MARCEL PROUSTcancelled the order for his degradation^1 ; on the 21st General de
Galliffet announced: 'The incident is closed'; and on 17 November
Waldeck-Rousseau tabled an amnesty bill covering all crimes or
misdemeanours committed in connection with dIe Affair.^2
Dreyfus retired to his sister's house at Carpentras near Avignon
to recuperate. A year later, in November 1900, he appeared in
Paris and was mobbed by hostesses, muclt to their disappoint-
ment and his own disgust. "I hate all this moaning about my
sufferings," he remarked to Julien Benda. "I like to talk about my
Case objectively." When Mme Straus met him she could not resist
a malicious "How d'you do, Captain, I've been hearing such a lot
about you !"; and she was heard afterwards to utter the Duchesse
de Guermantes's epigram: "What a pity we can't choose someone
else for our innocent!"3 Picquart's dislike of Jews mysteriously
returned; he refused to shake hands with Dreyfus, and took to
reading Drumont's La Libre Parole. The cynical Clemenceau
exclaimed: "If Drumont hadn't got in first, what a splendid anti-
Semitic newspaper Picquart and I could have run!" Leon Daudet
reported two remarks of Dreyfus which were none the less
apposite for being totally fictitious: "I've never had a moment's
peace since I left Devil's Island," and "Shut up, all of you, or I'll
confess."
The enchanting social scene on which Proust had moved for
six years was now riven asunder by complex antipathies; he
looked back on the Guermantes Way with disillusionment. Two
hostile groups confronted one another across a wide limbo of the
half-hearted and the indifferent. Not all were as violent as the
Marquis de Lubersac, a dreadful miser who thrashed his cabbies
and never paid Dr Proust's bills: suclt was his virulence, after he
1 A new Dreyfusist petition was organised at this time by L'Aurore. A
list of signatures with the postmark 20 September 1899, shown at the Proust
Exhibition at the Wildenstein Gallery in October 19!5 (Catalogue, No. 306),
has nothing to do with Proust, who was still at Evian, but includes the names
of several of his friends-Reynaldo Hahn, Rene Peter, Edouard Risler,
i-fery Laurent and Anatole France. Possibly the canvasser was Robert
Proust, whose Dreyfusist activity at this time was causing Proust anxiety
(,Please advise Robert to keep calm,' he wrote to Mme Proust on 10
September). Dr Robert Le Masle, who lent this list to the Proust exhibition,
was a personal friend of Robert Proust in later years.
2 The bill was not fmally carried until 24 December 1900; but in spite of
much skirmishing on either side no harm was done in the meantime.
, Cf. II, 239