An Officer and a Spy

by Robert Harris

There is a large ornate clock to my right. I can hear it ticking in the silence of the court whenever I pause between my points, such is the intensity with which my audience is concentrating. And from time to time, out of the corner of my eye, I can see the doubts beginning to creep across the faces not just of the jurors but even of some of the General Staff officers. Pellieux, less confident now, keeps rising to interrupt me, venturing further and further out on to thin ice, until he makes a significant mistake. I am in the process of pointing out that the concluding phrase of the bordereau – ‘I am leaving on manoeuvres’ – also indicates that its author was not working in the Ministry of War, because the General Staff’s manoeuvres are in the autumn and the bordereau was supposedly written in April, when Pellieux comes forward again.

  ‘But the bordereau wasn’t written in April.’

  Before I can answer, Labori is on him in a flash. ‘Yes it was – or at least so it has always been said by the ministry.’

  ‘Not at all,’ insists Pellieux, although there is a tremor of uncertainty in his voice. ‘I appeal to General Gonse.’

  Gonse comes forward and says, ‘General Pellieux is correct: the bordereau must have been written around the month of August, since it contains a reference to a note on the invasion of Madagascar.’

  Now Labori pounces on Gonse. ‘So when exactly was the note on Madagascar drawn up by the General Staff?’

  ‘In August.’

  ‘Wait.’ Labori searches through his bundle of documents and pulls out a sheet of paper. ‘But in the original indictment of Captain Dreyfus, which was read out at his trial, it is alleged that he copied the Madagascar note in February, when he was in the relevant department. I quote: “Captain Dreyfus could easily have procured it then.” How do you reconcile those two dates?’

  Gonse’s mouth flaps open in dismay. He looks at Pellieux. ‘Well, the note was written in August. I don’t actually know if there was a note in February . . .’

  ‘Ah, now, gentlemen!’ mocks Labori. ‘You see how important it is to be exact?’

  It is such a trivial discrepancy, and yet one can feel the change of mood inside the courtroom like a drop in barometric pressure. Some people start to laugh, and Pellieux’s face turns rigid and flushes with anger. He is a vain man, a proud man, and he has been made to look a fool. Worse, the whole of the government’s case seems suddenly fragile. It has never been tested properly by an advocate of Labori’s quality: under pressure it is starting to appear as fragile as matchwood.

  Pellieux requests a brief recess. He stalks back to his seat. Quickly the officers of the General Staff, including Gonse and Henry, form a huddle around him. I can see his finger jabbing. Labori sees it too. He frowns at me, spreads his hands and mouths, ‘What is this?’ But all I can offer is a shrug: I have no idea what they are discussing.

  Five minutes later, Pellieux marches back to the front of the court and indicates that he wishes to say something.

  ‘Gentlemen of the jury, I have an observation to make concerning what has just taken place. Until now, we on our side have kept strictly within the bounds of legality. We have said nothing of the Dreyfus case, and I don’t wish to speak of it now. But the defence has just read publicly a passage from the indictment which was supposed to stay behind closed doors. Well, as Colonel Henry says: they want the light; they shall have it! In November of ’96 there came into the Ministry of War absolute proof of the guilt of Dreyfus. This proof I have seen. It is a document, the origin of which cannot be contested, and it contains roughly these words: “A deputy is going to ask questions about the Dreyfus case. Never admit the relations that we had with that Jew.” Gentlemen, I make this declaration on my honour, and I appeal to General Boisdeffre to support my testimony.’

  There is a collective intake of breath around the court which then subsides into an exhalation of muttering as people turn to their neighbours to discuss what this means. Again Labori, baffled, stares across at me. It takes me a few seconds to work out that Pellieux must be referring to the letter supposedly retrieved from the German Embassy – the one that turned up so conveniently just before I was removed from Paris, and that Billot read out but wouldn’t show me. I nod vigorously to Labori and make a grabbing gesture with my hands. Pellieux has made another blunder. He must seize this moment before it is lost.

