An Officer and a Spy

22

The next day, with the help of Labori, I draft an open letter to the government. At his suggestion I send it not to the devout and unbending Minister of War, our toy Brutus, but to the anticlerical new prime minister, Henri Brisson:

Monsieur Prime Minister,

Until the present moment I have not been in a position to express myself freely on the subject of the secret documents which, it is alleged, establish the guilt of Dreyfus. Since the Minister of War has, from the tribune of the Chamber of Deputies, quoted three of those documents, I deem it a duty to inform you that I am in a position to establish before any competent tribunal that the two documents bearing the date 1894 cannot be made to apply to Dreyfus, and that the document dated 1896 shows every evidence of being a forgery. It would seem obvious therefore that the good faith of the Minister of War has been imposed upon, and that the same is true of all those who have believed in the relevance of the first two documents and in the authenticity of the last.

Kindly accept, Monsieur Prime Minister,

my sincere regards,

G. Picquart

The letter reaches the Prime Minister on Monday. On Tuesday, the government files a criminal charge against me, based on the Pellieux investigation, accusing me of illegally revealing “writings and documents of importance for national defence and security.” An investigating judge is appointed. That same afternoon—although I am not there to witness it, but only read about it the next morning in the papers—my apartment is raided, watched by a crowd of several hundred onlookers jeering “Traitor!” On Wednesday, I am summoned to meet the government-appointed judge, Albert Fabre, in his chambers on the third floor of the Palace of Justice. In his outer office two detectives are waiting and I am arrested, as is poor Louis Leblois.

“I warned you to think carefully before getting involved,” I say to him. “I have ruined too many lives.”

“Dear Georges, think nothing of it! It will be interesting to observe the justice system from the other side for a change.”

Judge Fabre, who to his credit at least seems slightly embarrassed by the whole procedure, tells me I am to be held in La Santé prison during his investigation, whereas Louis will remain free on bail. Outside in the courtyard, as I am being put into the Black Maria in full view of several dozen reporters, I have the presence of mind to remember to give Louis my cane. Then I am taken away. On arrival at the prison I have to fill in a registration form. In the space for “religion” I write “nothing.”

La Santé, it turns out, is no Mont-Valérien: there is no separate bedroom and WC here, no view to the Eiffel Tower. I am locked in a tiny cell, four metres by two and a half, with a small barred window that looks down onto an exercise yard. There is a bed and a chamber pot: that is all. It is the height of summer, thirty-five degrees Celsius, occasionally relieved by thunderstorms. The air is baking hot and stale with the smell of a thousand male bodies—our food, our bodily waste, our sweat—not unlike a barracks. I am fed in my cell, and locked up twenty-three hours a day to prevent me communicating with the other prisoners. I can hear them, though, especially at night, when the lights are turned off and there is nothing to do except lie and listen. Their shouts are like the cries of animals in the jungle, inhuman and mysterious and alarming. Often I hear such howls and screams, such inarticulate beggings for mercy, that I assume the next morning my warders will tell me of some horrendous crime that has been committed overnight. But daylight comes and the place goes on as before.

Thus does the army try to break me.

——

There is some variety in my routine. A couple of times a week I am taken out of La Santé, guarded by two detectives, and returned by Black Maria to the Palace of Justice, where Judge Fabre takes me very slowly through the evidence I have already recounted many times before.

When did Major Esterhazy first come to your attention?

When Fabre has finished for the day, I am often allowed to meet Labori in a nearby office. The great Viking of the Paris bar is officially my attorney now, and through him I am able to keep in touch with the progress of our various battles. The news is mixed. Zola, having lost his appeal, has fled into exile in London. But the magistrate Bertulus has arrested Esterhazy and Four-Fingered Marguerite on charges of forgery. We lodge a formal request with the Public Prosecutor that he should also arrest du Paty for the same offence. But the Prosecutor rules that this is “beyond the scope of M. Bertulus’s investigation.”

