Robert Harris - An Officer and a Spy

The second event that summer is much more significant and takes place four days later.

It is early in the evening, Thursday, 7 July, and as usual at that time of the week I am at Aline Ménard-Dorian’s neo-Gothic mansion: to be exact, I am standing in the garden prior to going into the concert, sipping champagne, talking to Zola, whose appeal against his conviction is being heard in a courtroom in Versailles. A new government has just been formed and we are discussing what effect this is likely to have on his case when Clemenceau, with Labori at his heels, suddenly erupts on to the patio carrying an evening newspaper.

‘Have you heard what’s just happened?’

‘No.’

‘My friends, it is a sensation! That little prig Cavaignac 1has just made his first speech in the chamber as Minister of War, and claims to have proved once and for all that Dreyfus is a traitor!’

‘How has he done that?’

Clemenceau thrusts the paper into my hands. ‘By reading out verbatim three intercepted messages from the secret intelligence files.’

‘It cannot be possible. .!’

It cannot be possible — and yet here it is, in black and white: the new Minister of War, Godefroy Cavaignac, who replaced Billot barely a week ago, claims to have ended the Dreyfus affair with a political coup de théâtre . ‘I’m going to show to the Chamber three documents. Here is the first letter. It was received in March 1894, when it came into the intelligence department of the Ministry of War. .’ Omitting only the names of the sender and the addressee, he goes through them one by one: the infamous message from the secret file (I am enclosing twelve master plans of Nice which that lowlife D gave me for you ), a second letter which I do not recognise (D has brought me many very interesting matters ), and the ‘absolute proof’ that turned the course of Zola’s trial:

I have read that a deputy is going to ask questions about Dreyfus. If someone asks in Rome for new explanations, I will say that I have never had any dealings with this Jew. If someone asks you, say the same, for no one must ever know what happened to him.

I hand the paper on to Zola. ‘He really declaimed all of this rubbish out loud? He must be crazy.’

‘You wouldn’t have thought so if you’d been in the Chamber,’ replies Clemenceau. ‘The entire place rose in acclamation. They think he’s settled the Dreyfus issue once and for all. They even passed a motion ordering the government to print thirty-six thousand copies of the evidence and post them in every commune in France!’

Labori says, ‘It’s a disaster for us, unless we can counter it.’

Zola asks, ‘Can we counter it?’

All three look at me.

That evening, after the concert, which includes the two great Wagner piano sonatas, I make my excuses to Aline and instead of staying for dinner, and with the music still playing in my head, I go to find Pauline. I know that she is lodging with an elderly cousin, a spinster, who has an apartment not far away, close to the Bois de Boulogne. At first, the cousin refuses to fetch her to the door: ‘Have you not done her enough harm already, monsieur? Is it not time to let her be?’

‘Please, madame, I need to see her.’

‘It is very late.’

‘It’s not yet ten, still light-’

‘Good night, monsieur.’

She closes the door on me. I ring the bell again. I hear whispered voices. There is a long pause and this time when the door opens Pauline is standing in her cousin’s place. She is dressed very soberly in a white blouse and dark skirt, her hair pulled back, no make-up. She might almost be a member of a religious order; I wonder if she is still going to confession. She says, ‘I thought we had agreed not to meet until things were settled.’

‘There may not be time to wait.’

She purses her lips, nods. ‘I’ll get my hat.’ As she goes into her bedroom, I see on the table in the little sitting room a typewriter: typically practical, she has taken the money I gave her and invested part of it in learning a new skill — the first time she has ever had an income of her own.

Outside, when we are round the corner and safely out of sight of the apartment, Pauline takes my arm and we walk into the Bois. It is a still, clear summer evening, the temperature so perfectly poised that there seems to be no climate, no barrier between the mind and nature. There are simply the stars, and the dry scent of the grass and the trees, and the occasional faint splash from the lake where two lovers drift in a boat in the moonlight. Their voices carry louder than they realise in the motionless air. But we have only to walk a few hundred paces, strike out from the sandy paths and enter the trees, and they, and the city, cease to exist.

We find a secluded place beneath an immense old cedar. I take off my tailcoat and spread it on the ground for us, loosen my white tie, sit down beside her and put my arm around her.

‘You’ll ruin your coat,’ she says. ‘You’ll have to get it cleaned.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I won’t need it for a while.’

‘Are you going away?’

‘You could put it that way.’

I explain to her then what I intend to do. I made my mind up listening to the concert; listening to the Wagner, in fact, which always has a heady effect on me.

‘I am going to challenge the government’s version of events in public.’

I have no illusions about what will happen to me as a result — I can hardly complain that I haven’t been given fair warning. ‘I suppose I should regard my month in Mont-Valérien as a kind of trial run.’ I put a brave face on it, for her sake. Inwardly I am less confident. What is the worst I can expect? Once the prison doors close on me, I will be in some physical jeopardy — that has to be taken into account. Incarceration will not be pleasant, and may be prolonged for weeks and months, possibly even a year or more, although I do not mention that to Pauline: it will be in the government’s interests to try to spin out legal proceedings as long as they can, if only in the hope that Dreyfus may die in the interim.

When I’ve finished explaining, she says, ‘You sound as though you have made up your mind already.’

‘If I pull back now, I may never get a better chance. I’d be obliged to spend the rest of my life with the knowledge that when the moment came, I couldn’t rise to it. It would destroy me — I’d never be able to look at a painting or read a novel or listen to music again without a creeping sense of shame. I’m just so very sorry to have mixed you up in all of this.’

‘Don’t keep apologising. I’m not a child. I mixed myself up in it when I fell in love with you.’

‘And how is it, being alone?’

‘I’ve discovered I can survive. It’s oddly exhilarating.’

We lie quietly, our hands interlaced, looking up through the branches to the stars. I seem to feel the turning of the earth beneath us. It will just be starting to get dark in the tropics of South America. I think of Dreyfus and try to picture what he is doing, whether they still manacle him to his bed at night. Our destinies are now entirely intertwined. I depend upon his survival as much as he depends on mine — if he endures, then so will I; if I walk free, then he will too.

I remain there with Pauline for a long time, savouring these final hours together, until the stars begin to fade into the dawn, then I pick up my coat and drape it over her shoulders, and arm in arm we walk back together into the sleeping city.

1Godefroy Cavaignac (1853–1905), fervent Catholic, appointed Minister of War 28 June 1898.

The next day, with the help of Labori, I draft an open letter to the government. At his suggestion I send it not to the devout and unbending Minister of War, our toy Brutus, but to the anti-clerical new prime minister, Henri Brisson: