Tolstoy does; he surrounded himself with the graces and the
luxuries which his honestly earned money enabled him to buy; but
when an act of public and official atrocity disturbed the working
of his mind and revolted his nature, he could not rest again till
he had done his best to right it.


IV

The other day Zola died (by a casualty which one fancies he would
have liked to employ in a novel, if he had thought of it), and
the man whom he had befriended at the risk of all he had in the
world, his property, his liberty, his life itself, came to his
funeral in disguise, risking again all that Zola had risked, to
pay the last honors to his incomparable benefactor.

It was not the first time that a French literary man had devoted
himself to the cause of the oppressed, and made it his personal
affair, his charge, his inalienable trust. But Voltaire's
championship of the persecuted Protestant had not the measure of
Zola's championship of the persecuted Jew, though in both
instances the courage and the persistence of the vindicator
forced the reopening of the case and resulted in final justice.
It takes nothing from the heroism of Voltaire to recognize that
it was not so great as the heroism of Zola, and it takes nothing
from the heroism of Zola to recognize that it was effective in
the only country of Europe where such a case as that of Dreyfus
would have been reopened; where there was a public imagination
generous enough to conceive of undoing an act of immense public
cruelty. At first this imagination was dormant, and the French