An Officer and a Spy

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: