For a little while we chatted together.  Some notable incidents connected with the interminable Affair had occurred during the last few days.  Colonel du Paty de Clam, for whose arrest the Revisionist journals had clamoured so long and so pertinaciously, had at last been cast into prison.  In M. Zola’s estimation, the Colonel’s arrest had been merely a question of time ever since the day when one had learnt that he had disguised himself with a false beard and blue glasses when he went to meet the notorious Esterhazy.

’A man may be guilty of any misdeed and may yet find forgiveness and even favour,’ M. Zola had then said to me, ’but he must not make himself, his profession, and his cause ridiculous.  In France, as you know, “ridicule kills.”  The false beard and the blue spectacles, following the veiled lady, are decisive.  One need scarcely trouble any further about M. du Paty de Clam.  His fate is as good as sealed.’

And now that the Colonel had at last been arrested, the master remarked, ’The military party is throwing him over to us as a kind of sop; it would be delighted to make him the general scapegoat, and thereby save all the other culprits.  But it won’t do.  There are men higher placed than Du Paty who must bear their share of censure and, if need be, punishment.’

Then we spoke of Esterhazy, ’that fine type for a melodrama or a novel of the romantic school,’ as M. Zola often remarked.  The Commandant had just acknowledged to the ‘Times’ and the ‘Daily Chronicle’ that the famous bordereau had been penned by him, and we laughed at the remembrance of his squabbles on this subject with the proprietress of another newspaper.  How indignantly he had then denied having ever acknowledged the authorship of the bordereau, and how complacently he now admitted it!  As for the circumstances under which he asserted the document to have been written, M. Zola could make nothing of them.  ’So far, the explanations explain nothing,’ said he; ’take them whichever way you will, there is no sense, no plausibility even, in them.  Hitherto I always thought Esterhazy a very shrewd and clever man, but after reading his statements in the “Times” and the “Chronicle” I no longer know what to think.  Still, one point is gained; he admits having written the bordereau, and others hereafter will tell us the exact circumstances under which he did so.  Colonel Sandherr, at whose bidding he says he wrote it, is dead; but others who know a great deal about him are still alive.’

While M. Zola thus expressed himself, we sat face to face, he in his favourite arm chair on one side of the fireplace, and I on the other, in the familiar room, with its three windows overlooking the lively road, while all around curvetted the scrolls and arabesques of the light fawn-tinted wall paper.  And after chatting about Du Paty and Esterhazy we gradually lapsed into silence.  It was a fateful hour.  There were ninety-nine probabilities out of a hundred that the decision of the Cour de Cassation would be given that same afternoon; and whatever that decision might be we felt certain that before it was made public by any newspaper in London we should be apprised of it.  We knew that five minutes after judgment should have been pronounced a telegram would be speeding through the wires to the Queen’s Hotel, Norwood.