Part 13

He was now kept very well informed of all that took place in France; intelligence often reached him before it appeared in the newspapers; and now and again he told me what was brewing. Going backward, too, he confided to me some curious particulars of the genesis of the Revisionist campaign. But he will himself some day tell all this in a book of his own, and I must not anticipate him. I will only say that various important things he mentioned to me in the autumn of 1898 have since become well-known, acknowledged facts, and I have every reason to believe that time will duly show the accuracy of those which have not as yet been publicly revealed.

There is one point to which I must refer at more length. In his declaration 'Justice,' published on the expiration of his exile, M. Zola stated that he had long suspected Colonel Henry, though he had possessed no actual proof of that officer's guilt. This is so true, that I well recollect listening to a conversation between him and M. Desmoulin during the first days of their sojourn in England, when they compared notes with respect to their impressions of Henry, whom they had particularly noticed at Versailles on the occasion of M. Zola's sentence by default.

They had then observed how nervous and crestfallen the colonel looked--the very picture, indeed, of a man who dreads the discovery of his guilt. This was the more remarkable, as Henry's confident arrogance at the earlier trial in Paris had been so conspicuous. The man had a skeleton in his cupboard--to Zola and Desmoulin that was certain.

M. Zola is a good physiognomist, and his friend (as a portraitist) is scarcely less gifted in that respect, and they felt equally certain of Henry's culpability. As yet they could not say that it was he who had actually forged that famous 'absolute proof' of Dreyfus's guilt, which they knew to have been forged by some one, but that time would prove him guilty of some abominable machination was to them a foregone conclusion.

One day, it must have been I suppose the 31st of August, a rather strange telegram in French reached me for transmission to M. Zola. It came from Paris, and was, so far as I remember, to this effect: 'Be prepared for a great success.'

A name I was acquainted with followed; but what the telegram might mean I knew not. There was absolutely nothing in the newspapers with reference to any great success achieved at that moment by the Revisionist party; but possibly the message might refer to one or another of M. Zola's lawsuits, such as that with the 'Petit Journal' or that with the handwriting experts. I re-telegraphed it to M. Zola, and that day, at all events, I thought no more of the matter.

But I afterwards learnt that the telegram had perplexed him quite as much as it perplexed me. A great success? What could it be? He racked his mind in vain. He reviewed all the phases and aspects of the Dreyfus case, wondering whether this or that had happened, but not suspecting the public revelations which were then impending, the tragedy which was being enacted.

For a while he walked up and down, feverish and anxious (he was at the time in poor health), and then he would fling himself on a sofa, still and ever indulging in his surmises. With that kind of prescience which he had so frequently displayed in the Dreyfus affair, he felt certain that something very important had occurred, for otherwise such a mysterious telegram would never have been sent him. This lasted the whole evening.

My daughter Violette was with him at the time, and his feverishness doubtless gained on her. At last she retired to rest, while M. Zola, according to his wont, carried a lamp into his own room to sit there a while and read some French newspapers which had reached him, via Wareham, by the evening delivery. There was nothing in them of a nature to explain the mysterious telegram; still he read on and on in the hope, as it were, of quieting himself.

It was, I believe, between eleven o'clock and midnight when he rose to go to bed, and as he did so he heard some loud exclamations, followed by a cry. At first he fancied that the calls came from one of the servants' rooms, and he paused on the landing. Then, however, as they were repeated, he found that they came from my daughter's apartment. With fatherly solicitude he waited and listened. Violette was calling in her sleep.

Practical enough in matters of everyday life, this girl of mine has literary partialities of a somewhat gruesome kind, and her avowed ambition (I quote her own words) is to write, some day, stories full of witches and wizards, that shall make people's flesh creep. For this reason I keep such of Anne Radcliffe's uncanny novels as I possess carefully locked up.

I can well remember my daughter telling me at times of strange things dreamt by her in her sleep; but not of being of a romantic or a mystical turn myself, I have usually pooh-poohed all this as nonsense. And such I believe is the course which fathers usually adopt if their daughters' imaginations begin to run riot.

As for M. Zola, when he heard Violette calling in her sleep, his first impulse was to rouse her, but all suddenly became still again. The girl had probably sunk into a more peaceful slumber. And so, after waiting a few minutes longer, he thought it best to leave her as she was.

Nothing further disturbed M. Zola that night; but on the following morning, when he met Violette downstairs, he asked her how she felt, and told her that he had heard her calling in her sleep. He had probably formed the same opinion as I should have formed under the circumstances, namely, that it was a case of indigestion or a little excitement.

