Robert Harris - An Officer and a Spy

A day or two later, Henry brings an agent to my office to brief me about Dreyfus. He introduces him as François Guénée, of the Sûreté. 1He is in his forties, yellow-skinned with the effects of nicotine or alcohol or both, with that manner, at once bullying and obsequious, typical of a certain type of policeman. As we shake hands I recognise him from my first morning: he was one of those who were sitting around smoking their pipes and playing cards downstairs. Henry says, ‘Guénée has been running the surveillance operation on the Dreyfus family. I thought you’d want to hear how things stand.’

‘Please.’ I gesture and we take our places around the table in the corner of my office. Guénée has a file with him; so has Henry.

Guénée begins. ‘In accordance with Colonel Sandherr’s instructions, I concentrated my enquiries on the traitor’s older brother, Mathieu Dreyfus.’ From the file he extracts a studio photograph and slides it across the table. Mathieu is handsome, even dashing: he is the one who ought to have been the army captain, I think, rather than Alfred, who looks like a bank manager. Guénée continues, ‘The subject is thirty-seven years old, and has moved from the family home in Mulhouse to Paris with the sole purpose of organising the campaign on behalf of his brother.’

‘So there is a campaign?’

‘Yes, Colonel: he writes letters to prominent people, and has let it be known he is willing to pay good money for information.’

‘You know they’re very rich,’ puts in Henry, ‘the wife of Dreyfus even more so. Her family are the Hadamards — diamond merchants.’

‘And is the brother getting anywhere?’

‘There’s a medical man from Le Havre, a Dr Gibert, who is an old friend of the President of the Republic. Right at the start he offered to intercede on the family’s behalf with President Fauré.’

‘Has he done so?’

Guénée consults his file. ‘The doctor met the President for breakfast at the Élysée on February twenty-first. Afterwards Gibert went straight to the hôtel de l’Athénée, where Mathieu Dreyfus was waiting — one of our men had followed him there from his apartment.’

He gives me the agent’s report. Subjects were seated in lobby and appeared greatly animated. Positioned myself at adjoining table and heard B remark to A the following: ‘I’m telling you what the President said — it was secret evidence given to judges that secured conviction, not evidence in court.’ Same point repeated with emphasis several times. . After departure of B, A remained seated in state of obvious emotion. A paid bill (see copy attached) and left hotel at 9.25.

I look at Henry. ‘The President has revealed that the judges were shown secret evidence?’

Henry shrugs. ‘People talk. It was bound to come out one day.’

‘Yes, but the President . .? You’re not concerned?’

‘No. Why? It’s just a bit of legal procedure. It doesn’t alter a thing.’

I brood on this; I’m not so sure. I think of how my lawyer friend Leblois might react if he heard about it. ‘I agree it doesn’t alter Dreyfus’s guilt. But if it were to become widely known that he was convicted on the basis of secret evidence that he and his lawyer never even saw, then some will certainly argue he didn’t get a fair trial.’ Now I start to understand why Boisdeffre scents political trouble. ‘How are the family planning to use this information, do we know?’

Henry glances at Guénée, who shakes his head. ‘They were all very excited about it at first. There was a family conference in Basel. They brought in a journalist, a Jew called Lazare. He moves in anarchist circles. But that was four months ago; since then, they’ve done nothing.’

‘Well, they have done one thing,’ says Henry, with a wink. ‘Tell the colonel about Madame Léonie — that’ll cheer him up!’

‘Oh yes, Madame Léonie!’ Guénée laughs and rummages through his report. ‘She’s another friend of Dr Gibert.’ He hands me a second photograph, of a plain-faced woman of about fifty, staring straight at the camera, wearing a Norman bonnet.

‘And who is Madame Léonie?’

‘She’s a somnambulist.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Absolutely! She goes into a clairvoyant sleep and tells Mathieu facts about his brother’s case which she claims to get from the spirit world. He met her in Le Havre and was so impressed he brought her to Paris. He’s given her a room in his apartment.’

‘Can you believe it?’ Henry roars with laughter. ‘They are literally stumbling around in the dark! Really, Colonel, we have nothing to worry about from these people.’

I lay the photographs of Mathieu Dreyfus and Madame Léonie side by side and I feel my uneasiness begin to lift. Table-tapping, fortune-telling, communing with the dead: these are all the fashion in Paris at the moment; sometimes one despairs of one’s fellow men. ‘You’re right, Henry. It shows they’re getting nowhere. Even if they have discovered there was a secret file of evidence, they obviously realise that on its own it means nothing. We just need to make sure it stays like that.’ I turn to Guénée. ‘How are you handling the surveillance?’

‘We have them very tightly surrounded, Colonel. Madame Dreyfus’s nanny reports to us weekly. The concierge in Mathieu Dreyfus’s apartment building in the rue de Châteaudun is our informant. We have another who works as his wife’s maid. His cook and her fiancé keep an eye out for us. We follow him wherever he goes. All the family’s communications are diverted here by the postal authorities, and we make copies.’

‘And this is the correspondence of Dreyfus himself.’ Henry holds up the file he has brought with him and hands it over to me. ‘They need it back tomorrow.’

It is tied with black ribbon and stamped with the official seal of the Colonial Ministry. I unfasten it and flick open the cover. Some of the letters are originals — the ones the censor has decided not to let through and which therefore have been retained in the ministry — others are copies of the correspondence that was cleared. My dear Lucie, I ask myself in truth how I can go on living. . I put the letter back and take out another. My poor Fred darling, what anguish I felt as I parted from you. . It jolts me. It’s hard to think of that stiff, awkward, chilly figure as ‘Fred’.

I say, ‘From now on, I’d like to be copied in to all their correspondence as soon as it arrives at the Colonial Ministry.’

‘Yes, Colonel.’

‘In the meantime, Monsieur Guénée, you should continue the surveillance of the family. As long as their agitation is confined to the level of clairvoyance, there is nothing to concern us. However, if it starts to go beyond that, we may have to think again. And at all times be on the lookout for something that might suggest an additional motive for Dreyfus’s treason.’

‘Yes, Colonel.’

And with that, the briefing ends.

At the end of the afternoon, I put the file of correspondence into my briefcase and take it home.

It is a still, warm, golden time of day. My apartment is high enough above the street to muffle most of the city’s noise; the rest is deadened by the book-lined walls. The floor space is dominated by a grand piano — an Erard — miraculously salvaged from the rubble of Strasbourg and given to me by my mother. I sit in my armchair and tug off my boots. Then I light a cigarette and gaze across at the briefcase sitting on the piano stool. I am supposed to change and go straight out again. I should leave it until I return. But my curiosity is too strong.

I sit at the tiny escritoire between the two windows and take out the file. The first item is a letter sent from the military prison of Cherche-Midi dated 5 December 1894, more than seven weeks after Dreyfus’s arrest. It has been neatly copied out by the censor on lined paper: