An Officer and a Spy

Fifteen minutes later the judges returned. Maurel ordered that Dreyfus should be retrieved from his cell. He was conducted back to his place, apparently as unperturbed as ever. Maurel said, ‘We have considered the matter carefully. This case is highly unusual in that it touches on the gravest and most sensitive issues of national security. In these matters one simply cannot be too careful. Our ruling therefore is that all spectators should be excluded immediately and that these hearings should proceed in private.’ A great groan of complaint and disappointment arose. Demange tried to object, but Maurel brought down his gavel. ‘No, no! I have made my decision, Maître Demange! I shall not debate it with you. Clerk, clear the court!’

Demange slumped back. Now he looked grim. It took barely two minutes for the press and public to be ushered out by the gendarmes. When the clerk closed the door, the atmosphere was completely altered. The room was hushed. The carpeted windows seemed to seal us off from the outside world. Only thirteen remained: Dreyfus and his defender and prosecutor, the seven judges, the clerk, Vallecalle, a police official and me.

‘Good,’ said Maurel. ‘Now we can begin to consider the evidence. Would the prisoner please stand? Monsieur Vallecalle, read the indictment. .’

For the next three afternoons, at the end of each day’s session, I would hurry down the stairs, past the waiting journalists — whose questions I would ignore — stride out into the winter dusk, and pace along the icy pavements for seven hundred and twenty metres exactly — I counted them each time — from the rue du Cherche-Midi to the hôtel de Brienne.

‘Major Picquart to see the Minister of War. .’

My briefings of the minister always followed the same pattern. Mercier would listen with close attention. He would ask a few terse and pertinent questions. Afterwards he would send me off to Boisdeffre to repeat what I had just said. Boisdeffre, only recently returned from the funeral of Tsar Alexander III in Moscow, his noble head no doubt stuffed full of matters Russian, would hear me through to the end courteously and mostly without comment. From Boisdeffre I would be taken in a War Ministry carriage to the Élysée Palace. There I would brief the President of the Republic himself, the lugubrious Jean Casimir-Perier — an uncomfortable assignment, as the President had long suspected his Minister of War of scheming behind his back. In fact Casimir-Perier was by this time something of a prisoner himself — cut off in his gilded apartments, ignored by his ministers, reduced to a purely ceremonial role. He made clear his contempt for the army by not once inviting me to sit. His response to my narrative was to punctuate it throughout with sarcastic remarks and snorts of disbelief: ‘It sounds like the plot of a comic opera!’

Privately I shared his misgivings, and they grew as the week progressed. On the first day the witnesses were the six key men who had put together the case against Dreyfus: Gonse, Fabre and d’Aboville, Henry, Gribelin and du Paty. Gonse explained how easily Dreyfus could have got access to the secret documents handed over with the bordereau. Fabre and d’Aboville described his suspicious behaviour while serving in the Fourth Department. Henry testified to the genuineness of the bordereau as evidence retrieved from the German Embassy. Gribelin — drawing on police reports compiled by Guénée — painted a picture of Dreyfus as a womaniser and gambler, which I found frankly unbelievable. But du Paty insisted Dreyfus was driven by ‘animal urges’ and that he was canaille — lowlife — despite his rather prim appearance (Dreyfus simply shook his head at this). Du Paty also alleged the accused had made conscious changes to disguise his handwriting during dictation — an accusation gravely undermined when Demange showed him samples of Dreyfus’s hand, asked him to point out where these transitions occurred, and du Paty was unable to do so.

Taken together, it was not impressive.

At the end of my first report, when Mercier asked me how I thought the prosecution case was looking, I hummed and hawed. ‘Now then, Major,’ he said softly, ‘your honest opinion, please. That’s why I put you in there.’

‘Well, Minister, in my honest view, it’s all very circumstantial. We have shown beyond doubt that the traitor could have been Dreyfus; we have not proved definitely that it was him.’

Mercier grunted but made no further comment. However, the next day when I turned up at the court building for the start of the second day’s evidence, Henry was waiting for me.

He said in an accusing tone, ‘I hear you’ve told the minister our case is looking thin.’

‘Well, isn’t it?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Now, Major Henry, don’t look so offended. Will you join me?’ I offered him a cigarette, which he took grudgingly. I struck a match and lit his first. ‘I didn’t say it was thin, exactly, just not specific enough.’