Pauline smiles. ‘Why?’
‘In honour of Loge in Das Rheingold, of course – the demigod of fire. You must see the resemblance, my dear? Look at that passion! Captain Lallemand is the Demigod, and Georges is the Good God.’
‘I don’t know very much Wagner, I’m afraid.’
Lallemand, the keenest student of music in our circle, affects shocked disbelief. ‘Don’t know very much Wagner! Colonel Picquart, you must take Madame Monnier to Bayreuth!’
Curé asks, a little too pointedly for my liking, ‘And does Monsieur Monnier enjoy the opera?’
‘Unfortunately my husband dislikes all forms of music.’
After they have moved off, Pauline says quietly, ‘Do you want me to leave?’
‘No, why would I want that?’ We are drinking orangeade. The great stink has lifted in the last day or so; the breezes of the faubourg Saint-Germain are warm and blossomy with the scent of a summer evening.
‘Only you seem very uncomfortable, my darling.’
‘No, it’s just I wasn’t aware that you and Blanche were acquainted, that’s all.’
‘Isabelle took me to tea with Alix Tocnaye a month ago, and she was there.’
‘And where is Philippe?’
‘He’s out of Paris tonight. He doesn’t get back until tomorrow.’
The implication, the offer, hangs unspoken in the air.
‘What about the girls?’ Pauline’s daughters are ten and seven. ‘Do you have to get back to them?’
‘They’re staying with Philippe’s sister.’
‘Ah, so now I know what Blanche meant by my “surprise”!’ I am not sure whether to be amused or annoyed. ‘Why did you decide to confide in her?’
‘I didn’t. I thought you had.’
‘Not I!’
‘But the way she spoke – she led me to believe you had. That’s why I let her arrange this evening.’ We stare at one another. And then, by a process of intuition or deduction too rapid for me to follow, she says, ‘Blanche is in love with you.’
I laugh in alarm. ‘She is not!’
‘At least you must have had an affair with her?’
I lie. What else should a gentleman do on these occasions? ‘My darling Pauline, she’s fifteen years younger than I am. I’m like an older brother to her.’
‘But she watches you all the time. She’s obsessed with you and now she’s guessed about us.’
‘If Blanche was in love with me,’ I say quietly, ‘she’d hardly arrange for me to spend the night with you.’
Pauline smiles and shakes her head. ‘That’s exactly what she would do. If she can’t have you, she’ll have the satisfaction of controlling whoever does.’
Instinctively we both check to see we are unobserved. A footman is doing the rounds, whispering to the guests that the concert is about to resume. The garden is beginning to empty. A captain in the dragoons stops on the threshold and turns to look at us.
Pauline says suddenly, ‘Let’s just go now, before the second part. Let’s miss the dinner.’
‘And leave two empty places for everyone to notice? We might as well put an announcement in Le Figaro.’
No, there is nothing for it but to endure the evening – the string quartet in the second half, the two encores, the champagne afterwards, the lingering goodbyes of those who have not been invited to dinner but hope for a last-minute reprieve. Throughout all this Pauline and I carefully avoid one another, which is of course the surest sign of a couple who are having an affair.
It is after ten by the time we sit down to eat. We are a table of sixteen. I am between Aimery’s widowed mother, the dowager comtesse – all black ruffled silk and dead white skin, like the ghost in Don Giovanni – and Blanche’s sister, Isabelle, recently married into an immensely wealthy banking family, proprietors of one of the five great vineyards of Bordeaux. She speaks expertly of appellations and grand crus, but she might as well be talking Polynesian for all I am taking in. I have an odd, almost dizzying sense of disconnection – the sophisticated talk is just a babble of phonemes, the music mere scrapes and twangs of gut and wire. I look down to the far end of the table, to where Pauline is listening to Isabelle’s banker husband, a young man whose pedigree breeding has given him an appearance so refined that it is almost foetus-like, as if it were an error of taste even to emerge from the womb. I catch Blanche’s eye in the candlelight, glittering out at me from within her game-bird plumage, the woman scorned, and I look away. We finally rise at midnight.
