LETTERS ABOUT WRITING
311
the defendant or to his attorney-and law-abiding people looked upon
this as a basic breach of justice; had that letter been written even
by the sun itself, not to speak of Wilhelm, it still should have been
shown to Demange. Everyone made wild guesses as to the contents
of this letter and cock and bull stories were current. Dreyfus was an
officer, and so the military expected the worst; Dreyfus was a Jew–
the Jews expected the worst. . . .
All
the talk was of militarism, of
the yids.... Such profoundly distrusted people as Drumont held their
heads high; an evil plant began growing in the soil of anti-Semitism,
in a soil stinking of the slaughterhouse. When something does not go
well with us, we look for reasons outside of us and have no trouble
finding them: "It's the French who are ruining us, the yids, Wil–
helm. ..." Capital, bogeymen, Masons, the syndicate, the Jesuits–
these are all specters, but how they do assuage our uneasy minds!
These things are a bad sign, of course. Once the French started
talking about yids, or the syndicate, it was an indication that they
felt all was not well, that some worm was gnawing underneath, that
they needed such specters to appease their troubled consciences. Then
this Esterhazy, a brawler out of Turgenev, an insolent, doubtful char–
acter, a
man
despised by his comrades, the striking similarity of his
handwriting with that of the document, the letters of the Uhlan, the
threats he chose not to carry out for reasons of his own, finally the
strange decision, made in absolute secrecy, that the document was
written in Esterhazy's handwriting but not by
his
hand.... The gases
were accumulating, and people began feeling acute tension, an op–
pressive closeness in the air. The scuffle in the court was a pure
manifestation of nerves, simply a hysterical consequence of this ten–
sion. Zola's letter and his trial are also aspects of this same situation.
What would you want? It is for the best people, always ahead of
their nations, to be the first to sound the alarm-and this is just what
happened. First to speak up was Scherer-Koestner, whom the French,
knowing him, call (in Kovalevski's8 words) a "Caucasian dagger"–
he is so shiningly clean and flawless. Zola was the second. And now
he is on trial.
8 Kovalevski
Wll!
a historian, sociologist and jurist. Because of his liberal
views he lost his post as professor at Moscow University and emigrated to Paris,
where he taught and lectured.
