An Officer and a Spy

23

I am released from gaol the following Friday, on the same day that Dreyfus is disembarked from Devil’s Island and begins the long voyage back to France aboard the warship Sfax. In light of the Supreme Court ruling, all charges against me are dropped. Edmond is waiting for me with his latest toy, a motorcar, parked outside the prison gates to drive me back to Ville-d’Avray. I refuse to speak to the journalists who surround me on the pavement.

The abrupt change in my fortunes disorientates me. The colours and noises of Paris in the early summer, the sheer aliveness of it, the smiling faces of my friends, the lunches and dinners and receptions that have been organised in my honour—all this after the solitary gloom and stale stink of my cell is overwhelming. It is only when I am with other people that I realise how much I have been affected. I find making conversation with more than one person bewildering; my voice is reedy in my ears; I am breathless. When Edmond takes me up to my room, I am unable to climb the stairs without pausing on every third or fourth step and clinging on to the handrail: the muscles that control my knees and ankles have atrophied. In the mirror I look pale and fat. Shaving, I discover white hairs in my moustache.

Edmond and Jeanne invite Pauline to stay and tactfully give her the room next to mine. She holds my hand under the table during dinner and afterwards, when the household is asleep, she comes into my bed. The softness of her body is both familiar and strange, like the memory of something once lived and lost. She is finally divorced; Philippe has been posted abroad at his request; she has her own apartment; the girls are living with her.

We lie in the candlelight, facing each other.

I stroke the hair from her face. There are lines around her eyes and mouth that weren’t there before. I have known her since she was a girl, I realise. We have grown old together. I am suddenly overwhelmed by tenderness towards her. “So you’re a free woman?”

“I am.”

“Would you like me to ask you to marry me?”

A pause.

“Not particularly.”

“Why not?”

“Because, my darling, if that is how you choose to pose the question, I don’t think there’s much point, do you?”

“I’m sorry. I’m not much used to any sort of conversation, let alone this kind. Let me try again. Will you marry me?”

“No.”

“Seriously, you’re refusing me?”

She takes her time answering. “You’re not the marrying sort, Georges. And now I’m divorced I realise that neither am I.” She kisses my hand. “You see? You’ve taught me how to be alone. Thank you.”

I am not sure how to respond.

“If that’s what you want …?”

“Oh yes, I’m perfectly content as we are.”

And so I am denied a thing I never really wanted. Yet why is it I feel obscurely robbed? We lie in silence, and then she says, “What are you going to do now?”

“Get fit again, I hope. Look at pictures. Listen to music.”

“And afterwards?”

“I’d like to force the army to take me back.”

“Despite the way they’ve behaved?”

“It’s either that or I let them get away with it. And why should I?”

“So people must be made to pay?”

“Absolutely. If Dreyfus is set free, it follows that the whole of the army leadership is rotten. There will be some arrests, I shouldn’t wonder. This is only the beginning of a war which may go on for some time. Why? You think I’m wrong?”

“No, but I think perhaps you are in danger of becoming an obsessive.”

“If I weren’t an obsessive, Dreyfus would still be on Devil’s Island.”

She looks at me. Her expression is impossible to interpret. “Would you mind blowing out the candle, darling? I’m suddenly very tired.”

We both lie awake in the darkness. I pretend to fall asleep. After a few minutes she gets out of bed. I hear her slip on her peignoir. The door opens and I see her for a moment silhouetted in the faint glow from the landing, and then she vanishes in the darkness. Like me, she has got used to sleeping alone.

Dreyfus is landed in the middle of the night in a running sea on the coast of Brittany. He cannot be brought back to Paris for his retrial; it is considered too dangerous. Instead he is taken under cover of darkness to the Breton town of Rennes, where the government announces that his new court-martial will be held, a safe three hundred kilometres to the west of Paris. The opening day of the hearings is fixed for Monday, 7 August.

Edmond insists on coming with me to Rennes, in case I need protection, even though I assure him there’s no need: “The government has already told me I’ll be provided with a bodyguard.”

“All the more reason to have someone around who you can trust.”

