What was the reason of Rochefort’s abominable campaign against the martyr from the Devil’s Island? Since he styled himself a democrat, the champion of liberty and justice, the enemy of tyranny, one would have expected to see the fierce old journalist fighting vigorously for Dreyfus. The fact is, Rochefort was a mass of contradictions: an imp of perversity: at once brutal and humane; gentle and bloodthirsty; simple and vain; the most chaotic Frenchman that ever died. Search his autobiography, in three portly volumes: not once do you find him resting, smiling or reflecting—he is all thunder and lightning, an everlasting storm. Exile, duels, fines and imprisonment—wild, delirious attacks upon the Government of the day. No one escaped; for fifty years, in the columns of the _Figaro_, the _Lanterne_, the _Intransigeant_, and finally, in the _Patrie_, Rochefort pursued presidents and politicians with his unique, extravagant vocabulary. M. Jaurès, the Socialist leader, was “a decayed turnip”; M. Georges Clemenceau, “a loathsome leper”; M. Briand, “a moulting vulture.” As for M. Combes, to the guillotine with him, and into the Seine with M. Delcassé, and a rope and a boulevard lamp-post for M. Pelletan. Then President Loubet was “the foulest of assassins”; President Fallières, “the fat old satyr of the Élysée”; and Madame Marguerite Steinheil, “the Black Panther.” For the life of me I could trace nothing of the “panther” in Madame Steinheil during the ten terrible days that she sat in the dock of the dim, oak-panelled Paris Assize Court. As for her “blackness,” Rochefort was referring to her clothes. “Heavy crape bands round the accused woman’s black dress, stiff crape bows in the widow’s cap, a deep sombre border to the handkerchief which she clenched tightly, convulsively, in her black-gloved hand... under her eyes, dark, dark shadows, which turned green as the trial tragically wore on.”[7] Impossible, one might have thought, not to sympathise with this prisoner who, with all her follies and faults, was certainly not the murderess of her husband and mother.