Robert Harris: An Officer and a Spy

None of these details is supposed to be made public, and my first response is to curse Lebrun-Renault beneath my breath as a bloody young fool. Shooting one’s mouth off in front of journalists is unpardonable for an officer at any time — but on a matter as sensitive as this? He must have been drunk! It crosses my mind that I should return to Paris immediately and go straight to the War Ministry. But then I consider my mother, no doubt even at this moment down on her knees praying for my immortal soul, and decide that I am probably better off out of it.

And so I allow the day to proceed as planned. I retrieve my mother from the clutches of a pair of nuns, we walk back to the house, and at noon my cousin, Edmond Gast, sends his carriage to collect us for lunch at his home in the nearby village of Ville-d’Avray. It is a pleasant, easy gathering of family and friends: the sort of friends who have been around long enough to feel like family. Edmond, a couple of years my junior, is already the mayor of Ville-d’Avray, one of those lucky individuals with a gift for life. He farms, paints, hunts, makes money easily, spends it well, and loves his wife — and who can be surprised, since Jeanne is still as pretty as a girl by Renoir? I envy no man, but if I did it would be Edmond. Next to Jeanne in the dining room sits Louis Leblois, who was at school with me; beside me is his wife, Martha; opposite me is Pauline Romazzotti, who, despite her Italian surname, grew up with us near Strasbourg, and who is now married to an official at the Foreign Ministry, Philippe Monnier, a man eight or ten years older than the rest of us. She is wearing a plain grey dress trimmed with white which she knows I like because it reminds me of one she wore when she was eighteen.

Everyone around the table apart from Monnier is an exile from Alsace and nobody has a good word to say for our fellow Alsatian, Dreyfus, not even Edmond, whose politics are radical republican. We all have tales of Jews, especially from Mulhouse, whose loyalties, when it came to the crunch and they were offered their choice of citizenship after the war, turned out to be to German rather than French.

‘They shift with the wind, according to who has power,’ pronounces Monnier, waving his wine glass back and forth. ‘That is how their race has survived for two thousand years. You can’t blame them, really.’

Only Leblois ventures a scintilla of doubt. ‘Mind you, speaking as a lawyer, I’m against secret trials in principle, and I must admit I wonder if a Christian officer would have been denied the normal judicial process in the same way — especially as according to Le Figaro the evidence against him sounds so thin.’

I say coldly, ‘He was “denied the normal judicial process”, as you put it, Louis, because the case involved matters of national security that simply couldn’t have been aired in open court, whoever was the defendant. And there was plenty of evidence against him: I can give you my absolute assurance of that!’

Pauline frowns at me and I realise I have raised my voice. There is a silence. Louis adjusts his napkin but says nothing more. He doesn’t want to spoil the meal, and Pauline, ever the diplomat’s wife, seizes the chance to move the conversation on to a more congenial topic.

‘Did I tell you that Philippe and I have discovered the most wonderful new Alsatian restaurant on the rue Marbeuf. .’

It is five by the time I arrive home. My apartment is in the sixteenth arrondissement, close to the place Victor Hugo. The address makes me sound much smarter than I am. In truth, I have just two small rooms on the fourth floor, and I struggle to afford even these on a major’s pay. I am no Dreyfus, with a private income ten times my salary. But it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre; I get by, just about.

I let myself in from the street and have barely taken a couple of paces towards the stairs when I hear the concierge’s voice behind me — ‘Major Picquart!’ — and turn to discover Madame Guerault brandishing a visiting card. ‘An officer came to call on you,’ she announces, advancing towards me. ‘A general!’

I take the card: ‘General Charles-Arthur Gonse, Ministry of War’. On the reverse he has written his home address.

His place is close to the avenue du Bois de Boulogne; I can walk to it easily. Within five minutes I am ringing his bell. The door is opened by a very different figure from the relaxed fellow I left on Saturday afternoon. He is unshaven; the pouches beneath his eyes are dark and heavy with exhaustion. His tunic is open to the waist, revealing a slightly grubby undershirt. He holds a glass of cognac.

‘Picquart. Good of you to come.’

‘My apologies that I’m not in uniform, General.’

‘No matter. It’s a Sunday, after all.’

I follow him through the darkened apartment — ‘My wife is in the country,’ he explains over his shoulder — and into what seems to be his study. Above the window is a pair of crossed spears — mementos of his service in North Africa, I assume — and on the chimney-piece a photograph of him taken a quarter of a century ago, as a junior staff officer in the 13th Army Corps. He refreshes his drink from a decanter and pours one for me, then flops down on to the couch with a groan and lights a cigarette.

‘This damned Dreyfus affair,’ he says. ‘It will be the death of us all.’

I make some light reply — ‘Really? I would have preferred mine to be slightly more heroic!’ — but Gonse fixes me with a look of great seriousness.

‘My dear Picquart, you don’t seem to realise: we have just come very close to war. I have been up since one o’clock this morning, and all because of that damned fool Lebrun-Renault!’

‘My God!’ Taken aback, I set down my untasted glass of cognac.

‘I know it’s hard to believe,’ he says, ‘that such a catastrophe might have resulted from one idiot’s gossip, but it’s true.’

He tells me how, an hour after midnight, he was woken by a messenger from the Minister of War. Summoned to the hôtel de Brienne, he found Mercier in his dressing gown with a private secretary from the Élysée Palace who had with him copies of the first editions of the Paris newspapers. The private secretary then repeated to Gonse what he had just told Mercier: that the President was appalled — appalled! scandalised! — by what he had just read. How could it be that an officer of the Republican Guard could spread such stories — in particular, that a document had been stolen by the French government from the German Embassy, and that the whole episode was some kind of espionage trap for the Germans? Was the Minister of War aware that the German ambassador was coming to the Élysée that very afternoon to present a formal note of protest from Berlin? That the German emperor was threatening to withdraw his ambassador from Paris unless the French government stated once and for all that it accepted the German government’s assurances that it had never had any dealings with Captain Alfred Dreyfus? Find him, the President demanded! Find this Captain Lebrun-Renault and shut him up!

And so General Arthur Gonse, the Chief of French Military Intelligence, at the age of fifty-six, found himself in the humiliating position of taking a carriage and going from door to door — to regimental headquarters, to Lebrun-Renault’s lodgings, to the fleshpots of Pigalle — until finally, just before dawn, he had run his quarry to earth in the Moulin Rouge, where the young captain was still holding forth to an audience of reporters and prostitutes!

At this point I have to press my forefinger across my lips to hide a smile, for the monologue is not without its comic elements — all the greater when delivered in Gonse’s hoarse and outraged tones. I can only imagine what it must have been like for Lebrun-Renault to turn around and see Gonse bearing down upon him, or his frantic attempts to sober up before explaining his actions, first to the Minister of War, and then, in what must have been an exquisitely embarrassing interview, to President Casimir-Perier himself.