February 8 Tuesday – In Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote “Private ” to J. Henry Harper, bemoaning the fact that he had let the book about Dreyfus drop after Chatto told him there was no interest in the case in England; Sam didn’t think of asking Harper’s London office, and now the entire world was excited:

“My Goodness! & to-day I could sell a ship-load of that book in little Belgium alone—Belgium, which sent Zola 79,000 telegrams yesterday, the day his ‘trial’ begain before that court of chicken-livered French monkeys. / Please send a cheap person over here to kick me” [MTP].

Sam then wrote to Chatto & Windus about the lost opportunity of a Dreyfus book. He’d only finished the first chapter of such a book when Chatto discouraged it.

“I’m trying hard not to cry over the spilt milk, but I am crying over it just the same; for I knew, at the time, that we were wasting the opportunity of the century….Oh, dear, that book died that the tramps abroad [FE] might live—what irony it is!” [MTP].