Oscar Wilde, Captain Dreyfus' reluctant hero
Hoping to pay his respects to a French army officer framed in an anti-Semitic plot, Eddie Naughton stumbled across a surprising role for the great Irish writer
DURING a recent trip to Paris, I visited the cemetery at Montparnasse where I unsuccessfully sought out the grave of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. A French Jewish army officer whom I have long admired, Dreyfus was framed by his anti-Semitic comrades for being a German spy and sent to Devil's Island at the back end of the 19th Century.
Despite the help of a map of the graveyard and a couple of French people, I was unable to locate the burial plot. So I gave up, and with my long-suffering wife, Lillian, left the graveyard and got on with my holiday in the city that's like no other city I have ever visited.
Back home not long afterwards, I came across a delightful book in Waterstones called Metrostop Paris, by Gregor Dallas, which is an extremely interesting and informative history of the 12 original stations and their surrounds on the Paris metro line. But it's the last metro station, Pere Lachaise, which is the most fascinating chapter of all, and is more than worth the price of the book alone. It is a brief but brilliant account of the Dreyfus affair, and surprisingly -- to me at any rate -- the role played by Oscar Wilde in outing the real traitor, Commandant Count Charles Walsin-Esterhazy.
Actually, it is a tale of two cities, Paris and London, and the aftermath of the two infamous legal battles that ran almost parallel to each other at that time.
No longer willing or able to write, and living down at heel in Paris, Wilde first met Esterhazy in a Paris cafe, and immediately the two men were drawn to each other. Wilde was fascinated by this unkempt, tubercular crook and entertained him with his gayest of witticisms while Esterhazy extravagantly responded with outbursts against Jews and supporters of Dreyfus (the Dreyfusards, as they were known). Friends of Wilde were a little put-out by his companionship with Esterhazy but, since his release from Reading gaol, Wilde claimed he had been forced into a commerce with thieves, liars and assassins. Besides, he said, he found them more interesting than honest men -- something to do with the seduction of sin and the kingdom of the wicked.
Round about this time, while Dreyfus was languishing on Devil's Island, Esterhazy had been secretly unmasked as the real traitor by an intelligence officer named Commandant George Picquart, who, for his trouble, was court-martialled and sent to prison for revealing secret documents. The uncaring army elite preferred to see an innocent Jew rotting in a hell hole than have their establishment boat rocked.
But it was Esterhazy's confession to Wilde at a dinner one night that brought the whole Dreyfus affair to a head.
At the dinner, along with Wilde and Esterhazy, were an anti-Semite English journalist, Rowland Strong, and a young Irish bohemian poet, Chris Healy. At the behest of supporters of Dreyfus, a largely indifferent Wilde prompted Esterhazy during his usual delirium about Jews into blurting out that it was he, Esterhazy, who'd been selling
secret military intelligence to the Germans.
"I put Dreyfus in prison," he stated boldly, "and all of France can't get him out!" Wilde cared little for the Dreyfusards, and was unperturbed by this confession, but not so Chris Healy, who immediately made contact with French writer Emile Zola.
At this time Zola was serving a prison sentence for libel after publishing his famous J'accuse, a devastating indictment of the French government, army and courts and their role in the framing of Captain Dreyfus.
Zola tried to contact Wilde, but Wilde refused to co-operate with him on the grounds that Zola, a strict moralist, had refused to sign a petition on behalf of Wilde at the time of his conviction. Zola contacted other sympathetic journalists and events at last were set in train that would expose and destroy the whole rotten edifice that had been built around the case of Captain Dreyfus.
During all of this turmoil, Wilde learnt of the unexpected death of his wife Constance. He was devastated. Healy later recalled finding him in Notre Dame Cathedral kneeling at the altar, head bowed, his face hidden in his hands.
Healy left Paris soon after this and never saw Wilde again.
Wilde died alone and penniless in the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris, now a place of pilgrimage. He is buried in the cemetery at Pere Lachaise, also a place of pilgrimage.
Metrostop Paris, by Gregor Dallas, published by John Murray, €10.50
- Eddie Naughton
