statement in a letter to the London Chronicle, which was reprinted in several American newspapers, urging foreigners to abstain from showing sympathy for the Jewish officer. This was not because O'Rell considered Dreyfus to be guilty; as he wrote in the letter, he personally believed the French officer to be innocent. Rather, he argued that an overseas campaign in favour of Dreyfus would only result in anti-Semitism increasing in France. A notice in the Times shows that his advice was taken seriously. David Christie Murray, one of the leaders of the pro-Dreyfus movement in England, mentioned O'Rell's letter and announced a withdrawal of an appeal to French journalists, because it might offend the French amour-propre. At the height of the Fashoda crisis a short time later, the London Times published a letter by O'Rell to the editor in which he presented himself as a member of the Committee of the Entente Cordiale for the Better Relations between England and France and argued that despite the current tensions, the relations between Britain and France had a solid basis of respect and goodwill. He also commented on the Boer War, but his critical comments about Boers' brave resistance to the English Goliath led to a marked decline of his popularity in Britain. When the Paris Figaro invited him to contribute a regular front page column, the news was widely circulated in the American media. However, O'Rell published only six front-page articles between 24 October 1901 and 4 February 1902, mostly containing amusing observations on American society. Final years At the age of fifty, Max O'Rell had passed the zenith of his fame and professional success. He had succeeded in carving himself a niche in the Anglo-American media market as a connoisseur of the female world, playing on the widespread stereotype of the feminised Frenchman. He found that his humorous texts dealing with trans-cultural gender relations were particularly successful. His attempt at novel writing, an adaptation of his stage play The Price of Wealth proved to be a failure. Woman and Artist (1899), relating the conflict of a woman torn between her role as a wife and an aspiring artist was a very conventional story with one-dimensional characters. Although it was reviewed by leading American newspapers, their criticism of the banality of the work was unanimous. His next three books Her Royal Highness Woman and his Majesty Cupid (1901), Between Ourselves: Some of