An Officer and a Spy (60 page)

There is more, but I have read enough. I give it back. “Well, these are very noble words,” I say bitterly. “Naturally they would be—one
can always rely on Jaurès for noble words. But the reality is the army has won. And the very least they’ll insist on in return is an amnesty for those who organised the conspiracy against your brother.”
And against me
, I want to add. “It will make it impossible for me to pursue my legal claim against the General Staff.”

“In the short term, perhaps. But in the long run, with a different political climate, I have no doubt we can win a full exoneration in the courts.”

“I wish I shared your faith in our legal system.”

Mathieu stuffs the statement back in his pocket and stands. There is defiance in the way he plants his legs apart. “I’m sorry you feel as you do, Picquart. I understand that for the sake of your cause you’d prefer to have my brother die a martyr, if that is what it takes. But his family wants him back alive. He isn’t reconciled to this decision himself, to be honest with you. I think it would make a difference if I could tell him he had your agreement.”

“
My
agreement? Why should that matter to him?”

“Nevertheless, I believe it does. What message may I give him from you?”

He stands there, implacable.

“What do the others say?”

“Zola, Clemenceau and Labori are opposed. Reinach, Lazare, Basch and the rest say yes, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.”

“Tell him I am opposed as well.”

Mathieu nods curtly, as if he expected nothing else, and turns to leave.

“But tell him that I understand.”

Dreyfus is released on Wednesday, 20 September 1899, although the news is not made public for another day, to enable him to travel without being accosted by members of the public. I learn about his freedom from the newspapers like everyone else. Wearing a dark blue suit and a soft black hat for disguise, he is driven away by automobile from the prison in Rennes at dusk by officers of the Sûreté and taken to join Mathieu at the railway station in Nantes, where the brothers catch the southbound sleeper. At a family house in Provence
he is reunited with his wife and children. Afterwards he moves to Switzerland. He doesn’t return to Paris. He fears assassination.

As for me, I scratch a living and, with Labori’s help, pursue various newspapers for libel. In December I refuse to accept the government’s offer of a general amnesty for all those involved in the affair, even though I am told I will be restored to the army and given a command. Why should I put on the same uniform as Mercier, du Paty, Gonse, Lauth and that gang of criminals?

In January, Mercier is elected as senator for the lower Loire on a nationalist platform.

From Dreyfus I hear nothing. And then, more than a year after his release, one bleak day in the winter of 1900, I go downstairs to collect my mail and find a letter, postmarked Paris. The address is in handwriting familiar to me only from secret files and courtroom evidence.

It comes from an address in the rue de Châteaudun.

I carry it back upstairs. Pauline has stayed overnight, as she does quite often now the girls are getting older. Madame Romazzotti is how she prefers to style herself these days, having reverted to her maiden name: people assume she is a widow. I tease her that it makes her sound like a spiritualist on the boulevard Saint-Germain.

She calls from the bedroom, “Anything interesting?”

I read the note again.

“No,” I call back, “nothing.”

Later that morning I take one of my visiting cards and write on the back:
Sir, I will let you know the day when I can see you. G. Picquart
.

And then I do nothing about it. He is not the kind of man who finds it easy to say thank you; very well; I am not the sort who finds it easy to be thanked; therefore let us spare ourselves the bathos of the encounter. Later, I am accused in the newspapers of flatly refusing to
meet Dreyfus. One anonymous friend of the family—it turns out to be the Zionist pamphleteer Bernard Lazare—tells
L’Echo de Paris
, a right-wing newspaper:

How am I to answer this? Perhaps by observing that if the true measure of a man’s character, as Aristotle says, is his actions, then mine have hardly been those of an energetic anti-Semite. Still, there is nothing like an accusation of anti-Semitism to get all one’s old prejudices flowing, and I write bitterly to a friend: “I knew that one day I would be attacked by the Jews, and notably by the Dreyfuses …”

Thus our beautiful cause descends into tantrums, disappointment, reproaches and acrimony.

On the parade ground of the École Militaire, the companies of cadets wheel and stamp on the packed brown dirt. I stand behind the railings of the place de Fontenoy, as I often do, and watch as they are put through their paces. So much of my life is contained here in this spot. This is where I was taught as a young officer, and where I did my teaching. This is where I witnessed Dreyfus’s degradation. Over there in the riding school is where I fought my duel with Henry.

“Companies—
attention!
”

“Companies—
present arms!
”

The young men march past, eyes right, in perfect step, and the worst of it is they do not even see me. Or if they do, they see me without registering me—just another middle-aged civilian in a black suit and bowler hat watching wistfully from the other side.

And yet, in the end, we win—not in a flash of glory, as we had always hoped; not at the climax of some great trial, with the condemned man, vindicated at last, carried shoulder-high to freedom.
We win quietly, behind closed doors, when tempers have cooled, in committee rooms and archives, as all the facts are sieved and sieved again, by careful jurists.

