An Officer and a Spy

Up to now, most of the letters in the file have been copies, presumably because the originals were delivered to the addressee. But from this point on the majority of the pages I turn are in Dreyfus’s own hand. His descriptions of the voyage — in an unheated cell on an upper deck, open to the elements, through violent winter storms, watched night and day by warders with revolvers who refuse to speak to him — have been retained by the censors in the Colonial Ministry. On the eighth day the weather began to grow warmer. Still Dreyfus did not know his destination and no one was allowed to tell him; his guess was Cayenne. On the fifteenth day of the voyage he wrote to Lucie that the warship had at last anchored, off three small humps of rock and vegetation in the middle of the ocean’s wastes: Royal Island, St Joseph’s Island and (tiniest of all) Devil’s Island. To his astonishment, he discovered that the latter was intended for him alone.

Dearest Lucie. . My darling Lucie. . Lucie, dearest. . Darling wife. . I love you. . I yearn for you. . I think of you. . I send you the echo of my deep affection. . So much emotion and time and energy expended in the hope of some connection, only for it to end up in the darkness of this file! But maybe it is better, I think, as I skim the increasingly desperate complaints, that Lucie doesn’t read all of this: isn’t aware that after the Saint-Nazaire dropped anchor in the tropics, her husband had to spend four days locked in his steel box under the ferocious sun without once being allowed on deck, or that when eventually he was landed on Royal Island — while the old leper colony on Devil’s Island was demolished and his new quarters prepared — he was locked in a cell with closed shutters and was not allowed out for a month.

My dear,

At last, after thirty days of close confinement, they came to remove me to Devil’s Island. By day I am able to walk about in a space a few hundred metres square, followed at every step by warders with rifles; at nightfall (six o’clock) I am locked in my hut, four metres square, closed by an iron grille, before which relays of warders watch me all night long. My rations are half a loaf of bread a day, one third of a kilo of meat three times a week and on other days tinned bacon. To drink I have water. I must gather wood, light a fire, cook my own food, clean my clothes and try to dry them in this humid climate.

It is impossible for me to sleep. This cage, before which the guard walks up and down like a phantom in my dreams, the torment of the vermin that infest me, and the agony in my heart all conspire to make rest impossible.

There was a deluge of rain this morning. When there was an interval I made the round of the small portion of the little island which is reserved to me. It is a barren place; there are a few banana trees and cocoa palms, and dry soil from which basaltic rock emerges everywhere, and that restless ocean which is always howling and muttering at my feet!