An Officer and a Spy (56 page)

“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:

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.