Page:Lettres d'un innocent; the letters of Captain Dreyfus to his wife ; (IA lettresduninnoce00drey).pdf/16

For many weeks this most infamous campaign was kept up in the columns of L'Echo de Paris, Le Petit Journal, Le Gaulois, La Libre Parole, and L'Intransigeant. So varied in character and so ingenious in conception were these libellous tales, that it became impossible for the friends of the condemned man to make an adequate defense. Dreyfus's counsel, Maître Demange, heard the stories, and could do nothing. The verdict of the court-martial closed the door to legal redress. The devoted wife of Dreyfus at first attempted to reply to them in Le Figaro. Parisians laughed at her naïveté. She was not the only deceived wife in the world, they said. At length, wearied of the unequal combat—one woman against a horde of anti-Semitic vilifiers—she gave to the world a volume of letters written by her husband to herself. It was her desire simply to show him as he was, to rehabilitate the prisoner as a husband and a father in the eyes of Frenchmen. But "Les Lettres d'un Innocent" have done more than this. To the women of France, at least, they have established the innocence of the man. No one can read these letters without being struck by the absolute sincerity of the writer; by his love for his wife and his family, and for his country; by his devotion to duty and to the traditions of the army whose heads had so remorselessly sacrificed him; by the utter hopelessness of his position. When, in the papers of January 6, 1895, the story of his dramatic degradation was published to the world, the French people pretended to see in his proud, fearless demeanor, as his uniform was stripped of insignia and his sword broken before him, a criminal stoicism that would have been impossible in an innocent man. Many English and American readers recognized simply the