An Officer and a Spy

office on 30 August. He could not do otherwise: the evidence was irrefutable. It seems that in response to my accusation of forgery, Cavaignac, the new Minister of War, supremely confident of his own correctness in all matters, ordered that the entire Dreyfus file be checked for authenticity by one of his officers. It took a long while – the file had by now swollen to three hundred and sixty items – and it was while this process was going on that I met Henry for the last time in Fabre’s chambers. I understand now why he seemed so broken: he must have guessed what was coming. Cavaignac’s aide did something that apparently no one else in the General Staff had thought to do in almost two years: he held the ‘absolute proof’ under a strong electric lamp. Immediately he noticed that the heading of the letter, My dear friend , and the signature, Alexandrine , were written on squared paper, the lines of which were bluish-grey, whereas the body of the letter – I have read that a deputy is going to ask questions about Dreyfus . . . – was on paper whose lines were mauve. It was obvious that a genuine letter that had been pieced together earlier – in fact in June 1894 – had been disassembled and then put back together with a forged central section.
    Summoned to explain himself, in the presence of Boisdeffre and Gonse, Henry at first tried to bluster, according to the transcript of his interrogation by Cavaignac released by the government:
    HENRY: I put the pieces together as I received them.
    CAVAIGNAC: I remind you that nothing is graver for you than the absence of an explanation. Tell me what you did.
    HENRY: What do you want me to say?
    CAVAIGNAC: To give me an explanation why one of the documents is lined in pale violet, the other in blue-grey.
    HENRY: I cannot.
    CAVAIGNAC: The fact is certain. Reflect on the consequences of my question.
    HENRY: What do you wish me to say?
    CAVAIGNAC: What you have done.
    HENRY: I have not forged papers.
    CAVAIGNAC: Come, come! You have put the fragments of one into the other.
    HENRY: [After a moment of hesitation] Well, yes, because the two things fitted admirably, I was led to this.
    Is the transcript accurate? Labori thinks not, but I have little doubt. Just because the government lies about some things, it doesn’t mean they lie about everything. I can hear Henry’s voice rising off the page better than any playwright could imitate it – bombastic, sulky, wheedling, cunning, stupid.
    CAVAIGNAC: What gave you the idea?
    HENRY: My chiefs were very uneasy. I wished to pacify them. I wished to restore tranquillity to men’s minds. I said to myself, ‘Let us add a phrase. Suppose we had a war in our present situation.’
    CAVAIGNAC: You were the only one to do this?
    HENRY: Yes, Gribelin knew nothing about it.
    CAVAIGNAC: No one knew it? No one in the world?
    HENRY: I did it in the interest of my country. I was wrong.
    CAVAIGNAC: And the envelopes?
    HENRY: I swear I did not make the envelopes. How could I have done so?
    CAVAIGNAC: So this is what happened? You received in 1896 an envelope with a letter inside, an insignificant letter. You suppressed the letter and fabricated another.
    HENRY: Yes.
    In the darkness of my cell I play out this scene again and again. I see Cavaignac behind his desk – the overambitious young minister: the fanatic with the temerity to believe he could end the affair once and for all and who now finds himself tripped up by his own hubris. I see Gonse’s hand trembling as he smokes and watches the interrogation. I see Boisdeffre by the window staring into the middle distance, as immutably aloof as one of the stone lions that no doubt guarding the gate of his family chateau. And I see Henry occasionally looking round at his chiefs in mute appeal as the questions rain down on him: help me! But of course they say nothing.
    And then I picture Henry’s expression when Cavaignac – not a soldier but a civilian Minister of War – orders him to be arrested on the spot and taken to Mont-Valérien, where he is locked up in the same rooms that I occupied in the winter. The next day, after a sleepless night, he writes to Gonse (I have the honour of requesting you to agree to come and see me here: I absolutely must speak to you ) and to his wife ( My adored Berthe, I see that except for you everyone is going to abandon me and yet you know in whose interest I acted ).
    I visualise him stretched out on his bed at noon, drinking a bottle of rum –