During the holidays, Monsieur Mazure, a keeper of departmental archives, came for a few days to Paris to canvass the offices of the Ministry for the Cross of the Legion of Honour, to make certain historical researches among the National Archives, and to see the Moulin-Rouge. Before entering upon his labours, on the day after his arrival, he called, about six o’clock in the evening, upon Monsieur Bergeret, who welcomed him benevolently. As the heat of the day was overwhelming to those who were detained in the city, under the scorching roofs and in the streets filled with acrid dust, a bright idea occurred to Monsieur Bergeret. He took Monsieur Mazure to the Bois, to a cabaret, where tables were set out under the trees, by the brink of a slumbering sheet of water.

There, in the cool shade and the peace of the foliage, they enjoyed an excellent dinner, and exchanged views upon familiar topics, discoursing in turn upon learning and the divers fashions of loving. Then, without preconcerted design, they yielded to an inevitable impulse and spoke of the Affair.

Monsieur Mazure was greatly perturbed by the Affair. Being both by persuasion and temperament a Jacobin and a patriot, after the manner of BarÈre and Saint-Just, he had joined the Nationalist hosts of his own department, and in company with Royalists and clerics, his bÊtes noires, he had, in the superior interest of his country, uplifted his voice for the unity and indivisibility of the Republic. He had even become a member of the league of which Monsieur Panneton de La Barge was the president, and as this league had voted an address to the King it was slowly dawning upon him that it was anti-republican, and he no longer felt easy in respect of its principles. As a matter of fact, being accustomed to dealing with documents, and quite capable of bringing his intelligence to bear upon a critical inquiry of a fairly simple character, he experienced some difficulty in upholding a system that displayed an audacity hitherto unexampled in the fabrication and falsification of documents intended to ruin an innocent man. He felt that he was surrounded by imposture, and yet he would not admit the fact that he had made a mistake, such an admission being possible only to minds of unusual quality.

He protested, on the contrary, that he was right, and it is only fair to admit that he was kept in ignorance, constrained, crushed and compressed by the compact mass of his fellow-citizens. The knowledge of the inquiry and the discussion of the documents had not yet reached his little town, comfortably situated on the green banks of a sluggish river. There, obstructing the light, filling public offices and sitting on the bench, was that host of politicians and churchmen, whom Monsieur MÉline had formerly sheltered beneath the skirts of his provincial frock-coat, waxing prosperous in acquiescent ignorance of the truth. This elect society, which enlisted crime in the interests of patriotism and religion, made it respectable for all, even for the Radical-Socialist chemist Mandar.

The department was all the more safely protected against any revelation of the most notorious facts in that it was administered by an Israelitish prefect.

Monsieur Worms-Clavelin held himself bound, by the very fact that he was a Jew, to serve the interests of the anti-Semites of his administration with greater zeal than a Catholic prefect would have displayed in his place. With a prompt and sure hand he stifled in his department the growing faction in favour of revision. He favoured the leagues of the clerical agitators, causing them to prosper so wonderfully that citizens Francis de PressensÉ, Jean Psichari, Octave Mirbeau and Pierre Quillard, who came to the departmental capital to speak their minds as free men, felt as though they had stepped straight into a city of the sixteenth century. They encountered none but idolatrous papists, howling for their death, who wanted to massacre them. And as Monsieur Worms-Clavelin, who since the judgment of 1894 was fully convinced that Dreyfus was innocent, made no mystery of that conviction after dinner, as he smoked his cigar, the Nationalists whose cause he favoured had good reason to count on a loyal support which was not dependent upon personal feeling.

This firm hold over the department whose archives he kept profoundly impressed Monsieur Mazure, who was an ardent Jacobin and capable of heroism, but who, like the company of heroes, marched only to the sound of the drum. Monsieur Mazure was not a brute. He felt that he owed it to others and to himself to explain his attitude.

After the soup, as they were waiting for the trout, he leaned his arms on the table and remarked:

“My dear Bergeret, I am a patriot and a republican; I do not know whether Dreyfus is guilty or innocent. I do not want to know; it’s not my business. He may be innocent, but there is no doubt that the Dreyfusites are guilty. They have been guilty of a great impertinence in substituting their own personal opinion for a decision given by republican justice. Besides, they have stirred up the whole country. Trade is suffering.”

“There’s a pretty woman,” said Monsieur Bergeret, “tall, straight and slender as a young tree.”

“Pooh!” said Monsieur Mazure. “A mere doll.”

“You speak very frivolously,” returned Monsieur Bergeret. “A doll, when alive, is a great force of Nature.”

“I don’t trouble my head about that woman or any other,” said Monsieur Mazure. “Perhaps because my own wife is a very well-made woman.”

So he said and did his best to believe. The truth was he had married the old servant and mistress of his two predecessors. Bourgeois society had kept aloof from her for ten years, but as soon as Monsieur Mazure joined the Nationalist leagues of the department she found herself received in the best society of the town. General Cartier de Chalmot’s wife went about with her, and the wife of Colonel DespautÈres could hardly tear herself away from her.

“The reason why I attach special blame to the Dreyfusites,” added Monsieur Mazure, “is that they have weakened our national defence and lowered our prestige in the eyes of other nations.”