  Already Gonse, recognising the danger, is on his feet and hurrying forward. He calls out anxiously to the judge, ‘I ask for the floor.’ But Labori is too quick for him.

  ‘Excuse me, but I have the floor, General. A matter of exceptional gravity has just arisen. After such a statement, there can be no restriction of the debate. I point out to General Pellieux that no document can have any scientific value as proof until it has been discussed openly. Let General Pellieux explain himself without reserve and let the document be produced.’

  The judge asks, ‘General Gonse, what do you have to say?’

  Gonse’s voice is a high croak. He sounds as if he is being strangled. ‘I confirm the testimony of General Pellieux. He has taken the initiative, and he has done well. I would have done the same in his place.’ He rubs his hands nervously up and down the sides of his trousers. He looks utterly wretched. ‘The army doesn’t fear the light. To save its honour, it doesn’t fear at all to tell the truth. But prudence is a necessity, and I do not believe that proofs of this character, though they are indeed real and absolute, can be brought here and made public.’

  Pellieux says bluntly, ‘I ask that General Boisdeffre be sent for to confirm my words,’ and ignoring both the judge and the hapless Gonse he calls out to his aide-de-camp, standing in the aisle: ‘Major Delcassé, take a carriage and go for General de Boisdeffre at once.’

  During the recess, Labori comes over to where I am standing. He whispers, ‘What kind of document is he talking about?’

  ‘I can’t tell you – not in any detail. It would breach my oath of secrecy.’

  ‘You have to give me something, Colonel – the Chief of the General Staff is about to walk in.’

  I glance over to where Pellieux, Gonse and Henry are sitting, too absorbed in their own conversation to pay any attention to me. ‘I can tell you it’s a pretty desperate tactic. I don’t think Gonse and Henry are very happy at the situation they’ve been put in.’

  ‘What line of questioning do you suggest I take with Boisdeffre?’

  ‘Ask him to read the document out in full. Ask whether they will allow it to be forensically examined. Ask him why they only seem to have discovered the “absolute proof” of Dreyfus’s guilt two years after they sent him to Devil’s Island!’

  Boisdeffre’s arrival outside the courtroom is announced by a round of applause and cheering from the corridor. The door bangs open. Several orderly officers hurry in ahead of him and then the great man himself begins his slow progress from the rear of the chamber towards the bar of the court. It is the first time I have seen him for fifteen months. Tall and dignified, walking stiffly, buttoned up tightly in his black uniform, which contrasts sharply with the whiteness of his hair and moustache, he seems to have aged a great deal.

  The judge says, ‘General, thank you for coming. An incident has occurred that we did not expect. Let me read to you the stenographic record of the testimony given by General Pellieux.’

  After he has finished, Boisdeffre nods gravely. ‘I shall be brief. I confirm General Pellieux’s deposition in all points as exact and authentic. I have not a word more to say, not having the right.’ He turns to the jury. ‘And now, gentlemen, permit me, in conclusion, to say one thing to you. You are the jury; you are the nation. If the nation has no confidence in the commanders of its army, in those who are responsible for the national defence, they are ready to leave this heavy task to others; you have only to speak. I will not say a word more. Monsieur President, I ask your permission to withdraw.’

  The judge says, ‘You may withdraw, General. Bring in the next witness.’

  Boisdeffre turns and walks towards the exit to loud ap
plause from all around the court. As he passes me, his gaze flickers for an instant across my face and a muscle twitches slightly in his cheek. Behind him, Labori is calling: ‘Pardon me, General, I have some questions to put to you.’

  The judge tells him to be quiet. ‘You do not have the floor, Maître Labori. The incident is closed.’

  His mission accomplished, Boisdeffre continues his steady tread away from the witness stand. Several of the General Staff officers rise to follow him, buttoning their capes.

  Labori is still trying to summon him back. ‘Pardon me, General Boisdeffre—’

  ‘You do not have the floor.’ The judge hammers his gavel. ‘Bring in Major Esterhazy.’

  ‘But I have some questions to put to this witness . . .’

  ‘It was an incident outside the scope of the trial. You do not have the floor.’

