Although I have to tell Desvernine we will not be requiring the services of Monsieur Lemercier-Picard, and that our request to lay a trap has been refused, I continue to pursue my investigation of Esterhazy as best I can. I interview a retired non-commissioned officer, Mulot, who remembers copying out portions of an artillery manual for the major; I also meet Esterhazy’s tutor at gunnery school, Captain le Rond, who calls his former pupil a blackguard: ‘If I met him in the street I would refuse to shake his hand.’ All this goes into the Benefactor file, and occasionally at the end of the day as I leaf through the evidence we have so far collected – the petit bleu, the surveillance photographs, the statements – I tell myself that I will see him in prison yet.
But I am not offered a new key to the garden of the hôtel de Brienne: if I want to see the minister, I have to make an appointment. And although he always receives me cordially, there is an unmistakable reserve about him. The same is true of Boisdeffre and Gonse. They no longer entirely trust me, and they are right.
One day towards the end of September, I climb the stairs to my office at the start of the morning and see Major Henry standing further along the corridor, deep in conversation with Lauth and Gribelin. His back is to me, but those broad and fleshy shoulders and that wide neck are as recognisable as his face. Lauth glances past him, notices me and darts him a warning look. Henry stops talking and turns round. All three officers salute.
‘Gentlemen,’ I say. ‘Major Henry, welcome back. How was your leave?’
He is different. He has caught the sun – like everyone else apart from me – but he has also changed his haircut to a short fringe so that he looks less like a sly farmer and more like a crafty monk. And there’s something else: a new energy in him, as if all the negative forces that have been swirling around our little unit – the suspicion and disaffection and anxiety – have coalesced in his capacious frame and charged him with a kind of electricity. He is their leader. My jeopardy is his opportunity. He is a danger to me. All this passes through my mind in the few seconds it takes him to salute, grin and say, ‘My leave was good, Colonel, thank you.’
‘I need to brief you on what’s been happening.’
‘Whenever you wish, Colonel.’
I am on the point of inviting him into my office, and then I change my mind. ‘I tell you what, why don’t we have a drink together at the end of the day?’
‘A drink?’
‘You look surprised.’
‘Only because we’ve never had a drink before.’
‘Well, that is a poor state of affairs, is it not? Let us rectify it. Shall we walk somewhere together? Let us say at five o’clock?’
Accordingly at five he knocks on my door, I pick up my cap and we go out into the street. He asks, ‘Where do you want to go?’
‘Wherever you like. I don’t frequent the bars round here very often.’
‘The Royale, then. It saves us from having to think.’
The Taverne Royale is the favourite bar of the General Staff. I haven’t been in it for years. The place is quiet at this hour: just a couple of captains drinking near the door, the barman reading a paper, a waiter wiping down the tables. On the walls are regimental photographs; on the bare wooden floor, sawdust; the colours are all brown and brass and sepia. Henry is very much at home. We take a table in the corner and he orders a cognac. For want of a better idea I do the same. ‘Leave us the bottle,’ Henry tells the waiter. He offers me a cigarette. I refuse. He lights one for himself and suddenly I realise that an odd part of me has actually missed the old devil, just as one occasionally grows fond of something familiar and even ugly. Henry is the army, in a way that I, or Lauth, or Boisdeffre will never be. When soldiers break ranks and want to run away on the battlefield, it is the Henrys of this world who can persuade them to come back and keep fighting.
‘Well,’ he says, raising his glass, ‘what shall we drink to?’
‘How about something we both love? The army.’
‘Very well,’ he agrees. We touch glasses: ‘The army!’
He downs his tumbler in one, tops up mine then refills his own. He sips it, staring at me over the rim. His small eyes are a muddy colour, and opaque: I can’t read them. ‘So – things seem to be in a bit of a mess back at the office, Colonel, if you don’t mind me saying.’
‘I’ll have that cigarette after all, if I may.’ He pushes his cigarette case across the table towards me. ‘And whose fault is that, do you think?’
‘I point no fingers. I’m just saying, that’s all.’
I light my cigarette and toy with my glass, moving it around the table as if it is a chess piece. I feel a curious desire to unburden myself. ‘Man to man, I never wanted to be chief of the section, did you know that? I had a horror of spies. I only achieved the position by accident. If I hadn’t known Dreyfus, I wouldn’t have been involved in his arrest, and then I wouldn’t have attended the court martial and the degradation. Unfortunately, I think our masters have got the entirely wrong idea about me.’
‘And what would the right idea be?’
Henry’s cigarettes are very strong, Turkish. The back of my nose feels as if it’s on fire. ‘I’ve been having another look at Dreyfus.’
‘Yes, Gribelin told me you’d taken the file. You seem to have stirred things up.’
‘General Boisdeffre was convinced the dossier no longer existed. He said that General Mercier ordered Colonel Sandherr to get rid of it.’
‘I didn’t know that. The colonel just told me to keep it nice and safe.’
‘Why did Sandherr disobey, do you think?’
‘You’d have to ask him that.’
‘Perhaps I shall.’
‘You can ask him all you want, my Colonel, but you won’t get much of an answer.’ Henry taps the side of his head. ‘He’s under lock and key in Montauban. I went all the way down to visit him. It was pitiful.’ He looks mournful. He suddenly raises his glass. ‘To Colonel Sandherr: one of the best!’
‘To Sandherr,’ I respond, and pretend to drink his health. ‘But why did he retain the file, do you think?’
‘I suppose because he thought it might be useful – it was the file that convicted Dreyfus after all.’
‘Except you and I both know that Dreyfus is innocent.’
Henry’s eyes open wide in warning and alarm. ‘I wouldn’t talk like that too loudly, Colonel, especially not in here. Some of the fellows wouldn’t like it.’
I look around. The bar is beginning to fill. I lean in closer and lower my voice. I’m not sure whether I’m seeking a confession or offering one, only that some kind of absolution is required. ‘It wasn’t Dreyfus who wrote the bordereau,’ I say quietly. ‘It was Esterhazy. Even Bertillon says his writing is a perfect match. That’s the central part of the case against Dreyfus demolished right there! As for your secret file of evidence—’
A gust of laughter from the neighbouring table interrupts me. I glance at them in irritation.
Henry says, very seriously now, studying me intently, ‘What were you going to say about the secret file?’
‘With the best will in the world, my dear Henry, the only thing in it that points to Dreyfus is the fact that the Germans and the Italians were receiving plans of fortifications from someone with the initial “D”. I’m not blaming you, incidentally: once Dreyfus was in custody, your job was to make the most convincing case you could. But now that we have the facts about Esterhazy, it changes everything. Now we know that the wrong man was condemned. So you tell me: what are we supposed to do in the light of that? Simply ignore it?’
I sit back. After a long silence, during which he continues to scan my face, Henry says, ‘Are you asking me for my advice?’
I shrug. ‘By all means, if you have any.’
‘You’ve mentioned this to Gonse?’
‘I have.’
‘And Boisdeffre, and Billot?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what do they say?’
‘They say dr
op it.’
‘Then for God’s sake, Colonel,’ he hisses, ‘drop it!’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m just not made that way. It’s not what I joined the army to do.’
‘Then you’ve chosen the wrong profession.’ Henry shakes his head in disbelief. ‘You have to give them what they want, Colonel – they’re the chiefs.’
‘Even though Dreyfus is innocent?’
‘There you go, saying it again!’ He looks around. Now it’s his turn to lean over the table and talk quietly. ‘Listen, I don’t know whether he’s innocent or guilty, Colonel, and quite frankly I don’t give a shit, if you’ll excuse me, either way, and neither should you. I did as I was told. You order me to shoot a man and I’ll shoot him. You tell me afterwards you got the name wrong and I should have shot someone else – well, I’m very sorry about that, but it’s not my fault.’ He pours us both another cognac. ‘You want my advice? Well here’s a story. When my regiment was in Hanoi, there was a lot of thieving in the barracks. So one day my major and I, we laid a trap and we caught the thief red-handed. It turned out he was the son of the colonel – God knows why he needed to steal from the likes of us, but he did it. Now my major – he was a bit like you, a little bit of the idealistic type, shall we say – he wanted this man prosecuted. The top brass disagreed. Still, he went ahead and brought the case anyway. But at the court martial it was my major that was broken. The thief went free. A true story.’ Henry raises his glass to me. ‘That’s the army we love.’