I don’t argue. There is an ugly, violent atmosphere. The President has been attacked at the races by an anti-Semitic aristocrat wielding a cane. Zola and Dreyfus have been burned in effigy. The Libre Parole is offering discounted fares to its readers to encourage them to travel to Rennes and break a few Dreyfusard heads. When Edmond and I leave for the railway station at Versailles early on Saturday morning, we are both carrying guns and I feel as though I am on a mission into enemy territory.

At Versailles, we are met by a four-man bodyguard: two police inspectors and two gendarmes. The train, which originated in Paris, pulls in soon after nine, packed from end to end with journalists and spectators heading for the trial. The police have reserved us the rear compartment in the first-class section and insist on sitting between me and the door. I feel as though I am back in custody. People come to gawp at me through the glass partition. It is stiflingly hot. There is a flash as someone tries to take a photograph. I stiffen. Edmond puts his hand on mine. “Easy, Georges,” he says quietly.

The journey drags interminably. It is late in the afternoon by the time we pull into Rennes, a town of seventy thousand but without any suburbs as far as I can see. One minute the view is woodland and water meadows and a barge being pulled along a wide river by a horse, and then suddenly it is factory chimneys and stately houses of grey and yellow stone with blue slate roofs, trembling in the haze of heat. The two inspectors jump out ahead of us to check the platform, then Edmond and I clamber down, followed by the gendarmes. We are marched quickly through the station towards a pair of waiting cars. I am vaguely aware of a flurry of recognition in the crowded ticket hall, cries of “Vive Picquart!” met by a few countering jeers, and then we are into the cars and driving up a wide, tree-lined avenue filled with hotels and cafés.

We have barely travelled three hundred metres when one of the inspectors, sitting next to the driver, turns round in his seat and says, “That is where the trial will be held.”

I know that the venue has been transferred to a school gymnasium in order to accommodate the press and public, and for some reason I have pictured a drab municipal lycée. But this is a fine building, a symbol of provincial pride, almost like a chateau: four storeys of high windows, pink brick and pale stone, capped by a tall roof. Gendarmes guard the perimeter; workmen unload a cart full of timber.

We turn a corner.

“And that,” adds the inspector a moment later, “is the military prison where Dreyfus is being held.”

It lies just across the street from the side entrance to the school. The driver slows and I glimpse a large gate set into a high, spiked wall, with the barred windows of a fortress just visible behind it; in the road, mounted cavalry and foot soldiers face a small crowd of onlookers. As a connoisseur of prisons, I would say it looks grim; Dreyfus has been in there a month.

Edmond says, “Odd to think he’s so close to us, poor fellow. I wonder what sort of shape he’s in.”

That’s what everyone wants to know. That is what has drawn three hundred journalists from across the globe to this sleepy corner of France; has led to the engagement of special telegraph operators to handle what are anticipated to be some two-thirds of a million words of copy per day; has obliged the authorities to equip the Bourse de Commerce with a hundred and fifty desks for reporters; has lured cinematographers to set up their tripods outside the military gaol in the hope of recording a few seconds of jerky images of the prisoner crossing the yard. That is why Queen Victoria has sent the Lord Chief Justice of England to observe the opening of the trial.

Until now, only four outsiders have been permitted to see him since his return to France: Lucie and Mathieu and his two lawyers, the faithful Edgar Demange, attorney at the first court-martial, and Labori, who has been brought in by Mathieu to sharpen the attack on the army. I have not spoken to them. All I know of the prisoner’s condition is what I read in the press:

On Dreyfus’s arrival at Rennes, the Préfet sent word to Mme Dreyfus that she could see him that morning. Accordingly at 8:30, her father, mother and brother walked with her to the prison. She alone was admitted to his cell on the first storey, and she remained till 10:15. A captain of the gendarmerie was present, but discreetly kept at a distance. She is said to have found him less altered than she expected, but she seemed much dejected on leaving the prison.

Edmond has rented rooms in a quiet residential street, the rue de Fougères, in a pretty, white-shuttered, wisteria-covered house owned by Madame Aubry, a widow. A tiny front garden is separated from the road by a low wall. A gendarme is on guard outside. The house stands on a hill only a kilometre from the courtroom. Because of the summer heat, the hearings are scheduled to begin at seven and finish at lunchtime; our intention is to walk there early each morning.