Tell me again the circumstances in which you came into possession of the petit bleu …

About a month after my arrest, Fabre, as investigating judge, enters that stage of proceedings, so beloved by the frustrated dramatists of the French legal system, of staging confrontations between witnesses. The ritual is always the same. First I am asked, for the twentieth time, about a particular incident—the reconstruction of the petit bleu, the showing of the pigeon file to Louis, the leaks to the newspapers. Then the judge presses an electric bell and one of my enemies is admitted to recount his version of the same event. Finally I am invited to respond. Throughout these performances the judge scrutinises us carefully, as if he can send out X-rays into our souls and see who is lying. In this way I am brought face-to-face again with Gonse, Lauth, Gribelin, Valdant, Junck, and even the concierge Capiaux. I must say that for men who are at liberty and supposedly triumphant, they look pale and even haggard, especially Gonse, who seems to have developed a nervous tic below his left eye.

The greatest shock, however, is Henry. He enters without looking at me and retells in a monotone his story about seeing Louis and me with the secret file. His voice has lost its old strength and I notice he has shed so much weight that when he starts to sweat he can insert his entire hand between his neck and the collar of his tunic. He has just finished his account when there is a knock at the door and Fabre’s clerk enters to say that there is a telephone call for the judge in the outer office. “It is urgent: the Minister of Justice.”

Fabre says, “If you will excuse me for a moment, gentlemen.”

Henry looks at him anxiously as he leaves. The door closes and we are alone together. Immediately I am suspicious that this is a trap, and glance around to see where a listener might be concealed. But I can see no obvious hiding place, and after a minute or two, curiosity gets the better of me.

I say, “So, Colonel, how is your hand?”

“What, this?” He looks at it and flexes it, as if checking it works. “This is fine.” He turns and stares at me. The weight that has fallen from his cheeks and jowls seems to have stripped away the padding of his defences and left him lined with age; his dark hair is flecked with grey. “And you?”

“I am well enough.”

“Do you sleep?”

The question surprises me. “Yes. Do you?”

He coughs to clear his throat. “Not so well, Colonel—monsieur, I should say. I’m not sleeping much. I’m sick and tired of this whole damned business, I don’t mind telling you.”

“We can agree on that much at least!”

“Is prison bad?”

“Let’s say it smells even worse than our old offices.”

“Ha!” He leans in closer to me, and confides, “To be honest, I’ve asked to be relieved of my duties in intelligence. I’d like to get back to a healthier life with my regiment.”

“Yes, I can see that. And your wife, and your little boy—how are they?”

He opens his mouth to reply, but then stops and gulps, and to my amazement his eyes suddenly fill with tears and he has to look away, just as Fabre comes back into the room.

“So, gentlemen,” he says, “the secret file …”

——

It is after lights-out, about two weeks later. I am lying on my thin prison mattress, no longer able to read, waiting for the cacophony of the night to begin, when there is a sound of bolts being drawn back and keys turned. A strong light is shone in my face.

“Prisoner, follow me.”

La Santé is built according to the latest scientific principles on a hub-and-spoke design—the prisoners’ cells form the spokes, the governor and his staff occupy the hub. I follow the warder all the way down the long corridor towards the administrative block at the centre. He unlocks a door then conducts me around a curving passage to a small windowless visitors’ room with a steel grille set in the wall. He stays outside but leaves the door open.

From behind the grille a voice says, “Picquart?”

The light is dim. It’s hard for me to make him out at first. “Labori? What’s going on?”

“Henry has been arrested.”

“My God. For what?”

“The government has just put out a statement. Listen: ‘Today in the office of the Minister of War, Colonel Henry admitted that he was the author of the document of 1896 in which Dreyfus was named. The Minister of War immediately ordered his arrest and he was taken to the fortress of Mont-Valérien.’ ” He pauses for my reaction. “Picquart? Did you hear that?”

It takes me a moment to absorb it. “What made him confess?”

“Nobody knows yet. This only happened a few hours ago. All we have is the statement.”

“And what about the others? Boisdeffre, Gonse—do we know anything about them?”

“No, but all of them are finished. They staked everything on that letter.” Labori leans in very close to the grille. Through the thick mesh I can see his blue eyes bright with excitement. “Henry would never have forged it purely on his own initiative, would he?”

“It’s unimaginable. If they didn’t directly order it, then at the very least they must have known what he was up to.”

“Exactly! You do realise now we’ll be able to call him as a witness? Just let me get him on the stand! What a prospect! I’ll make him sing about that and everything else he knows—all the way back to the original court-martial.”

“I would love to know what made him admit it after all this time.”

