In October, 1897, M. Ernest Vaughan, who had laid by a very considerable sum of money for the purpose of founding an efficient social and literary newspaper, approached Clemenceau with the offer of the editorship in chief. The famous _L'Aurore_ came into existence, and it set sail at once in the stormy waters of the Dreyfus affair. Terrific was the clash of passions around the name of the mysterious Jew, whose exact character and definite purpose will perhaps never be completely elucidated. M. Clemenceau did not hesitate to throw the weight of his pen into the unpopular scale. When Esterhazy was acquitted he almost lost his self-control; with furious irony and snarling invectives he lashed the populace into a frenzy. Then followed (on the 13th of January, 1898) the famous intervention of Zola, in a manifesto which rang from one end of the civilized world to the other. This was _J'accuse_, the admirably effective title of which, so M. Maurice Le Blond assures us, was the invention of Clemenceau. Next month, at the Zola trial, Clemenceau defended the cause of justice in the teeth of enemies who did not refrain from threatening his very life, and for two years _L'Aurore_, in the midst of the frenzied Dreyfus hurly-burly, was unflagging in its attacks and its rejoinders.
At such a moment M. Clemenceau sat down to write his solitary novel. It would be fulsome to represent _Les Plus Forts_ as a masterpiece of fiction, though in the present flush of the author's celebrity some have dared so to describe it. As a matter of fact it owes the interest which it possesses almost entirely to the light which it throws on the character of its author. As a mere romance, _Les Plus Forts_ suffers from the fact that its author, gifted in so many other directions, is not an effective narrator. As Dr. Johnson mischievously said of Congreve's one novel, _Incognita_, it is easier to praise _Les Plus Forts_ than to read it. The scene is laid in a village deep in the heart of Poitou, and commentators have recognized a close reproduction of Mouilleron-en-Paradis, the hamlet near Fontenay where M. Clemenceau was born. At the moment of his fiercest struggle in Paris, his thoughts turned back to the cool woods and the still waters of his old home in the west, to the land of hollow valleys, and to the inexpressive sixteenth-century château which the doctor's child learned to regard as the symbol of rapine and tyranny in the past.