one, and that Mme. de Sagan would be glad to see at her ball the friend of a woman whom she had called in person to invite.
The Marquise made no reply, and Bloch did not press the point, for he had another, more serious matter to discuss with her, and, with that in view, had already asked her whether he might call again in a couple of days. Having heard the two young men say that they had both just resigned from the Rue Royale Club, which was letting in every Tom, Dick and Harry, he wished to ask Mme. de Villeparisis to arrange for his election there.
“Aren’t they rather bad form, rather stuck-up snobs, these Sagans?” he inquired in a tone of sarcasm.
“Not at all, they’re the best we can do for you in that line,” M. d’Argencourt, who adopted all the catch-words of Parisian society, assured him.
“Then,” said Bloch, still half in irony, “I suppose it’s one of the solemnities, the great social fixtures of the season.”
Mme. de Villeparisis turned merrily to Mme. de Guermantes.
“Tell us, is it a great social solemnity, Mme. de Sagan’s ball?”
“It’s no good asking me,” answered the Duchess, “I have never yet succeeded in finding out what a social solemnity is. Besides, society isn’t my strong point.”
“Indeed; I thought it was just the other way,” said Bloch, who supposed Mme. de Guermantes to be speaking seriously.
He continued, to the desperation of M. de Norpois, to ply him with questions about the Dreyfus case. The Ambassador declared that, looking at it from outside, he got the impression from du Paty de Clam of a somewhat cloudy brain, which had perhaps not been very happily chosen to conduct that delicate operation, which required so much coolness and discernment, a judicial inquiry.
“I know that the Socialist Party are crying aloud for his head on a charger, as well as for the immediate release of the prisoner from the Devil’s Isle. But I think that we are not yet reduced to the necessity of passing the Caudine Forks of MM. Gérault-Richard and Company. So far, the whole case has been an utter mystery, I don’t say that on one side just as much as on the other there has not been some pretty dirty work to be hushed up. That certain of your client’s more or less disinterested protectors may have the best intentions I will not attempt to deny, but you know that heaven is paved with such things,” he added, with a look of great subtlety. “It is essential that the Government should give the impression that they are not in the hands of the factions of the Left, and that they are not going to surrender themselves, bound hand and foot, at the demand of some pretorian guard or other, which, believe me, is not the same thing as the Army. It stands to reason that, should any fresh evidence come to light, a new trial would be ordered. And what follows from that? Obviously, that to demand a new trial is to force an open door. When the day comes, the Government will speak with no uncertain voice or will let fall into abeyance what is their essential prerogative. Cock and bull stories will no longer be enough. We must appoint judges to try Dreyfus. And that will be an easy matter because, although we have acquired the habit, in our sweet France, where we love to belittle ourselves, of thinking or letting it be thought that, in order to hear the words Truth and Justice, it is necessary to cross the Channel, which is very often only a roundabout way of reaching the Spree, there are judges to be found outside Berlin. But once the machinery of Government has been set in motion, will you have ears for the voice of authority? When it bids you perform your duty as a citizen will you have ears for its voice, will you take your stand in the ranks of law and order? When its patriotic appeal sounds, will you have the wisdom not to turn a deaf ear but to answer: ‘Present!’?”
M. de Norpois put these questions to Bloch with a vehemence which, while it alarmed my friend, flattered him also; for the Ambassador spoke to him with the air of one addressing a whole party, questioned him as though he had been in the confidence of that party and might be held responsible for the decisions which it would adopt. “Should you fail to disarm,” M. de Norpois went on, without waiting for Bloch’s collective answer, “should you, before even the ink had dried on the decree ordering the fresh trial of the case, obeying it matters not what insidious word of command, fail, I say, to disarm, and band yourselves, rather, in a sterile opposition which seems to some minds the ultima ratio of policy, should you retire to your tents and burn your boats, you would be doing so to your own, damnation. Are you the prisoners of those who foment disorder? Have you given them pledges?” Bloch was in doubt how to answer. M. de Norpois gave him no time. “If the negative be true, as I should like to think, and if you have a little of what seems to me to be lamentably lacking in certain of your leaders and your friends, namely political sense, then, on the day when the Criminal Court assembles, if you do not allow yourselves to be dragooned by the fishers in troubled waters, you will have won your battle. I do not guarantee that the whole of the General Staff is going to get away unscathed, but it will be so much to the good if some of them at least can save their faces without setting the heather on fire.
“It stands to reason, moreover, that it is with the Government that it rests to pronounce judgment, and to close the list — already too long — of unpunished crimes, not certainly at the bidding of Socialist agitators, nor yet of any obscure military mouthpiece,” he added, looking Bloch boldly in the face, perhaps with the instinct that leads all Conservatives to establish support for themselves in the enemy’s camp. “Government action is not to be dictated by the highest bidder, from wherever the bid may come. The Government are not, thank heaven, under the orders of Colonel Driant, nor, at the other end of the scale, under M. Clemenceau’s. We must curb the professional agitators and prevent them from raising their heads again. France, the vast majority here in France, desires only to be allowed to work in orderly conditions. As to that, there can be no question whatever. But we must not be afraid to enlighten public opinion; and if a few sheep, of the kind our friend Rabelais knew so well, should dash headlong into the water, it would be as well to point out to them that the water in question was troubled, that it had been troubled deliberately by an agency not within our borders, in order to conceal the dangers lurking in its depths. And the Government ought not to give the impression that they are emerging from their passivity in self-defence when they exercise the right which is essentially their own, I mean that of setting the wheels of justice in motion. The Government will accept all your suggestions. If it is proved that there has been a judicial error, they can be sure of an overwhelming majority which would give them room to act with freedom.”
“You, sir,” said Bloch, turning to M. d’Argencourt, to whom he had been made known, with the rest of the party, on that gentleman’s arrival, “you are a Dreyfusard, of course; they all are, abroad.”
“It is a question that concerns only the French themselves, don’t you think?” replied M. d’Argencourt with that peculiar form of insolence which consists in ascribing to the other person an opinion which one must, obviously, know that he does not hold since he has just expressed one directly its opposite.
Bloch coloured; M. d’Argencourt smiled, looking round the room, and if this smile, so long as it was directed at the rest of the company, was charged with malice at Bloch’s expense, it became tempered with cordiality when finally it came to rest on the face of my friend, so as to deprive him of any excuse for annoyance at the words which he had heard uttered, though those words remained just as cruel. Mme. de Guermantes murmured something to M. d’Argencourt which I could not hear, but which must have referred to Bloch’s religion, for there flitted at that moment over the face of the Duchess that expression to which one’s fear of being noticed by the person of whom one is speaking gives a certain hesitancy and unreality, while there is blended with it the inquisitive, malicious amusement inspired in one by a group of human beings to which one feels oneself to be fundamentally alien. To retrieve himself, Bloch turned to the Duc de Châtellerault. “You, sir, as a Frenchman, you must be aware that people abroad are all Dreyfusards, although everyone pretends that in prance we never know what is going on abroad. Anyhow, I know Ï can talk freely to you; Saint-Loup told me so.” But the young Duke, who felt that every one was turning against Bloch, and was a coward as people often are in society, employing a mordant and precious form of wit which he seemed, by a sort of collateral atavism, to have inherited from