On Monday, I get up at five. The sun hasn’t risen but it is light enough for me to shave. I dress carefully in a black frock coat with the ribbon of the Legion of Honour in my buttonhole; the bulge of the Webley in my shoulder holster is barely visible. I pick up my cane and a high silk hat, knock on Edmond’s door, and together we set off down the hill towards the river, trailed by two policemen.

The houses we pass are solid, prosperous bourgeois villas, their shutters tightly closed; nobody is awake up here. Down at the bottom of the hill, along the brick embankments of the river, laundrywomen in lace caps are already on the steps tipping out baskets of dirty washing, while three men wearing harnesses strain to drag a barge piled with scaffolding and ladders. They turn to watch us as we pass—two gentlemen in top hats followed by two gendarmes—but without curiosity, as if such a sight is commonplace at this hour of the morning.

The sun is up by now; it’s already hot; the river an opaque algae-green. We cross a bridge and turn towards the lycée, to be greeted by a double line of mounted gendarmes drawn up across the empty street. Our papers are checked and we are directed to where a small crowd queues to pass through a narrow door. We go up a few stone steps, through another doorway, past a cordon of infantry with fixed bayonets, and abruptly we are in the courtroom.

It is twenty metres long, perhaps, by fifteen wide, and two storeys high, filled with clear Breton daylight that pours in on both sides through a double tier of windows. The airy space is thronged with several hundred people. At the far end is a stage with a table and seven crimson-backed chairs; on the wall behind them a white plaster Christ nailed to a black wooden cross; below them, facing each other across the well of the court, the desks and chairs of the prosecution and defence; on both sides, running the length of the hall, the jammed narrow tables and benches of the press, whose numbers dominate the room; and at the back, behind another line of infantry, the public. The central section is reserved for the witnesses, and here we all are again—Boisdeffre, Gonse, Billot, Pellieux, Lauth, Gribelin. We carefully avoid one another’s gaze.

“Excuse me,” rasps a quiet voice at my back that raises the hairs on my neck. I stand aside and Mercier edges past me, without giving me a look. He walks up the aisle and takes a seat between Gonse and Billot, and immediately the generals begin a whispered conclave. Boisdeffre looks shattered, vacant—he is said to have become a recluse; Billot strokes his moustache and seems bemused; Gonse nods, obsequious; Pellieux has his back half turned. It is Mercier, now on the retired list, gesturing with his fist, who is suddenly the dominant figure again; he has assumed the leadership of the army’s cause. In this affair there must be a guilty party, he has declared to the press. And that guilty party is either Dreyfus or me. Since it is not me, it is Dreyfus. Dreyfus is a traitor. I will prove it. His leathery masklike face briefly turns in my direction; the gun-slit eyes are momentarily trained on mine.

It is almost seven. I take a seat just behind Mathieu Dreyfus, who turns and shakes my hand. Lucie nods to me, her face as pale as a midday moon, and manages a brief, strained smile. The lawyers enter clad in their black robes and their strange conical black hats, the giant figure of Labori gesturing with elaborate courtesy for the older Demange to go ahead of him. Then a cry from the back of the court—“Present arms!”—a crash of fifty boots stamping to attention, and the judges file in, led by the diminutive Colonel Jouaust. He wears a bushy white moustache even larger than Billot’s, so huge the top of his face seems to peer over it. He mounts the stage and takes the central chair. His voice is dry and hard: “Bring in the accused.”

The sergeant usher marches to a door near the front of the court, his tread very loud in the sudden silence. He opens the door and two men step through. One is the escorting officer and the other is Dreyfus. The courtroom gasps, I among them, for he is an old man—a little old man, with a stiff-limbed walk and a baggy tunic his frame is too shrunken to fill. His trousers flap around his ankles. He moves jerkily into the middle of the courtroom, pauses at the couple of steps that lead to the platform where his lawyers sit, as if to summon his strength, then mounts them with difficulty, salutes the judges with a white-gloved hand and takes off his cap to reveal a skull almost entirely bald, except for a fringe of silver hair at the back which hangs over his collar. He is told to sit while the registrar reads out the orders constituting the court, then Jouaust says, “Accused—stand.”

He struggles back to his feet.

