‘Excuse me,’ rasps a quiet voice at my back that raises the hairs on my neck. I stand aside and Mercier edges past me, without giving me a look. He walks up the aisle and takes a seat between Gonse and Billot, and immediately the generals begin a whispered conclave. Boisdeffre looks shattered, vacant – he is said to have become a recluse; Billot strokes his moustache and seems bemused; Gonse nods, obsequious; Pellieux has his back half turned. It is Mercier, now on the retired list, gesturing with his fist, who is suddenly the dominant figure again; he has assumed the leadership of the army’s cause. In this affair there must be a guilty party, he has declared to the press. And that guilty party is either Dreyfus or me. Since it is not me, it is Dreyfus. Dreyfus is a traitor. I will prove it. His leathery mask-like face briefly turns in my direction; the gun-slit eyes are momentarily trained on mine.
It is almost seven. I take a seat just behind Mathieu Dreyfus, who turns and shakes my hand. Lucie nods to me, her face as pale as a midday moon, and manages a brief, strained smile. The lawyers enter clad in their black robes and their strange conical black hats, the giant figure of Labori gesturing with elaborate courtesy for the older Demange to go ahead of him. Then a cry from the back of the court – ‘Present arms!’ – a crash of fifty boots stamping to attention, and the judges file in, led by the diminutive Colonel Jouaust. He wears a bushy white moustache even larger than Billot’s, so huge the top of his face seems to peer over it. He mounts the stage and takes the central chair. His voice is dry and hard: ‘Bring in the accused.’
The sergeant usher marches to a door near the front of the court, his tread very loud in the sudden silence. He opens the door and two men step through. One is the escorting officer and the other is Dreyfus. The courtroom gasps, I among them, for he is an old man – a little old man, with a stiff-limbed walk and a baggy tunic his frame is too shrunken to fill. His trousers flap around his ankles. He moves jerkily into the middle of the courtroom, pauses at the couple of steps that lead to the platform where his lawyers sit, as if to summon his strength, then mounts them with difficulty, salutes the judges with a white-gloved hand and takes off his cap to reveal a skull almost entirely bald, except for a fringe of silver hair at the back which hangs over his collar. He is told to sit while the registrar reads out the orders constituting the court, then Jouaust says, ‘Accused – stand.’
He struggles back to his feet.
‘What is your name?’
In the silent courtroom the response is barely audible: ‘Alfred Dreyfus.’
‘Age?’
‘Thirty-nine.’ That draws another shocked gasp.
‘Place of birth?’
‘Mulhouse.’
‘Rank?’
‘Captain, breveted to the General Staff.’ Everyone is leaning forward, straining to hear. It is difficult to understand him: he seems to have forgotten how to formulate his words; there is a whistling sound through the gaps in his teeth.
After various bits of legal procedure, Jouaust says, ‘You are accused of the crime of high treason, of having delivered to an agent of a foreign power the documents that are specified in the memorandum called the bordereau. The law gives you the right to speak in your defence. Here is the bordereau.’
He nods to a court official, who hands it to the prisoner. Dreyfus studies it. He is trembling, appears close to breaking down. Finally, in that curious voice of his – flat even when charged with emotion – he says: ‘I am innocent. I swear it, Colonel, as I affirmed in 1894.’ His stops; his struggle to maintain his composure is agony to watch. ‘I can bear everything, Colonel, but once more, for the honour of my name and my children, I am innocent.’
For the rest of the morning, Jouaust takes Dreyfus through the contents of the bordereau, item by item. His questions are harsh and accusatory; Dreyfus answers them in a dry and technical manner, as if he were an expert witness in somebody else’s trial: no, he knew nothing of the hydraulic brake of the 120 millimetre cannon; yes, he could have acquired information about covering troops, but he had never asked for it; the same was true of the plans for invading Madagascar – he could have asked but he didn’t; no, the colonel is mistaken – he wasn’t in the Third Department when changes were made to artillery formations; no, the officer who claimed to have lent him a copy of the firing manual was also mistaken – he had never had it in his possession; no, he had never said that France would be better off under German rule, certainly not.