I am careful to leave the house before Pauline, to preserve appearances. ‘You,’ I say to Blanche at the door, wagging my finger, ‘are a wicked woman.’
‘Good night, Georges,’ she says sadly.
I walk up the boulevard searching for the white light of a cab heading home to its depot at the Arc de Triomphe. Plenty of blues and reds and yellows bob past until eventually a white appears, and by the time I have stepped out into the street to hail it, and it has clattered to a halt, Pauline is already coming along the pavement to join me. I take her arm and help her up. I tell the driver, ‘Rue Yvon-Villarceau, the corner of the rue Copernic,’ and then I haul myself in after her. She lets me kiss her briefly then pushes me away.
‘No, I need to know what all that was about.’
‘Surely not? Do you really?’
‘Yes.’
I sigh and take her hand. ‘Poor Blanche is simply very unhappy in her love affairs. Whichever man in the room is the most unsuitable or unobtainable, you may be sure that he is the one whom Blanche will fall for. There was quite a scandal a couple of years ago, all hushed up, but it caused a lot of embarrassment for the family, especially to Aimery.’
‘Why especially to Aimery?’
‘Because the man involved was an officer on the General Staff – a superior officer, recently widowed, a lot older than Blanche – and it was Aimery who brought him into the house and introduced them.’
‘What happened?’
I take out my cigarette case and offer one to Pauline. She refuses. I light up. I feel uncomfortable talking about the whole business, but I guess Pauline has a right to know, and I trust her not to spread the tale.
‘She and this officer had an affair. It went on for some time, a year perhaps. Then Blanche met someone else, a young aristocrat her own age and much more suitable. This young man proposed. The family were delighted. Blanche tried to break off her relationship with the officer. But he refused to accept it. Then Aimery’s father, the old comte, began receiving messages from a blackmailer, threatening to expose the affair. The comte ended up going to the Préfecture of the Paris police.’
‘My God, it’s like a story out of Balzac!’
‘It gets better than that. At one stage the comte paid five hundred francs for the return of a particularly compromising letter Blanche had written to her widowed lover, which was allegedly in the hands of a mysterious woman. The woman was supposed to have turned up in a park wearing a veil in order to return it. The police investigated the matter and the blackmailer proved to be the widowed officer himself.’
‘No? I don’t believe it! What happened to him?’
‘Nothing. He’s very well connected. He was allowed to continue with his career. He’s still on the General Staff – a colonel, in fact.’
‘And what did Blanche’s fiancé make of it?’
‘He refused to have anything more to do with her.’
Pauline sits back in her seat, considering all this. ‘Then I feel sorry for her.’
‘She is silly on occasions. But curiously good-hearted. And gifted in her way.’
‘What is the name of this colonel, so I can slap his face if I ever meet him?’
‘You won’t forget his name once you’ve heard it – Armand du Paty de Clam. He always wears a monocle.’ I am on the point of adding the curious detail that he was the officer in charge of the investigation into Captain Dreyfus, but in the end I don’t. That information is classified, and besides, Pauline has started
nuzzling her cheek against my shoulder and suddenly I have other things on my mind.
My bed is narrow, a soldier’s cot. To prevent ourselves slipping to the floor, we lie entwined in one another’s arms, naked to the warm night air. At three in the morning, Pauline’s breathing is slow and regular, rising from some deep soft seabed of sleep. I am wide awake. I stare over her shoulder at the open window and try to imagine us married. If we were, would we ever experience a night like this? Isn’t an awareness of their transience what gives these moments their exquisite edge? And I have such a horror of constant company.
I extract my arm carefully from beneath hers, feel for the rug with my feet, and pull myself away from the bed.
In the sitting room the night sky sheds enough light for me to find my way around. I pull on a robe and light the gas lamp on the escritoire. I unlock a drawer and take out the file of Dreyfus’s correspondence, and while my lover sleeps I resume reading from where I left off.
