An Officer and a Spy

I don’t want to tell Gonse about Esterhazy yet, for three reasons: first, because I know that once that consummate old bureaucrat gets his hands on the case he will want to take control of it and information will start to leak; secondly, because I know how the army works and I wouldn’t put it past him to go behind my back to Henry; and thirdly, and above all, because if I can armour myself with the prior backing of the Chief of the General Staff and the Minister of War, then Gonse will be unable to interfere and I shall be free to follow the trail wherever it leads me. I am not entirely without cunning: how else did I become the youngest colonel in the French army?

Accordingly, on Thursday morning, at the same time as the team in Basel should be making its first contact with the double agent, Cuers, I take the Benefactor file and my private key — the token of my privileged access — and let myself through the wooden door into the garden of the hôtel de Brienne. The grounds, which appeared so magical to me under snow on the day of Dreyfus’s degradation, have a different kind of charm in August. The foliage on the big trees is so thick that the ministry might not exist; the distant sounds of Paris are as drowsy as the drone of bees; the only other person around is an elderly gardener watering a flower bed. As I cross the scorched brown turf I promise myself that if I am ever minister, I shall move my desk out here in the summer, and run the army from under a tree, as Caesar did in Gaul.

I reach the edge of the lawn, cross the gravel, and trot up the shallow pale stone steps that lead to the glass doors of the minister’s residence. I let myself in and ascend the same marble staircase that I climbed at the beginning of my story, pass the same suits of armour and the bombastic painting of Napoleon. I put my head around the door of the minister’s private office and ask one of his orderlies, Captain Robert Calmon-Maison, if it would be convenient for me to have a word with the minister. Calmon-Maison knows better than to ask what it is about, for I am the keeper of his master’s secrets. He goes off to check and returns to tell me that I can be seen immediately.

How quickly one accommodates to power! Not many months ago, I would have been awed at finding myself in the minister’s inner sanctum; now it is just a place of work, and the minister himself merely another soldier-bureaucrat passing through the revolving door of government. The present occupant, Jean-Baptiste Billot, is nudging seventy, and is on his second stint in the office, having held it fourteen years before. He is married to a wealthy and sophisticated woman and his politics are left-radical, yet he looks like an idiot general out of a comic opera — all barrel chest and bristling white moustaches and outraged bulging eyes: naturally, the cartoonists adore him. There’s one other detail about him I know, and is of interest: he dislikes his predecessor, General Mercier, and has done ever since the grand army manoeuvres of 1893, when the younger man commanded the opposing corps and defeated him — a humiliation he has never forgiven.

As I enter, he is standing at the window with his broad back to the room. Without turning round he says, ‘When I watched you coming across that lawn just now, Picquart, I thought to myself: well, here he comes, that bright young colonel with another damn problem! And then I asked myself: why do I need such tribulations at my age? I should be at my country place on a day like this, playing with my grandchildren, not wasting it by talking to you!’

‘We both know, Minister, that you would be bored to death within five minutes, and complaining that we were ruining the country in your absence.’

The massive shoulders shrug. ‘That’s true enough, I suppose. Someone sane must oversee this madhouse.’ He pivots on his heel and waddles across the carpet towards me: an alarming sight for those not used to it, like a charging bull walrus. ‘Well, well, what is it? You look very tense. Sit down, my boy. Do you want a drink?’

‘No, thank you.’ I occupy the same chair that I did when I described the degradation ceremony to Mercier and Boisdeffre. Billot settles himself opposite me and regards me with a piercing eye. The old buffer routine is all an act: he is as sharp and ambitious as a man of half his age. I open the Benefactor file. ‘I’m afraid we appear to have discovered a German spy operating in the army. .’

‘Oh God!’

Yet again I describe Esterhazy’s activities and the operation we have mounted to watch him. I give Billot a few more details than I did Boisdeffre; in particular I tell him about the debriefing mission that is under way in Basel. I show him the petit bleu and the surveillance photographs. But I don’t mention Dreyfus: I know that if I did, it would blot out everything else.