ABSTRACT
Given the immense amount of scrutiny which the Dreyfus affair has received over the last century, this chapter sheds a little new light on matters of epistolary sources. These epistolary sources are a valuable asset for understanding how the Dreyfus affair was mentioned and felt by individuals: they are exemplary of its intrusion, in this case in the friendship of an intellectual and a would-be politician at a formative moment of their respective careers. The friendship between writer André Gide and correspondent Eugène Rouart was cemented by two factors: firstly, both men loved art and had literary ambitions; and secondly, both were homosexuals, coming to terms with their natures in a climate of social and moral hostility. The Dreyfus affair and the friends' disagreements about it appears in the correspondence between Gide and Rouart from 1894 right through to the end of the affair in July 1906.
