Metro Stop Paris

by Gregor Dallas

  "You go back to England and what is going to happen to you?" Gide asked before leaving for Biskra. There was something sombre in Wilde's face. "My friends keep on saying to me, Take care, take care!" he answered. "That would be to go backwards. I have to go as far forward as possible. Something has to happen." He paused and then repeated: "Something has to happen." Gide told him he ought to speak in public the way he spoke to his friends. "Why," he probed, "aren't your plays better?"—a wicked question which Gide would later regret. Wilde brusquely leant over and, taking Gide by the shoulder, he said slowly: "You want to know the great drama of my life? I have put all my genius into my life; I have only put my talent into my works." Wilde's two years in gaol would put to the test both genius and talent. The result was a paralysing silence.

  AFTER HE HAD met the Parisian decadents, Wilde made a fetish of evil and lying. In "The Decay of Lying," which he first read at a Christmas dinner in 1888, he presented the liar as the embodiment of the genuine artist. "The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure," he remarked. "He is the very basis of civilized society, and without him a dinner-party even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society" It was an attack— very fin-de-sièclein style—on conventional Victorian morality and reason; Wilde was reconnoitring artistic zones that lay beyond the frontiers of good and evil. It was here that he observed that "Life imitates Art," that the brown fogs of London were a creation not of the weather but of the French Impressionists. The darkness of evil, he further hinted, was much more interesting than the bright light of goodness. 'At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect," he concluded, "and is not without loveliness."

  Sure enough, within a few years the Dreyfos Affair began proving Wilde's point. The innocent man would turn out to be so dull; the guilty man so fascinating.

  In July 1895 Commandant Georges Picquart replaced the dying Colonel Jean Sandherr as director of the Section de Statistique. He was as convinced as his colleagues on the General Staff of Dreyfus's guilt. The charwoman who worked at the German embassy kept on supplying the agency with packets of torn-up crumpled pieces of paper she had retrieved from the wastepaper baskets. One day in March an assistant showed Picquart a telegram—a petit bleu or blue form that was sent through a network of pneumatic tubes, the nineteenth-century equivalent of an email—which he had laboriously pieced together from around thirty or forty shreds. It was a note from the German military attaché asking for further details on documents supplied—obviously by some traitor in the French Army On the other side of the form was the traitor's address (the letter had not been forwarded): Monsieur le Commandant Esterhazy 27, Rue de la Bienfaisance—Paris. Dreyfus by this time had spent over a year on Devil's Island. Wilde had already been transferred to Reading where he was reading Dante on Hell.

  Who was the Bienfaisant, as Picquart nicknamed him? Picquart would not consult his immediate seniors for another five months; strange behaviour in the Ministry of War had aroused his suspicions. Esterhazy, oddly, was sending in numerous demands to the ministry at this time for employment. In late August 1896 one of these letters fell into Picquart's hands. The handwriting seemed familiar . . . The bordereau!. He pulled out of a drawer a photograph of the one piece of evidence that had condemned Dreyfos to his island. The writing was not similar; it was identical! Esterhazy was the author of the bordereau, not Dreyfos!

  Commandant Count Marie Charles Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy was a son of the French illegitimate branch of the great Esterhazy dynasty whose domains stretched from the mouth of the Danube across Hungary and into Austria, who imposed on Hungarian noble rebels the Habsburg imperial crown, and inspired a penniless Franz Schubert in 1824 to dedicate his Unfinished Symphony to one of their beautiful daughters. They claimed direct descent from Attila the Hun. The Commandant was born in Paris in 1847 and never spoke a word of Hungarian; but he did learn German. He failed to graduate from the Lycée Bonaparte but he did serve with some distinction in Gambetta's Army of the Loire during the winter campaign of 1870. His German got him into the Army's Service de Renseignements —a forerunner of the Service de Statistique—in 1877, where over a period of three years he got to know Colonel Hubert Henry, one of the key figures in the Dreyfus Affair. How close this early relationship was is a matter much debated to this day; Esterhazy was the kind of master liar who would have elicited the admiration of Oscar Wilde in his own time and was to confuse historians a hundred years on.

