Metro Stop Paris Page 24

  General Ernest Mercier became Minister of War in December 1893. He was a republican and never went to church, so he was regarded with some suspicion by people of traditional values on the political right. At the end of September 1894, he was shown a handwritten note—it became known as the bordereau—picked up in the German military attache's office in Paris by a charwoman who worked for the Section de Statistique, the French Army's intelligence agency. The bordereau, composed by a French officer, listed documents that he was handing over to the German military attaché.

  Mercier at once realized that if he caught the traitor he would be able to silence his right-wing critics. The range of possible suspects was quickly narrowed down to officer trainees working within the General Staff in Paris; in less than a month the chiefs of the Section de Statistique were focusing on the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus—there were vague similarities in the writing, he had been described as an "officier incomplet" by his superior, and he was Jewish. 'At first glance," as Mercier himself put it, Dreyfus's guilt was established. The unfortunate captain was called in to the Ministry of War early Monday morning, 15 October, interrogated by a delirious Commandant Armand du Paty de Clam and locked up in the Cherche-Midi military gaol that night. He was offered a service revolver with which to shoot himself. "I am innocent; you can kill me if you like," he riposted. "I want to live to establish my innocence!" Dreyfus's guilt was confirmed at a court martial that December; the judges had been shown a secret dossier crammed with false documents that the Section de Statistique had made up. The press mounted aviolent, anti-Semitic campaign against "the traitor."The Socialist leader Jean Jaurès called for his execution. The Army could never retreat on a judgement of a court martial, "la chose jugé'e"; that would have brought into question the competence of the nation's military defenders, the honour of the French Army.

  If Captain Dreyfus had died on Devil's Island there would have been no Dreyfus Affair to divide Paris between its two warring camps, the defenders of the Republic and defenders of the Army, the defenders of the Rights of Man and the anti-Semites. If the inmate of Wandsworth had died that same autumn in the gaol's infirmary there would have been no cult of Oscar Wilde. Both affairs were blown up by the new mass media. The French Army was drawn into a rearguard action to save its honour. Dreyfus stayed alive for the sake of his honour. And, in London, the Marquess of Queensberry pressed his case against Wilde to defend his honour. In the decadent world of the 1890s there was much talk of honour.

  RICHARD BURDON HALDANE, later Viscount—who ordered the famous army reforms in Asquith's 1905 Liberal government—had visited Wilde in June 1895 as a member of the Home Office prison committee. It was he who arranged Wilde's transfer to Reading Gaol. It was he who eventually got him books, pen and paper. In January 1897, five months before his release, Wilde began writing a long letter.

  His biographer Richard Ellmann speaks of it as a love letter that must rank "as one of the greatest and the longest, ever written." Addressed to Alfred Douglas, much of the text is indeed a lover's rant about Douglas's infidelities, his intellectual inconsequence and particularly his responsibility for Wilde's arrest—beautifully composed, but a rant all the same. Fortunately for posterity the other half of the text is far more than a love letter; it is a work of philosophy, of theology and even, one may not inaccurately claim, a piece of holy scripture.

  Wilde wanted it published as Epistola: in Carcere et Vinculis; it seems it was Robert Ross who came up with the title De Profundis, drawn from the 130th Psalm, the terrible psalm.

  In De Profundis lies the mystery of Oscar Wilde, his secret, the origin of the cult one witnesses today at Père Lachaise. Wilde examines a glorious past, assesses the dismal present and waits hopefully upon the future. To establish the depths to which he has fallen, Wilde celebrates the summit of his former success. Then he embraces the awfulness of his fall. Upon that anguish, weeping and sorrow he builds his hope. Wilde was borrowing directly from Dante's Inferno, which he had been reading in gaol in Italian, though his interpretation certainly goes back to the ideas of one of his early masters at Oxford, Walter Pater. The lowest and most damnable in Dante's hell are those who have willfully lived in sadness, those who have worn a perpetual grimace on their faces. When Pater had introduced the idea to Wilde in his youth he thought it ridiculous, "just the sort of sin, I fancied, a priest who knew nothing about real life would invent." But sadness became his own sin. At first it was an immediate aim, then a determination to commit suicide the moment he left gaol, then something more vague, an aim never to smile again, to make everyone around him miserable, "to wear gloom as a king wears purple." Then he read Dante. Dante opened his eyes and gave his life new direction: "I must learn how to be happy" Wilde would read beautiful books. He would say beautiful things. After that, "I hope to be able to recreate my creative faculty" (my emphasis).

