An Officer and a Spy

I stroke the polished wood of the handrail, smoothing the grain. ‘I wish to say something about the document that General Pellieux has mentioned as absolute proof of Dreyfus’s guilt. If he hadn’t brought it up, I would never have spoken of it, but now I feel I must.’ The clock ticks, a trapdoor seems to open at my feet and I step over the edge at last. ‘It is a forgery.’

The rest is quickly told. When the howling and the shouting have died down, Pellieux steps forward to make a violent attack upon my character: ‘Everything in this case is strange, but the strangest thing of all is the attitude of a man who still wears the French uniform and yet who comes to this bar to accuse three generals of having committed a forgery. .’

On the day the verdict is announced, I am taken by carriage from Mont-Valérien for the final time. The streets around the Palace of Justice are crammed with roughs carrying heavy sticks, and when the jury retires to consider its verdict our group of ‘Dreyfusards’, as we are starting to be called, stands together in the centre of the court, for mutual protection as much as anything else: me, Zola, Perrenx, the Clemenceau brothers, Louis and Labori, Madame Zola and Labori’s strikingly beautiful young Australian wife, Marguerite, who has brought along her two little boys by her previous marriage. ‘This way we’ll all be together,’ she tells me in her strongly accented French. Through the high windows we can hear the noise of the mob outside.

Clemenceau says, ‘If we win, we will not leave this building alive.’

After forty minutes the jury returns. The foreman, a brawny-looking merchant, stands. ‘On my honour and my conscience the declaration of the jury is: as concerns Perrenx, guilty, by a majority vote; as concerns Zola, guilty, by a majority vote.’

There is uproar. The officers are cheering. Everyone is on their feet. The ladies of fashion at the back of the court clamber on to their seats to get a better view.

‘Cannibals,’ says Zola.

The judge tells Perrenx, manager of L’Aurore, that he is sentenced to four months in prison and a fine of three thousand francs. Zola is given the maximum penalty of a year in gaol and a fine of five thousand. The sentences are suspended pending appeal.

As we leave, I pass Henry standing with a group of General Staff officers. He is in the middle of telling a joke. I say to him coldly, ‘My witnesses will be calling on yours in the next few days to make arrangements for our duel; be ready to respond,’ and I am pleased to see that this has the effect, at least briefly, of knocking the smile off his porcine face.

Three days later, on Saturday 26 February, the commandant of Mont-Valérien calls me to his office and leaves me standing at attention while he informs me that I have been found guilty of ‘grave misconduct’ by a panel of senior officers and that I am dismissed from the army forthwith. I will not receive the full pension of a retired colonel but only that of a major: thirty francs per week. He is further authorised to tell me that if I make any comments in public again regarding my period of service on the General Staff, the army will take ‘the severest possible action’ against me.

‘Do you have anything to say?’

‘No, Colonel.’

‘Dismissed!’

At dusk, carrying my suitcase, I am escorted to the gate and left on the cobbled forecourt to make my own way home. I have known no other life except the army since I was eighteen years old. But all that is behind me now, and it is as plain Monsieur Picquart that I walk down the hill to the railway station to catch the train back into Paris.

¹ Zola’s novel about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

21

The next evening I occupy the familiar corner table in the café of the gare Saint-Lazare. It is a Sunday, a quiet time, a lonely place. I am one of only a handful of customers. I have taken precautions getting here — diving into churches, leaving by side doors, doubling back on myself, dodging down alleys — with the result that I am fairly sure no one has followed me. I read my paper, smoke a cigarette and manage to make my beer last until a quarter to eight, by which time it is obvious Desvernine is not coming. I am disappointed but not surprised: given the change in my circumstances since we last met, one can hardly blame him.

I walk outside to catch an omnibus home. The lower deck is crowded. I climb up to the top, where the chill through the open sides is enough to deter my fellow passengers. I sit about halfway down the central bench, my chin on my chest and my hands in my pockets, looking out at the darkened upper storeys of the shops. I have not been there a minute when I am joined by a man in a heavy overcoat and muffler. He leaves a space between us.

He says, ‘Good evening, Colonel.’

I turn in surprise. ‘Monsieur Desvernine.’

He continues to stare straight ahead. ‘You were followed from your apartment.’

‘I thought I’d lost them.’