“No doubt we’ll discover in the morning. Anyway, there it is—wonderful news for you to sleep on. I’ll come back again tomorrow. Good night, Picquart.”

“Thank you. Good night.”

I am taken back to my cell.

The animal noises are particularly loud that night, but it isn’t those that keep me awake—it is the thought of Henry in Mont-Valérien.

The next day is the worst I have ever spent in prison. For once I cannot even concentrate to read. I prowl up and down my tiny cell in frustration, my mind constructing and discarding scenarios of what might have happened, what is happening and what could happen next.

The hours crawl past. The evening meal is served. The daylight begins to retreat. At around nine o’clock the warder unlocks my door again and tells me to follow him. How long that walk is! And the curious thing is, right at the very end of it, when I am in the visiting room, and Labori turns his face to the grille, I know exactly what he is going to say, even before I have registered his expression.

He says, “Henry’s dead.”

I stare at him, allowing the fact to settle. “How did it happen?”

“They found him this afternoon in his cell at Mont-Valérien with his throat cut. Naturally they’re saying he killed himself. Strange how that seems to keep happening.” He says anxiously, “Are you all right, Picquart?”

I have to turn away from him. I am not sure why I am weeping—out of tiredness, perhaps, or strain; or perhaps it is for Henry, whom I never could bring myself to hate entirely, despite everything, understanding him too well for that.

I think of Henry often. I have little else to do.

I sit in my cell and ponder the details of his death as they emerge over the weeks that follow. If I can solve this mystery, I reason, then perhaps I can solve everything. But I can only rely on what is reported in the papers and the scraps of gossip that Labori picks up on the legal circuit, and in the end I have to admit that probably I will never know the full truth.

I do know that Henry was forced to admit that the “absolute proof” document was a forgery during a terrible meeting in the Minister of War’s office on 30 August. He could not do otherwise: the evidence was irrefutable. It seems that in response to my accusation of forgery, Cavaignac, the new Minister of War, supremely confident of his own correctness in all matters, ordered that the entire Dreyfus file be checked for authenticity by one of his officers. It took a long while—the file had by now swollen to three hundred and sixty items—and it was while this process was going on that I met Henry for the last time in Fabre’s chambers. I understand now why he seemed so broken: he must have guessed what was coming. Cavaignac’s aide did something that apparently no one else in the General Staff had thought to do in almost two years: he held the “absolute proof” under a strong electric lamp. Immediately he noticed that the heading of the letter, My dear friend, and the signature, Alexandrine, were written on squared paper, the lines of which were bluish-grey, whereas the body of the letter—I have read that a deputy is going to ask questions about Dreyfus …—was on paper whose lines were mauve. It was obvious that a genuine letter that had been pieced together earlier—in fact in June 1894—had been disassembled and then put back together with a forged central section.

Summoned to explain himself, in the presence of Boisdeffre and Gonse, Henry at first tried to bluster, according to the transcript of his interrogation by Cavaignac released by the government:

HENRY: I put the pieces together as I received them.

CAVAIGNAC: I remind you that nothing is graver for you than the absence of an explanation. Tell me what you did.

HENRY: What do you want me to say?

CAVAIGNAC: To give me an explanation why one of the documents is lined in pale violet, the other in blue-grey.

HENRY: I cannot.

CAVAIGNAC: The fact is certain. Reflect on the consequences of my question.

HENRY: What do you wish me to say?

CAVAIGNAC: What you have done.

HENRY: I have not forged papers.

CAVAIGNAC: Come, come! You have put the fragments of one into the other.

HENRY: [After a moment of hesitation] Well, yes, because the two things fitted admirably, I was led to this.

Is the transcript accurate? Labori thinks not, but I have little doubt. Just because the government lies about some things, it doesn’t mean they lie about everything. I can hear Henry’s voice rising off the page better than any playwright could imitate it—bombastic, sulky, wheedling, cunning, stupid.

CAVAIGNAC: What gave you the idea?

HENRY: My chiefs were very uneasy. I wished to pacify them. I wished to restore tranquillity to men’s minds. I said to myself, “Let us add a phrase. Suppose we had a war in our present situation.”

CAVAIGNAC: You were the only one to do this?

HENRY: Yes, Gribelin knew nothing about it.

