An Officer and a Spy

smarter than I am. In truth, I have just two small rooms on the fourth floor, and I struggle to afford even these on a major’s pay. I am no Dreyfus, with a private income ten times my salary. But it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre; I get by, just about.
    I let myself in from the street and have barely taken a couple of paces towards the stairs when I hear the concierge’s voice behind me – ‘Major Picquart!’ – and turn to discover Madame Guerault brandishing a visiting card. ‘An officer came to call on you,’ she announces, advancing towards me. ‘A general!’
    I take the card: ‘General Charles-Arthur Gonse, Ministry of War’. On the reverse he has written his home address.
    His place is close to the avenue du Bois de Boulogne; I can walk to it easily. Within five minutes I am ringing his bell. The door is opened by a very different figure from the relaxed fellow I left on Saturday afternoon. He is unshaven; the pouches beneath his eyes are dark and heavy with exhaustion. His tunic is open to the waist, revealing a slightly grubby undershirt. He holds a glass of cognac.
    ‘Picquart. Good of you to come.’
    ‘My apologies that I’m not in uniform, General.’
    ‘No matter. It’s a Sunday, after all.’
    I follow him through the darkened apartment – ‘My wife is in the country,’ he explains over his shoulder – and into what seems to be his study. Above the window is a pair of crossed spears – mementos of his service in North Africa, I assume – and on the chimney-piece a photograph of him taken a quarter of a century ago, as a junior staff officer in the 13th Army Corps. He refreshes his drink from a decanter and pours one for me, then flops down on to the couch with a groan and lights a cigarette.
    ‘This damned Dreyfus affair,’ he says. ‘It will be the death of us all.’
    I make some light reply – ‘Really? I would have preferred mine to be slightly more heroic!’ – but Gonse fixes me with a look of great seriousness.
    ‘My dear Picquart, you don’t seem to realise: we have just come very close to war. I have been up since one o’clock this morning, and all because of that damned fool Lebrun-Renault!’
    ‘My God!’ Taken aback, I set down my untasted glass of cognac.
    ‘I know it’s hard to believe,’ he says, ‘that such a catastrophe might have resulted from one idiot’s gossip, but it’s true.’
    He tells me how, an hour after midnight, he was woken by a messenger from the Minister of War. Summoned to the hôtel de Brienne, he found Mercier in his dressing gown with a private secretary from the Élysée Palace who had with him copies of the first editions of the Paris newspapers. The private secretary then repeated to Gonse what he had just told Mercier: that the President was appalled – appalled! scandalised! – by what he had just read. How could it be that an officer of the Republican Guard could spread such stories – in particular, that a document had been stolen by the French government from the German Embassy, and that the whole episode was some kind of espionage trap for the Germans? Was the Minister of War aware that the German ambassador was coming to the Élysée that very afternoon to present a formal note of protest from Berlin? That the German emperor was threatening to withdraw his ambassador from Paris unless the French government stated once and for all that it accepted the German government’s assurances that it had never had any dealings with Captain Alfred Dreyfus? Find him, the President demanded! Find this Captain Lebrun-Renault and shut him up!
    And so General Arthur Gonse, the Chief of French Military Intelligence, at the age of fifty-six, found himself in the humiliating position of taking a carriage and going from door to door – to regimental headquarters, to Lebrun-Renault’s lodgings, to the fleshpots of Pigalle – until finally, just before dawn, he had run his quarry to earth in the Moulin Rouge, where the young captain was still holding forth to an audience of reporters and prostitutes!
    At this point I have to press my forefinger across my lips to hide a smile, for the monologue is not without its comic elements – all the greater when delivered in Gonse’s hoarse and outraged tones. I can only imagine what it must have been like for Lebrun-Renault to turn around and see Gonse bearing down upon him, or his frantic attempts to sober up before