One thing is certain, he had come to the wrong person in
applying to me to aid and abet him in the foolhardy enterprise he spoke
of.
This is the first time I have told this anecdote in any detail; but at
the period when the incident occurred I spoke of it casually to a few
friends, to which circumstance I am inclined to attribute the earlier
paragraphs which appeared in the newspapers about American schemes for
delivering Dreyfus. The person whom I saw was, I believe, a
German-American.
Well, this incident, preposterous as it may appear (but truth, remember,
is quite as fantastic as fiction), had proved another link in the chain
of suspicious occurrences in which I had been mixed up prior to M. Zola's
exile. Other curious little incidents had followed, and thus for many
months I had been living--even as we lived long ago in besieged Paris--in
distrust of all strangers, and the climax had come with my foolish fears
respecting a couple of French musicians. The story I have told goes
against me, but the man who cannot tell a story against himself when he
thinks it a good one can have, I think, little grit in his composition.
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