MEN I HAVE PAINTED
Rochefort could have been seen, with his handsome niece, constantly in Christie's auction rooms, watching the sales of pictures and furniture. After his return to Paris I commenced the portrait at his house. It was never finished. The Dreyfus affair was at its hottest. At first I was not interested, but a New York lady, who lived always in Europe, called my attention to the apparent injustice of the officer's conviction, degradation, and exile. After reading Zola's famous letter, J'accuse, I became a Dreyfusard, and followed every aspect of le petit bleu with ardour and excitement.
It was an unfortunate moment to be closeted with Henri Rochefort. The French language contained no epithet strong enough, no cochonnerie vile enough to convey Rochefort's spleen against this unfortunate "spy," who was not only in league with the Devil, but, what was far worse, with the Emperor William of Germany. There was no doubt at all in Rochefort's mind that the Emperor himself was in constant secret communication with Dreyfus, and that the fireproof safe, in his palace at Potsdam, contained documents supplied by his correspondent in France, revealing the strength and the weakness of the French army, the characters of the personnel of the staff, the number and calibre of the guns, and the definitions of all the secret mechanisms and appliances of the various armaments.
Rochefort did not believe in original sin, and vigorously pooh-poohed the idea that little children, pure and innocent angels, as he called them, could possibly be inheritors of the germs of wickedness. But original sin and all other kinds of sin were innate in the Kaiser and in the traitorous miscreant who had betrayed France to the grasp of the "mailed fist," the foe acharné de la Patrie.
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