An Officer and a Spy

dressed as a travelling salesman with a cardboard briefcase, breaks cover to cross the street and argue on behalf of his partner. He too is perspiring and frustrated and also makes an insulting remark about the general intelligence of uniformed policemen, at which the guardian of the peace loses his temper and within a minute they are both in custody.
    Ten minutes later I am able to leave my name and address with the duty sergeant in the commissary and slip away unescorted.
    The rue de Grenelle is only just round the corner. Number 11 is an imposing ancient property. I check along the street to make sure I am unobserved and then ring the bell. Almost at once the front door opens and a maid lets me in. Behind her, Louis waits anxiously in the hallway. He glances past my shoulder. ‘Are you being followed?’
    ‘Not any more.’ I give the maid my umbrella and hat. From behind a closed door comes a drone of male voices.
    Louis helps me off with my coat. ‘Are you really sure you want to do this?’
    ‘Where are they? Through there?’
    I open the door myself. Six middle-aged men in morning coats standing around a blazing fire cease talking and turn to look at me: I am reminded of a group portrait by Fantin-Latour – Homage to Delacroix , perhaps. Louis says, ‘Gentlemen, this is Colonel Picquart.’
    There is a moment of silence and then one of the men – bald-headed and with a heavy drooping moustache, whom I recognise as Georges Clemenceau, the left-wing politician and editor of the radical newspaper L’Aurore – starts a round of clapping in which everyone joins. As Louis ushers me into the room, another man, dapper and attractive, calls out cheerfully, ‘Bravo Picquart! Vive Picquart!’ and I recognise him too, from the surveillance photographs that used to cross my desk, as Mathieu Dreyfus. Indeed, as I go round shaking their hands, I find I know all these men by sight or by reputation: the publisher Georges Charpentier, whose house this is; the heavily bearded senator for the Seine, Arthur Ranc, the oldest man in the room; Joseph Reinach, a left-wing Jewish member of the Chamber of Deputies; and of course the pudgy figure in pince-nez to whom I am introduced last, Émile Zola.
    A fine lunch is served in the dining room, but I spend too much time talking to eat very much. I tell my fellow guests that I need to say my piece and leave; that every minute we spend together increases the chances that our meeting will be discovered. ‘Monsieur Charpentier may believe his servants are above acting as informants for the Sûreté, but regrettably experience has taught me otherwise.’
    ‘It has certainly taught me,’ adds Mathieu Dreyfus.
    I bow to him. ‘My apologies for that.’
    Opposite my place hangs a large portrait of Charpentier’s wife and children by Renoir, and from time to time as I recount my story my gaze wanders up to it and I experience that strange feeling of disconnection that can sometimes afflict me when I talk to a group of people. I tell them that they ought to take a look at a certain Colonel Armand du Paty de Clam, who was the officer who first interrogated Dreyfus and whose lurid imagination has shaped so much of the affair. I describe the methods of interrogation he used, which amounted almost to torture. And then there was my predecessor, Colonel Sandherr, a sick man who became convinced, wrongly, that the spy must be on the General Staff. I say that the greatest public misconception is that what was handed over to the Germans was of crucial military importance, whereas really it was the merest trivia. Yet the treatment of Dreyfus – the secret trial, the degradation, the imprisonment on Devil’s Island – has been so extreme the world has somehow become convinced that the very existence of France must have been at stake. ‘People say to one another, “There has to be more to it than meets the eye,” when the truth is there is less. And the longer this scandal goes on, the more colossal and absurd becomes the discrepancy in size between the original crime and the monumental efforts to cover up the judicial error.’
    At the far end of the table I see Zola taking notes. I pause for a sip of wine. One of the children in the Renoir is sitting on a large dog. The pattern of the dog’s fur echoes the colouring of Madame Charpentier’s dress, and thus what seems a natural pose is actually artfully contrived.
    I go on. Without revealing classified information, I tell them how I