The double tier of windows heats the courtroom like a greenhouse. Everyone is sweating apart from Dreyfus, perhaps because he is accustomed to the tropics. The only time he shows real emotion again is when Jouaust brings up the old canard that he confessed on the day of his degradation to Captain Lebrun-Renault.
‘I did not confess.’
‘But there were other witnesses.’
‘I do not remember any.’
‘Well then, what conversation did you have with him?’
‘It was not a conversation, Colonel. It was a monologue. I was about to be led before a huge crowd that was quivering with patriotic anguish, and I said to Captain Lebrun-Renault that I wished to cry out my innocence in the face of everybody. I wanted to say that I was not the guilty man. There was no confession.’
At eleven, the session ends. Jouaust announces that the next four days of hearings will be held behind closed doors, so that the judges can be shown the secret files. The public and press will be barred, and so will I. It will be at least a week before I am called to give evidence.
Dreyfus is escorted back the way he came without once looking in my direction, and the rest of us file out into the brilliant August heat, the journalists all running away down the street towards the special telegraph operators in their haste to be first with their description of the Prisoner of Devil’s Island.
Edmond, with characteristic attention to the finer things in life, has found a restaurant close to where we are staying – ‘a hidden gem, Georges, it might almost be Alsace’ – Les Trois Marches in the rue d’Antrain, a rustic inn on the edge of open country. We walk to it for lunch, labouring up the hill in the broiling sun, trailed by my bodyguards. The auberge is a farmhouse, run by a couple named Jarlet, with a garden, orchard, stables, barn and pigsty. We sit out on benches under a tree drinking cider, buzzed by wasps, discussing the events of the morning. Edmond, who has never seen Dreyfus before, is remarking on his curious ability to repel sympathy – ‘Why is it that whenever he proclaims “I am innocent”, even though one knows for certain that he is, the words somehow lack conviction?’ – when I notice a group of gendarmes standing talking across the street.
Jarlet is laying out a plate of pâté de campagne. I point the gendarmes out to him. ‘Two of those gentlemen are with us, but who are the others?’
‘They are standing guard outside the house of General de Saint-Germain, monsieur. He commands the army in this area.’
‘Does he really require police protection?’
‘No, monsieur, the guards are not for him. They are for the man who is staying in his house – General Mercier.’
‘Did you hear that, Edmond? Mercier is living across the road.’
Edmond shouts with laughter. ‘That’s wonderful! We must establish a permanent bridgehead in the vicinity of the enemy.’ He turns to the patron. ‘Jarlet, from now on, I’ll pay to reserve a table for ten, for every lunch and dinner, for as long as the trial lasts. Is that all right with you?’
It is indeed all right with M. Jarlet, and from that time on begins the ‘Conspiracy of Les Trois Marches’, as the right-wing papers call it, with all the leading Dreyfusards gathering here to eat the Jarlets’ good plain bourgeois fare each day at noon and seven – regulars include the Clemenceau brothers, the socialists Jean Jaurès and René Viviani, the journalists Lacroix and Séverine, the ‘intellectuals’ Octave Mirabeau, Gabriel Monod and Victor Basch. Quite why Mercier needs a bodyguard to protect him from such roughs as these is not at all clear – does he imagine that Professor Monod is going
to attack him with a rolled-up copy of the Revue Historique? On Wednesday I ask for my own police protection to be withdrawn. Not only do I view them as unnecessary, I suspect they pass on information about me to the authorities.
All week people come and go to Les Trois Marches. Mathieu Dreyfus puts in an appearance, but never Lucie, who is staying with a widow in the town, while Labori, who has lodgings close to us, walks up the hill most evenings with Marguerite after he has finished consultations with his client in the military prison.
‘How is he bearing up?’ I ask one night.
‘Amazingly well, all things considered. My God, but he’s a strange one, isn’t he? I’ve seen him almost every day for a month, yet I don’t believe I know him any better now than I did in the first ten minutes. Everything is at a distance with him. I suppose that’s how he has survived.’