* * *
1 The French detective police force.
5
THE STORY OF the four months after the degradation is easy to follow in the file, which has been arranged by some bureaucrat in strict chronological order. It was twelve days later, in the middle of the night, that Dreyfus was taken from his prison cell in Paris, locked in a convict wagon in the gare d’Orleans, and dispatched on a ten-hour rail journey through the snowbound countryside to the Atlantic coast. In the station at La Rochelle, a crowd was waiting. All afternoon they hammered on the sides of the train and shouted threats and insults: ‘Death to the Jew!’ ‘Judas!’ ‘Death to the traitor!’ It wasn’t until nightfall that his guards decided to risk moving him. Dreyfus ran the gauntlet.
Île de Ré prison
21 January 1895
My darling Lucie,
The other day, when I was insulted at La Rochelle, I wanted to escape from my warders, to present my naked breast to those to whom I was a just object of indignation, and say to them: ‘Do not insult me; my soul, which you cannot know, is free from all stain; but if you think I am guilty, come, take my body, I give it up to you without regret.’ Then, perhaps, when under the stinging bite of physical pain I had cried ‘Vive la France!’ they might have believed in my innocence!
But what am I asking for night and day? Justice! Justice! Is this the nineteenth century, or have we gone back some hundred years? Is it possible that innocence is not recognised in an age of enlightenment and truth? Let them search. I ask no favour, but I ask the justice that is the right of every human being. Let them continue to search; let those who possess powerful means of investigation use them towards this object; it is for them a sacred duty of humanity and justice . . .
I reread the final paragraph. There is something odd about it. I see what he is doing. Ostensibly he is writing to his wife. But knowing his words are bound to pass through many hands along the way, he is also sending a message to the arbiters of his fate in Paris; to me, in fact, although he would never have guessed that I would be sitting at Sandherr’s desk. Let those who possess powerful means of investigation . . . It does not alter my belief in his guilt, but it is a clever tactic; it gives me pause for thought: he certainly does not give up, this fellow.
Paris
January 1895
Fred, my dearest,
Very fortunately I had not read the newspapers yesterday morning; my people had tried to conceal from me the knowledge of the ignoble scene at La Rochelle, otherwise I should have gone mad with despair . . .
Next in the file is a letter from Lucie to the minister, requesting permission to visit her husband on the Île de Ré to say goodbye. The request is granted for 13 February, subject to stringent restrictions, which are also listed. The prisoner is to remain standing between two guards at one end of the room; Madame Dreyfus is to remain seated at the other end, accompanied by a third guard; the prison governor will stand between them; they are not to discuss anything connected with the trial; there is to be no physical contact. A letter from Lucie offering to have her hands tied behind her back if she can approach a little closer is stamped ‘refused’.
Fred to Lucie: The few moments I passed with you were full of joy to me, though it was impossible to tell you all that was in my heart (14 February). Lucie to Fred: What emotion, what a fearful shock we both felt at seeing each other again, especially you, my poor beloved husband (16 February). Fred to Lucie: I wanted to tell you all the admiration I feel for your noble character, for your admirable devotion (21 February). Hours later, Dreyfus was on a warship, the Saint-Nazaire, steaming out into the Atlantic.
Up to now, most of the letters in the file have been copies, presumably because the originals were delivered to the addressee. But from this point on the majority of the pages I turn are in Dreyfus’s own hand. His descriptions of the voyage – in an unheated cell on an upper deck, open to the elements, through violent winter storms, watched night and day by warders with revolvers who refuse to speak to him – have been retained by the censors in the Colonial Ministry. On the eighth day the weather began to grow warmer. Still Dreyfus did not know his destination and no one was allowed to tell him; his guess was Cayenne. On the fifteenth day of the voyage he wrote to Lucie that the warship had at last anchored, off three small humps of rock and vegetation in the middle of the ocean’s wastes: Royal Island, St Joseph’s Island and (tiniest of all) Devil’s Island. To his astonishment, he discovered that the latter was intended for him alone.
