But in the same way he wished for something that he himself could eat, and he was weary of the perpetual joint and the vegetables a l’eau.  One day, when in a jocular spirit he was talking to me on this subject, I told him that we English had a saying to the effect that ’God sent us food, but the devil invented cooks.’

‘You are quite right,’ he replied, ’only as a Frenchman I should put it this way:  “God sent us food, but the devil invented English cooks."’

Towards the end of August he again became very dispirited.  The ‘cause’ did not at that time appear to be prospering in France, where so many people remained under the spell of the deceptive declarations and documents which had been made public in the Chamber of Deputies by War Minister Cavaignac early in July.

Of course the Revisionists were still hard at work, but in the face of M. Cavaignac’s speech, placarded throughout the 36,000 townships of France, they seemed to have a very uphill task before them.  The anti-Dreyfusites on their side were more arrogant than ever, and although M. Zola never once lost faith in the justice of his cause and its ultimate triumph, he did, on more than one occasion, question whether that triumph would come in a peaceful way.

Felix Faure was then still President of the Republic, and I am abusing, I think, no confidence in saying that M. Zola regarded that vain, showy man as one of the great obstacles to the victory of truth and justice.  Faure, he said to me, had undoubtedly at one time enjoyed well-deserved popularity; he, Zola, had been received by him and in the most cordial manner.  But the President’s intercourse with crowned heads, and his intimacy with arrogant general officers, coupled with all the flummery of the Protocole, all the pomp and display observed whenever he stirred from the Palace of the Elysee, had virtually turned his head.  He was in the hands of those military men who opposed revision, and he shielded them because their downfall would mean his own.  He was bent on the hushing-up course lest his Presidency should become synonymous with a great judicial crime; he feared that he might be forced to resign even before his term of office was over, or, at all events, that he might have to abandon all hope of re-election.

And thus with the President and the more prominent generals opposed to revision, M. Zola, though confident in the final issue, more than once said to me that there might be serious trouble before all was over.

He was now kept very well informed of all that took place in France; intelligence often reached him before it appeared in the newspapers; and now and again he told me what was brewing.  Going backward, too, he confided to me some curious particulars of the genesis of the Revisionist campaign.  But he will himself some day tell all this in a book of his own, and I must not anticipate him.  I will only say that various important things he mentioned to me in the autumn of 1898 have since become well-known, acknowledged facts, and I have every reason to believe that time will duly show the accuracy of those which have not as yet been publicly revealed.