  He was a gambler, a womanizer and lived in a perpetual state of bankruptcy His marriage to Anne de Nettancourt-Vaubécourt brought him a dowry of 200,000 francs but she proved as much of a spendthrift as he. "My wife," he complained one day, "never realized for an instant, never even took a moment to understand that when you marry as poor as us you have to make economies, not buy dresses, coats and hats left, right and centre, not travel first class, not pay chambermaids sixty francs a month." In 1888 they bought a huge chateau at Dommartin-la-Planchette, in the Marne, without any idea how they would maintain it. He had an extraordinary circle of friends. Under a series of pseudonyms he wrote regularly for Édouard Drumont's anti-Semitic Libre Parole, keeping up his correspondence throughout the Dreyfos Affair and even beyond, when he was in exile. But he was also the friend of a number of high-profile Jews. Shortly after the Marquis de Morés killed Captain Armand Mayer in the fatal duel of May 1892, he put about the rumour that he had been the murdered man's second; as a result Esterhazy won the sympathies and financial support of both the Grand Rabbi Zadoc Kahn and Edmond de Rothschild. Maurice Weil was a Jew he befriended while working at the Service de Renseignements. Weil's pretty wife was the mistress of the Paris military governor, General Félix-Gustave Saussier—and some have argued that it was through him that Esterhazy managed to pass misleading documents on to the Section de Statistique. Weil was also a very close friend of Jules Roche, former Minister of War—it was through Roche that Esterhazy passed his almost hysterical demands for employment to the ministry, one of which found its way into Picquart's office. Under the name of Rohan-Chabrol, Esterhazy ran a high-class whorehouse on Rue du Rocher which helped him through the difficult year of 1897; he had a list of over 1,500 possible clients, drawn mainly from army officers. Ester-hazy's web of friends and associates reached into the highest places of government and the Army; his life was built on a long sequence of lying, trickery and deception; and he looked the part of a conspirator—thin, drawn face, straggly moustache, dark eyes sunken into deep orbits. Mathieu Dreyfos, when he first saw him in court, thought he looked like a bird of prey Haunted by debt, he began selling his secrets to the German military attaché in Paris on 20 July 1894, and continued selling them long after Dreyfus was shipped out to Devil's Island.

  Picquart proposed to the General Staff a sting operation. The Minister of War said he did not have the right to order such an act against "a superior officer." The Second Chief of Staff heaved his shoulders and asked Picquart, "What do you care if this Jew stays on Devil's Island?" He waved his hands and went on: "It's possible Dreyfus is innocent. That's of no importance. These are not considerations that should be taken into account." "What you say is abominable," replied Picquart. He saluted, turned on his heels and walked out. It was Picquart who was stung. He was first sent off on a useless mission in Tunisia and subsequently court-martialled for divulging secret documents. He was to spend a total often months in gaol.

  Like split sour milk in a hamper, evil spread through every nook and cranny of Parisian society in those last years of the nineteenth century Rural France was hardly touched, though many of the provincial cities, along with Algeria, were soiled. The corruption of one man, Esterhazy, had infected all the vital organs of a nation—government, parliament, the armed forces, the schools, the universities, the law courts along with the flowering literary and artistic creations of the belle époque. Everything and everyone that mattered in France was drawn into the stinking Dreyfus Affair.

  Joseph Reinach, who publis
hed a multi-volume work on the Affair shortly after the events, remarked, "Because it was extraordinary one wanted it to be more extraordinary yet." He criticized writers for reading too much into the Affair, for imagining things for which there was no evidence. Perhaps Reinach leant too far in the other direction. In particular, to dismiss as a mere defence of the Army's honour the General Staff's ferocious war against Picquart's efforts to discover the truth beggars the imagination. One wants to hear more.

  Once Picquart was dismissed, the Section de Statistique was transformed into a factory of faked evidence. The charwoman at the German embassy continued to supply her piles of scrapped paper. These were now studied at the Section de Statistique not for evidence against Dreyfos, but for pieces that could be cut up, pasted together and otherwise manipulated to make them look like damning evidence. Dates were changed, letters were altered, whole paragraphs were added. But the work was done in a most amateurish manner. One of the key pieces was made up of a page supposedly torn out of a square lined notebook; neither the squares matched up, nor were the lines of the same colour. Another fruitful source were the letters Picquart continued to receive at the Section after his departure. These were supposed to demonstrate his secret collaboration with the Dreyfus family and the "Jewish syndicate." To add spice to the sauce, incriminating letters, addressed to Picquart, were sent in the post and then "intercepted." The grand dossier that General Charles Gonse, the Deputy Chief of Staff, finally pulled together in June 1898 contained 365 documents, nearly all of which were creations of the Section de Statistique. "One cannot fabricate 1,500 papers!" noted the general in his covering letter: "One can swear to one's soul and conscience with the judges of the Court Martial of 1894: 'Yes, Dreyfos is guilty.'" The new Minister of War, General Godefroy Cavaignac, a no-nonsense republican, was sure he had got to the bottom of the matter when he revealed before the Chamber of Deputies three conclusive proofs of Dreyfos's guilt—all three eventually turned out to be fabrications of the Section de Statistique.

  One person, and one person alone, was responsible for producing all these tampered documents, Colonel Henry, the fat and jovial officer who had known Esterhazy in the Service de Renseignements in the 1870s. That is to say, the evidence used against Dreyfus was manufactured by a man who personally knew Esterhazy. But it was even worse than that: it seems that it was Henry who put the Chiefs of Staff directly in touch with this damnable spy. In October 1897 shortly before Le Matin published a photograph of the bordereau — revealing Esterhazy's cranky handwriting to the whole world—Henry, Gonse and General du Paty de Clam (who had arrested Dreyfus in 1894) decided to send an anonymous letter to Esterhazy warning him that Picquart was planning to substitute him for the "guilty man" on Devil's Island. Secret meetings between the three officers, disguised in coloured spectacles and false beards, and Esterhazy were arranged in parks and on bridges in Paris. Esterhazy, now equipped with all the secrets of the Section de Statistique, began writing threatening letters to the military Governor of Paris, the Minister of War and the President of the Republic, Félix Fauré. What did they do? Arrest the man who was quite evidently the spy? Fauré maintained a discreet silence. The Minister of War ordered the military enquiry that would lead to Picquart's arrest, court martial and prison sentence. Henry and Esterhazy began to collaborate on a regular basis. Esterhazy granted a series of interviews to La Libre Parole, Le Matin, L'Écho de Paris, Le Figaro and Le Temps, denouncing Picquart's wicked plot which had been revealed to him, he claimed, by a veiled "lady most elegant, most fine" on the Pont Alexandre—possibly Madame Henry or Madame du Paty de Clam, or simply an invention. Esterhazy seemed invulnerable. For most of the press he was a hero, defending the nation against the incursions of the Jewish lobby. The Army, the courts, parliament and the President of the Republic shivered at each of his pronouncements.

  However, the publication of the bordereau and the identification of the handwriting could hardly favour Esterhazy in the long run. Many of the country's leading writers, artists, academics and teachers saw in Dreyfos's case the symbol of injustice in the world. "Who is protecting Esterhazy?" asked Clemenceau in L'Aurore. The protectors in the Section de Statistique thought the best defence for their secret client would be for him to ask for a court martial; they could guarantee his acquittal. Esterhazy duly wrote his own demand, though it was edited by the chief of the ongoing military enquiry into Colonel Picquart. A high-profile trial opened at the military court on Rue du Cherche Midi on 10 January 1898, and two days later, after the judges had deliberated for just five minutes, Esterhazy was acquitted—to criés of "Long live the Army!" "Long live France!" and "Death to the Jews!" The following morning, 13 January, Émile Zola published "J'accuse,"his devastating indictment of the Army, government and courts. The atmosphere in France was one of civil war. It was Clemenceau who popularized the term "intellectuals" for thinkers engaged in the public cause of justice—a term that has stuck in France to this day.

