Robert Harris - An Officer and a Spy

I hear Ranc complain to the adjudicator, ‘But this is ridiculous, monsieur!’ and the adjudicator calls out, ‘Colonel Henry, the purpose is to settle a dispute between gentlemen!’ but I can see in Henry’s eyes that he hears nothing except the pumping of his own blood. He lunges at me once again and this time I feel his blade on the tendon of my neck, which is as close as I have come to death since the day I was born. Ranc calls out, ‘Stop!’ just as the tip of my sword catches Henry on the forearm. He glances down at it and lowers his weapon, and I do the same as the witnesses and doctors hurry across to us. The sergeant major consults his watch. ‘The first engagement lasted two minutes.’

My surgeon stands me directly beneath a skylight and turns my head to inspect my neck. He says, ‘You’re fine: he must have missed you by a hair.’

Henry, though, is bleeding from his forearm — not a serious cut, merely a graze, but enough for the adjudicator to say to him, ‘Colonel, you may refuse to continue.’

Henry shakes his head. ‘We’ll carry on.’

While he is rolling back his sleeve and wiping the blood away Edmond says to me quietly, ‘This fellow is a homicidal lunatic. I’ve never seen such a display.’

‘If he tries it again,’ adds Ranc, ‘I shall have the thing stopped.’

‘No,’ I say, ‘don’t do that. Let’s fight it to the end.’

The adjudicator calls, ‘Gentlemen, to your places!’

‘Allez!’

Henry tries to start the re-engagement where he left it, with the same aggression as before, driving me back towards the wall. But the lower part of his arm is braided with blood. His grip is slippery. The slashing strokes no longer carry the old conviction — they are slowing, weakening. He needs to finish me quickly or he will lose. He throws everything into one last lunge at my heart. I parry the blow, turn his blade, thrust, and catch the edge of his elbow. He bellows in pain and drops his sword. His seconds shout, ‘Stop!’

‘No!’ he shouts, wincing and clutching his elbow. ‘I can continue!’ He stoops and retrieves his sword with his left hand and attempts to fit the hilt into his right, but his bloodied fingers won’t close on it. He tries repeatedly, but each time he attempts to raise it, the sword drops to the floor. I watch him without pity. ‘Give me a minute,’ he mutters, and turns his back to me to hide his weakness.

Eventually the two colonels and his doctor persuade him to go over to the table to allow the wound to be examined. Five minutes later Colonel Parès approaches where I am waiting with Edmond and Ranc and announces, ‘The cubital nerve is damaged. The fingers will be unable to grip for several days. Colonel Henry must withdraw.’ He salutes and walks away.

I put on my waistcoat and my jacket and glance across to where Henry sits slumped on a chair, staring at the floor. Colonel Parès stands behind him and guides his arms into the sleeves of his tunic, then Colonel Boissonnet kneels at his feet and fastens his buttons.

‘Look at him,’ says Ranc contemptuously, ‘like a great big baby. He’s completely finished.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I believe he is.’

We do not observe the usual custom following a duel and shake hands. Instead, as word filters out into the avenue de Lowendal that their hero has been wounded, I am hurried away through a rear exit to avoid the hostile crowd. According to the front pages the next day, Henry leaves to the cheers of his supporters, his arm in a sling, and is driven in an open landau around the corner to his apartment, where General Boisdeffre waits in person to offer him the best wishes of the army. I go out to lunch with Edmond and Ranc, and discover that the old senator is indeed correct: I have seldom had a better appetite nor more enjoyed a meal.

This buoyant mood persists, and for the next three months I wake each morning with a curious sense of optimism. On the face of it, my situation could hardly be worse. I have nothing to do, no career to go to, an inadequate income, and little capital to draw on. I still cannot see Pauline while her divorce is pending in case we are observed by the press or the police. Blanche has gone away: it was only after much string-pulling by her brother and various subterfuges (including the pretence that she was a fifty-five-year-old spinster with a heart condition) that she managed to avoid being called as a witness at the Zola trial. I am hissed at in public and libelled in various newspapers, which are tipped off by Henry that I have been seen meeting Colonel von Schwartzkoppen in Karlsruhe. Louis is removed as deputy mayor of the seventh arrondissement and sanctioned by the Order of Advocates for ‘improper conduct’. Reinach and other prominent supporters of Dreyfus lose their seats in the national elections. And while Lemercier-Picard’s death creates a great sensation, it is officially declared a suicide and the case is closed.

Everywhere the forces of darkness are in control.

But I am not entirely ostracised. Parisian society is divided, and for each door that is now slammed in my face, another opens. On Sundays I begin regularly to go for lunch at the home of Madame Geneviève Straus, the widow of Bizet, on the rue de Miromesnil, along with such new comrades-in-arms as Zola, Clemenceau, Labori, Proust and Anatole France. On Wednesday evenings it is often dinner for twenty in the salon of Monsieur France’s mistress, Madame Léontine Arman de Caillavet, ‘Our Lady of the Revision’, in the avenue Hoche — Léontine is an extravagant grande dame with carmine-rouged cheeks and orange-dyed hair on which sits a rimless hat of stuffed pink bullfinches. And on Thursdays I might walk a few streets west, towards the porte Dauphine, for the musical soirées of Madame Aline Ménard-Dorian, in whose scarlet reception rooms decorated with peacock feathers and Japanese prints I turn the pages for Cortot and Casals and the three ravishing young sisters of the trio Chaigneau.

‘Ah! You are always so cheerful, my dear Georges,’ these grand hostesses say to me. They flutter their fans and their eyelashes at me in the candlelight, and touch my arm consolingly — for a gaolbird is always a trophy for a smart table — and call across to their fellow guests to take note of my serenity. ‘You are a wonder, Picquart!’ their husbands exclaim. ‘Either that or you are mad. I am sure I should not retain my good humour in the face of so much trouble.’

I smile. ‘Well, one must always wear the mask of comedy for society. .’

And yet the truth is I am not wearing a mask: I do feel quite confident about the future. I am sure in my bones that sooner or later, although by what means I cannot foresee, this great edifice the army has constructed — this mouldering defensive fortress of worm-eaten timber — will collapse all around them. The lies are too extensive and ramshackle to withstand the pressures of time and scrutiny. Poor Dreyfus, now entering his fourth year on Devil’s Island, may not live to see it, and nor for that matter may I. But vindication will come, I am convinced.

And I am proved right, even sooner than I expected. That summer, two events occur that change everything.

First, in May, I receive a note from Labori summoning me urgently to his apartment in the rue de Bourgogne, just around the corner from the Ministry of War. I arrive within the hour to find a nervous young man of twenty-one, obviously up from the provinces, waiting in the drawing room. Labori introduces him as Christian Esterhazy.

‘Ah,’ I say, shaking his hand somewhat warily, ‘now that is an infamous name.’

‘You mean my cousin?’ he responds. ‘Yes, he has made it so, and a blacker rogue never drew breath!’

His tone is so vehement I am taken aback. Labori says, ‘You need to sit down, Picquart, and listen to what Monsieur Esterhazy has to tell us. You won’t be disappointed.’