.

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.'

So that was the man whom Violette, in her dream, had seen weltering in a
pool of blood, surrounded by his custodians, who had rushed in full of
excitement! M. Zola's presence in that vision was, so to say, symbolical.
'He had waved his arms and had seemed well pleased'--so the girl had put
it in her frank, artless way. 'Well pleased' may perhaps appear to be
scarcely the correct expression. At all events, it needs to be
interpreted. Most certainly Zola never desired the death of a sinner;
but, on the other hand, he could only feel some satisfaction at knowing
that Henry's crime was at last divulged to the world.

This, then, is how my daughter dreamt Henry's death. I do not wish to
insist unduly on the incident, and I have no intention of appealing to
the Psychical Research Society to test, corroborate, or disprove the
case.

There was one rather curious feature that I have not yet mentioned. My
daughter has assured me that during the same night she dreamt the same
thing over and over again. She tried to banish the vision, but ever and
ever it returned, as if to impress itself indelibly upon her mind. And
ever did she see M. Zola waving his arms as he hovered round the scene.

At that time the girl knew nothing of Colonel Henry; she understood very
little about the Dreyfus case; and all she had to go upon was the
enigmatical telegram and M. Zola's talk during the evening, when he was
expressing his thoughts aloud. But at that moment he had foreseen no
death, murder, or suicide, and if the possibility of any arrest had
occurred to him it was that of M. du Paty de Clam, which the Revisionist
papers were then demanding.

It is true that in infancy my daughter had often seen Mont Valerien, as I
lived for some years at Boulogne-sur-Seine, and the hill and fortress
towering across the river were then familiar objects to us all. But the
girl was little more than a baby at the time, and so this circumstance
can have exercised no influence upon her. Moreover, she has told me t