His last party is in the final volume, Le Temps retrouvé. Everyone is changed by white hair, baldness, wrinkles, but even more from a worldly point of view. The aristocrats whom Proust had longed to know in his youth, and who had become his friends, were now mixed up with the middle-class people they had formerly so rigidly excluded. The Great War had been the catalyst, rich bourgeois gifts to war charities had broken the taboo, and the snobbish Proust becomes disillusioned.
All Proust’s characters are caricatures, from the Duc de Guermantes and his brother Charlus to Mme Verdurin, all three so grossly rude and absurd that Charles Dickens’s grotesques pale beside them. Oriane de Guermantes, however, is a real heroine, like Trollope’s Lady Glencora. The narrator has loved and admired her ever since, as a boy, he glimpsed her at a country wedding; her brilliant blue eyes, gold hair and beaky nose have been his ideal of what an aristocrat should be. Yet even she lets him down. Her witticisms are only paradoxes spiced with malice.
The only tender and loving portraits in the novel are of the mother and grandmother, and, up to a point, Swann. The most fashionable man of his day, a recognised expert who advised his grand friends about pictures and music, he is perhaps what Proust himself would have liked to be; but he makes him spoil his life by marrying a woman not received in society. He marries in an attempt to assuage his jealousy of her many lovers, a jealousy that foreshadows the narrator’s own suffering with Albertine.
I once asked an old French duke to what extent Proust had known ‘Guermantes’ during his party-going years before the First World War. ‘Mais pas du tout!’ was the reply. Not quite true, but much imagination supplemented small acquaintance.
I read Scott Moncrieff’s translation in 1934, having been put off for years by Clive Bell, who wrote that the novel was difficult. In 1935, I read it in French. The translation is a delightful book, but it is not Proust. The jokes that make one choke with laughter are not so funny, the descriptions of flowers and rivers and churches lose their poetry.
Mine is the old NRF (Nouvelle Revue Française) edition of 1929 in 15 volumes. One of them, Sodome et Gomorrhe II, succumbed to damp in an Irish house. They have moved with me from place to place, books to re-read. Newer editions, over-burdened by the scribbles found in Proust’s room when he died, have become holy writ, but I prefer the beautifully printed NRF of Gallimard.
Sunday Times (1998)
A Fight for Justice
Every few years somebody writes a book about the Dreyfus case, and this is likely to continue until kingdom come, because it is a story containing every ingredient of the most thrilling thriller and it never fails to enthrall. David L. Lewis’s is the latest version, written in American.
Alfred Dreyfus was a Jew from Alsace. He was eleven when the Prussians took his native province from the French. His brothers remained in Mulhouse looking after the family business, but Alfred was educated in Paris and joined the French army. He became a captain in the artillery in 1889, passed through the staff college and received an appointment on the staff. He was fairly rich, and married with two small children at the time the drama begins in 1894.
A charwoman who worked at the German embassy was paid by the French secret service to collect the contents of the embassy waste paper baskets. The German military attaché threw most interesting things into his, including love letters. He employed various French spies, among them a raffish officer who was always short of money, Major Esterhazy. One day Major Henry, who worked in the Statistical Section of the War Office—a parallel section to the Second Bureau, the formal Intelligence branch—found among the waste paper a letter offering a list of five items of military information, none of them top secret, but nevertheless clearly emanating from a spy. This was the famous ‘bordereau’. Major Henry passed it on to his superiors, and it was circulated to the chiefs of all the War Office departments. Somebody thought the handwriting on the bordereau resembled Dreyfus’s hand. Graphologists were called in, who disagreed with one another. In spite of this, it was upon the slender evidence of his authorship of the bordereau that Dreyfus was arrested, court martialled, publicly degraded, sentenced to life imprisonment, and sent to Devil’s Island.
