in the sacred name of Patriotism.* Should their menaces be escaped there remains the Assize Court with a jury that will need to be brave indeed if it is to resist all the pressure of a deliberately organised “terror.”  At the end possibly lie imprisonment, fine, disgrace, ruin.  How jubilantly some are already rubbing their hands in the bishops’ palaces, the parsonages, the sacristies of France!  Ah! no stone will be kept unturned to secure a conviction!  But Emile Zola does not waver.  It may be the truth, the whole truth will only be known to the world in some distant century; but he, anxious to hasten its advent and prevent the irreparable, courageously stakes all that he has, person, position, fame, affections, and friendships. . . .  And this he does for no personal object whatsoever, but in the sole cause of truth and justice, ever repeating the cry common to both Goethe and himself:  “Light, more light!”

  * There is not the slightest doubt that M. Zola incurred the
    greatest personal danger between January and April 1898. 
    M. Ranc, the old and tried Republican, who knows what danger
    is, has lately pointed this out in forcible terms in the
    Paris journal Le Matin.

’Ah! to all the true hearts that have followed and loved him through years of mingled blame and praise, hard-earned victory and unmerited reviling, he is at this hour dearer even than he was before; for he has now put the seal upon his principles, and to the force of precept has added that of the most courageous personal example.’

This then is what I wrote immediately after the publication of Zola’s letter ‘J’accuse,’ basing myself simply on my knowledge of the master’s character, of the passions let loose in France, and of a few matters connected with the Dreyfus case, then kept secret but now public property.  And had I to write anything of the kind at the present time, I should, I think, have but few words to alter beyond substituting the past for the present or future tense.  In one respect I was mistaken.  I did not imagine the truth to be quite so near at hand.  Since January 1898, however, nine-tenths of it have been revealed and the rest must now soon follow.  And I hold, as all hold who know the inner workings of l’Affaire Dreyfus, that M. Zola’s exile, like his letter to President Faure and his repeated trials for libel, has in a large degree contributed to this victory of truth.  For by going into voluntary banishment, he kept not only his own but also Dreyfus’s case ‘open,’ and thus helped to foil the last desperate attempts that were being made to prevent the truth from being discovered.

I should add that in the following pages I deal very slightly with l’Affaire Dreyfus, on which so many books have already been written.  Indeed, as a rule, I have only touched on those incidents which had any marked influence on M. Zola during his sojourn in this country.

E. A. V.