In the warm luminous decline of day, the Luxembourg garden was as though bathed in a golden dust. Monsieur Bergeret sat on the terrace between Messieurs Denis and Goubin, at the foot of the statue of Marguerite d’AngoulÊme.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I should like to read you an article that appeared this morning in the Figaro. I shall not name the author, for I think you will recognize him for yourselves. Since chance will have it so, it gives me all the more pleasure to read it in the presence of this lovable woman who was a lover of sound doctrine and of open-hearted men, and who, because she was learned, sincere, tolerant and pitiful, and sought to deprive the torturers of their victims, raised against her all the monasteries and all the universities. They used even to incite the young scapegraces of the College of Navarre to insult her, and had she not been sister to the King of France they would have sewed her up in a sack and thrown her into the Seine. She was a gentle soul, profound yet cheerful. I cannot say whether when alive she had the coquettish and mischievous expression which she wears in this statue by a little-known sculptor, by name LescornÉ, but she certainly has not in the hard, sincere pencil drawings of Clouet’s pupils, who have left us her portrait. I would rather believe that her smile was often veiled in sadness, and that her lips drooped sorrowfully when she said: ‘I have borne more than my share of the burden common to all persons of high estate.’ In her private life she was anything but happy, and all around her she saw the wicked triumph amid the applause of the cowardly and ignorant. I believe that in the days when her ears were not of marble she would have listened with sympathy to what I am about to read.”

And Monsieur Bergeret, having unfolded his paper, read as follows:

“The Government.

“To see just where one stood in the Affair one needed, at the outset, some application, and a certain amount of critical method, together with sufficient leisure to apply it. So that we see that the light first dawned upon those who, by the quality of their minds and the nature of their occupation, were better adapted than others to the solution of difficult problems. After this, all that was needed was common sense and close attention. Common sense is enough to-day.

“We must not be surprised that the general public has held out so long against the obvious truth. Nothing should surprise us. There are reasons for everything, and it is our place to discover these reasons. In the present instance little reflection is needed in order to perceive that the public has been utterly and absolutely deceived, and its touching credulity abused. The Press has largely helped the lie to succeed. Most of the newspapers have hurried to the assistance of the forgers, and have published forged or falsified documents, insults and lies. But we must admit that in most cases this was done to please their public and respond to the private opinions of their readers. It is certain that the battle against truth was in the first place based on the popular instinct.

“The crowd, by which I mean the crowd of people who are incapable of thinking for themselves, did not understand; they could not understand. Their idea of the Army was a simple one. For them the Army was parade, march past, review, manoeuvres, uniforms, high boots, spurs, epaulets, guns and flags. It also meant conscription, with beribboned caps, litres of cheap wine, barracks, drill, the mess, the guard-room and the canteen. It meant, again, a national trade in pictures, the brilliant little sketches of our military painters with their spotless uniforms and nice tidy battle scenes. And finally it was a symbol of strength and security, of honour and glory. The officers who rode past on horseback with their swords in their hands, amid the glitter of gold and steel, to the sound of music and the roll of drums, how was it possible to believe that they would shortly be bending over a table, behind locked doors, tÊte À tÊte with anxious agents from the prefecture of police, handling the eraser and the india-rubber, handling the gum brush or sprinkling pounce, scratching out or putting in a name in a document, forging handwritings, to ruin an innocent man; or thinking out ridiculous disguises for mysterious appointments with the traitor they had to save?

“What made these crimes seem impossible to the public mind was that they did not smack of the open air, the early morning march, the field of manoeuvres and the battle-field. They were all too stuffy, they savoured too much of the office; there was nothing military about them. And, in truth, all the practices which were resorted to in order to conceal the judicial error of 1895, all those infamous documents, all that vile and rascally trickery, reeks of the office, and a dirty office at that. All that the four green-papered walls, the china inkstand surrounded with sponge, the boxwood paper-knife, the water-bottle on the mantelpiece, the pigeon-holes, and the leather-seated chair could suggest in the way of ridiculous imaginings and evil thoughts to these stay-at-homes, these poor ‘sitters’ as a poet has called them, to vain, poor, lazy, plotting scribblers, idle even in the accomplishment of their idle task, jealous of one another and proud of their occupation; all the equivocal, false, treacherous and stupid things that can be done with pen and paper in the service of wickedness and folly, came out of a corner of that building on which are sculptured battle trophies and smoking hand-grenades.

“The jobs perpetrated in these offices during the space of four years, for the purpose of burdening a condemned prisoner with evidence which they had neglected to produce before his condemnation, and of acquitting the guilty man whom all accused, who inculpated himself, are so monstrous in their conception as to baffle the moderate mind of a Frenchman, and they exhale a spirit of tragic buffoonery most displeasing in a country whose literature abhors the confusion of styles. These documents and inquiries must be studied minutely before one can admit the reality of all these plots and intrigues, these prodigiously audacious tricks and inept manoeuvres, and I can well understand that the careless, ill-informed public refused to believe in them even after they were divulged.

