Short-Form Proust

Abstract

IN AUGUST 1899, THE DREYFUS AFFAIR was at its height. France’s Court of Cassation had overturned Alfred Dreyfus’s original judgment as guilty, and the case had been referred to a military court in Rennes. The retrial began on August 7; on August 14, Dreyfus’s defense lawyer, Fernand Labori, was shot en route to the courthouse. Proust, who was twenty-eight at the time, and a still-little-known writer, was not Labori’s acquaintance. All the same, he was moved to send Dreyfus’s lawyer a telegram. The telegram reached Labori on August 18, by which point Labori’s condition was improving, and he was soon to resume his place on Dreyfus’s defense. Preserved in Harvard’s Houghton Library amid files related to the Dreyfus affair, it reads as follows (Figure 1):