  So he would leave gaol with an aura of happiness about him, and he would read and he would write. But when? In De ProfundisWilde spells out in some detail how he would go about this. But he never actually wrote an extensive piece of prose again. There was the long and famous poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol completed within three months of his release. Over the same period he wrote a lengthy letter to the Daily Chronicle about children in prison, and very moving it is, too. And that was it. Wilde died penniless and in agony in the Hôtel d'Alsace, on the Rue des Beaux-Arts, on 30 November 1900 —without a further verse or paragraph to his name, silent. So did he fail?

  MANY OF DREYFUS'S most fervent supporters would be exasperated by their hero's silence. He did not seem to join in their enthusiasm for the great cause of justice. "What was tragic, even fatal, about the whole business was that he [Dreyfus] did not have the right to be a private man," wrote Charles Péguy in Notre jeunesse, certainly the most thoughtful, eloquent memoir to emerge from the Affair. "The man who is chosen must march, the man who is called upon must answer. It is the law, it is the rule." France was divided in two by the Affair. After almost a year of political polemic, Dreyfus was brought back from his island; his supporters were horrified to discover a stiff and silent captain, who, if he had not been called Dreyfus, would probably have been an anti-Dreyfusard.

  He was put on trial again at another court martial in Rennes—and found guilty again. What saved him from further imprisonment, and yet another deportation, was a presidential pardon—hardly a sign of faith in French military justice. The Dreyfosards, heroically, called on the captain to refuse the offer and be a martyr for their cause; Dreyfus and his family wisely accepted the pardon. He was then denounced by his own camp. Georges Clemenceau, when he met him on one rare occasion, said he looked like a "a pencil merchant." But in a moving encounter at the Ministry of Justice in September 1899, between Dreyfus's brother Mathieu and the leading Dreyfosards, the Tiger of France admitted privately, "If I were the brother I would accept the pardon."

  Dreyfos never did understand the "mystical" enthusiasm of his supporters. The passions the case had aroused were not his. Dreyfus remained forever the artillery engineer he had been trained to be, gauging the range of fire in the trials he attended and assessing their impact—as if he were observing from a distant hill. When lawyers complained of his absence of emotion at the review of his case before a civilian court in 1904, all Dreyfus could muster up in reply was: "I am stupefied; I believed in reason, I had faith in reason in such affairs, I thought the dragging in of matters of the heart would have no bearing whatever on the final judgement." Dreyfus's feelings could not be aroused. He would never breathe a word on his Jewish origins, though the anti-Semites screamed around him. He never complained of the rough conditions he had known on Devil's Island—just treatment, he remarked, if he had been a genuine traitor. He never scowled. He never even smiled—except once, just slightly, when he was decorated with the Légion d'honneur in 1906. 'All his protestations of innocence sounded false," remarked the high-ranking diplomat Maurice Paléologue after attending Dreyfos's public degradation at the École M
ilitaire in December 1894; "one felt no warmth of soul; it might have been the voice of an automaton." By 1906, many Dreyfosards would have agreed with Paléologue.

  Only a handful of people knew why Dreyfus was so silent. The truth was revealed to those who observed him at close quarters. When his wife, Lucie, first saw him on his return from Devil's Island, she found a man "distant, huddled up, incapable of expressing anything." Mathieu met him a couple of weeks later in Rennes; he was very thin, he spoke only slowly, and when he did speak there was a slight whistling sound due to the loss of several teeth. A shy and solitary person even in childhood, Dreyfus was the victim of his imprisonment: the courts martial had effectively condemned Captain Dreyfus to silence.