‘And how are the secret sessions going? What does the court make of the intelligence files?’
‘Ah, how the military adore all that stuff! Hundreds and hundreds of pages of it – love letters and buggers’ billets-doux and gossip and rumours and forgeries and false trails that lead nowhere. It’s like the Sibylline Books: you can put the leaves together however you like and read whatever you want into them. Yet I doubt if more than twenty lines apply directly to Dreyfus.’
We are standing smoking cigarettes a little way apart from the others. It is dusk. There is laughter behind us. Jaurès’s voice, which was created by nature for talking to an audience of ten thousand rather than a table of ten, booms out over the garden.
Labori says suddenly, ‘I see we are being watched.’
Across the road, in one of the upper windows, Mercier is plainly visible, gazing down at us.
‘He has just had his old comrades round to dinner,’ I say. ‘Boisdeffre, Gonse, Pellieux, Billot – they are in and out of there constantly.’
‘I hear he’s planning to run for the Senate. This trial is a great platform for him. If it weren’t for his political ambitions, their side would lack direction.’
‘If it weren’t for his political ambitions,’ I reply, ‘the whole thing might never have happened. He thought Dreyfus could be his ticket to the presidency.’
‘He still does.’
Mercier is scheduled to give his evidence on Saturday – the first day that the press and public will be allowed back into the courtroom since the opening session. His appearance is only slightly less eagerly awaited than that of Dreyfus himself. He arrives in court wearing the full undress uniform of a general – red tunic, black trousers, with a kepi of crimson and gold. On his breast glints the medal of a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour. When he is called, he rises from his place among the military witnesses and walks to the front of the court carrying a black leather document case. He stands no more than two paces from where Dreyfus is sitting, but doesn’t once glance in his direction.
‘My deposition,’ he says, in his quiet, hoarse voice, ‘will have to be a trifle long.’
Jouaust says unctuously, ‘Usher, fetch a chair for the general.’
Mercier speaks for three hours, producing document after document from his black leather case – among them the ‘lowlife D’ letter, which he continues to insist refers to Dreyfus, and even the fabricated Guénée reports about a spy in the intelligence department, although he leaves out the name of the source, Val Carlos. He passes them up to Jouaust, who hands them along the line of judges. After a while, Labori leans back in his chair and cranes his head to look at me, as if to say, ‘What is this idiot doing?’ I am careful to maintain a neutral expression, but I think he is right: by introducing the evidence of the secret dossier into open court, Mercier is exposing a dangerous flank for Labori to attack in cross-examination.
On and on drones Mercier, like some paranoid, illiterate editorial in La Libre Parole seeing Jewish conspiracies everywhere. He alleges that thirty-five million francs have been raised to free Dreyfus in England and Germany. He quotes as if it is fact what Dreyfus is supposed to have said about the occupation of Alsace-Lorraine, and has always denied: ‘For us Jews it is not the same thing; where we are, our God is.’ He drags up the old myth of the ‘confession’ before the degradation. He spins the most fantastical explanation as to why he showed the secret dossier to the judges at the court martial, claiming that because of the Dreyfus controversy the country was ‘within two finger-breadths of war’ with Germany – so much so that he had ordered General Boisdeffre to be ready to dispatch the telegrams that would trigger a full mobilisation while he, Mercier, sat with President Casimir-Perier in the Élysée Palace until half past midnight waiting to see if the German emperor would back down.
Casimir-Perier, who is sitting with the witnesses, actually rises to challenge this lie, and when Jouaust won’t permit him to intervene, he shakes his head at such nonsense, which causes a sensation in the court.
