Drumont, “Paris will rebel; and the next events will prove fatal to this unspeakable Republic.” The next important event was the landing in France, in the middle of the night, of a bent, prematurely aged figure: Captain Dreyfus. How the musty old carriage in which he sat, dazed, exhausted, shivering, rattled over the cobble-stones to the Rennes prison! How the prison gates clanged to when the shabby vehicle had entered the dark, grim courtyard! And how split and how cracked was the voice of the prisoner from the Devil’s Island when, at the court-martial a few days afterwards, he protested his innocence and refuted the new monstrous accusations of highly respected and brilliantly uniformed Generals Gonse, de Boisdeffre and Mercier! Solitary confinement had left him almost inarticulate. But he defended himself heroically: and, with an effort, straightened his bent back when questioned by his judges. Then how the trial dragged on; and what scenes took place in the streets, hotels and cafés of Rennes, which were crowded with _le Tout Paris_ and echoed with Parisian exclamations and disputes! Brawls, duels, Henri Rochefort’s white “Imperial” pulled; Maître Labori, Captain Dreyfus’s brilliant counsel, shot between the shoulders; a famous _demi-mondaine_ expelled the town; arrests, startling _canards_, alarms; hysteria, chaos, and delirium enough for Paris itself; and in Paris—whilst these exhibitions were occurring in the Rennes streets, and Captain Dreyfus (in the severe court-room) was stiffening his back and straining his split voice until it rose to an uncanny scream—what of Jules Guérin in Paris? and of his guns and revolvers, his well and his flower-bed? and of his assistants and clerks, the young men with the bull-dog faces, whom he had recruited from the ghastly slaughter-house of La Villette?