But the first to fall was Ernest Psichari. I knew him root and branch--knew his parents and grandparents before him, and the earliest image that I preserve of him (since the first of all are forgotten) is of a little lad between eight and nine years of age, unaware of my presence in his grandmother’s drawing-room, as he talks to his little brother in the twilight: ‘When I am grown up (says Ernest) I shall be a great man! Et j’aurai ma statue sur tous les marchés de France!’ And the little one of seven ripples with laughter at Ernest’s having so satisfactorily ‘gone one better’: ‘Il y a du chemin à faire, mon frère! (says he). Il y a bien de chemin à faire!’ Whereat I too laughed and broke the spell, the two little boys informing me that, while waiting for their violin-lesson, ‘on s’amusait à raconter des blagues.’ Even in Ernest’s fun there was a desire of greatness; that, and an intense sensibility, a rare faculty of moral imagination, were what I chiefly noticed in the child, of whom I saw less and less as his studies absorbed him more and more: youths between twelve and twenty have little time for their mother’s friends. A quiet young man, with charming, living eyes, and in his whole aspect something ardent, firm, and grave: that is all that Ernest Psichari was to me. And then came a bolt from the blue. It was on the morrow of the Dreyfus case when France was divided into two camps, and each faction feverishly counted its men and the great families which centralised these men on either side. As Daniel Halévy wrote, in a passage already celebrated: ‘Paris a ses familles comme Florence eut les siennes, et ses maisons, non couronnées de tours, n’en abritent pas moins des factions guerrières.’ Ernest was born into one of these houses--one of the most important to the Liberals--for those grandparents of his (both dead before that shock of schism shook France to her foundations), those grandparents of whom I have written, were Ernest Renan and his wife. And his father was Jean Psichari, a Greek philologist of most ‘advanced’ opinions. It came, therefore, almost as a defection, an apostasy, when the rumour spread in the ruffled circles of the Dreyfusards that Ernest Psichari had gone into the Army--that Renan’s grandson, at nineteen, had enlisted as a volunteer in the Colonial Artillery.