Robert Harris - An Officer and a Spy

He struggles back to his feet.

‘What is your name?’

In the silent courtroom the response is barely audible: ‘Alfred Dreyfus.’

‘Age?’

‘Thirty-nine.’ That draws another shocked gasp.

‘Place of birth?’

‘Mulhouse.’

‘Rank?’

‘Captain, breveted to the General Staff.’ Everyone is leaning forward, straining to hear. It is difficult to understand him: he seems to have forgotten how to formulate his words; there is a whistling sound through the gaps in his teeth.

After various bits of legal procedure, Jouaust says, ‘You are accused of the crime of high treason, of having delivered to an agent of a foreign power the documents that are specified in the memorandum called the bordereau . The law gives you the right to speak in your defence. Here is the bordereau .’

He nods to a court official, who hands it to the prisoner. Dreyfus studies it. He is trembling, appears close to breaking down. Finally, in that curious voice of his — flat even when charged with emotion — he says: ‘I am innocent. I swear it, Colonel, as I affirmed in 1894.’ His stops; his struggle to maintain his composure is agony to watch. ‘I can bear everything, Colonel, but once more, for the honour of my name and my children, I am innocent.’

For the rest of the morning, Jouaust takes Dreyfus through the contents of the bordereau , item by item. His questions are harsh and accusatory; Dreyfus answers them in a dry and technical manner, as if he were an expert witness in somebody else’s trial: no, he knew nothing of the hydraulic brake of the 120 millimetre cannon; yes, he could have acquired information about covering troops, but he had never asked for it; the same was true of the plans for invading Madagascar — he could have asked but he didn’t; no, the colonel is mistaken — he wasn’t in the Third Department when changes were made to artillery formations; no, the officer who claimed to have lent him a copy of the firing manual was also mistaken — he had never had it in his possession; no, he had never said that France would be better off under German rule, certainly not.

The double tier of windows heats the courtroom like a greenhouse. Everyone is sweating apart from Dreyfus, perhaps because he is accustomed to the tropics. The only time he shows real emotion again is when Jouaust brings up the old canard that he confessed on the day of his degradation to Captain Lebrun-Renault.

‘I did not confess.’

‘But there were other witnesses.’

‘I do not remember any.’

‘Well then, what conversation did you have with him?’

‘It was not a conversation, Colonel. It was a monologue. I was about to be led before a huge crowd that was quivering with patriotic anguish, and I said to Captain Lebrun-Renault that I wished to cry out my innocence in the face of everybody. I wanted to say that I was not the guilty man. There was no confession.’

At eleven, the session ends. Jouaust announces that the next four days of hearings will be held behind closed doors, so that the judges can be shown the secret files. The public and press will be barred, and so will I. It will be at least a week before I am called to give evidence.

Dreyfus is escorted back the way he came without once looking in my direction, and the rest of us file out into the brilliant August heat, the journalists all running away down the street towards the special telegraph operators in their haste to be first with their description of the Prisoner of Devil’s Island.

Edmond, with characteristic attention to the finer things in life, has found a restaurant close to where we are staying — ‘a hidden gem, Georges, it might almost be Alsace’ — Les Trois Marches in the rue d’Antrain, a rustic inn on the edge of open country. We walk to it for lunch, labouring up the hill in the broiling sun, trailed by my bodyguards. The auberge is a farmhouse, run by a couple named Jarlet, with a garden, orchard, stables, barn and pigsty. We sit out on benches under a tree drinking cider, buzzed by wasps, discussing the events of the morning. Edmond, who has never seen Dreyfus before, is remarking on his curious ability to repel sympathy — ‘Why is it that whenever he proclaims “I am innocent”, even though one knows for certain that he is, the words somehow lack conviction?’ — when I notice a group of gendarmes standing talking across the street.

Jarlet is laying out a plate of pâté de campagne . I point the gendarmes out to him. ‘Two of those gentlemen are with us, but who are the others?’

‘They are standing guard outside the house of General de Saint-Germain, monsieur. He commands the army in this area.’

‘Does he really require police protection?’

‘No, monsieur, the guards are not for him. They are for the man who is staying in his house — General Mercier.’

‘Did you hear that, Edmond? Mercier is living across the road.’

Edmond shouts with laughter. ‘That’s wonderful! We must establish a permanent bridgehead in the vicinity of the enemy.’ He turns to the patron. ‘Jarlet, from now on, I’ll pay to reserve a table for ten, for every lunch and dinner, for as long as the trial lasts. Is that all right with you?’

It is indeed all right with M. Jarlet, and from that time on begins the ‘Conspiracy of Les Trois Marches’, as the right-wing papers call it, with all the leading Dreyfusards gathering here to eat the Jarlets’ good plain bourgeois fare each day at noon and seven — regulars include the Clemenceau brothers, the socialists Jean Jaurès and René Viviani, the journalists Lacroix and Séverine, the ‘intellectuals’ Octave Mirabeau, Gabriel Monod and Victor Basch. Quite why Mercier needs a bodyguard to protect him from such roughs as these is not at all clear — does he imagine that Professor Monod is going to attack him with a rolled-up copy of the Revue Historique ? On Wednesday I ask for my own police protection to be withdrawn. Not only do I view them as unnecessary, I suspect they pass on information about me to the authorities.

All week people come and go to Les Trois Marches. Mathieu Dreyfus puts in an appearance, but never Lucie, who is staying with a widow in the town, while Labori, who has lodgings close to us, walks up the hill most evenings with Marguerite after he has finished consultations with his client in the military prison.

‘How is he bearing up?’ I ask one night.

‘Amazingly well, all things considered. My God, but he’s a strange one, isn’t he? I’ve seen him almost every day for a month, yet I don’t believe I know him any better now than I did in the first ten minutes. Everything is at a distance with him. I suppose that’s how he has survived.’

‘And how are the secret sessions going? What does the court make of the intelligence files?’

‘Ah, how the military adore all that stuff! Hundreds and hundreds of pages of it — love letters and buggers’ billets-doux and gossip and rumours and forgeries and false trails that lead nowhere. It’s like the Sibylline Books: you can put the leaves together however you like and read whatever you want into them. Yet I doubt if more than twenty lines apply directly to Dreyfus.’

We are standing smoking cigarettes a little way apart from the others. It is dusk. There is laughter behind us. Jaurès’s voice, which was created by nature for talking to an audience of ten thousand rather than a table of ten, booms out over the garden.

Labori says suddenly, ‘I see we are being watched.’

Across the road, in one of the upper windows, Mercier is plainly visible, gazing down at us.

‘He has just had his old comrades round to dinner,’ I say. ‘Boisdeffre, Gonse, Pellieux, Billot — they are in and out of there constantly.’