“What is your name?”

In the silent courtroom the response is barely audible: “Alfred Dreyfus.”

“Age?”

“Thirty-nine.” That draws another shocked gasp.

“Place of birth?”

“Mulhouse.”

“Rank?”

“Captain, breveted to the General Staff.” Everyone is leaning forward, straining to hear. It is difficult to understand him: he seems to have forgotten how to formulate his words; there is a whistling sound through the gaps in his teeth.

After various bits of legal procedure, Jouaust says, “You are accused of the crime of high treason, of having delivered to an agent of a foreign power the documents that are specified in the memorandum called the bordereau. The law gives you the right to speak in your defence. Here is the bordereau.”

He nods to a court official, who hands it to the prisoner. Dreyfus studies it. He is trembling, appears close to breaking down. Finally, in that curious voice of his—flat even when charged with emotion—he says: “I am innocent. I swear it, Colonel, as I affirmed in 1894.” His stops; his struggle to maintain his composure is agony to watch. “I can bear everything, Colonel, but once more, for the honour of my name and my children, I am innocent.”

For the rest of the morning, Jouaust takes Dreyfus through the contents of the bordereau, item by item. His questions are harsh and accusatory; Dreyfus answers them in a dry and technical manner, as if he were an expert witness in somebody else’s trial: no, he knew nothing of the hydraulic brake of the 120 millimetre cannon; yes, he could have acquired information about covering troops, but he had never asked for it; the same was true of the plans for invading Madagascar—he could have asked but he didn’t; no, the colonel is mistaken—he wasn’t in the Third Department when changes were made to artillery formations; no, the officer who claimed to have lent him a copy of the firing manual was also mistaken—he had never had it in his possession; no, he had never said that France would be better off under German rule, certainly not.

The double tier of windows heats the courtroom like a greenhouse. Everyone is sweating apart from Dreyfus, perhaps because he is accustomed to the tropics. The only time he shows real emotion again is when Jouaust brings up the old canard that he confessed on the day of his degradation to Captain Lebrun-Renault.

“I did not confess.”

“But there were other witnesses.”

“I do not remember any.”

“Well then, what conversation did you have with him?”

“It was not a conversation, Colonel. It was a monologue. I was about to be led before a huge crowd that was quivering with patriotic anguish, and I said to Captain Lebrun-Renault that I wished to cry out my innocence in the face of everybody. I wanted to say that I was not the guilty man. There was no confession.”

At eleven, the session ends. Jouaust announces that the next four days of hearings will be held behind closed doors, so that the judges can be shown the secret files. The public and press will be barred, and so will I. It will be at least a week before I am called to give evidence.

Dreyfus is escorted back the way he came without once looking in my direction, and the rest of us file out into the brilliant August heat, the journalists all running away down the street towards the special telegraph operators in their haste to be first with their description of the Prisoner of Devil’s Island.

Edmond, with characteristic attention to the finer things in life, has found a restaurant close to where we are staying—“a hidden gem, Georges, it might almost be Alsace”—Les Trois Marches in the rue d’Antrain, a rustic inn on the edge of open country. We walk to it for lunch, labouring up the hill in the broiling sun, trailed by my bodyguards. The auberge is a farmhouse, run by a couple named Jarlet, with a garden, orchard, stables, barn and pigsty. We sit out on benches under a tree drinking cider, buzzed by wasps, discussing the events of the morning. Edmond, who has never seen Dreyfus before, is remarking on his curious ability to repel sympathy—“Why is it that whenever he proclaims ‘I am innocent,’ even though one knows for certain that he is, the words somehow lack conviction?”—when I notice a group of gendarmes standing talking across the street.

Jarlet is laying out a plate of pâté de campagne. I point the gendarmes out to him. “Two of those gentlemen are with us, but who are the others?”

“They are standing guard outside the house of General de Saint-Germain, monsieur. He commands the army in this area.”

“Does he really require police protection?”

“No, monsieur, the guards are not for him. They are for the man who is staying in his house—General Mercier.”

“Did you hear that, Edmond? Mercier is living across the road.”

