January 30 Sunday – In Vienna, Austria, Sam’s recent letter to T.H. about Emile Zola (1840-1902) ran in the New York Herald as “Zola and Dreyfus.” Sam had been moved by Zola’s publication this month of J’Accuse to the French newspaper, L’Aurore. Zola cut up the French authorities for framing Captain Alfred Dreyfus:

It is a grand figure—Zola—standing there all alone fighting his splendid fight to save the remains of the honor of France. I feel for him the profoundest reverence and an admiration which has no bounds. Ecclesiastical and military courts made up of cowards, hypocrites and time-servers can be bred at a rate of a million a year and have material left over; but it takes five centuries to breed a Joan of Arc & a Zola [MTP: NB 42 TS 54]. Dolmetsch quotes part of this as a letter to Zola, which was “evidently never sent…probably because Zola fled to England to escape sentencing and his exact whereabouts were unknown for a while” [173].