Nobody recognised him on his rambles.  I even doubt if people, generally, thought him a foreigner.  He had long ceased to wear his rosette of the Legion of Honour, and he had replaced his white billycock by an English straw hat.  Towards the close of the fine weather he purchased a ‘bowler,’ which greatly altered his appearance.  Indeed, there is nothing like a ‘bowler’ to make a foreigner look English.

Wareham and I had now quite ceased to fear that any attempt would be made to serve the Versailles judgment on M. Zola.  We were only troubled by gentlemen of the Press, both French and English, for since Esterhazy had fled from France and the case for revision had been formally referred to the Cour de Cassation, several newspapers had become desirous of ascertaining M. Zola’s views on the course of events.  My instructions remained, however, the same as formerly:  I was to tell every applicant that M. Zola declined to make any public statement, and that he would receive nobody.  I was occasionally inclined to fancy that some of those who called on me imagined that these instructions were of my own invention, and that I was simply keeping M. Zola au secret for purposes of my own.  But nothing was further from the truth.

Personally, at certain moments, when the revision proceedings began, when M. Brisson fell from office, when M. Dupuy, listening to the clamour of a pack of jackals, transferred the revision inquiry from the Criminal Chamber to the entire Court of Cassation, I thought that it might really be advisable for him to speak out.  But, anxious though he was, disgusted, indignant, too, at times, he would do nothing to add fuel to the flame.  Passions were roused to a high enough pitch already, and he had no desire to inflame them more.

Besides the cause was in very good hands; Clemenceau and Vaughan, Yves Guyot and Reinach, Jaures and Gerault-Richard, Pressense, Cornely, and scores of others were fighting admirably in the Press, and his intervention was not required.  Many a man circumstanced as M. Zola was would have rushed into print for the mere sake of notoriety, but he condemned himself to silence, stifling the words which rose from his throbbing heart.  And, after all, was not that course more worthy, more dignified?

Thus I could only return one answer to the newspaper men who wrote to me or called at my house.  Late in autumn there was an average of three applications a week.  One or two gentlemen, I believe, imagined that M. Zola was staying very near me, and, failing to learn anything at my place, they tried to question one or two tradesmen in the neighbourhood.  One of these, a grocer, became so irate at the frequent inquiries as to whether a Frenchman, who wrote books and had a grey beard, and wore glasses, was not staying in the vicinity, that he ended by receiving the reporters with far more energy than politeness, not only ordering them out of his shop at the double quick, but pursuing them with his vituperative eloquence.  ’Taking one consideration with another, a reporter’s lot, at times, is not a happy one.’