Dearest Lucie . . . My darling Lucie . . . Lucie, dearest . . . Darling wife . . . I love you . . . I yearn for you . . . I think of you . . . I send you the echo of my deep affection . . . So much emotion and time and energy expended in the hope of some connection, only for it to end up in the darkness of this file! But maybe it is better, I think, as I skim the increasingly desperate complaints, that Lucie doesn’t read all of this: isn’t aware that after the Saint-Nazaire dropped anchor in the tropics, her husband had to spend four days locked in his steel box under the ferocious sun without once being allowed on deck, or that when eventually he was landed on Royal Island – while the old leper colony on Devil’s Island was demolished and his new quarters prepared – he was locked in a cell with closed shutters and was not allowed out for a month.
My dear,
At last, after thirty days of close confinement, they came to remove me to Devil’s Island. By day I am able to walk about in a space a few hundred metres square, followed at every step by warders with rifles; at nightfall (six o’clock) I am locked in my hut, four metres square, closed by an iron grille, before which relays of warders watch me all night long. My rations are half a loaf of bread a day, one third of a kilo of meat three times a week and on other days tinned bacon. To drink I have water. I must gather wood, light a fire, cook my own food, clean my clothes and try to dry them in this humid climate.
It is impossible for me to sleep. This cage, before which the guard walks up and down like a phantom in my dreams, the torment of the vermin that infest me, and the agony in my heart all conspire to make rest impossible.
There was a deluge of rain this morning. When there was an interval I made the round of the small portion of the little island which is reserved to me. It is a barren place; there are a few banana trees and cocoa palms, and dry soil from which basaltic rock emerges everywhere, and that restless ocean which is always howling and muttering at my feet!
I have been thinking much of you, my dear wife, and of our children. I wonder whether my letters reach you. What a sad and terrible martyrdom is this for both of us, for all of us! The guards are forbidden to speak to me. Days pass without a word. My isolation is so complete that it often seems to me that I have been buried alive.
The conditions under which Lucie is allowed to write are strict. She is not allowed to mention the case, or any events relating to it. She is instructed to deposit all letters at the Colonial Ministry by the 25th of each month. These are then carefully copied and read by the relevant officials in that ministry and in
the Ministry of War. Copies are also passed to Major Étienne Bazeries, chief of the cipher bureau in the Foreign Ministry, who checks to see if they may contain encoded messages. (Major Bazeries also scrutinises Dreyfus’s letters to Lucie.) I see from the file that the first batch of her letters reached Cayenne at the end of March, but was returned to Paris to be checked again. Only on 12 June, after a four-month silence, did Dreyfus finally receive word from home:
My darling Fred,
I cannot tell you the sadness and the grief I feel while you are going further and further away. My days pass in anxious thoughts, my nights in frightful dreams. Only the children, with their pretty ways and the pure innocence of their souls, succeed in reminding me of the one compelling duty I must fulfil, and that I have no right to give way. So then I gather strength and put my whole heart into bringing them up as you always desired, following your good counsels, and endeavouring to make them noble in heart, so that when you come back you will find your children worthy of their father, and as you would have moulded them.
With my love always, my dearest husband,
Your devoted
Lucie
The file ends here. I put down the last page and light a cigarette. I have been so absorbed, I haven’t registered that dawn has come. Behind me in the bedroom I can hear Pauline moving around. I go into my tiny kitchen to make coffee and by the time I emerge carrying two cups she is already dressed and looking around for something.
‘I won’t,’ she says distractedly, noticing the coffee, ‘thank you. I have to go but I’m missing a stocking. Ah!’
She sees it and swoops to retrieve it. She rests her instep on a chair and unrolls the white silk over her toes and heel and strokes it up her calf.
I watch her. ‘You look like a Manet: Nana in the Morning.’
‘Isn’t Nana a whore?’
‘Only in the eyes of bourgeois morality.’
‘Yes, well I am bourgeois. And so are you. And so, more to the point, are most of your neighbours.’ She pulls on her shoe and smooths down her dress. ‘If I leave now, they may not see me.’