CAVAIGNAC: No one knew it? No one in the world?

HENRY: I did it in the interest of my country. I was wrong.

CAVAIGNAC: And the envelopes?

HENRY: I swear I did not make the envelopes. How could I have done so?

CAVAIGNAC: So this is what happened? You received in 1896 an envelope with a letter inside, an insignificant letter. You suppressed the letter and fabricated another.

HENRY: Yes.

In the darkness of my cell I play out this scene again and again. I see Cavaignac behind his desk—the overambitious young minister: the fanatic with the temerity to believe he could end the affair once and for all and who now finds himself tripped up by his own hubris. I see Gonse’s hand trembling as he smokes and watches the interrogation. I see Boisdeffre by the window staring into the middle distance, as immutably aloof as one of the stone lions that no doubt guard the gate of his family château. And I see Henry occasionally looking round at his chiefs in mute appeal as the questions rain down on him: Help me! But of course they say nothing.

And then I picture Henry’s expression when Cavaignac—not a soldier but a civilian Minister of War—orders him to be arrested on the spot and taken to Mont-Valérien, where he is locked up in the same rooms that I occupied in the winter. The next day, after a sleepless night, he writes to Gonse (I have the honour of requesting you to agree to come and see me here: I absolutely must speak to you) and to his wife (My adored Berthe, I see that except for you everyone is going to abandon me and yet you know in whose interest I acted).

I visualise him stretched out on his bed at noon, drinking a bottle of rum—which was the last time he was seen alive—and again six hours later, when a lieutenant and an orderly enter the room and find him still lying on the same bed saturated in blood, his body already cold and stiff, his throat slit twice with a razor, which (an odd detail, this) is clenched in his left hand even though he is right-handed.

But between these two scenes, between noon and six—between Henry alive and Henry dead—my imagination fails me. Labori believes he was murdered, like Lemercier-Picard, to keep him quiet, and that his killing was staged to look like a suicide. He cites medical friends of his who state that it is physically impossible for a person to sever their carotid artery on both sides. But I am not convinced that murder would have been necessary, not with Henry. He would have known what was expected of him after Boisdeffre and Gonse both failed to raise their voices in his defence.

You order me to shoot a man and I’ll shoot him.

That afternoon, at the same time as Henry’s lifeblood is flowing out of him, Boisdeffre is writing to the Minister of War:

Minister,

I have just received proof that my trust in Colonel Henry, head of the intelligence service, was not justified. That trust, which was total, led me to be deceived and to declare authentic a document that was not, and to present it to you as such.

In these circumstances, I have the honour of asking you to relieve me of my duties.

Boisdeffre

He retires at once to Normandy.

Three days later Cavaignac also resigns, albeit defiantly (I remain convinced of the guilt of Dreyfus and as resolute as ever to fight against a revision of the trial); Pellieux submits his resignation; Gonse is transferred out of the Ministry of War and goes back to his regiment on half pay.

I assume, like most people, that it is all over: that if Henry could have arranged the forging of one document, it will be accepted that he could have done it many times, and that the case against Dreyfus has collapsed.

But the days pass, Dreyfus stays on Devil’s Island and I remain in La Santé. And gradually it becomes apparent that even now the army will not acknowledge its mistake. I am refused parole. Instead I receive a notification that I will stand trial with Louis in three weeks’ time in an ordinary criminal court for illegally transmitting secret documents.

On the eve of the hearing Labori visits me in prison. Normally he is ebullient, even aggressive; today he looks worried. “I have some bad news, I’m afraid. The army are bringing fresh charges against you.”

“What now?”

“Forgery.”

“They’re accusing me of forgery?”

“Yes, of the petit bleu.”

I can only laugh. “You have to credit them with a sense of humour.”

But Labori refuses to join in. “They will argue that a military investigation into forgery takes precedence over a civil proceeding. It’s a tactic to get you into army custody. My guess is the judge will agree.”

“Well,” I shrug, “I suppose one prison is much like another.”

“That’s precisely where you’re wrong, my friend. The regime at Cherche-Midi is much harsher than here. And I don’t like the thought of you in the clutches of the army—who can tell what accidents might befall you?”

