A well-known English novelist and art critic, M. Zola’s oldest English friend, and his earliest champion in this country, likewise saw him.  Further, in a friendly capacity he received an English journalist for whom he has much regard, and who came to see him quite apart from any journalistic matters.  To this list I will add the names of Mr. Andrew Chatto and Mr. Percy Spalding of Messrs. Chatto and Windus, and Mr. George P. Brett, of the Macmillan Company of New York.

Such, then, were M. Zola’s visitors and guests—­say, apart from the Warehams, myself and family, less than a score of persons, the total duration of whose visits added together amounted perhaps to a hundred and twenty hours spread over many long and trying months.

At times when we chatted together, M. Zola and myself, and mention was made of his friends—­of persons occasionally whom we both knew—­he referred to the many estrangements caused by the divergence of views on the Dreyfus affair.  Friends of twenty and thirty years’ standing, men who had laboured sided by side often in pursuit of the same ideal, had not only quarrelled and parted but had assailed each other with the greatest virulence in the Press and at public meetings.

Many whom he himself had regarded as close and sincere friends had trodden upon all the past and attacked him abominably, as though he were the veriest scum of the earth.  Some in the earlier stages of the affair had hypocritically feigned sympathy, in order to provoke his confidence, and had then turned round to hold him up to execration and ridicule.  One or two had behaved so badly that he had refused ever to receive them at his house again.

He spoke to me of an eminent French litterateur who at the outset of the agitation on behalf of Dreyfus had immediately promised his help, and had even prepared articles and appeals on behalf of the prisoner of Devil’s Island.  But this litterateur had of recent years been lapsing into mysticism, and at the behests of the reverend father his confessor, he had abruptly destroyed what he had written, and gone over to the other side to wage desperate warfare upon the cause he had promised to help.

The writer in question (one who will probably leave a name in French literature) was tortured by the everlasting fear that he might go to hell when he died, and he was the more timorous, the more easily influenced by certain persons, as he suffered from a horrible, incurable complaint, and feared that his medical man—­a bigoted Romanist—­might abandon him to all the pangs of sudden death if he did not comply with the injunctions of the Church.

Then there was a friend of many years’ standing, a Minister in successive Cabinets, who feigned that by remaining in office he would be able to favour the cause, and who, instead of that, did his utmost against it.  A playwright wrote:  ’I am heartily with you, but for God’s sake don’t say it, for my plays might be hissed.’* Another prominent man started on a long journey to avoid having to express any opinion.  Nearly all the baser passions of humanity were made manifest in some degree—­treachery, rancour, jealousy, and moral and physical cowardice.