First, Jaurès, the leader of the socialists, makes a forensic speech in the Chamber of Deputies, lasting a day and a half, setting out the entire affair with such clarity that the new Minister of War, General André, agrees to look again at all the evidence—that is in 1903. Then the result of the André inquiry prompts the Criminal Chamber to take up the case itself, and conclude that it should be reviewed by the Supreme Court of Appeal—that occupies 1904. Then a year is lost in political turmoil over the separation of Church and State—farewell 1905. But finally, the Supreme Court of Appeal quashes the Rennes verdict and exonerates Dreyfus entirely—that happens on 12 July 1906.

On the thirteenth, a motion is laid before the Chamber of Deputies to restore Dreyfus to the army with the rank of major, and to award him the highest available distinction, the cross of the Legion of Honour; that passes by a margin of 432 to 32, and when Mercier tries to speak against it in the Senate, he is howled down. On the same day, a second motion is debated, restoring me to the army with the rank I might have hoped to achieve if I had not been dishonourably discharged in 1898; this resolution passes by an even larger margin, of 449 to 26. To my astonishment I find myself walking back onto the parade ground of the École Militaire for Dreyfus’s medal ceremony in the uniform of a brigadier general.

On 25 October, my friend Georges Clemenceau becomes prime minister; I am in Vienna at the time. That evening, dressed in white tie and tails, with Pauline on my arm, I take my seat at the Vienna State Opera to watch Gustav Mahler conduct
Tristan und Isolde
. I have been looking forward to this performance for weeks. But just before the house lights dim, I notice an official from the French Embassy hovering in the aisle, and then a telegram begins to be passed along the row, from gloved to jewelled hand. Eventually it reaches Pauline, who gives it to me.

“Major Dreyfus to see the Minister of War …”

I hear him announce himself to my orderly at the foot of the marble staircase in that familiar voice with its trace of German. I listen to the click of his boots as he mounts the steps, and then slowly he emerges into view—the cap, the epaulettes, the gold buttons, the braid, the sword, the stripe on his trousers: all exactly as it was before the degradation, but with the addition of the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour on his artilleryman’s black tunic.

He comes to a halt on the landing and salutes. “General Picquart.”

“Major Dreyfus.” I smile and extend my hand. “I have been waiting for you. Please come through.”

The ministerial office is unchanged since the days of Mercier and Billot, still panelled in duck-egg blue, although Pauline, who acts as chatelaine, likes to arrange fresh flowers each day on the table between the large windows overlooking the garden. The trees this afternoon are bare; the lights of the ministry burn bright in the late November gloom.

“Sit down, Major,” I say. “Make yourself comfortable. Have you been in here before?”

“No, Minister.” He lowers himself onto the gilt chair and sits very formally, stiff-backed.

I take the seat opposite him. He has thickened out, looks good, almost sleek in his expensively cut uniform. The pale blue eyes behind the familiar pince-nez are wary. “So then,” I say, putting my fingertips together, and contemplating him long and hard, “what is it you want to discuss?”

“It concerns my rank,” he says. “The promotion I have received,
from captain to major, takes no account of the years I spent wrongly imprisoned on Devil’s Island. Whereas your promotion—if you’ll forgive me for pointing it out—from colonel to brigadier general, treats your eight years out of the army as though they were spent in active service. I believe this is unfair—prejudiced, in fact.”

“I see.” I feel my smile hardening. “And what do you want me to do about it?”

“Rectify it. Promote me to the rank I should have achieved.”

“Which would be what, in your opinion?”

“Lieutenant colonel.”

I pause. “But that would require special legislation, Major. The government would have to go back to the Chamber of Deputies and introduce a new motion.”

“It should be done. It is the right thing.”

“No. It is impossible.”

“Might I ask why?”

“Because,” I say in exasperation, “it is politically impossible. The motion passed in July, when feelings were overwhelmingly in your favour because it was the day after your exoneration. This is now November—the mood is already quite different. Also, I have a difficult enough task as it is—as I’m sure you will appreciate—coming back into this building as Minister of War and trying to work with so many officers who were for so long our bitter enemies. I must swallow my anger every day and put past battles behind me. How can I now turn round to them and tear open the whole controversy yet again?”

“Because it is the right thing to do.”

“I’m sorry, Dreyfus. It simply cannot be.”

We sit in silence. Suddenly there is more than just a strip of carpet between us: there is a chasm, and I would number those few seconds as among the most excruciating of my life. Eventually I can bear it no longer and get to my feet. “If that is all …?”

At once, Dreyfus also stands. “Yes, that is all.”

I show him towards the door. It seems an appalling note on which to end.

“It is a matter of some regret to me, Major,” I say carefully, “that we have not met alone in private until now.”

“No. Not since the morning of my arrest, when you took me to your office before conducting me to meet Colonel du Paty.”

I feel my face colouring. “Yes, I apologise for my part in that lugubrious charade.”

“Ah well. You made up for it, I think!” Dreyfus looks around the office and nods in appreciation. “It is a great thing to have done all that, and at the end of it to have been appointed to the Cabinet of the French Republic.”