Robert Harris - An Officer and a Spy

The judge tells him to be quiet. ‘You do not have the floor, Maître Labori. The incident is closed.’

His mission accomplished, Boisdeffre continues his steady tread away from the witness stand. Several of the General Staff officers rise to follow him, buttoning their capes.

Labori is still trying to summon him back. ‘Pardon me, General Boisdeffre-’

‘You do not have the floor.’ The judge hammers his gavel. ‘Bring in Major Esterhazy.’

‘But I have some questions to put to this witness. .’

‘It was an incident outside the scope of the trial. You do not have the floor.’

‘I demand the floor!’

It is too late. From the back of the courtroom comes the sound of a door closing — courteously, not slammed — and Boisdeffre’s intervention is over.

After the drama of the last few minutes, the arrival of Esterhazy is an anticlimax. Labori and the Clemenceau brothers can be heard debating in loud whispers whether they should walk out of the trial in protest at Boisdeffre’s extraordinary intervention. The jury — that collection of drapers, merchants and market gardeners — still look stunned at having been threatened by the Chief of the General Staff in person that if they find against the army, the entire High Command will take it as a vote of no confidence and will resign. As for me, I sit shifting in my seat in an agony of conscience as to what I should do next.

Esterhazy — trembling, his unnaturally large and protruding eyes darting constantly this way and that — begins by making an appeal to the jury. ‘I do not know whether you realise the abominable situation in which I am placed. A wretch, Monsieur Mathieu Dreyfus, without the shadow of a proof, has dared to accuse me of being the author of the crime for which his brother is being punished. Today, in contempt of all rights, in contempt of all the rules of justice, I am summoned before you, not as a witness, but as an accused. I protest with all my might against this treatment. .’

I cannot bear to listen to him. Ostentatiously I stand and walk out of the court.

Esterhazy shouts after me, ‘During the last eighteen months there has been woven against me the most frightful conspiracy ever woven against any man! During that time I’ve suffered more than any one of my contemporaries has suffered in the whole of his life. .!’

I close the door on him and search the corridors for Louis until I find him on a bench in the vestibule de Harlay staring at the floor.

He looks up, grim-faced. ‘You realise we have just witnessed a coup d’état ? What else is one to call it when the General Staff is allowed to produce a piece of evidence the defence isn’t allowed to see, and then threatens to desert en masse unless a civilian court accepts it? The tactics they used on Dreyfus they are now trying to use on the entire country!’

‘I agree. That’s why I want to be recalled to the witness stand.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Will you tell Labori?’

‘Be careful, Georges — I’m speaking as your lawyer now. You break your oath of confidentiality and they will put you away for ten years.’

As we walk back to the court, I say, ‘There’s something else I’d like you to do for me, if you would. There is an officer of the Sûreté, Jean-Alfred Desvernine. Would you try to contact him discreetly, and say I need to meet him in the strictest confidence? Tell him to keep an eye on the papers, and the day after I’m released I’ll be in the usual place at seven in the evening.’

‘The usual place. .’ Louis makes a note without passing comment.

Back in court, the judge says, ‘Colonel Picquart, what is it you wish to add?’

As I walk towards the stand, I glance across at Henry, sitting crammed in his seat between Gonse and Pellieux. His chest is so vast his arms folded across it appear stubby, like clipped wings.

I stroke the polished wood of the handrail, smoothing the grain. ‘I wish to say something about the document that General Pellieux has mentioned as absolute proof of Dreyfus’s guilt. If he hadn’t brought it up, I would never have spoken of it, but now I feel I must.’ The clock ticks, a trapdoor seems to open at my feet and I step over the edge at last. ‘It is a forgery.’

The rest is quickly told. When the howling and the shouting have died down, Pellieux steps forward to make a violent attack upon my character: ‘Everything in this case is strange, but the strangest thing of all is the attitude of a man who still wears the French uniform and yet who comes to this bar to accuse three generals of having committed a forgery. .’

On the day the verdict is announced, I am taken by carriage from Mont-Valérien for the final time. The streets around the Palace of Justice are crammed with roughs carrying heavy sticks, and when the jury retires to consider its verdict our group of ‘Dreyfusards’, as we are starting to be called, stands together in the centre of the court, for mutual protection as much as anything else: me, Zola, Perrenx, the Clemenceau brothers, Louis and Labori, Madame Zola and Labori’s strikingly beautiful young Australian wife, Marguerite, who has brought along her two little boys by her previous marriage. ‘This way we’ll all be together,’ she tells me in her strongly accented French. Through the high windows we can hear the noise of the mob outside.

Clemenceau says, ‘If we win, we will not leave this building alive.’

After forty minutes the jury returns. The foreman, a brawny-looking merchant, stands. ‘On my honour and my conscience the declaration of the jury is: as concerns Perrenx, guilty, by a majority vote; as concerns Zola, guilty, by a majority vote.’

There is uproar. The officers are cheering. Everyone is on their feet. The ladies of fashion at the back of the court clamber on to their seats to get a better view.

‘Cannibals,’ says Zola.

The judge tells Perrenx, manager of L’Aurore , that he is sentenced to four months in prison and a fine of three thousand francs. Zola is given the maximum penalty of a year in gaol and a fine of five thousand. The sentences are suspended pending appeal.

As we leave, I pass Henry standing with a group of General Staff officers. He is in the middle of telling a joke. I say to him coldly, ‘My witnesses will be calling on yours in the next few days to make arrangements for our duel; be ready to respond,’ and I am pleased to see that this has the effect, at least briefly, of knocking the smile off his porcine face.

Three days later, on Saturday 26 February, the commandant of Mont-Valérien calls me to his office and leaves me standing at attention while he informs me that I have been found guilty of ‘grave misconduct’ by a panel of senior officers and that I am dismissed from the army forthwith. I will not receive the full pension of a retired colonel but only that of a major: thirty francs per week. He is further authorised to tell me that if I make any comments in public again regarding my period of service on the General Staff, the army will take ‘the severest possible action’ against me.

‘Do you have anything to say?’

‘No, Colonel.’

‘Dismissed!’

At dusk, carrying my suitcase, I am escorted to the gate and left on the cobbled forecourt to make my own way home. I have known no other life except the army since I was eighteen years old. But all that is behind me now, and it is as plain Monsieur Picquart that I walk down the hill to the railway station to catch the train back into Paris.

1Zola’s novel about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

The next evening I occupy the familiar corner table in the café of the gare Saint-Lazare. It is a Sunday, a quiet time, a lonely place. I am one of only a handful of customers. I have taken precautions getting here — diving into churches, leaving by side doors, doubling back on myself, dodging down alleys — with the result that I am fairly sure no one has followed me. I read my paper, smoke a cigarette and manage to make my beer last until a quarter to eight, by which time it is obvious Desvernine is not coming. I am disappointed but not surprised: given the change in my circumstances since we last met, one can hardly blame him.