The sun was shedding his last crimson rays between the black tree-trunks. Monsieur Bergeret felt that he must in honesty reply:

“Just consider, my dear Mazure,” he said, “that if the affairs of an obscure captain have become a matter of national importance the fault is not ours, but that of the ministers who erected the support of an erroneous and illogical sentence into a system of government. If the Keeper of the Seals had done his duty and proceeded to the revision of the trial as soon as it was clearly proved to be necessary, no one would have said anything. It was during this lamentable evasion of justice that protests began to make themselves heard. What upset the whole country, what is calculated to injure us abroad and at home, was that those in authority obstinately persisted in a monstrous piece of wickedness which increased day by day under the covering of lies with which they strove to hide it.”

“What else would you expect?” said Monsieur Mazure. “I am a good patriot and a republican.”

“Then since you are a republican,” said Monsieur Bergeret, “you must feel an alien, a solitary, among your fellow-citizens. There are few republicans left in France to-day. The Republic herself has created none. It’s absolute government that makes republicans. The love of liberty is sharpened on the grinding-stone of royalty or imperialism, but it grows blunt in a country where people believe they are free. People seldom care much for what they possess. Reality as a rule is not a very pleasant thing. One needs wisdom to be content with it. We can safely say that to-day Frenchmen under fifty are not republicans.”

“They are not monarchists.”

“No, they are not monarchists either, for while as a rule men care little for what they have, because what they have is not usually pleasant, they fear change because it contains the Unknown. It is the Unknown that frightens them most; that is the source and fountain-head of all fear. You see that in universal suffrage, which would produce an incalculable effect but for this terror of the Unknown, which annihilates it. It contains a force which ought to perform prodigies of good or evil, but the fear of the change contained in the Unknown gives it power, and the monster bows his head to the yoke.”

“Would the gentlemen care for a pÊche au marasquin?” inquired the head waiter.

His voice was gentle and persuasive, and none of the occupied tables escaped his vigilant gaze. But Monsieur Bergeret did not reply; he was watching a lady who was advancing along the sandy path, wearing a Louis XIV “church-lamp” hat of rice-straw, covered with roses, and a white muslin gown, the body of which was loose and floating, drawn in at the waist by a pink sash. The ruche round her neck looked like the collar of wings enclosing the face of an angel. Monsieur Bergeret recognized Madame de Gromance, whom he had more than once met, to his secret agitation, in the dull monotony of provincial streets. He saw that she was accompanied by a very smart young man, whose attitude was altogether too correct for him to appear anything but bored.

He stopped at the table next to that occupied by Monsieur Bergeret and his friend, when Madame de Gromance happened to glance round and see Monsieur Bergeret. An expression of displeasure came over her face, and she led her companion to the remotest corner of the lawn, where they sat down under the shade of a large tree. The sight of Madame de Gromance filled Monsieur Bergeret with that bitter-sweet feeling of which a pleasure-loving soul is conscious at the sight of the beauty of living forms.

He asked the head waiter whether he knew the lady and gentleman.

“I know them in a kind of way,” replied the waiter. “They often come here, but I don’t know their names. We see so many people! On Saturday the place was crowded. There were covers all over the grass and under the trees, as far as the hedge that encloses the lawn.”

“Really?” said Monsieur Bergeret. “There were covers under all those trees?”

“Yes, and on the terrace as well, and in the kiosk.”

Busily cracking almonds, Monsieur Mazure had not noticed the muslin dress. He inquired which lady they were speaking of. Monsieur Bergeret, however, decided to keep Madame de Gromance’s secret, and made no reply.

Night had fallen. Here and there a lamp whose radiance was softened by a shade of white or pink paper marked the position of a table and revealed shapes surrounded by faint haloes of light. Beneath one of these discreet lights the little white plume surmounting a straw hat was drawing closer and closer to the gleaming cranium of an elderly man. At the next table were two youthful faces, more unsubstantial than the moths that fluttered around them. Not in vain was the white round shape of the moon ascending the paling sky.

“I trust you are satisfied, gentlemen,” said the head waiter.

And without waiting for a reply he directed his vigilant steps elsewhere.

“Look at those people dining in the kindly darkness,” said Monsieur Bergeret with a smile. “Those little white plumes, and right at the back, under that great tree, those roses on a Louis Quatorze straw hat. They are eating, drinking and making love, and to this man they are nothing but covers! They have instincts and desires, even thoughts perhaps, and they are covers! What strength of mind and of language! This knight of the appetite is a great man.”

“We have had a very pleasant dinner,” said Monsieur Mazure, rising. “This restaurant is frequented by the very smartest people.”

“Their smartness,” replied Monsieur Bergeret, “was possibly not of the highest category. But some of them, certainly, were graceful and charming enough. I must confess, however, that it gives me less pleasure to contemplate these fashionable folk since a vile conspiracy has aroused the sickly fanaticism and thoughtless cruelty of their poor little brains. The Affair has revealed the moral sickness with which our fashionable society is afflicted, just as the vaccine of Koch discovers the lesions of tuberculosis in an infected organism. Fortunately the depths of the human ocean lie beneath this gilded scum. But when will my country be delivered from ignorance and hatred?”