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Background photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash
A snow-heavy lowering sky over the courtyard of a military academy; a quivering and drunken crowd, jeering and whistling behind the gates; a quarter to nine in the morning on Saturday, January 5, 1895. In contrast to the horror they are about to witness, the magnificent dome of Les Invalides lights up the gray clouds with its golden halo. A general on horseback, flanked by two dragoon officers, directs the parade, firm in his stirrups, as haughty as an equestrian statue. He raises his sword; he is answered by drumbeats. The condemned officer steps forward between four artillerymen. The journalists murmur: why does he look unabashed? How dare he not walk in shame! The humiliated figure of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, hot in the freezing cold of the Parisian January morning, stands surrounded but alone in the principal courtyard of the eighteenth-century École Militaire, Place Fontenoy, the elite school where Napoleon Bonaparte earned his spurs. Thousands of spectators are outside, some on rooftops; 5,000 troops have gathered — two units, infantry under arms and new recruits from each regiment of the Paris garrison, with 300 journalists alongside them. Only General Darras and his retinue are on horseback.
Darras: “Alfred Dreyfus, you are unworthy to bear arms; in the name of the French people, we degrade you.” Dreyfus replies, “theatrically” stretching out his arm, “I swear that I am innocent. I swear on my wife’s head, and those of my children. I am innocent! I am innocent!” Sergeant-Major Bouxin from the Republican Guard tears at Dreyfus’s uniform — gold braid, buttons, red trimmings, are all torn off and cast into the mud (it is cruelly, even camply theatrical: in the night, his uniform had been taken away, the trimmings pulled off and sewn on loosely; the sword broken, and smelted back together, for ease of public breakage). As the finale, Bouxin grabs Dreyfus’s saber, unhooks the sheath, pulls out the blade, straddles it across his knee, and snaps it. Dreyfus, tense, bearded, bespectacled in ripped, funereal black clothing, stares ahead, stripped of insignia, buttons, epaulettes. He shouts, “I am innocent! Vive la France!” The spell of silence is broken: the ruffled crowd shout back, hissing, fists at the ready, “Death to the Jew!”
Bouxin the NCO turns to General Darras and salutes him, a sign that he has finished. Dreyfus is taken away by the police. At Darras’s signal, the drums and bugles of the 39th Regiment start up a gleeful march. Fleeting shafts of sunlight fall on breastplates, sabers, and bayonets.
In the crowd, reporting for the Neue Freie Presse, is Theodor Herzl, who, like many others, at that moment assumes that Dreyfus is guilty. But elsewhere in the city many people, such as Sarah Bernhardt, believe his protestations of innocence. Even Edmond de Goncourt is not convinced of his guilt. Dreyfus has been ceremonially degraded. This “execution parade” by government decree is only the first of the punishments that the French establishment believes will result in his eternal shame.
But it is France that will be dishonored.
______
The Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, son of a textile manufacturer from Alsace, has been convicted of spying for Germany. He will be sentenced to life imprisonment in the hellhole of Devil’s Island off French Guiana. It will take years for the truth to emerge, but what the affair triggers for now is a sinister question in the mind of the (conscious or not) antisemites: could Jews in the army be loyal to France or are they, in some covert way, as Drumont insists, only serving themselves?
For the Cahen d’Anvers, supposedly nothing as yet has changed. Louise was planning a frantically social spring. But has it?
For the Cahen d’Anvers, supposedly nothing as yet has changed. Louise was planning a frantically social spring. But has it? Her friend Marcel Proust noted the unpredictable, subtle shifts spinning around her:
But, like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranged successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern. Before I had made my first communion, right-minded ladies had the stupefying experience of meeting an elegant Jewess while paying a social call. These new arrangements of the kaleidoscope are produced by what a philosopher would call a “change of criterion.” The Dreyfus case brought about another, at a period rather later than that in which I began to go to Mme. Swann’s, and the kaleidoscope once more reversed its colored lozenges. Everything Jewish, even the elegant lady herself, went down, and various obscure nationalists rose to take its place.
Dreyfus is degraded in the season of ice: a week later, at the Cercle des Patineurs, Irène is skating with her mother and younger sister Alice alongside figures such as Lady Terence Blackwood, the socialite wife of the secretary at the British embassy, daughter-in-law of the British ambassador (born Flora Davis, the heiress of a New York banker). Irène and Louise take the stalls at the fête of the Cercle de l’Union artistique, and Comtesse Louise announces that “every Thursday evening, there will be dinner followed by a small reception at the hôtel on rue Bassano.” On February 2 she is skating with two of her daughters (Elisabeth is too fragile); and a few days later as the young King Alexander I of Serbia skates — the eighteen-year-old monarch whose father, King Milan, had abdicated in 1889 for his young son — so does Irène.
In early February, Elisabeth is at home with her sisters as her mother hosts a dinner followed by a waltz. The next night Louise, in “black, with a white trim” is at a new opera, The Black Mountain, written, unusually, by a woman — Augusta Holmès — alongside the new president of France and his wife, M. and Mme. Félix Faure. (It is poorly received.) On Thursday the parquet floors of Rue de Bassano resound with the tapping feet of young women learning how to waltz. Waltzing lessons could mean only one thing: Louise wants to secure husbands for her two remaining daughters. How is anyone meant to flirt without dancing?
A “very brilliant night at Mme. Aubernon de Nerville’s,” at which a comedy was performed. Louise wears “black velvet sewn with silver stars”; Louis and Marcel Proust were with her. Mme. Aubernon de Nerville — on whom Proust partly based his manipulative and narcissistic salonnière Mme. Verdurin (along with Mme. Lemaire) — by now in her seventies, was a banking and railway heiress who held a literary salon at the Louis XVI – style house at 11 Rue Montchanin (now Rue Jacques-Bingen), which she had commissioned the architect Édouard Dailly to design for her. So prestigious were performances at her house that Ibsen’s French premiere for A Doll’s House was held there: a French salon in the Belle Époque was no amateur undertaking.
Things did not always run smoothly at Mme. Aubernon’s, particularly when she aggressively rang her handbell at the dinner table to change the topic of conversation. She tried to avoid politics. Even before his conviction, the Dreyfus affair had become divisive. Was the evidence convincing? Could the French Army be capable of such treachery as to accuse, let alone frame, an innocent man?
Copyright © 2026 by Catherine Ostler. From The Renoir Girls by Catherine Ostler, published by Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.
Catherine Ostler is an author and journalist who has been Editor-in-Chief of Tatler, the English Standard (London), the Evening Standard magazine (London), and Editor of The Times (London) Weekend. She has also written for a wide range of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph (London), the Financial Times, and Vogue. She studied English at Oxford University. Her first book was the critically acclaimed The Duchess Countess: The Woman Who Scandalized Eighteenth-Century London.