  THE OLD BAILEY in London had likewise condemned Oscar Wilde to silence, though the nature of that silence was not exactly the same. Wilde, unlike Dreyfos, never even pretended to be innocent. But if he was guilty, he was guilty of what? The charge levelled against him in court had been "indecent acts"—the charge of sodomy was dropped for lack of evidence. Like Dreyfos on his Jewish roots, Wilde, in De Profundis, never mentioned a word on his sexuality, though this was the obsession of the London press at the time. Wilde judged himself guilty not of homosexuality but, by associating himself with the unimaginative Lord Alfred Douglas, he avowed that he had "soiled and shamed my life irretrievably." He had committed a sin of the imagination, not of sex. He had been the "spendthrift of my own genius," basking in glory and ignoring sorrow and the essential lessons sorrow had to teach. Now, in prison, he would learn the hard way, sinking beneath Hell to the common foundation of human suffering, upon which he would build his new "creative faculty"

  Only one man in the world understood why he did not do this, why Wilde would remain silent. André Gide would dominate the Parisian literary scene until Sartre's existentialism. He must be one of the most cultivated men who has ever walked this planet; he steeped himself in the Latin classics, the French classics, English and German, both ancient and modern. At seven he was playing on the piano the symphonies of Haydn. Bach, Chopin and Schumann pervade the pages of Gide's work as much as the thoughts of Plato, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Homer or Dante. Born into a family of Protestant manufacturers and lawyers, he was one of the richest men in France. So he had no concern about his earnings; for the first forty years of his life he would consider the sale of thirty copies of any one of his books, printed at his own expense, a sovereign success. André Gide devoted himself entirely to his art.

  Gide first met Wilde in 1891; he was only twenty-one. Over the following six years Wilde would exert a powerful influence on Gide, which Gide would feel for the remainder of his long and productive life. But it would not be straining the truth to say that young Gide would also have an appreciable influence on Wilde. Indeed, Paris's gift to Wilde was not just decadence; it was also Gide.

  One feature of his life coloured all Gide's art, his homosexuality. In Gide it could not be separated from a religious sensibility fostered by his Huguenot parents, particularly his mother. Though he eventually rejected God, he never passed a day without a reading of the Bible. His pederasty—as he termed it himself—seemed to open the way to a new form of godless religion. It was as if a sexuality experimented without women invited a spirituality lived without God: every major affair in his life brought on an intense religious brooding, most notably in the case of his unconsummated marriage in 1895 t 0 his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux—one of the mystical turning points in his life. It would have a direct impact on Wilde.

  Gide's attraction to his cousin Madeleine was triggered by a sorrow, a secret sorrow from which she seemed to suffer. Just before Christmas, 1882, when Gide was thirteen, he discovered what it was: her mother was having an affair. By chance, he had come upon the mother with her lover on a settee in their drawing room; he climbed the stairs to find the fifteen-year-old Madeleine kneeling by her bed, weeping. This critical event in the life of Gide can be pieced together from his journal and his autobiographical novel, La Porte étroite. "I remained standing beside her," he writes; "she remained kneeling; I could find no words to express the new rapture in my heart... Drunk with love, pity and a vague mixture of enthusiasm, abnegation, virtue, I called on God with all my strength and offered myself... I finally knelt down beside her; my heart full of prayer." Gide's adolescent love was indistinguishable from his first teenage feelings of religious fervour—and the gradual revelation of his homosexuality, the "hell of the flesh." Madeleine became an ideal, an object of religious exaltation. They were married in the Protestant chapel at Etretat, near one of the Gide properties, on 8 October 1895, four months after the death of his mother—and four months after Wilde went to gaol.