The next day when I am taken into the criminal court of the Seine I ask the judge if I can make a statement. The courtroom is small and jammed with journalists—not just French, but international: I can even see the bald dome and massive side-whiskers of the most famous foreign correspondent in the world, Monsieur de Blowitz of the London Times. It is to the reporters that I address my remarks.

“This evening,” I say, “I may well be taken to Cherche-Midi, so this is probably the last time that I can speak in public before the secret investigation. I want it to be known that if Lemercier-Picard’s shoelaces or Henry’s razor are ever found in my cell, it will be murder, for never would a man such as I, even for one instant, contemplate suicide. I shall face this accusation, my head held high, and with the same serenity that I have always shown before my accusers.”

To my surprise there is loud applause from the reporters, and I am escorted out of the chamber to shouts of “Vive Picquart!” “Vive la verité!” “Vive la justice!”

Labori’s prediction is correct: the army wins the right to deal with me first, and the following day I am taken to Cherche-Midi—to be locked, I am told with relish, in the very same cell in which poor Dreyfus used to bash his head against the wall exactly four years before.

I am kept in solitary confinement, forbidden most visitors and let out for only an hour a day into a tiny yard, six paces square, surrounded by high walls. I crisscross it, back and forth, from corner to corner, and circle the edge, like a mouse trapped in the bottom of a well.

The accusation is that I scratched off the original addressee of the telegram-card and wrote in Esterhazy’s name myself. The offence carries a sentence of five years. The questioning goes on for weeks.

Tell us the circumstances in which you came into possession of the petit bleu …

Fortunately, I haven’t forgotten that I asked Lauth to make photographic copies of the petit bleu soon after it was pieced together: eventually these are fetched and show clearly that the address had not been tampered with at that time; only subsequently was it altered as part of the conspiracy to frame me. Still I am kept in Cherche-Midi. Pauline writes, asking to visit me; I tell her not to—it might get into the papers, and besides, I don’t want her to see me in this condition; I find it easier to endure it alone. Occasionally the boredom is alleviated by trips to court. In November I lay out the whole of my evidence yet again, this time to the twelve senior judges of the Criminal Chamber, who are beginning the civil process of considering whether the verdict against Dreyfus is safe.

My continued detention without trial becomes notorious. Clemenceau, who is allowed to visit me, proposes in L’Aurore “the nomination of Picquart to the post of Grand Prisoner of State, vacant since the Man in the Iron Mask.” At night, after they have turned out my light and I can no longer read, I can hear demonstrations both for and against me in the rue Cherche-Midi. The prison has to be protected by seven hundred troops; the hooves of the cavalry clatter down the cobbled streets. I receive thousands of letters of support, including one from the old Empress Eugénie. So embarrassing does this become to the government that Labori is told by officials of the Ministry of Justice that he should ask the civil courts to intervene and release me. I refuse to permit him to do so: I am more useful as a hostage. Every day that I am locked up, the more desperate and vindictive the army looks.

Months pass, and then on the afternoon of Saturday, 3 June 1899, Labori comes to see me. Outside the sun is shining strongly, penetrating even the grime and bars of the tiny window; I can hear a bird singing. He puts a large and inky palm to the metal grille and says, “Picquart, I want to shake your hand.”

“Why?”

“Must you always be so damned contrary?” He rattles the steel mesh with his long, thick fingers. “Come: for once, just do as I ask.” I place my palm to his and he says quietly, “Congratulations, Georges.”

“On what?”

“The Supreme Court of Appeal has ordered the army to bring Dreyfus back for a retrial.”

I have waited for this news for so long, and yet when it comes I feel nothing. All I can say is, “What reasons did they give?”

“They cite two, both drawn from your evidence: first, that the ‘lowlife D’ letter doesn’t actually refer to Dreyfus and shouldn’t have been shown to the judges without informing the defence, and second, that—how do they put it? Oh yes, here’s the line: ‘facts unknown to the original court-martial tend to show that the bordereau could not have been written by Dreyfus.’ ”

“What language you lawyers talk!” I savour the legalese on my tongue as if it were a delicacy: “ ‘Facts unknown to the original court-martial tend to show …’ And the army can’t appeal against this?”

“No. It’s done. A warship is on its way to pick up Dreyfus now and bring him back for a new court-martial. And this time it won’t be in secret—this time the whole world will be watching.”