There is one point to which I must refer at more length.  In his declaration ‘Justice,’ published on the expiration of his exile, M. Zola stated that he had long suspected Colonel Henry, though he had possessed no actual proof of that officer’s guilt.  This is so true, that I well recollect listening to a conversation between him and M. Desmoulin during the first days of their sojourn in England, when they compared notes with respect to their impressions of Henry, whom they had particularly noticed at Versailles on the occasion of M. Zola’s sentence by default.

They had then observed how nervous and crestfallen the colonel looked—­the very picture, indeed, of a man who dreads the discovery of his guilt.  This was the more remarkable, as Henry’s confident arrogance at the earlier trial in Paris had been so conspicuous.  The man had a skeleton in his cupboard—­to Zola and Desmoulin that was certain.

M. Zola is a good physiognomist, and his friend (as a portraitist) is scarcely less gifted in that respect, and they felt equally certain of Henry’s culpability.  As yet they could not say that it was he who had actually forged that famous ‘absolute proof’ of Dreyfus’s guilt, which they knew to have been forged by some one, but that time would prove him guilty of some abominable machination was to them a foregone conclusion.

One day, it must have been I suppose the 31st of August, a rather strange telegram in French reached me for transmission to M. Zola.  It came from Paris, and was, so far as I remember, to this effect:  ’Be prepared for a great success.’

A name I was acquainted with followed; but what the telegram might mean I knew not.  There was absolutely nothing in the newspapers with reference to any great success achieved at that moment by the Revisionist party; but possibly the message might refer to one or another of M. Zola’s lawsuits, such as that with the ‘Petit Journal’ or that with the handwriting experts.  I re-telegraphed it to M. Zola, and that day, at all events, I thought no more of the matter.

But I afterwards learnt that the telegram had perplexed him quite as much as it perplexed me.  A great success?  What could it be?  He racked his mind in vain.  He reviewed all the phases and aspects of the Dreyfus case, wondering whether this or that had happened, but not suspecting the public revelations which were then impending, the tragedy which was being enacted.

For a while he walked up and down, feverish and anxious (he was at the time in poor health), and then he would fling himself on a sofa, still and ever indulging in his surmises.  With that kind of prescience which he had so frequently displayed in the Dreyfus affair, he felt certain that something very important had occurred, for otherwise such a mysterious telegram would never have been sent him.  This lasted the whole evening.

My daughter Violette was with him at the time, and his feverishness doubtless gained on her.  At last she retired to rest, while M. Zola, according to his wont, carried a lamp into his own room to sit there a while and read some French newspapers which had reached him, via Wareham, by the evening delivery.  There was nothing in them of a nature to explain the mysterious telegram; still he read on and on in the hope, as it were, of quieting himself.