Mercier takes no notice. It is the old paranoia about Germany, the lingering stench of defeatism after 1870. He presses on. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘at that moment, should we have desired war? Should I, as Minister of War, have desired for my country a war undertaken in these conditions? I did not hesitate to say “no”. On the other hand, was I to leave the court martial in ignorance of the charges against Dreyfus? These documents’ – he pats the case on the stand in front of him – ‘then formed what was called the secret dossier, and I regarded it as imperative that the judges should see them. Could I not have relied on the comparative secrecy of a trial behind closed doors? No, I have no confidence in closed doors! Sooner or later the press manages to get hold of all it wants and publishes it, despite the threats of the government. In these circumstances, I placed the secret documents in a sealed envelope and sent them to the president of the court martial.’
Dreyfus is sitting straight up in his chair now, looking at Mercier with intense astonishment, and something else, something beyond amazement – for the first time: burning anger.
Mercier does not see it because he is carefully not looking at him. ‘Let me add one last word,’ he says. ‘I have not reached my age without having had the sad experience of learning that all that is human is liable to error. But if I am weak-minded, as Monsieur Zola has alleged, I am at least an honest man and the son of an honest man. And if the slightest doubt had ever crossed my mind, I should be the first to declare it’ – and now finally he turns in his chair to look at Dreyfus – ‘and to say, before you all, to Captain Dreyfus, “I have blundered in good faith.”’
The cheap theatrical touch is too much for the prisoner to bear. Suddenly, and incredibly, without the least trace of stiffness in his legs, Dreyfus springs to his feet, clenches his fist and swings round at Mercier as if to strike him, roaring in a terrible voice, half cry and half sob: ‘That is what you should say!’
The whole court draws in its breath. The officials are too stunned to move. Only Mercier seems unaffected. He ignores the figure looming over him. ‘I would say to Captain Dreyfus,’ he repeats patiently, ‘“I have been honestly mistaken. I acknowledge it in good faith and will do all in my power to repair a terrible mistake.”’
Dreyfus is still on his feet, staring down at him, his arm raised. ‘It is your duty!’
There is a round of applause, mostly from the journalists; I join in.
Mercier smiles slightly, as if confronted by overemotional children, shakes his head, waits for the demonstration to die down. ‘No, it is not so. My conviction since 1894 has not undergone the slightest change. In fact it has actually been strengthened, not only by a thorough study of the secret dossier but by the pathetic case that has been made for Dreyfus’s innocence by his supporters, despite all the frantic efforts and the millions spent on his behalf. There. I have done.’
With that, Mercier closes his leather case, stands, bows to the judges, collects his kepi from the shelf in front of him, tucks the documents under his arm, and turns to walk out of the court, to a loud accompaniment of jeers. As he passes the press benches, one of the rep
orters – it is Georges Bourdon of Le Figaro – hisses at him, ‘Assassin!’
Mercier stops and points at him. ‘This fellow just called me an assassin!’
The army prosecutor rises. ‘Monsieur President, I demand that man be arrested for contempt.’
Jouaust calls to the sergeant-at-arms, ‘Take him into custody!’
As soldiers close in on Bourdon, Labori rises. ‘Monsieur President, excuse me, but I would like to question the witness.’
‘Of course, Maître Labori,’ replies Jouaust, coolly checking his watch, ‘but it is already after twelve, and tomorrow is Sunday. You will have your chance at six thirty on Monday morning. Until then the court is adjourned.’
24
MERCIER’S TESTIMONY IS held to have been a disaster – a grave disappointment to his own side, as he failed to provide the promised ‘proof’ that Dreyfus was guilty, and an opportunity for ours, in that Labori – generally considered to be the most aggressive cross-examiner at the Paris bar – will now have the chance to challenge him on the witness stand about the secret file. All he needs is sufficient ammunition, and on Sunday morning I walk to his lodgings to help him prepare. I have no qualms about breaking the last vestiges of my oath of confidentiality: if Mercier can talk about matters of national security, so can I.
‘The point about Mercier,’ I say, when Labori and I are ensconced in his makeshift study, ‘is that the Dreyfus affair would never have happened without him. He was the one who ordered the spy-hunt to be confined to the General Staff – the original and fundamental error. He was the one who ordered that Dreyfus should be held in solitary confinement for weeks in order to break him. And he was the one who ordered the compilation of the secret dossier.’