15
THE FOLLOWING MORNING when I go into the office, the Dreyfus file is on my desk – not the secret dossier but the Colonial Office record, which continues to be sent over regularly for my comments.
There have been two security scares about Dreyfus in recent weeks. First there was the English newspaper report that the prisoner had escaped. Then there was a letter addressed to him posted in the rue Cambon and signed with a name that looked like ‘Weiler’ that contained a message supposedly written in invisible ink: Impossible to decipher last communication. Return to the former procedure in your answer. Indicate precisely where the documents are and how the cupboard can be unlocked. Actor ready to move immediately. Dreyfus’s guards were ordered to observe him closely after he was handed this letter. He merely frowned and put it aside. Manifestly he had never heard of ‘Weiler’. Both we and the Sûreté were in agreement that this was just a malicious hoax.
Yet as I turn the pages of the file I see that the episodes have been used by the Colonial Ministry as a pretext to make Dreyfus’s confinement much harsher. For the past three weeks he has been clapped in irons every night. There is even an illustration of the contraption shipped over from the penal colony in Cayenne that is used to restrain him. Two U-shaped irons are fixed to his bed. His ankles are put into these at sundown. A bar is then inserted through the irons and padlocked. He is left in this position until dawn. In addition, a double perimeter fence of heavy timber is being erected around his hut to a height of two and a half metres. The inner fence is only half a metre from his window. Therefore his view of the sea is entirely cut off. And during the day he is no longer allowed access to the island beyond the second perimeter fence. The bare narrow space of rock and scrub between the two walls, in which there are no trees or shade, is now the entirety of his world.
As usual, the file contains an appendix of Dreyfus’s confiscated writings:
Yesterday evening I was put in irons. Why, I know not. Since I have been here, I have always scrupulously observed the orders given me. How is it I did not go crazy during the long, dreadful night? (7 September 1896)
These nights in irons! I do not even speak of the physical suffering, but what moral ignominy, and without any explanation, without knowing why or for what cause! What an atrocious nightmare is this in which I have lived for nearly two years! (8 September)
Put in irons when I am already watched like a wild beast night and day by a guard armed with rifle and revolver! No, the truth should be told. This is not a security precaution. This is a measure of hatred and torture, ordered from Paris by those who, not being able to strike a family, strike an innocent man, because neither he nor his family will accept submissively the most frightful judicial error that has ever been made. (9 September)
I am disinclined to read any further. I have seen what the chafing of leg-irons can do to a prisoner’s flesh: cut it to the bone. In the insect-infested heat of the tropics, the torment must be unendurable. For a moment my pen hovers over the file. But in the end I simply mark it ‘Return to the Colonial Ministry’ and sign the circulation slip without comment.
Later that day I attend a meeting in Gonse’s office to settle last-minute security details for the Tsar’s visit. Sombre-faced men from the Interior and Foreign Ministries, the Sûreté and the Élysée Palace – men full of the grand self-importance of those who handle such issues – sit around the table and discuss the minutiae of the Imperial itinerary.
The Russian flotilla will be escorted into Cherbourg harbour on Monday at 1 p.m. by twelve ironclads. The President of the Republic will meet the Tsar and Tsarina. There will be a dinner for seventy in the Arsenal at 6.30, General Boisdeffre to be seated on the Tsar’s table. On Tuesday morning the Russian Imperial train will arrive in Versailles at 8.50 a.m. The Imperial party will transfer to the President’s train, which will arrive at the Ranelagh railway station at 10 a.m. It will take one and a half hours for the procession to cover the ten-kilometre route into Paris: 80,000 soldiers will be deployed for protection. All suspected terrorists have either been detained or turned away from Paris. After luncheon at the Russian Embassy, the Tsar and Tsarina will visit the Russian Orthodox church in the rue Daru. At 6.30 there will be a state banquet for two hundred and seventy at the Élysée, and at 8.30 fireworks in the Trocadéro followed by a gala performance at the Opéra. On Wednesday . . .