“And yet it is very true that at the end of a corridor in a Ministerial building, on thirty square yards of waxed flooring, a few military bureaucrats, some of them idle and crafty, others excited and unruly, betrayed justice and deceived a great people by their wicked, fraudulent documents. But if this Affair, which was above all the Affair of Mercier and the bureaux, has revealed a villainous morality, it has also raised up some noble characters.

“For even in this very office there was one man unlike the rest. His mind was broad, shrewd and lucid, his character noble, his heart patient, abundantly human and invincibly gentle. He was rightly looked upon as one of the most intelligent officers in the Army. And although the singularity of a spirit of too rare an essence might have been a stumbling-block, he had been the first among the officers of his age to be appointed lieutenant-colonel, and everything foretold for him the most brilliant future in the Army. His friends understood his rather quizzical indulgence and his genuine kindliness. They knew him to be endowed with an unusual sense of beauty, apt to feel keenly all that was best in music and literature, and to live in the ethereal world of ideas. Like all men whose inner life is deep and meditative, he developed his great moral and intellectual faculties in solitude. This tendency to retire within himself, together with his natural simplicity, his spirit of renunciation and sacrifice, and the beautiful sincerity which sometimes seems to grace the minds of those most conscious of universal suffering and evil, combined to form in him the type of soldier known or dreamed of by Alfred de Vigny, the quiet hero of daily life who imparts some of his own nobility to the humblest tasks which he undertakes, and to whom the accomplishment of routine duty is the familiar poetry of life. “This officer, who was appointed to the second committee of investigation, found one day that Dreyfus had been condemned for the crime of Esterhazy. He informed his superior officers. They tried, quietly at first, and then by threats, to put a stop to his investigations, which, in proving the innocence of Dreyfus, would reveal their own crimes and errors. He knew that it meant ruin if he persevered. He persevered. With quiet reflection, slow and sure, with calm courage, he continued his work of justice. He was removed. He was sent to GabÈs, and to the Tripoli frontier, on some wicked pretext, for no other reason than to get him murdered by the Arab brigands.

“Having failed to kill him, they set to work to dishonour him, to ruin him by the profusion of their slanders. With treacherous promises they tried to keep him from speaking at the Zola trial. He spoke, with the unruffled calm of the just man, with the serenity of a mind that knew neither fear nor desire. There was no exaggeration in his speech and no weakness; only the words of a man who was doing his duty on that day as on all other days, without thinking for a moment that there was a singular courage in the act. Neither threats nor persecution caused him to hesitate for a moment.

“Many have said that in order to accomplish the task which he had set himself, to establish the innocence of a Jew and the crime of a Christian, he had to get the better of clerical prejudices, to conquer a hatred of the Jews ingrained in him since his early youth, when he was growing to manhood in that land of Alsace and of France which gave him to the Army and the country. Those who know him best know that he heeded nothing of the kind, that he was incapable of any sort of fanaticism, that his ideals were never those of a sectary, that his great intelligence placed him above petty hatreds and partialities; in short, that his soul was free.

“This inward liberty, the most precious of all liberties, his persecutors could not take from him. In the prison to which they sent him, whose stones, in the words of Fernand Gregh, formed the pedestal of his statue, he was free, freer than they. His wide reading, his calm, benevolent speech, and his letters, full of serene and noble thoughts, bear witness (I know) to the freedom of his soul. Those others, his persecutors and calumniators, were the real prisoners—the prisoners of their lies and their crimes. People who saw him behind the bolts and bars testify to the fact that he was quiet, smiling and indulgent. When the great mental revolution took place during which those public meetings that united thousands of scholars, students and working-men were organized, while petitions covered with signatures demanded an end to the scandal of his imprisonment, he said to Louis Havet, who went to see him: ‘I am much more easy in my mind than you.’ I think, however, that he suffered. I think he suffered intensely at the thought of so much baseness and treachery, of so monstrous an injustice, of that epidemic of crime and madness, of the execrable fury of the men who were deceiving the crowd, and the pardonable fury of the ignorant mob. He, too, saw the aged woman bearing with saintly simplicity the faggots for the torture of the innocent. How could he do other than suffer, when he found that men were worse than his philosophy had pictured them, less courageous and less intelligent when put to the test than the psychologists imagined in their quiet studies? I believe he suffered inwardly in the secret places of his silent soul, veiled as by the Stoic’s cloak. But I should be ashamed to pity him. I should be too much afraid lest that murmur of human pity should reach his ears and offend the rightful pride of his heart. Far from pitying him, rather will I say that he was happy; happy because on the sudden day of trial he was ready and without weakness; happy because unforeseen circumstances permitted him to give to the full the measure of his great soul; happy that he proved himself to be an honest man, heroic in his simplicity; happy because he stands for ever as an example to soldiers and to citizens. Pity is for those who have failed. To Colonel Picquart we can offer nothing less than admiration.”

Having come to an end of his reading, Monsieur Bergeret refolded his newspaper. The statue of Marguerite of Navarre was all rosy-pink. In the west the harshly brilliant sky clothed itself as with a suit of mail, a network of clouds like bars of red copper.