  ‘I demand the floor!’

  It is too late. From the back of the courtroom comes the sound of a door closing – courteously, not slammed – and Boisdeffre’s intervention is over.

  After the drama of the last few minutes, the arrival of Esterhazy is an anticlimax. Labori and the Clemenceau brothers can be heard debating in loud whispers whether they should walk out of the trial in protest at Boisdeffre’s extraordinary intervention. The jury – that collection of drapers, merchants and market gardeners – still look stunned at having been threatened by the Chief of the General Staff in person that if they find against the army, the entire High Command will take it as a vote of no confidence and will resign. As for me, I sit shifting in my seat in an agony of conscience as to what I should do next.

  Esterhazy – trembling, his unnaturally large and protruding eyes darting constantly this way and that – begins by making an appeal to the jury. ‘I do not know whether you realise the abominable situation in which I am placed. A wretch, Monsieur Mathieu Dreyfus, without the shadow of a proof, has dared to accuse me of being the author of the crime for which his brother is being punished. Today, in contempt of all rights, in contempt of all the rules of justice, I am summoned before you, not as a witness, but as an accused. I protest with all my might against this treatment . . .’

  I cannot bear to listen to him. Ostentatiously I stand and walk out of the court.

  Esterhazy shouts after me, ‘During the last eighteen months there has been woven against me the most frightful conspiracy ever woven against any man! During that time I’ve suffered more than any one of my contemporaries has suffered in the whole of his life . . .!’

  I close the door on him and search the corridors for Louis until I find him on a bench in the vestibule de Harlay staring at the floor.

  He looks up, grim-faced. ‘You realise we have just witnessed a coup d’état? What else is one to call it when the General Staff is allowed to produce a piece of evidence the defence isn’t allowed to see, and then threatens to desert en masse unless a civilian court accepts it? The tactics they used on Dreyfus they are now trying to use on the entire country!’

  ‘I agree. That’s why I want to be recalled to the witness stand.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Will you tell Labori?’

  ‘Be careful, Georges – I’m speaking as your lawyer now. You break your oath of confidentiality and they will put you away for ten years.’

  As we walk back to the court, I say, ‘There’s something else I’d like you to do for me, if you would. There is an officer of the Sûreté, Jean-Alfred Desvernine. Would you try to contact him discreetly, and say I need to meet him in the strictest confidence? Tell him to keep an eye on the papers, and the day after I’m released I’ll be in the usual place at seven in the evening.’

  ‘The usual place . . .’ Louis makes a note without passing comment.

  Back in court, the judge says, ‘Colonel Picquart, what is it you wish to add?’

  As I walk towards the stand, I glance across at Henry, sitting crammed in his seat between Gonse and Pellieux. His chest is so vast his arms folded across it appear stubby, like clipped wings.

  I stroke the polished wood of the handrail, smoothing the grain. ‘I wish to say something about the document that General Pellieux has mentioned as absolute proof of Dreyfus’s guilt. If he hadn’t brought it up, I would never have spoken of it, but now I feel I must.’ The clock ticks, a trapdoor seems to open at my feet and I step over the edge at last. ‘It is a forgery.’

  The rest is quickly told. When the howling and the shouting have died down, Pellieux steps forward to make a violent attack upon my character: ‘Everything in this case is strange, but the strangest thing of all is the attitude of a man who still wears the French uniform and yet who comes to this bar to accuse three generals of having committed a forgery . . .’

  On the day the verdict is announced, I am taken by carriage from Mont-Valérien for the final time. The streets around the Palace of Justice are crammed with roughs carrying heavy sticks, and when the jury retires to consider its verdict our group of ‘Dreyfusards’, as we are starting to be called, stands together in the centre of the court, for mutual protection as much as anything else: me, Zola, Perrenx, the Clemenceau brothers, Louis and Labori, Madame Zola and Labori’s strikingly beautiful young Australian wife, Marguerite, who has brought along her two little boys by her previous marriage. ‘This way we’ll all be together,’ she tells me in her strongly accented French. Through the high windows we can hear the noise of the mob outside.

