THE DREYFUS CASE 235
graceful as a branch of hawthorn'. The incident is one of several
which show that Proust was now beginning, at last, to return to
the secret springs of his early youth, the source of A fa Recherche.
On the afternoon of 16 February 1899 the Angel of Death,
this time in the guise of the lovely Mme Steinheil, called on yet
another enemy of Dreyfus. She was admitted to President Faure's
study in the Elysee Palace at HO. At 6.45 the President's
secretary, hearing loud screams from the lady, broke the door in
and found his master lying in a coma from a cerebral haemorrhage,
still clutching the flowing hair of his stark-naked companion.
Even Dr Potain could do nothing, and at 10 p.m. the father of
Proust's playmates Antoinette and Lucie expired, without
regaining consciousness. The nationalist newspapers decided it
was, somehow, all a Jewish plot, and referred darkly to Judith
and Delilah. The brutal Clemenceau wrote: 'Felix Faure is dead.
There's still not a man the less in France, but there's a good situa-
tion vacant-I vote for Loubet.' Loubet, whom the anti-
Dreyfusists hated because he had tried to hush up the Baron de
Reinach scandal in the Panama crisis, and was known to be pro-
English and a revisionist, was duly elected President of the
Republic. For a few days the country was on the verge of revolu-
tion: on the 19th the new President was mobbed by Deroulede's
nationalists and Guerin's anti-Semites, shouting their slogans of
"Panama!" and "Aoh, yes!" (a favourite anti-English expression).
On the 23rd, the day of Faure's funeral, the troops in the cortege
were followed to their barracks by Deroulede, Guerin and Barres,
imploring them to march on the Elysee and impose a military
dictatorship. Deroulede was arrested on a charge of high treason
and subsequently acquitted; and this fiasco was the last serious
threat to the cause of Dreyfusism.
On 25 February at the Vaudeville theatre Proust attended the. first night of Le Lys rouge, an adaptation by Gaston de Caillavct
of Anatole France's novel ahout love in high society. Both novel
and adaptation had been written to Mme Arman's order, and the
decor of the first act, as everyone noticed with satisfaction, was
copied from her drawing-room. Proust arrived towards the end
of the act and hurried to the dress-circle, where Mme Arman, her
cheeks rouged carmine, her greying hair dyed copper-colour, and
a toque trimmed with stuffed pink bull-finches perched on her
vast forehead, took little trouble to conceal her ill-temper at the