He continually protested his innocence. No motive for his treachery could be found. He was passionately devoted to the French army, and he had plenty of money. He was unpopular among his fellow officers. They said he was inquisitive, forever asking questions about things which were no concern of his. There were a few who resented a Jew being on the staff at all, but it would not be true to put down his unpopularity to anti-semitism; he simply was not liked. The idea that a rigidly Catholic, Jesuit-educated aristocratic army caste manufactured evidence of treason because Dreyfus was a Jew is not borne out by the facts. On the other hand, the shrill cries of the anti-semitic press influenced the outcome. Once the journalists had got hold of Dreyfus’s name, to acquit him was to be accused of being in the pay of the Jews, and through them in the pay of the Germans. No law of libel curbed these rabid men, and they succeeded in frightening both politicians and generals. Also, since even a court martial held in camera might not have convicted on the bordereau alone, Major Henry recklessly added forged evidence in order to obtain a conviction.
David Lewis describes the dreadful ceremony of the degradation, when Dreyfus had the buttons and braid torn off his uniform and his sword was broken across the knee of an officer. As he was marched back he cried out in his harsh voice: ‘Soldats! Je suis innocent! Vive la France!’ The angry crowd shouted: ‘Salaud! Silence! Mort au juif!’ [Bastard. Shut up. Death to the Jew.]
How could such a terrible thing happen? A few people suspected almost from the beginning that there might have been a miscarriage of justice, but they had nothing to go on and they kept their thoughts to themselves. There were several reasons for this. The most respectable was that some of the items on the bordereau concerned the artillery, and the French were then developing their famous 75 mm gun. It would have been a disaster if details of this had reached the Germans. Then, whenever during the weeks leading up to the court martial awkward questions were asked, Major Henry produced new ‘evidence’, some of it highly dramatic. He even said he had intercepted a letter from Emperor William II to Dreyfus, though nobody actually set eyes upon it. The German ambassador, an old-fashioned aristocrat, Count von Münster, gave his word that neither he nor the military attaché had ever heard of Dreyfus. This shook the Foreign Minister, but the gutter press said it was another German lie.
As time went on many of the ‘intellectuals’ became violently pro-Dreyfus; some of them convinced of his innocence, others for party political reasons, but they often did more harm than good. ‘The intellectuals have all more or less lost their national mentality,’ wrote Maurice Paléologue, who called them ‘these presumptuous pedants who believe they are the aristocrats of intelligence’. To the ordinary patriotic Frenchman they simply represented a group of nondescript writers and publicists who put every other country before their own, ready and willing to knock the government, the army, and France itself. There is no doubt that most of Dreyfus’s supporters managed in their tactless way to stiffen the opinion that ‘raison d’état,’ or the life of the country, mattered infinitely more than the fate of one man.
A very terrible fate it was. They sent him across the ocean to be the only prisoner on Devil’s Island. His wife and brother were unremitting in their efforts to get the case reopened. Mathieu Dreyfus, afraid that the whole thing was being forgotten, almost managed to finish him off: he arranged for an English paper to print a story that Dreyfus had escaped from Devil’s Island. The result was that he was no longer allowed to walk on the island, or to look at the sea; a high palisade was put up to contain him. Worst of all, he was riveted to his bed at night, by the ankles and the wrists. The misery of this in a tropical climate in a cell buzzing with insects can easily be imagined.
The hero of the ‘affaire’ is Colonel Picquart, who had become head of the Statistical Section. Picquart ha
d been present at the court martial; at the time he never doubted that Dreyfus was guilty. Some time later, following the traces of the amateurish spy Esterhazy, he saw Esterhazy’s handwriting and immediately recognised it as the writing on the ‘bordereau’. He told his superiors. They said there could be no question of a re-trial; it might set off a diplomatic ‘incident’ with Germany; it might even lead to war. Picquart, now convinced that Dreyfus was innocent, continued his inquiries. Nothing would induce him to throw up the case, he could not bear the heavy load on his conscience. As a result, in order to shut his mouth, Picquart was ordered to the Tunisian frontier where a colonial war was in progress. There were those who fervently hoped he might leave his bones in North Africa; but eventually he returned, more determined than ever to get the Dreyfus case reopened. Major Henry’s forgeries and lies gradually came to light, and he was arrested. Alone in his cell, he took his razor and cut his throat.
Major Henry’s suicide excited the press of the entire world. Even French newspapers, hitherto neutral, now demanded revision. One of the court martial judges announced publicly that his eyes had been opened. When Mercier, Minister of War, heard the news he uttered the one word: ‘Foutu!’ [Screwed].
This was in 1899, four years since Dreyfus had been languishing on Devil’s Island. The new trial was staged in the lycée at Rennes in August. The town was stuffed with generals and lawyers and Dreyfusists and anti-Dreyfusists and journalists from every country on earth. The best account of this trial and of the atmosphere at Rennes is to be found in the diary kept by Maurice Paléologue, a diplomat in the Intelligence Department of the Quai d’Orsay. It was published in 1955, twenty years after the death of Dreyfus; the same year as the excellent English book on the Dreyfus case by Guy Chapman. Paléologue believed Dreyfus to be innocent, yet he felt sure he would be found guilty all over again. Passions ran high. One of the ‘facts’ which damned Dreyfus in the eyes of most Frenchmen was the alleged letter to him from their arch-enemy the Kaiser. Paléologue ridiculed the mere idea of the Emperor of Germany, King of Prussia, Margrave of Baden, Landgrave of Hessen, and so on and on, taking up his pen and writing to a spy. But neither the generals nor the lawyers were men of the world, and they swallowed such fantasies.
International interest in the trial was such that the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Russell of Killowen, went over to Rennes for a few days busman’s holiday. He was given an armchair near the judges and Paléologue sat beside him. They had breakfast at 5.30 am, for the court sittings began at 6.30. When the accused was brought in, Lord Russell half stood up the better to gaze at this man who had so bitterly divided France and indeed set the whole world arguing his guilt or his innocence, this martyr with his legendary sufferings, this victim of lies, forgeries, and a monster miscarriage of justice. After a long look, the Lord Chief Justice turned to Paléologue and whispered in his ear: ‘Comme il est antipathique!’ [He is so awful] And that seems to have been half the trouble. Nobody liked him, he was quite exceptionally uncharming. Nobody, that is, but his own family. His wife and his brother were devoted to him.
All the same, he aroused deep pity in some observers. An English journalist at Rennes described him thus: ‘There came in a little old man—an old, old man of 39, a small-statured, thick-set old man in the black uniform of the artillery—his hair was gone white as silver, and on the temples and back of the head he was bald.’
Lord Russell was loud in his criticism of the conduct of the trial. Hearsay, even at second or third hand, was admitted as evidence and readily listened to. The trial dragged on for a month. Amazingly enough, with two of the judges dissenting, Dreyfus was again found guilty at Rennes. Partly the reason was the poor impression made on the military judges by the melodramatic demagogy of the defence lawyers, but principally, and disgracefully, it was the old question: Mercier, Minister of War, or Dreyfus? Mercier carried the day.
However, there was no more Devil’s Island. Dreyfus was speedily amnestied, and a few years later the whole trumped-up case was reviewed and the verdicts quashed by the High Court. Dreyfus was reinstated in the army and given the Legion of Honour. It was twelve years after his degradation. Picquart, who had been abominably treated, was also reinstated. He could not abide the Dreyfus brothers and refused to meet them. His motive for interfering in the case had been singularly pure; there was nothing personal about it; it was love of justice and of truth: no more, and no less.
Mr Lewis’s book is never boring. There are one or two tiresome little mistakes (for example, he says the German Embassy in the rue de Lille is in the eighth arrondissement which is the other side of the Seine) and it is written in American. For English readers it should perhaps have a glossary, some of the words are so curious. What do finagle and feisty mean, and how about sworling? One can make a wild guess, and on the whole the fascinating and dreadful tale is well told. Madame Straus, hostess of Marcel Proust, would have been as amazed as delighted to find herself and her guests described as the crème de la crème of Paris Society, even in a book from across the Atlantic. But such small details are unimportant. Prisoners of Honour is interesting and well illustrated. The only one of the protagonists who looks at all attractive in his photograph is Colonel Picquart: and that is as it should be.
