THE DREYFUS CASE 225difficulty he managed to smuggle a copy of Les Plaisirs et les Jours
to Picquart's cell at Mont-Valerien; though whether or not the
martyr's confinement was soothed by this gift remains unknown.
All through the Zola trial he climbed with Louis de Robert each
morning to the public gallery in the Palais de Justice, feeling
the same pleasurable apprehension and mental tension as at the
time of his examination for the licence en droit, and armed, as then,
with a flask of coffee and a packet of sandwiches.'
Zola showed to less advantage in his trial than in the magni-
ficent protest which had provoked it: alternately sulky and vain,
he made unfortunate remarks such as: "I don't know the law,
and I don't want to know it," or "I have won with my writings
more victories than these generals who insult me." Proust had
eyes only for the officers, the mistaken, unjust kindred of the
spiritual fathers and elder brothers he had known at Orleans. The
honour of the Army, he knew, could be saved only by admission
of error, not by perpetuating injustice; yet it was with admiration
mingled with his horror that he studied General de Boisdeffre,
tall, elderly and handsome, with violet cheeks and a courteous
manner, when on the morning of 18 February he swore to the
genuineness of the faux Henry and threatened his resignation as
Chief of General Staff if disbelieved. But the centre of the inter-
minable trial was Picquart himself, the Angel of the Revision, as
Dreyfusist hostesses had already begun to call him. In Jean
Santeuil,2 advancing in his sky_blue uniform towards the presi-
dent of the court, 'with the light, rapid movement of a Spahi, as
if he had just dismounted from his horse, his head on one side
and glancing right and left with vague astonishment', Picquart
has the air of Saint-Loup. In his scrupulous way of pausing to
think before he answered, in order to discover not the most telling
1 Robert de Billy was told a few years later by an informant in the inner
circle of Reinachls assistants that Proust had been 'singled out to take an
active part in the movement; but his ill-health prevented rum from accepting~.
Jean Santeui! attended the Zola trial with a watching-brief for Zola's lawyer:
"Call for me in the morning," he says to his friend Durrieux as they leave
the Palais de Justice, "I'll have, finished the notes I'm taking for Labori by
then" (vol. 2., p. 121). Perhaps Proust, too, had an official task to perform
at the trial. In A la Recherche the Narrator's attitude to the Affair is more
neutral, and Proust transferred his own attendance at the Zola trial,
including the coffee and sandwiches, to Bloch (II, 234).- Vol. 2, IJ4