  What Gide brought to Wilde was this passionate, Christian sense of pity which permeates the whole text of De Profundis. Wilde indeed refers to Gide in the text, and the reference is not just random: it occurs at the moment Wilde is portraying the artist, the perfect artist, in Christ. Gide, too, is present in Wilde's analysis of the role of imagination in love. Both are rare gifts, beyond ordinary mortals, argues Wilde; "nobody is worthy of love." Gide would have said as much. And it is astonishing how close Wilde's acceptance of love resembles Gide's early experience at Madeleine's bedside: "Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and Domine, non sum dignus ["Lord, I am not worthy"] should be on the lips and in the hearts of those who receive it." The passage immediately precedes Wilde's long outline of how he intends to rebuild, from beneath Hell, his "creative faculty"

  The relationship between Wilde and Gide went two ways. What Wilde brought to Gide was knowledge of what it was to be homosexual; he was—as Gide's biographer Alan Sheridan notes—a Mephistopheles to Gide's Faust; Wilde was always, as Gide put it himself, "trying to insinuate inside you the authorization of evil."

  Gide cut all references in his journal to his encounters with Wilde in 1891, save one entry on New Year's Day, 1892: "Wilde, I believe, has only done me ill. With him I had unlearned how to think." Two articles Gide published in the Mercure de France shortly after Wilde's death in 1900 tell what happened. There was no sex; Gide is very clear that his first experience with boys, as well as girls, was in North Africa in October 1893. Wilde proved much more perverse; he told tales. Every day, for weeks on end, Gide would join Wilde in a Paris café and listen to Wilde's fantastic stories. "You listen with your eyes," Wilde said on their first encounter at a restaurant in the company of Stephane Mallarmé's circle of friends. But a week later he told him, "I don't like your lips; they are straight as if they had never lied." He would have to learn how to lie, said Wilde; it was the secret of art; nature was always repeating itself, whilst each work of art was unique because it was a lie.

  The story told by Wilde that touched Gide most was that of a village raconteur who drew crowds with his tales of prancing fauns in the forest and mermaids swimming in the waves. One day the storyteller went out to the seashore and he really did see three mermaids rolling in the waves; then he turned round to discover at the edge of the wood a faun playing on his flute: "Tell us, what have you seen today?" asked the villagers on his return. "I saw nothing," the storyteller replied. Truth had reduced the artist to a paralysing silence.

  It may not yet have been the silence of Dreyfus, but the sequence of events over the next few years would bring the silence of Wilde dramatically close to it. In January 1895, m e month Dreyfus was shipped out to Devil's Island and three months before the trials opened in London, Gide was travelling through Algeria in the grip of one of his mystical depressions; he had just completed his fourth book. He was leaving the Grand Hôtel de l'Orient at Blida to catch a train to Biskra when he noticed on the blackboard list of guests the names of Wilde and Douglas—"that terrible man, the most dangerous product of modern civilization," accompanied by his friend, "cette folie de dépravation." He scrubbed out his own name and left. But on approaching the railway station he had second thoughts, and returned to the hotel.

  Gide had changed; he was no longer
a virgin. More significant was the change in Wilde. The stories had dried up; his laughter was husky and forced. He told Gide that he was fleeing thought. "I want to worship only the sun," he said. "Have you noticed how the sun hates thought? It makes thought retreat and take refuge in shadow" Thought had retreated from Egypt and Greece, and was now only found in Norway and Russia. "I hope you are like me," interrupted Alfred Douglas; "I hate women. I like only boys. Since you're with us this evening, I'd rather tell you straight away" "Here begin the tragic memories," noted Gide.

  Later in the day Gide was sitting in a café with Wilde when Douglas burst in and, with "a hissing voice," upbraided Wilde on some minor subject. Wilde was visibly shocked. Wilde took Gide to a Moorish café in the neighbourhood and signalled to a boy named Mohammed to play on a reed flute, accompanied by another boy on a darbouka. If the account in Site grain ne meurt is to be trusted, Wilde then took Gide outside and asked, "Dear, vous voulez le petit musicien?" Gide choked out a "Oui." Wilde roared with laughter, negotiated with the two boys and, at a Hôtel by the docks, Gide spent the night with Mohammed while Wilde slept with the darbouka player. It was, according to Gide, the turning point in his life. That same year, 1895, his mother died and he married Madeleine; Wilde went to gaol.