An Officer and a Spy

and imagine, for an instant or two before the darkness rushes in, that they can still communicate?
    So it is with me after my visit from Gonse. I continue to come into the office at my usual hour as if I am still alive. I read reports. I correspond with agents. I hold meetings. I write my weekly blanc for the Chief of the General Staff: the Germans are planning military manoeuvres in Alsace-Moselle, they are making increasing use of dogs, they are laying a telephone cable at Bussang close to the border. But this is a dead man talking. The real direction of the Statistical Section has passed over the road to the ministry, where regular meetings now take place between Gonse and my officers Henry, Lauth and Gribelin. I hear them leaving. I listen to them coming back. They are up to something, but I cannot work out what.
    My own options seem non-existent. Obviously I cannot report what I know to my superiors, since I must assume they already know it. For a few days I consider appealing directly to the President, but then I read his latest speech, delivered in the presence of General Billot – The army is the nation’s heart and soul, the mirror in which France perceives the most ideal image of her self-denial and patriotism; the army holds the first place in the thoughts of the government and in the pride of the country – and I realise that he would never take up arms on behalf of a despised Jew against ‘the nation’s heart and soul’. Obviously also I cannot share my discoveries with anyone outside the government – senator, judge, newspaper editor – without betraying our most secret intelligence sources. The same applies to the Dreyfus family; besides, the Sûreté is watching them night and day.
    Above all, I recoil from the act of betraying the army: my heart and soul, my mirror, my ideal.
    Paralysed, I wait for something to happen.
    I notice it on a newsstand on the corner of the avenue Kléber early one morning in November, when I am on my way to work. I am just about to step off the kerb and it stops me dead: a facsimile of the bordereau printed slap in the middle of the front page of Le Matin .
    I glance around at the people reading it in the street. My immediate instinct is to snatch their newspapers off them: don’t they realise this is a state secret? I buy a copy and retreat into a doorway. The full-size illustration is plainly taken from one of Lauth’s photographs. The article is headlined ‘The Proof’; its tone is unremittingly hostile to Dreyfus. Immediately it reads to me like the work of one of the prosecution’s handwriting experts. The timing is obvious. Lazare’s pamphlet, A Judicial Error: the Truth about the Dreyfus Affair , was published three days ago. It contains a violent attack on the graphologists. They have a professional motive to want everyone still to believe that Dreyfus was the author of the bordereau ; more to the point, they have all hung on to their facsimiles.
    I hail a cab to get to the office as quickly as possible. The atmosphere is funereal. Even though the report appears to vindicate Dreyfus’s conviction, it is a calamity for our section. Schwartzkoppen, like the rest of Paris, will be able to read the bordereau over his breakfast table; when he realises his private correspondence is in the hands of the French government he will choke, and then presumably he will try to work out how it reached them. The long career of Agent Auguste may well be over. And what of Esterhazy? The thought of how he will react to seeing his handwriting emblazoned over the newsstands is the only aspect that gives me any pleasure, especially when Desvernine comes to see me late in the morning to report that he has just observed the traitor rushing bare-headed out of the apartment of Four-Fingered Marguerite into a rainstorm, ‘looking as if all the hands of hell were after him’.
    I am summoned by General Billot. He sends a captain with a message that I am to come to his office at once.
    I would like time to prepare for this ordeal. I say to the captain, ‘I’ll be there directly. Tell him I’m on my way.’
    ‘I’m sorry, Colonel. My orders are to escort you to him now.’
    I collect my cap from the hatstand. When I step into the corridor I notice Henry loitering outside his office with Lauth. Something about their stance – some combination of shiftiness and curiosity and triumph – tells me that they knew beforehand that this summons was coming and wanted to watch me