Edmond shouts with laughter. “That’s wonderful! We must establish a permanent bridgehead in the vicinity of the enemy.” He turns to the patron. “Jarlet, from now on, I’ll pay to reserve a table for ten, for every lunch and dinner, for as long as the trial lasts. Is that all right with you?”

It is indeed all right with M. Jarlet, and from that time on begins the “Conspiracy of Les Trois Marches,” as the right-wing papers call it, with all the leading Dreyfusards gathering here to eat the Jarlets’ good plain bourgeois fare each day at noon and seven—regulars include the Clemenceau brothers, the socialists Jean Jaurès and René Viviani, the journalists Lacroix and Séverine, the “intellectuals” Octave Mirabeau, Gabriel Monod and Victor Basch. Quite why Mercier needs a bodyguard to protect him from such roughs as these is not at all clear—does he imagine that Professor Monod is going to attack him with a rolled-up copy of the Revue Historique? On Wednesday I ask for my own police protection to be withdrawn. Not only do I view them as unnecessary, I suspect they pass on information about me to the authorities.

All week people come and go to Les Trois Marches. Mathieu Dreyfus puts in an appearance, but never Lucie, who is staying with a widow in the town, while Labori, who has lodgings close to us, walks up the hill most evenings with Marguerite after he has finished consultations with his client in the military prison.

“How is he bearing up?” I ask one night.

“Amazingly well, all things considered. My God, but he’s a strange one, isn’t he? I’ve seen him almost every day for a month, yet I don’t believe I know him any better now than I did in the first ten minutes. Everything is at a distance with him. I suppose that’s how he has survived.”

“And how are the secret sessions going? What does the court make of the intelligence files?”

“Ah, how the military adore all that stuff! Hundreds and hundreds of pages of it—love letters and buggers’ billets-doux and gossip and rumours and forgeries and false trails that lead nowhere. It’s like the Sibylline Books: you can put the leaves together however you like and read whatever you want into them. Yet I doubt if more than twenty lines apply directly to Dreyfus.”

We are standing smoking cigarettes a little way apart from the others. It is dusk. There is laughter behind us. Jaurès’s voice, which was created by nature for talking to an audience of ten thousand rather than a table of ten, booms out over the garden.

Labori says suddenly, “I see we are being watched.”

Across the road, in one of the upper windows, Mercier is plainly visible, gazing down at us.

“He has just had his old comrades round to dinner,” I say. “Boisdeffre, Gonse, Pellieux, Billot—they are in and out of there constantly.”

“I hear he’s planning to run for the Senate. This trial is a great platform for him. If it weren’t for his political ambitions, their side would lack direction.”

“If it weren’t for his political ambitions,” I reply, “the whole thing might never have happened. He thought Dreyfus could be his ticket to the presidency.”

“He still does.”

Mercier is scheduled to give his evidence on Saturday—the first day that the press and public will be allowed back into the courtroom since the opening session. His appearance is only slightly less eagerly awaited than that of Dreyfus himself. He arrives in court wearing the full undress uniform of a general—red tunic, black trousers, with a kepi of crimson and gold. On his breast glints the medal of a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour. When he is called, he rises from his place among the military witnesses and walks to the front of the court carrying a black leather document case. He stands no more than two paces from where Dreyfus is sitting, but doesn’t once glance in his direction.

“My deposition,” he says, in his quiet, hoarse voice, “will have to be a trifle long.”

Jouaust says unctuously, “Usher, fetch a chair for the general.”

Mercier speaks for three hours, producing document after document from his black leather case—among them the “lowlife D” letter, which he continues to insist refers to Dreyfus, and even the fabricated Guénée reports about a spy in the intelligence department, although he leaves out the name of the source, Val Carlos. He passes them up to Jouaust, who hands them along the line of judges. After a while, Labori leans back in his chair and cranes his head to look at me, as if to say, “What is this idiot doing?” I am careful to maintain a neutral expression, but I think he is right: by introducing the evidence of the secret dossier into open court, Mercier is exposing a dangerous flank for Labori to attack in cross-examination.

