An Officer and a Spy (61 page)

“And yet, you know, the strange truth is I would never have attained it without you.”

“No, my General,” says Dreyfus, “you attained it because you did your duty.”

A novel such as this is heavily dependent on the work of others, and I would like to express my thanks to all whose books have opened up this subject for me. The first general history I read was
The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus
by Jean-Denis Bredin: still the preeminent account for the general reader.
The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair That Divided France
was also immensely useful, and I thank its author, Dr. Ruth Harris of New College, Oxford, for the additional information and advice she gave me. I have also benefited from
Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 1789–1945
by Michael Burns,
Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters
by Louis Begley,
France and the Dreyfus Affair
by Douglas Johnson,
The Dreyfus Affair
by Piers Paul Read and the monumental
Histoire de l’affaire Dreyfus
by Joseph Reinach, which remains indispensable even though it was published in 1908.
Zola: A Life
by Frederick Brown and George Painter’s two-volume life of Proust were also useful.

Among more specialist books, I owe an immense debt to
The Dreyfus Affair: A Chronological History
by George R. Whyte, which has rarely left my side for a year. Another extremely valuable source was
Georges Picquart: dreyfusard, proscrit, minister: La justice par l’exactitude
by Christian Vigouroux, the first biography of Picquart to be published for more than a century, which contains family letters and information drawn from police files. I have been fortunate in being able to benefit from the very latest scholarship on the affair contained in
Le Dossier Secret de l’affaire Dreyfus
by Pierre Gervais, Pauline Peretz and Pierre Stutin. The associated website,
www.affairedreyfus.com
, which went online while I was writing, contains a wealth of information, including links to photographs and transcripts of all the documents in the secret file, recently released by the French Ministry of Defence.

For primary research I read the transcripts of the Zola libel trial, the Rennes court-martial, and the various inquiries and hearings of 1898, 1904, 1905 and 1906; all can now be found online. Most major French newspapers of the period are freely available at the website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France,
www.gallica.bnf.fr
. I also found invaluable the digital archive of the London
Times
, which I accessed through the London Library.

I have quoted extensively from Dreyfus’s own writings, published variously in
Five Years of My Life, The Dreyfus Case
(written with his son, Pierre) and
Carnets, 1899–1907
. Other useful contemporary sources are
My Secret Diary of the Dreyfus Case
by Maurice Paléologue and
L’Affaire Dreyfus: L’Iniquité, la Réparation
by Louis Leblois. Finally,
The Tragedy of Dreyfus
by G. W. Steevens, an eyewitness account of the proceedings at Rennes, contrary to its title, is a comic delight—the affair as written by Jerome K. Jerome—and I have used his version of Bertillon’s insane testimony almost verbatim.

The idea of retelling the story of the Dreyfus case first came up during lunch in Paris with Roman Polanski at the beginning of 2012: I shall always be grateful to him for his generosity and encouragement. I should also like to thank my English-language editors, Jocasta Hamilton of Hutchinson in London and Sonny Mehta of Knopf in New York, for their wise advice and suggestions; thanks too to my literary agent, Michael Carlisle. For many years, my German translator, Wolfgang Müller, has worked on my manuscripts whilst they were still being written, and as usual he has made many suggestions and corrected many mistakes. My French editor, Ivan Nabokov, has also been a great source of support.

Finally, there is one other name to mention. Over the course of twenty-five years of married life—a total achieved just as this book was completed—my wife, Gill Hornby, has been obliged to share our house with successive waves of Nazis, codebreakers, KGB men, hedge fund managers, ghostwriters and assorted ancient Romans;
this time it was officers of the French General Staff. I thank her for her love, tolerance and shrewd literary judgement over a quarter of a century.

All the errors that remain, factual and stylistic, along with the various sleights of hand in narrative and characterisation invariably required to turn fact into fiction, remain my sole responsibility.

Robert Harris is the author of eight best-selling novels:
Fatherland
,
Enigma
,
Archangel
,
Pompeii
,
Imperium
,
The Ghost Writer
,
Conspirata
, and
The Fear Index
. Several of his books have been adapted to film, most recently
The Ghost Writer
, which was directed by Roman Polanski. Harris’s work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. He lives in the village of Kintbury, West Berkshire, with his wife, Gill Hornby.

Other titles available in eBook format by Robert Harris:

The Fear Index
· 978-0-307-95795-5

For more information, please visit
www.aaknopf.com