ed a
tri-colour flag from an upper window, it went roaring mad with cries of
_Vive Rochefort! Vive la France! Vive Fannie!_ In the end it dribbled
away quite peacefully, overflowing into all the neighbouring cabarets,
or trailing off homeward through the dusk and mud. Here and there a
street orator found his chance and gathered a crowd about him, but these
were quietly moved on by the police, and before seven o'clock, that part
of Paris had resumed its normal aspect. I tried hard to discover some
intelligible reason for this curious outburst of popular feeling, but I
could find none except that the condition of the popular mind was such
that almost any excuse for gathering in crowds, and indulging in noisy
cheers and groans, was welcome as a sort of safety valve.

Whilst that travesty of a trial was going on, and every suggestion
in favour of the accused was being trampled on, and every one of the
chartered liars who had sworn falsely for the honour of the army was
being bolstered by the authority of the court, I had many opportunities
for conversation with Zola, and in the course of one of them, he offered
me an almost passionate justification of his literary methods. He did
not complain, he said, that he had been misunderstood; he had been
charged with being a pornographist and with revelling in filth and
horror for their own sake. "It is not so," he declared, "but look you! I
love and revere this beautiful and noble France, and I believe that she
has yet a splendid destiny before her. At this moment she seems to lie
dead and drowned beneath a river of lies, but she will yet revive and
justify herself. I picture her," he went on, marching up and down the
room, "as a great suffering angel stricken down by a disease which only
a cruel cautery can cure. It has been the aim and effort of my life to
apply that cautery, and if I am fated to be remembered in the future,
the future will do me justice." All this left me as far as ever from an
approval of the methods he defended, but it was absolutely impossible to
doubt his sincerity.

Two English journalists, who were at that time resident in Paris and who
felt strongly at the time that the notorious Major Esterhazy was a
much maligned and injured man, engineered an interview between him and
myself. The major, it appeared, was extremely anxious to be rightly
understood by the British public. He complained that on several
occasions he had consented to be interviewed by the Lo