On and on drones Mercier, like some paranoid, illiterate editorial in La Libre Parole seeing Jewish conspiracies everywhere. He alleges that thirty-five million francs have been raised to free Dreyfus in England and Germany. He quotes as if it is fact what Dreyfus is supposed to have said about the occupation of Alsace-Lorraine, and has always denied: “For us Jews it is not the same thing; where we are, our God is.” He drags up the old myth of the “confession” before the degradation. He spins the most fantastical explanation as to why he showed the secret dossier to the judges at the court-martial, claiming that because of the Dreyfus controversy the country was “within two finger-breadths of war” with Germany—so much so that he had ordered General Boisdeffre to be ready to dispatch the telegrams that would trigger a full mobilisation while he, Mercier, sat with President Casimir-Perier in the Élysée Palace until half past midnight waiting to see if the German emperor would back down.

Casimir-Perier, who is sitting with the witnesses, actually rises to challenge this lie, and when Jouaust won’t permit him to intervene, he shakes his head at such nonsense, which causes a sensation in the court.

Mercier takes no notice. It is the old paranoia about Germany, the lingering stench of defeatism after 1870. He presses on. “Now,” he says, “at that moment, should we have desired war? Should I, as Minister of War, have desired for my country a war undertaken in these conditions? I did not hesitate to say ‘no.’ On the other hand, was I to leave the court-martial in ignorance of the charges against Dreyfus? These documents”—he pats the case on the stand in front of him—“then formed what was called the secret dossier, and I regarded it as imperative that the judges should see them. Could I not have relied on the comparative secrecy of a trial behind closed doors? No, I have no confidence in closed doors! Sooner or later the press manages to get hold of all it wants and publishes it, despite the threats of the government. In these circumstances, I placed the secret documents in a sealed envelope and sent them to the president of the court-martial.”

Dreyfus is sitting straight up in his chair now, looking at Mercier with intense astonishment, and something else, something beyond amazement—for the first time: burning anger.

Mercier does not see it because he is carefully not looking at him. “Let me add one last word,” he says. “I have not reached my age without having had the sad experience of learning that all that is human is liable to error. But if I am weak-minded, as Monsieur Zola has alleged, I am at least an honest man and the son of an honest man. And if the slightest doubt had ever crossed my mind, I should be the first to declare it”—and now finally he turns in his chair to look at Dreyfus—“and to say, before you all, to Captain Dreyfus, ‘I have blundered in good faith.’ ”

The cheap theatrical touch is too much for the prisoner to bear. Suddenly, and incredibly, without the least trace of stiffness in his legs, Dreyfus springs to his feet, clenches his fist and swings round at Mercier as if to strike him, roaring in a terrible voice, half cry and half sob: “That is what you should say!”

The whole court draws in its breath. The officials are too stunned to move. Only Mercier seems unaffected. He ignores the figure looming over him. “I would say to Captain Dreyfus,” he repeats patiently, “ ‘I have been honestly mistaken. I acknowledge it in good faith and will do all in my power to repair a terrible mistake.’ ”

Dreyfus is still on his feet, staring down at him, his arm raised. “It is your duty!”

There is a round of applause, mostly from the journalists; I join in.

Mercier smiles slightly, as if confronted by overemotional children, shakes his head, waits for the demonstration to die down. “No, it is not so. My conviction since 1894 has not undergone the slightest change. In fact it has actually been strengthened, not only by a thorough study of the secret dossier but by the pathetic case that has been made for Dreyfus’s innocence by his supporters, despite all the frantic efforts and the millions spent on his behalf. There. I have done.”

With that, Mercier closes his leather case, stands, bows to the judges, collects his kepi from the shelf in front of him, tucks the documents under his arm, and turns to walk out of the court, to a loud accompaniment of jeers. As he passes the press benches, one of the reporters—it is Georges Bourdon of Le Figaro—hisses at him, “Assassin!”

Mercier stops and points at him. “This fellow just called me an assassin!”

The army prosecutor rises. “Monsieur President, I demand that man be arrested for contempt.”

Jouaust calls to the sergeant-at-arms, “Take him into custody!”

As soldiers close in on Bourdon, Labori rises. “Monsieur President, excuse me, but I would like to question the witness.”

“Of course, Maître Labori,” replies Jouaust, coolly checking his watch, “but it is already after twelve, and tomorrow is Sunday. You will have your chance at six-thirty on Monday morning. Until then the court is adjourned.”