It was, I believe, between eleven o’clock and midnight when he rose to go to bed, and as he did so he heard some loud exclamations, followed by a cry.  At first he fancied that the calls came from one of the servants’ rooms, and he paused on the landing.  Then, however, as they were repeated, he found that they came from my daughter’s apartment.  With fatherly solicitude he waited and listened.  Violette was calling in her sleep.

Practical enough in matters of everyday life, this girl of mine has literary partialities of a somewhat gruesome kind, and her avowed ambition (I quote her own words) is to write, some day, stories full of witches and wizards, that shall make people’s flesh creep.  For this reason I keep such of Anne Radcliffe’s uncanny novels as I possess carefully locked up.

I can well remember my daughter telling me at times of strange things dreamt by her in her sleep; but not of being of a romantic or a mystical turn myself, I have usually pooh-poohed all this as nonsense.  And such I believe is the course which fathers usually adopt if their daughters’ imaginations begin to run riot.

As for M. Zola, when he heard Violette calling in her sleep, his first impulse was to rouse her, but all suddenly became still again.  The girl had probably sunk into a more peaceful slumber.  And so, after waiting a few minutes longer, he thought it best to leave her as she was.

Nothing further disturbed M. Zola that night; but on the following morning, when he met Violette downstairs, he asked her how she felt, and told her that he had heard her calling in her sleep.  He had probably formed the same opinion as I should have formed under the circumstances, namely, that it was a case of indigestion or a little excitement.

But she turned to him and replied, ’Oh!  I had such a frightful dream. . .  I was in a big black place, and there was a man on the ground covered with blood, and people were crowding round him, talking with great excitement.  And I saw you, Monsieur Zola, and you came up looking like a giant and waved your arms again and again, and seemed well pleased.’

M. Zola was dumbfounded.  He could make nothing of it.  A man in a pool of blood and others round him; and he, Zola, waving his arms and looking well pleased!  It was nonsense; and he was disposed to laugh at the girl and chide her.  But a little later, with the arrival of some morning newspapers, the position suddenly changed.

Here I should mention that as the Paris journals only reached M. Zola with a delay of twelve or four-and-twenty hours, it had just been arranged that he should be supplied with two or three London papers every morning, and that he and Violette between them should put the telegrams concerning the Dreyfus business into French.

He opened one of these English newspapers—­which it was I do not recollect—­and there he saw a whole column dealing with the arrest and confession of Colonel Henry.  The heading to the telegrams, the very words ‘arrest’ and ‘confession,’ made everything intelligible to M. Zola; and beneath all this came a brief wire headed, I think, ‘Paris, midnight,’ and worded much to this effect:  ’Colonel Henry has been found dead in his cell at Mont Valerien.’