An Officer and a Spy

The bitterness between Labori and Demange afterwards worsens to such an extent that Labori, white with pain, announces he will not deliver a closing speech: ‘I cannot be a party to a strategy in which I do not believe. If that old fool thinks he can win by being polite to these murdering bastards, let him try it alone.’

As the end of the trial draws near, the Préfecture of Police in Rennes, Dureault, approaches me in the crowded courtyard of the lycée during an adjournment, when everyone is outside stretching their legs. He beckons me to one side and says in a low voice: ‘We have good intelligence, Monsieur Picquart, that the nationalists are planning to arrive in force at the time of the verdict, and that if Dreyfus is acquitted there is liable to be serious violence. In the circumstances, I fear we cannot guarantee your safety, and I would urge you to leave the town before then. I hope you understand.’

‘Thank you, Monsieur Dureault. I appreciate your candour.’

‘One further piece of advice, if I may. I suggest you catch the night train in order to avoid being seen.’

He moves away. I lean against the wall in the sunshine and smoke a cigarette. I shall not be sorry to go. I have been here nearly a month. So has everyone. There are Gonse and Boisdeffre promenading up and down, arm in arm, as if clinging to one another for support. There are Mercier and Billot, sitting on a wall, swinging their legs like schoolboys. There is Madame Henry, the nation’s widow, veiled from head to foot in black, floating across the courtyard like the Angel of Death, on the arm of Major Lauth, whose relationship with her is said to be intimate. There is the stubby, hairy figure of Bertillon, with his suitcase full of diagrams, still insisting that Dreyfus forged his own handwriting in order to produce the bordereau. There is Gribelin, who has found a shadow to stand in. Not everyone is here, of course. There are some ghostly absences — Sandherr, Henry, Lemercier-Picard, Guénée — and a few that are not so ghostly: du Paty, who has avoided giving evidence by insisting he is too ill; Scheurer-Kestner, who really is ill, and said to be about to die from cancer; and Esterhazy, who has gone to earth in the English village of Harpenden. But otherwise here we all are, like the inmates of an asylum, or the passengers on some legal Flying Dutchman, doomed to circle one another, and the world, for ever.

A bell rings, summoning us back into court.

Edmond and I have a farewell supper at Les Trois Marches on the evening of Thursday 7 September. Labori and Marguerite are there, but Mathieu and Demange don’t come. We drink a final toast to victory, raising our glasses in the direction of Mercier’s house, and then we take a taxi to the deserted railway station and board the evening train to Paris. No one sees us leave. The town sinks away into the dark behind us.

The verdict is due on Saturday afternoon, and Aline Ménard-Dorian decides it offers the most wonderful opportunity for a luncheon party. She arranges with her friend the Under-Secretary of State for Posts and Telegraphs to have a telephone line left open from her drawing room to the Bourse de Commerce in Rennes — we will thus have the result almost as soon as it is announced — and invites all her usual salon, plus a few others, to a buffet at one o’clock in the rue de la Faisanderie.

I don’t feel much like going, but her invitation is so insistent — ‘it would be utterly wonderful to have you with us, my dearest Georges, to share in your moment of glory’ — that I feel it would be churlish to refuse; besides, I have nothing else to do.

Back from exile, Zola attends, along with Georges and Albert Clemenceau, Jean Jaurès, and de Blowitz of the London Times; there must be fifty or sixty of us, including Blanche de Comminges with a young man named d’Espic de Ginestet, whom she introduces as her fiancé. A liveried footman crouches by the telephone in the corner, checking occasionally with the operator to ensure the line is still working. At three fifteen, after we have finished eating — or not eating, in my case — he signals to our host, Paul Ménard, Aline’s husband, an industrialist of radical sympathies, and hands him the instrument. Ménard listens gravely for a moment and then announces, ‘The judges have retired to consider their verdict.’ He returns the telephone to the white-gloved hand of the footman.

I go out on to the terrace to be alone, but several other guests follow me. De Blowitz, whose spherical body and bulbous ruddy features give him the look of a character out of Dickens — Bumble, perhaps, or Pickwick — asks me if I can remember how long the judges spent deliberating at the first court martial.

‘Half an hour.’

‘And would you say, monsieur, that the longer they take, the more likely the outcome is to be favourable to the accused, or the reverse?’

‘I really couldn’t answer that. Excuse me.’