MARCEL PROUSTMonet (Elstir himself!) joined in.l By the end of the month the
petition numbered three thousand names, and was attacked by
Barres in Le Journal for I February: 'the petition of the intel-
lectuals is signed mostly by half-wits,' he wrote, and went on to
call them 'the semi-intellectuals'.
From 7 to 23 February 1898 Zola was tried for defamation of
the officers who had acquitted Esterhazy. 'The Dreyfus court-
martial may have been unintelligent, but the Esterhazy court-
martial was criminal,' he had written in I Accuse. His protest was
not only a moral act of supreme courage and danger: it was also a
tactical move of great skill. By forcing the Government to
prosecute him on the Esterhazy question he hoped to enable his
lawyers to bring out, in cross-examination of the army witnesses,
the new evidence on the Dreyfus Case which was the essential
need of the revisionists. Despite the judges' efforts, on instruc-
tions from above, to exclude all mention of Dreyfus, a few
important facts came out: notably, the admission that Dreyfus
had been illegally condemned, since part of the evidence had not
been shown to the defence.^2
A few weeks before Picquart's arrest Proust had been taken to
the house of Zola's publisher, Gustave Charpentier, to meet
Picquart in person. His admiration for the heroic officer was re-
doubled when he found he was a friend of Monsieur Darlu,
interested in philosophy and music, and well-read. With great
1 Among other signatories were Albert Bloch, 'licencie es lois, teacher in
the Polytechnic school at Buenos Ayres', whose name Proust used for the
character in A La Recherche, though there is no evidence that he knew him
personally; Pierre Quillard, a poet whom Proust had met at Mallarme's, and
who spoke Bloch's Homeric jargon ("warrior of the shining greaves", of
Pierre Louys in well-varnished shoes, or "thou of the swift chariot" to a
friend alighting from an omnibus, and so on); also Jules Renard and Andre
Gide.
2 A no less vital consequence (and no doubt purpose) ofZola's action was
that in the witness-box Picquart would be free at last to make his own
discoveries public. He revealed the existence of the petit hleu (Schwartz-
koppen's letter to Esterhazy), and told the court of his horrified amazement,
on examining the Secret File against Dreyfus, at finding it contained not a
shadow of proof. He also expressed his opinion that the letter from the
Italian military attache Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen, asking him to Isay
we've had nothing to do with this Jew ... no one must ever know wll'll
happened with him', was spurious. It was in fact forged by Henry and is
generally known as the 'faux-Henry'.