An Officer and a Spy

fortunes disorientates me. The colours and noises of Paris in the early summer, the sheer aliveness of it, the smiling faces of my friends, the lunches and dinners and receptions that have been organised in my honour – all this after the solitary gloom and stale stink of my cell is overwhelming. It is only when I am with other people that I realise how much I have been affected. I find making conversation with more than one person bewildering; my voice is reedy in my ears; I am breathless. When Edmond takes me up to my room, I am unable to climb the stairs without pausing on every third or fourth step and clinging on to the handrail: the muscles that control my knees and ankles have atrophied. In the mirror I look pale and fat. Shaving, I discover white hairs in my moustache.
    Edmond and Jeanne invite Pauline to stay and tactfully give her the room next to mine. She holds my hand under the table during dinner and afterwards, when the household is asleep, she comes into my bed. The softness of her body is both familiar and strange, like the memory of something once lived and lost. She is finally divorced; Philippe has been posted abroad at his request; she has her own apartment; the girls are living with her.
    We lie in the candlelight, facing one another.
    I stroke the hair from her face. There are lines around her eyes and mouth that weren’t there before. I have known her since she was a girl, I realise. We have grown old together. I am suddenly overwhelmed by tenderness towards her. ‘So you’re a free woman?’
    ‘I am.’
    ‘Would you like me to ask you to marry me?’
    A pause.
    ‘Not particularly.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because, my darling, if that is how you choose to pose the question, I don’t think there’s much point, do you?’
    ‘I’m sorry. I’m not much used to any sort of conversation, let alone this kind. Let me try again. Will you marry me?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Seriously, you’re refusing me?’
    She takes her time answering. ‘You’re not the marrying sort, Georges. And now I’m divorced I realise that neither am I.’ She kisses my hand. ‘You see? You’ve taught me how to be alone. Thank you.’
    I am not sure how to respond.
    ‘If that’s what you want . . .?’
    ‘Oh yes, I’m perfectly content as we are.’
    And so I am denied a thing I never really wanted. Yet why is it I feel obscurely robbed? We lie in silence, and then she says, ‘What are you going to do now?’
    ‘Get fit again, I hope. Look at pictures. Listen to music.’
    ‘And afterwards?’
    ‘I’d like to force the army to take me back.’
    ‘Despite the way they’ve behaved?’
    ‘It’s either that or I let them get away with it. And why should I?’
    ‘So people must be made to pay?’
    ‘Absolutely. If Dreyfus is set free, it follows that the whole of the army leadership is rotten. There will be some arrests, I shouldn’t wonder. This is only the beginning of a war which may go on for some time. Why? You think I’m wrong?’
    ‘No, but I think perhaps you are in danger of becoming an obsessive.’
    ‘If I weren’t an obsessive, Dreyfus would still be on Devil’s Island.’
    She looks at me. Her expression is impossible to interpret. ‘Would you mind blowing out the candle, darling? I’m suddenly very tired.’
    We both lie awake in the darkness. I pretend to fall asleep. After a few minutes she gets out of bed. I hear her slip on her peignoir. The door opens and I see her for a moment silhouetted in the faint glow from the landing, and then she vanishes in the darkness. Like me, she has got used to sleeping alone.
    Dreyfus is landed in the middle of the night in a running sea on the coast of Brittany. He cannot be brought back to Paris for his retrial; it is considered too dangerous. Instead he is taken under cover of darkness to the Breton town of Rennes, where the government announces that his new court martial will be held, a safe three hundred kilometres to the west of Paris. The opening day of the hearings is fixed for Monday 7 August.
    Edmond insists on coming with me to Rennes, in case I need protection, even though I assure him there’s no need: ‘The government has already told me I’ll be provided with a bodyguard.’
    ‘All the more reason to have someone around who you can trust.’
    I don’t argue. There is an ugly, violent atmosphere. The President has been attacked at the races by an anti-Semitic aristocrat wielding a cane. Zola and Dreyfus have been burned in