Prisoners of Honour: The Dreyfus Affair, Lewis, D.L. Books and Bookmen (1975)
Sabre-Toothed Politician
‘There are some people who think themselves progressives who say quite seriously: We accept the principles of 1792, but we reject the violence of the Revolution. Those who say this are either stupid or hypocrites. Can they not see that the violence was the inevitable result of the appearance of such principles?’ These words were written by Clemenceau when he was 20. Ten years later he was himself to witness the violent horrors of the Commune.
This long and scholarly book is apparently the first biography of Clemenceau in English. Born in 1841, he was, like his father, a devoted worshipper of the Revolution and a convinced atheist. At home in Vendée, he was brought up to venerate St Just and Robespierre, whose portraits hung on the walls. He insisted that the Revolution was a bloc and must be accepted whole.
A left-wing opponent of Napoleon III, after the Franco-Prussian war he was elected member of the National Assembly and also mayor of Montmartre. To this day it is sometimes alleged that Clemenceau was in some way to blame for the murder of General Thomas and General Lecomte, who had been ordered to remove the cannons that the National Guard had dragged up to the Butte. The cannons were no danger to the Prussians, who sat outside Paris preparing the German Empire, while civil war was brewing in the city. In truth, as soon as he was told that the Generals had been seized, Clemenceau ran up the hill from his town hall to try to save them. They had already fallen victims to mob violence, and a ghastly sight met his eyes: ‘Soldiers, National Guardsmen, women and children, all were shouting like savage beasts, without realising what they were doing. I saw there the pathological phenomenon of bloodlust, children perched on top of a wall were waving indescribable trophies, dishevelled women… uttering harsh, inarticulate shouts.’ Thus Clemenceau described a scene reminiscent of Paris during the Terror, seventy eight years before.
Politics were his passion. Clemenceau was a violent tornado of a man, brave, clever, quick, ready with wounding sarcasms and insults in debate, prepared to fight as well as to quarrel. His duels were almost as numerous as his love affairs. ‘His personality was combative through and through,’ writes Mr Watson, and ‘he had an extraordinary facility in debate… he was able time and time again to make his opponents look foolish. Naturally they did not like it.’ Déroulède, attacking him in the Chamber for the part he was alleged to have played in the Panama scandal, said he inspired fear ‘fear of his sword, fear of his pistol, fear of his tongue.’ Considered ‘too arrogant, too assured of his own ability, of his intellectual superiority, and of his political judgement’, he was kept out of office until he was 65.
During the first three years of the war he co
nstituted himself a sharp critic of the government and its conduct of the war. He had a paper, L’Homme libre, which was in constant trouble with the censor; he changed its name to L’Homme enchainé. In 1917, when the war was going badly for the Allies, Clemenceau at the age of 76 became Prime Minister.
There is no doubt that his courage and fierce tenacity, the way in which he backed up the generals when they were being blamed for every reverse, his frequent visits to the Front, and the fear of him which silenced opposition, all contributed greatly to the final success of Allied arms. He incarnated an intractable will to victory; the Tiger, transformed, became Père la Victoire. He despised and disliked—hated is hardly too strong a word—almost all his colleagues in the government, most of the generals including those of his allies, and all the allied politicians. But he hated the Germans even more. He subordinated, as it were, his little local hatreds until after the victory, when they blossomed anew.
For France and for Europe it might have been well had this furiously determined old man chanced to die at the end of the war. Clemenceau’s warlike gifts and virtues were singularly inappropriate to the infinitely delicate task of peacemaking, yet as France’s Prime Minister he was to be the principal architect of the Peace Treaties. His sole preoccupation, the German danger dictated his every move. At the very moment when a far-seeing Talleyrand was needed, France was represented by a vengeful politician. Of course public opinion insisted upon revenge; it is no good pretending that Clemenceau did not represent the feelings of the average Frenchman at that time, but it is for statesmen to show more common-sense, not to speak of wisdom. He wanted to hang the Kaiser, and to exact crippling reparations from Germany, as well as to change the map of Europe. Until his dying day he never understood that reparations caused stagnation in France and hurt the receiver more than the donor.
The Pursuit of Laughter Page 34