had been tactful enough to send no invitations to the Jewish landowners, although she had friends and relations among them.  After the death of her husband she was baptised, and had now been five years naturalised. She was wholly devoted to her religion and country.  Like her brother Wallstein, of Vienna, she was careful to distinguish herself from her former co-religionists by a sincere anti-Semitism.

"Allow me to point out, Monsieur," says the Abbé Guitrel to the duke, "that Madame Jules de Bonmont is a Catholic."

"Nonsense," cried the Duke. "She is an Austrian Jewess, and her maiden name was Wallstein. The real name of her late husband, the Baron de Bonmont, was Gutenberg."

"I do not deny that the Baronne de Bonmont is of Jewish descent.  What I mean is that she has been converted and baptised, and is therefore a Christian. She is a good Christian, I might add, and gives largely to our charities, in fact, she is an example to..."

"I am acquainted with your ideas," interrupted the Duke, "and I respect them as I respect your cloth. But to me a converted Jew remains a Jew; I cannot make any distinction between the two."

"Neither can I," said Madame de Brécé.

I am a patriot and a republican; I do not know whether Dreyfus is guilty or innocent. I do not want to know; it's not my business. He may be innocent, but there is no doubt that the Dreyfusites are guilty. They have been guilty of a great impertinence in substituting their own personal opinion for a decision given by republican justice. Besides, they have stirred up the whole country. Trade is suffering.

held himself bound, by the very fact that he was a Jew, to serve the interests of the anti-Semites in his administration with greater zeal than a Catholic prefect would have displayed in his place. With a prompt and sure hand he stifled in his department the growing faction in favour of revision...

And Monsieur Worms-Clavelin, who since the judgment of 1894 was fully convinced that Dreyfus was innocent, made no mystery of that conviction after dinner as he smoked his cigar, though the Nationalists, whose cause he favoured, had good reason to count on a loyal support which was not dependent upon personal feelings. 

In the wake of the Affair, which he brilliantly satirised in his novel Penguin Island (1908), Anatole France became the prototype of the celebrity intellectual. He became a friend of the socialist politician, Jean Jaurès, and signed numerous revolutionary petitions at Jaurès's instigation even while writing a novel, Les Dieux ont Soif, denouncing the Jacobin fanaticism in the Revolution of 1789. Like some of his successors among champagne socialists, he signed manifestos with his left hand even as his right hand was writing best-selling books. France won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921 but, along with Prévost, Mirbeau and Bourget, is now seldom read-his reputation eclipsed by the young Dreyfusard who first persuaded him to sign the manifesto of the intellectuals, Marcel Proust.