My mind keeps wandering eight thousand miles to the shackled figure on Devil’s Island.
When the meeting is finished and everyone is filing out, Gonse asks me to stay for a moment. He could not be friendlier. ‘I’ve been thinking, my dear Picquart. When all this Russian fuss is over, I want you to undertake a special mission to the eastern garrison towns.’
‘To do what, General?’
‘Inspect and report on security procedures. Recommend improvements. Important work.’
‘How long will I be away from Paris?’
‘Oh, just a few days. Perhaps a week or two.’
‘But who will run the section?’
‘I’ll take it over myself.’ He laughs and claps my shoulder. ‘If you’ll trust me with the responsibility!’
On Sunday, I see Pauline at the Gasts’: the first time I have set eyes on her in weeks. She wears another dress she knows I like, plain yellow with white lace cuffs and collar. Philippe is with her and so are their two little girls, Germaine and Marianne. Usually I can cope perfectly well seeing the family all together, but on this day it is agony. The weather is cold and wet. We are confined indoors. So there is no escaping the sight of her immersed in her other life – her real life.
After a couple of hours I can’t keep up the pretence any longer. I go out on to the veranda at the back of the house to smoke a cigar. The rain is coming down cold and hard and mixed with hail like a northern European monsoon, stripping the few remaining leaves from the trees. The hailstones bounce off the saturated lawn. I think of Dreyfus’s descriptions of the incessant tropical downpours.
There is a soft chafing of silk behind me, a scent of perfume, and then Pauline is at my side. She doesn’t look at me but stands gazing out across the gloomy garden. I have my cigar in my right hand, my left hangs loosely. The back of her right hand barely brushes against it. It feels as if only the hairs are touching. To anyone coming up behind us we are just two old friends watching the storm together. But her proximity is almost overwhelming. Neither of us speaks. And then the door to the passage bangs op
en and Monnier’s voice booms out: ‘Let’s hope it’s not like this next week for their Imperial Majesties!’
Pauline casually moves her hand up to her forehead to brush away a stray hair. ‘Are you very much involved in it, Georges?’
‘Not much.’
‘He’s being modest, as usual,’ cuts in Monnier. ‘I know the part you fellows have played to make the whole thing secure.’
Pauline says, ‘Will you actually have an opportunity to meet the Tsar?’
‘I’m afraid you have to be at least a general for that.’
Monnier says, ‘But surely you could watch the parade, couldn’t you, Picquart?’
I puff hard on my cigar, wishing he would go away. ‘I could, if I could be bothered. The Minister of War has allocated places for my officers and their wives at the Bourbon Palace.’
‘And you’re not going!’ cries Pauline, pretending to punch my arm. ‘You miserable republican!’
‘I don’t have a wife.’
‘That’s no problem,’ says Monnier. ‘You can borrow mine.’
And so on Tuesday morning, Pauline and I edge along the steps of the Bourbon Palace to our allotted places, whereupon I discover that every officer of the Statistical Section has accepted the minister’s invitation and has brought his wife – or in Gribelin’s case his mother. They make no attempt to hide their curiosity when we appear and I realise, too late, how we must look in their eyes – the bachelor chief with his married mistress on his arm. I introduce Pauline very formally, emphasising her social position as the wife of my good friend Monsieur Monnier of the quai d’Orsay. That only makes it sound more suspicious. And although Henry bows briefly and Lauth nods and clicks his heels, I notice that Berthe Henry, the innkeeper’s daughter, with her parvenu’s snobbery, is reluctant even to take Pauline’s hand, while Madame Lauth, her mouth tightly crimped in disapproval, actually turns away.
Not that Pauline seems to care. We have a perfect view, looking straight down the bridge, across the Seine, half a kilometre to the obelisk in the place de la Concorde. The weather is sunny but windy. The vast tricolours hanging off the buildings – the red, white and blue stripes vertical for France, horizontal for Russia – snap and billow against their moorings. The crowds on the bridge are ten or twelve deep and have been waiting since dawn. It is reported to be the same all across the city. According to the Préfecture of Police, one and a half million spectators are lining the route.