An Officer and a Spy

conspiracy ever woven against any man! During that time I’ve suffered more than any one of my contemporaries has suffered in the whole of his life . . .!’
    I close the door on him and search the corridors for Louis until I find him on a bench in the vestibule de Harlay staring at the floor.
    He looks up, grim-faced. ‘You realise we have just witnessed a coup d’état ? What else is one to call it when the General Staff is allowed to produce a piece of evidence the defence isn’t allowed to see, and then threatens to desert en masse unless a civilian court accepts it? The tactics they used on Dreyfus they are now trying to use on the entire country!’
    ‘I agree. That’s why I want to be recalled to the witness stand.’
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘Will you tell Labori?’
    ‘Be careful, Georges – I’m speaking as your lawyer now. You break your oath of confidentiality and they will put you away for ten years.’
    As we walk back to the court, I say, ‘There’s something else I’d like you to do for me, if you would. There is an officer of the Sûreté, Jean-Alfred Desvernine. Would you try to contact him discreetly, and say I need to meet him in the strictest confidence? Tell him to keep an eye on the papers, and the day after I’m released I’ll be in the usual place at seven in the evening.’
    ‘The usual place . . .’ Louis makes a note without passing comment.
    Back in court, the judge says, ‘Colonel Picquart, what is it you wish to add?’
    As I walk towards the stand, I glance across at Henry, sitting crammed in his seat between Gonse and Pellieux. His chest is so vast his arms folded across it appear stubby, like clipped wings.
    I stroke the polished wood of the handrail, smoothing the grain. ‘I wish to say something about the document that General Pellieux has mentioned as absolute proof of Dreyfus’s guilt. If he hadn’t brought it up, I would never have spoken of it, but now I feel I must.’ The clock ticks, a trapdoor seems to open at my feet and I step over the edge at last. ‘It is a forgery.’
    The rest is quickly told. When the howling and the shouting have died down, Pellieux steps forward to make a violent attack upon my character: ‘Everything in this case is strange, but the strangest thing of all is the attitude of a man who still wears the French uniform and yet who comes to this bar to accuse three generals of having committed a forgery . . .’
    On the day the verdict is announced, I am taken by carriage from Mont-Valérien for the final time. The streets around the Palace of Justice are crammed with roughs carrying heavy sticks, and when the jury retires to consider its verdict our group of ‘Dreyfusards’, as we are starting to be called, stands together in the centre of the court, for mutual protection as much as anything else: me, Zola, Perrenx, the Clemenceau brothers, Louis and Labori, Madame Zola and Labori’s strikingly beautiful young Australian wife, Marguerite, who has brought along her two little boys by her previous marriage. ‘This way we’ll all be together,’ she tells me in her strongly accented French. Through the high windows we can hear the noise of the mob outside.
    Clemenceau says, ‘If we win, we will not leave this building alive.’
    After forty minutes the jury returns. The foreman, a brawny-looking merchant, stands. ‘On my honour and my conscience the declaration of the jury is: as concerns Perrenx, guilty, by a majority vote; as concerns Zola, guilty, by a majority vote.’
    There is uproar. The officers are cheering. Everyone is on their feet. The ladies of fashion at the back of the court clamber on to their seats to get a better view.
    ‘Cannibals,’ says Zola.
    The judge tells Perrenx, manager of L’Aurore , that he is sentenced to four months in prison and a fine of three thousand francs. Zola is given the maximum penalty of a year in gaol and a fine of five thousand. The sentences are suspended pending appeal.
    As we leave, I pass Henry standing with a group of General Staff officers. He is in the middle of telling a joke. I say to him coldly, ‘My witnesses will be calling on yours in the next few days to make arrangements for our duel; be ready to respond,’ and I am pleased to see that this has the effect, at least briefly, of knocking the smile off his porcine face.
    Three days later, on Saturday 26 February, the commandant of Mont-Valérien calls me to his office and leaves me standing at attention while