fabricated evidence.
This dossier was created by a counterintelligence agent, Hubert-Joseph Henry, and attested to Dreyfus having an affair, which he hadn’t; being a gambler with enormous debts, which he wasn’t; and being loyal to Germany because he spoke German and visited Alsace-Lorraine where he had family. That thousands of other Frenchmen spoke German and lived in Alsace-Lorraine, a territory that had changed hands between France and Germany several times, didn’t seem to be a compelling argument against Dreyfus’s guilt. Most convincing was a forged letter, supposedly from the Italian attaché, that named Dreyfus as a German spy.
Injustice for Dreyfus
By a unanimous vote, the military tribunal convicted Dreyfus in December 1894. They ordered him to repay the military for the expenses of the trial and sent him to solitary confinement on Devil’s Island in French Guyana, off the coast of Brazil. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was enormously relieved to have gotten through the trial so quickly, having protected national security and avoided igniting tension with Germany. The French press echoed these sentiments, adding with ferocious glee that the menace from the Jews had been quashed. Even the far left despised Dreyfus and felt he deserved the death penalty, which wasn’t permitted under French law.
While the French press celebrated the downfall of the evil Jew, the British newspapers called for transparency, insisting the charges were too grave to allow for a secret, closed trial. The rest of the world took little notice of what was happening in Paris. The Dreyfus Affair wasn’t an affair yet, but a simple court-martial.
Dreyfus filed an immediate appeal, which was summarily rejected by Commandant du Paty, the same man who had given the judges the fabricated file. Instead Du Paty offered a lighter sentence in exchange for a full list of the information given to the Germans. Given that he knew the charges had been trumped up, it was a cynical offer, one that Dreyfus rejected, proclaiming his innocence.
The public display of Dreyfus literally being stripped of his rank took place on January 6, 1895, in the Morland Courtyard of the War College. The ceremony took place behind iron gates, but hordes of people crowded into the square in front of the college. More thronged onto the nearby roofs and balconies, eager to see the reviled traitor’s humiliation.
Thousands of troops lined the courtyard as a military clerk read the verdict. “Alfred Dreyfus, you are unworthy to bear arms. I hereby degrade you in the name of the French people. Let the judgment be executed.”
In response, Dreyfus raised his right hand and shouted, “I swear and declare that you are degrading an innocent man. Vive la France!”
A drumroll muffle
d his words as an officer stripped off Dreyfus’s cap and tore the insignia, gold braid, and ornaments off his jacket. As a final insult, the officer took Dreyfus’s sword and broke it over his knee. Through it all, Dreyfus held his head high, yelling, “Innocent! I am innocent!”
The crowds inside and outside the War College, both military and public, jeered Dreyfus, calling out, “Down with the Jew! Judas! Traitor! Kill all the Jews!”
As ugly as the ceremony was, it was only the beginning of Dreyfus’s suffering. He spent fifteen days locked in a mesh cage on the deck of a ship, exposed to the elements and the insults of the crew, before landing at Devil’s Island in French Guyana. In an old leper colony that had been turned into a prison, Dreyfus was chained to his bed for days on end, always in solitary confinement. Unaware of any efforts to prove his innocence, Dreyfus spent four dark years there. In his diary he wrote of his desperation and despair, his loss of faith in justice and reason. Only the thought of his wife and children kept him from committing suicide.
The Real Traitor
Two years after the trial, the same cleaning woman/agent who had found the first bordereau discovered a new document that suggested the original traitor was still actively selling secrets to the Germans. Major Georges Picquart suspected Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterházy, an inveterate gambler, but he found no hard evidence until six months later when he closely examined the document and recognized the famous handwriting from the first bordereau.
Shocked to realize that Esterházy was the original traitor and that Dreyfus must be innocent, Picquart reviewed the secret dossier and realized it held no proof, only hysterical speculation. Horrified by what he’d learned, Picquart went to his superiors, du Paty and Henry, and told them of his discoveries.
The military refused to acknowledge their mistake, instead closing ranks around Esterházy and protecting him. As for Picquart, he was ordered out of Paris and sent to northern Africa where his pangs of conscience wouldn’t be heard.