  The case for Esterhazy was bound to collapse at some point. Zola's "J'accuse" had provoked the Minister of War to take both the author and his newspaper, L'Aurore, to court on the charge of defamation. They were, of course, found guilty. But the minister's witnesses—members of the General Staff—made the mistake of producing one of Henry's forgeries; the document was an obvious fake. Even worse for the generals, the scandal brought to the forefront of the press the name of the fraudster, Colonel Henry. His fate was sealed by Godefroy Cavaignac's attempt to prove Dreyfus's guilt before the Chamber of Deputies on 7 July with the three key pieces drawn from Gonse's dossier. "These pieces are forgeries," boomed out Jean Jaures, "they smell of forgeries, they stink of forgeries." The cat was out of the bag. The Chamber may have applauded Cavaignac's speech and voted that it be posted in every commune—so copies of the forgeries went up in the thirty-six thousand towns and villages of France. But on 30 August Cavaignac interrogated Henry, who confessed. The next day he was locked up in Fort Mont Valérien, where he cut his own throat with a razor that night. "My dearest Berthe," were the last words he wrote to his wife, "I am as if mad, a terrible pain grips my brain, I am going to bathe in the Seine . . ."

  On 1 September 1898 Commandant Esterhazy took a train to London under a new name, Monsieur de Becourt.

  ON THE DAY of his release from prison, 19 May 1897, Oscar Wilde applied to a Jesuit home, on Farm Street in London, for a six-month retreat. Wilde sobbed bitterly when his request was refused; he decided to take the next boat to Dieppe. He was met on the pier at four in the morning by his two most faithful friends, Reggie Turner and Robert Ross. His Hôtel room was filled with flowers and books, including Gide's latest novel, Les Nourritures terrestres, which had just been published.

  It was perhaps the first book Wilde read after his release. By Gide's standards the book was a massive success, selling over 200 copies in two years and reaching 500 by 1908. After the First World War it would become a cult book among the younger generation who sought physical pleasure in nature and the flesh. For Wilde, straight out of prison, it must have been like a window reopening on the world's beauty Typical of Gide, the book also contained a powerful religious dimension, which must have appealed to the author of De Profundis—or so one would have thought. But Wilde never spoke a word about Les Nourritures terrestres.

  Richard Ellmann claims that it was his reconciliation with Douglas that was the cause of Wilde's writer's block—"a second fall for Wilde," as Ellmann terms it. By letter, Wilde offered Douglas a pardon the day he arrived in Dieppe. But they did not meet until the end of August. And Douglas only lived with Wilde, in Naples, for three months, and for a brief period at Nogent-sur-Marne, outside Paris, the following spring, 1898. This certainly caused a drying up of funds, and particularly it cancelled the life interest he had in his marriage settlement. But his writing had clearly dried up first, before his reencounter with Douglas. As Wilde himself explained, Douglas was the only person in the world willing to keep him company.

  Many of Wilde's friends, in
cluding Gide, longed for him to start writing again. A new career in writing was above all what his estranged wife wanted of her husband. She called herself Mrs. Constance Holland and lived with their two sons in Freiburg, Germany She had found The Ballad of Reading Gaol exquisite and wrote on 4 March 1898 to Carlos Blacker, a journalist and a trustee of her marriage settlement, "I hope that the great success it has had in London at all events will urge him on to write more. I hear he does nothing now but drink." Unhappily, she died one month later, on 7 April, following spinal surgery But Blacker would not give up. He, like Constance, wanted Wilde to write again. The renewed relationship between the two men, who had been intimate friends, would launch one of the most curious episodes in Wilde's already exotic life, and link him implacably with the Dreyfus Affair.

  But, first, what was it that caused Wilde's writing to dry up? The two essays proposed in De Profundis, "Christ as the Precursor of the Romantic Movement in Life" and "The Artistic Life Considered in Relation to Conduct," never got as much as a courtesy call from their potential author—and, on the surface, they had little to do with his recent prison experience, which hordes of pressmen were urging him to write about, with good pay Wilde had two plays up his sleeve, "Pharaoh" (a particularly Wildean vision of Moses) and "Ahab and Isabelle." But, again, that was not what was being asked of Wilde in the late 1890s. Commissions came streaming in. One of them, proposed during a meeting in June 1897 with Fernand Xau of Le Journal, would have solved all his financial problems. Wilde put down his pen and stared at Xau: "My former successes will suffice me," he replied imperiously Wilde did not want to write about his prison experience. As he told one of his few genuine friends, Vincent O'Sullivan, "I would rather continue stitching sacks."