THE DREYFUS CASE 2.33Benna, Rejane and Sarah Bernhardt. Every night from his cell
in Cherche-Midi prison Picquart could hear bands of students
from the Sorbonne shouting "Vive Picquartl" It was decided
that his case should await the decision of the Appeal Court on
Dreyfus; but the unfortunate consequence was that Picquart
remained incarcerated for ten months. When Proust read the
newspaper which contained the first list of signatures he found,
to his extreme indignation, that his own name had been omitted.
'I know my name will add nothing to the list; but the fact of
appearing in the list will add to my name,' he wrote to the editor;
' ... I believe that to honour Picquart is to honour the Army, since
he incarnates its sublime spirit of sacrifice of the self to ends which
surpass the individual.' However Proust might loathe the real
Army of Henry and Boisdeffre, he never ceased to admire the ideal
Army-to which he himself had belonged under Colonel Arvers
and Captain Walewski at Orleans-of Picquart and Saint-Loup.
Even Henry's suicide ('the Affair, which used to be sheer
Balzac, is now Shakespearean,' Proust had written to Mme Straus)
could not convince the anti-revisionists. It was now the nationalist
party-line to pretend that Henry's forgeries were a heroic act in
defence of the State, and did not in the least affect the certainty
of Dreyfus's guilt. Proust's acquaintance Charles Maurras became
famous overnight for an article in the Garette de France promising
vengeance to the martyred Henry: 'Your ill-fated forgery will be
acclaimed as one of your finest deeds of war [' This appeal to the
doctrine that the end justifies the means began the resplendent
career of propaganda-Catholic, royalist, anti-parliamentary and
fascist-which ended, nearly fifty years later, in an extraordinary
stroke of Nemesis: the aged Maurras found himself, like Dreyfus,
imprisoned for life for betraying his country to the Germans.
Now it was the turn of the anti-Dreyfusists to organise a list of
names. The anti-Semitic Libre Parole opened a subscription, 'for. Colonel Henry's widow against the Jew Reinach', which soon
reached 130,000 francs. Contributions came not only from Barres,
the young Paul Valery and Arthur Meyer, but from half the noble
Faubourg, including the Dues de Brissac, Luynes and La Roche-
foucauld, the Duchesse d'Uzes, the Marquis's de Lubersac, Ludre
and Luppe, and the Comtes de FitzJames, Ganay and Montes-
quiou (Robert's cousin Leon).
In opposition to the Dreyfusist Ligue des Droits de I'Homme,