THE DREYFUS CASE 249became the lover of the royalist Mme Porges (although she was
born a W odianer and came from Vienna) that he made each of
his sons, one by one, fight duels with the young Rothschilds.
Comtesse Potocka lectured Comte Etienne de Lorencez on
patriotism, till he retorted: "Surely you, a Neapolitan Pole, aren't
going to preach the love of France to the son of a French
general?" The lovely Marie Finaly forgot her Jewish birth and
adopted ("by way of keeping up with her in-laws," said Proust)
the anti-Dreyfusist views of her husband's family, the Barbarins.
An ambassador's son remarked to Proust's friend Louis de la
Salle: 'Good Lord, are you a Dreyfusist? It won't do your career
any good, you know!" Mme Greffulhe became secretly convinced
of Dreyfus's innocence, and wrote to her friend the Kaiser
begging him to grant her an audience in Berlin, and confide in
her whether or not he had employed Dreyfus as a spy; but a large
basket of orchids was the only answer Wilhelm II vouchsafed.
It is very possible that the story told in Sodome et Gomorrhfil of
the Prince and Princesse de Guermantes-how each unknown to
the other asked Abbe Poire to say a mass for Dreyfus-is true of
Mme Greffulhe and her husband; and if so Abbe Poire may be
identified as their friend the Abbe Muguier, a saintly and delight-
ful high-society priest, whom we shall later find taking an interest
in Proust's salvation. But Mme Greffulhe's motives were mixed,
for she was becoming interested in politics, moving ever leftward,
and had begun to invite those 'Dreyfusards of the eleventh hour',
Barthou and Briand, to her dinners. Sometimes, however, as in
the dying Charles Haas, Proust saw a genuine conscience in
travail. It is probable that Haas, like Swann, risked his social
position by proclaiming his belief in Dreyfus's innocence and his
support for revision. But it is certain that he resembled Swann
(who 'refused to sign, because his name sounded too Hebraic') in
refraining. from supporting the petition for Picquart. Swann,. 'although he approved of revision, would have nothing to do with
the campaign against the Army'2; and Haas, the veteran of 1870,
as Jacques Emile Blanche records, joined the Marquis du Lau and
other members of the Jockey Club in 'cutting' their fellow-club-
man and former friend General de Galliffet, when he became the
revisiouist War Minister and undertook the reform of the Army.
The Dreyfus Case had broken the spell of the Guermantes
1 11,709-11 • I1,7^1 )