  Clemenceau says, ‘If we win, we will not leave this building alive.’

  After forty minutes the jury returns. The foreman, a brawny-looking merchant, stands. ‘On my honour and my conscience the declaration of the jury is: as concerns Perrenx, guilty, by a majority vote; as concerns Zola, guilty, by a majority vote.’

  There is uproar. The officers are cheering. Everyone is on their feet. The ladies of fashion at the back of the court clamber on to their seats to get a better view.

  ‘Cannibals,’ says Zola.

  The judge tells Perrenx, manager of L’Aurore, that he is sentenced to four months in prison and a fine of three thousand francs. Zola is given the maximum penalty of a year in gaol and a fine of five thousand. The sentences are suspended pending appeal.

  As we leave, I pass Henry standing with a group of General Staff officers. He is in the middle of telling a joke. I say to him coldly, ‘My witnesses will be calling on yours in the next few days to make arrangements for our duel; be ready to respond,’ and I am pleased to see that this has the effect, at least briefly, of knocking the smile off his porcine face.

  Three days later, on Saturday 26 February, the commandant of Mont-Valérien calls me to his office and leaves me standing at attention while he informs me that I have been found guilty of ‘grave misconduct’ by a panel of senior officers and that I am dismissed from the army forthwith. I will not receive the full pension of a retired colonel but only that of a major: thirty francs per week. He is further authorised to tell me that if I make any comments in public again regarding my period of service on the General Staff, the army will take ‘the severest possible action’ against me.

  ‘Do you have anything to say?’

  ‘No, Colonel.’

  ‘Dismissed!’

  At dusk, carrying my suitcase, I am escorted to the gate and left on the cobbled forecourt to make my own way home. I have known no other life except the army since I was eighteen years old. But all that is behind me now, and it is as plain Monsieur Picquart that I walk down the hill to the railway station to catch the train back into Paris.

  * * *

  1 Zola’s novel about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

  21

  THE NEXT EVENING I occupy the familiar corner table in the café of the gare Saint-Lazare. It is a Sunday, a quiet time, a lonely place. I am one of only a handful of customers. I have taken precautions getting here – diving into churches, leaving by side doors, doubling back on myself, dodging down alleys – with the result that I am fairly sure no one has followed me. I read my paper, sm
oke a cigarette and manage to make my beer last until a quarter to eight, by which time it is obvious Desvernine is not coming. I am disappointed but not surprised: given the change in my circumstances since we last met, one can hardly blame him.

  I walk outside to catch an omnibus home. The lower deck is crowded. I climb up to the top, where the chill through the open sides is enough to deter my fellow passengers. I sit about halfway down the central bench, my chin on my chest and my hands in my pockets, looking out at the darkened upper storeys of the shops. I have not been there a minute when I am joined by a man in a heavy overcoat and muffler. He leaves a space between us.

  He says, ‘Good evening, Colonel.’

  I turn in surprise. ‘Monsieur Desvernine.’

  He continues to stare straight ahead. ‘You were followed from your apartment.’

  ‘I thought I’d lost them.’

  ‘You lost two of them. The third is sitting downstairs. Fortunately, he works for me. I don’t think there’s a fourth, but even so, I suggest we keep our conversation brief.’

  ‘Yes, of course. It was good of you to come at all.’

  ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘I need to speak to Lemercier-Picard.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s been a lot of forgery in the Dreyfus case: I suspect he may have had a hand at least in some of it.’

  ‘Oh.’ Desvernine sounds pained. ‘Oh, that won’t be easy. Can you be more specific?’

  ‘Yes, I’m thinking in particular of the document mentioned in the Zola trial the other day, the so-called “absolute proof” that General Boisdeffre vouched for. If it’s what I think it is, it consists of about five or six lines of writing. That’s a lot for an amateur to forge, and there’s plenty of original material to compare it with. So I suspect they must have brought in a professional.’

  ‘“They” being who in particular, Colonel – if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘The Statistical Section. Colonel Henry.’