But she turned to him and replied, 'Oh! I had such a frightful dream. . . I was in a big black place, and there was a man on the ground covered with blood, and people were crowding round him, talking with great excitement. And I saw you, Monsieur Zola, and you came up looking like a giant and waved your arms again and again, and seemed well pleased.'

M. Zola was dumbfounded. He could make nothing of it. A man in a pool of blood and others round him; and he, Zola, waving his arms and looking well pleased! It was nonsense; and he was disposed to laugh at the girl and chide her. But a little later, with the arrival of some morning newspapers, the position suddenly changed.

Here I should mention that as the Paris journals only reached M. Zola with a delay of twelve or four-and-twenty hours, it had just been arranged that he should be supplied with two or three London papers every morning, and that he and Violette between them should put the telegrams concerning the Dreyfus business into French.

He opened one of these English newspapers--which it was I do not recollect--and there he saw a whole column dealing with the arrest and confession of Colonel Henry. The heading to the telegrams, the very words 'arrest' and 'confession,' made everything intelligible to M. Zola; and beneath all this came a brief wire headed, I think, 'Paris, midnight,' and worded much to this effect: 'Colonel Henry has been found dead in his cell at Mont Valerien.'

So that was the man whom Violette, in her dream, had seen weltering in a pool of blood, surrounded by his custodians, who had rushed in full of excitement! M. Zola's presence in that vision was, so to say, symbolical. 'He had waved his arms and had seemed well pleased'--so the girl had put it in her frank, artless way. 'Well pleased' may perhaps appear to be scarcely the correct expression. At all events, it needs to be interpreted. Most certainly Zola never desired the death of a sinner; but, on the other hand, he could only feel some satisfaction at knowing that Henry's crime was at last divulged to the world.

This, then, is how my daughter dreamt Henry's death. I do not wish to insist unduly on the incident, and I have no intention of appealing to the Psychical Research Society to test, corroborate, or disprove the case.

There was one rather curious feature that I have not yet mentioned. My daughter has assured me that during the same night she dreamt the same thing over and over again. She tried to banish the vision, but ever and ever it returned, as if to impress itself indelibly upon her mind. And ever did she see M. Zola waving his arms as he hovered round the scene.

At that time the girl knew nothing of Colonel Henry; she understood very little about the Dreyfus case; and all she had to go upon was the enigmatical telegram and M. Zola's talk during the evening, when he was expressing his thoughts aloud. But at that moment he had foreseen no death, murder, or suicide, and if the possibility of any arrest had occurred to him it was that of M. du Paty de Clam, which the Revisionist papers were then demanding.

It is true that in infancy my daughter had often seen Mont Valerien, as I lived for some years at Boulogne-sur-Seine, and the hill and fortress towering across the river were then familiar objects to us all. But the girl was little more than a baby at the time, and so this circumstance can have exercised no influence upon her. Moreover, she has told me that she had no notion as to what might be the actual scene of her dream; it merely appeared to her that she was in France, because the people she saw raised ejaculations in French.

Passing from this incident, I may point out that the telegram sent to M. Zola through me was explained by the news in the English newspapers. It was evident that the 'great success' referred to in the message was the discovery of Henry's forgery and possibly his arrest.

Directly I saw the news in a London newspaper I hurried off to M. Zola's, and when I reached his abode about noon I found him expecting me. We then went over matters together, the press telegrams, my daughter's dream and the probable outcome of the whole affair.

As was natural, M. Zola was quite excited. First, the document which Henry had confessed to having forged was the very one that General de Pellieux had imported into the Zola trial in Paris as convincing proof of Dreyfus's guilt. At that time already its effect had been very great; it had destroyed all chance of M. Zola's acquittal. Then, too, it had been solemnly brought forward in the Chamber of Deputies by War Minister Cavaignac, who had vouched for its authenticity. And now, as previously alleged by Colonel Picquart, it was shown to be a forgery of the clumsiest kind.

Here at least was 'a new fact' warranting the revision of the whole Dreyfus case. Surely the blindest bigot could not resist such evidence of the machinations of those who had sent Dreyfus to Devil's Island; truth and justice would speedily triumph, and in a week or two he, Zola, would be able to return to France again.

But he did not take sufficient account of human obstinacy and vileness. His friends, to whom he appealed on the subject of his return, urged him to remain where he was, for the battle, they said, was by no means over, and his name was still like the red scarf of the matador that goads the bull to fury. The advice proved good, for again were passions stirred. Henry, the ignoble forger, was raised to the position of martyr, and Cavaignac and Zurlinden and Chanoine in turn strove to impede the course of justice. 'Hope deferred maketh the heart sick,' and thus M. Zola, finding so many difficulties in the way of his return, abandoned for a time all work and fell into brooding melancholy.