An Officer and a Spy

‘It can’t be both, my darling,’ I correct her, ever the tutor, ‘because that would be illogical.’ I am standing at the window with the curtain wrapped around me like a toga, looking across the embankment to the Île Saint-Louis. A boat glides past, ploughing a glossy furrow in the black river, its deck lit up as if for a party but deserted. I am trying to concentrate on this moment, to file it away in my memory, so that if anyone ever asks me, ‘When were you content?’ I can answer, ‘There was an evening with a girl at the Tour d’Argent. .’

‘Is it true,’ asks Blanche suddenly from the bed behind me, ‘that Armand du Paty had some kind of hand in the Dreyfus business?’

The moment freezes, vanishes. I don’t need to turn round. I can see her reflection in the window. Her right foot is still describing its ceaseless circle. ‘Where did you hear that?’

‘Oh, just something Aimery said tonight.’ She rolls over quickly and stabs out her cigarette. ‘In which case, it means of course that the poor Jew is bound to turn out to be innocent.’

This is the first time anyone has suggested to me that Dreyfus might not be guilty. Her flippancy shocks me. ‘It’s not a subject to joke about, Blanche.’

‘Darling, I’m not! I’m absolutely serious!’ She thumps the pillow into shape and lies back with her hands clasped behind her head. ‘I thought it was odd at the time, the way he had his insignia torn off publicly and was marooned on a desert island — all a little too much, no? I should have guessed Armand du Paty was behind it! He may dress like an army officer, but beneath that tunic beats the heart of a romantic lady novelist.’

I laugh. ‘Well, I must bow to your superior knowledge of what goes on beneath his tunic, my dear. But I happen to know more than you about the Dreyfus case, and believe me, there were many other officers involved in that inquiry apart from your former lover!’

She pouts at me in the glass; she doesn’t like being reminded of the lapse of taste that was her affair with du Paty. ‘Georges, you look exactly like Jove standing there. Be a Good God and come back to bed. .’

The exchange with Blanche unsettles me very slightly. The tiniest speck of — no, I shall not call it doubt, exactly — let us say curiosity lodges in my mind, and not so much about Dreyfus’s guilt as his punishment. Why, I ask myself, do we persist in this absurd and expensive rigmarole of imprisonment, which requires four or five guards to be stranded with him in silence on his tiny island? What is our policy? How many hours of bureaucratic time — including mine — are to be tied up in the endless administration, surveillance and censorship his punishment entails?

I keep these thoughts to myself as the weeks and months pass. I continue to receive reports from Guénée on the monitoring of Lucie and Mathieu Dreyfus; it yields nothing. I read their letters to the prisoner (My good dear husband, What endless hours, what painful days we have experienced since this disaster struck its stunning blow. .) and his replies, which are mostly not delivered (Nothing is so depressing, nothing so exhausts the energy of heart and mind as these long agonising silences, never hearing human speech, seeing no friendly face, nor even one that shows sympathy. .). I am also copied into the regular dispatches from the Colonial Ministry’s officials in Cayenne, monitoring the convict’s health and morale: The prisoner was asked how he was. ‘I am well for the moment,’ he replied. ‘It is my heart that is sick. Nothing. .’ and here he broke down and wept for a quarter of an hour. (2 July 1895)

The prisoner said: ‘Colonel du Paty de Clam promised me, before I left France, to make enquiries into the matter; I should not have thought that they could take so long. I hope that they will soon come to a head.’ (15 August 1895)

On receiving no letter from his family, the prisoner wept and said, ‘For ten months now I have been suffering horrors.’ (31 August 1895)