happened to call at that very moment, and was heard speaking in French in
the hall. This seemed to alarm the stranger, who ceased pressing his
request that I should give him letters of introduction to prominent
Dreyfusites. He rose abruptly, saying that the time would come when we
should probably regret having refused to entertain his proposals, and
hurrying past the waiting French client he ran off down the Alexandra
Road in much the same way as I myself subsequently ran off from the
French 'detectives' who were simply harmless disciples of St. Cecilia.

To this day I do not know whether the man was a lunatic, an imposter
seeking money, or an _agent provocateur_, that is, one who imagined that
he might through me inveigle M. Zola into an illegal act which would lead
to prosecution and imprisonment. The last-mentioned status that I have
ascribed to my interviewer is by no means an impossible one, considering
the many dastardly attempts made to discredit and ruin M. Zola. And yet,
suspicious and abrupt as was the man's leave-taking when he heard French
being spoken outside Wareham's private room (where the interview took
place), I nowadays think it more charitable to assume that he was a
trifle crazy. One thing is certain, he had come to the wrong person in
applying to me to aid and abet him in the foolhardy enterprise he spoke
of.

This is the first time I have told this anecdote in any detail; but at
the period when the incident occurred I spoke of it casually to a few
friends, to which circumstance I am inclined to attribute the earlier
paragraphs which appeared in the newspapers about American schemes for
delivering Dreyfus. The person whom I saw was, I believe, a
German-American.

Well, this incident, preposterous as it may appear (but truth, remember,
is quite as fantastic as fiction), had proved another link in the chain
of suspicious occurrences in which I had been mixed up prior to M. Zola's
exile. Other curious little incidents had followed, and thus for many
months I had been living--even as we lived long ago in besieged Paris--in
distrust of all strangers, and the climax had come with my foolish fears
respecting a couple of French musicians. The story I have told goes
against me, but the man who cannot tell a story against himself when he
thinks it a good one can have, I think, little grit in his composition.

From the time of my adventure with the French musicians I steeled myself
against excessive fear