An Officer and a Spy

be Alsace’ – Les Trois Marches in the rue d’Antrain, a rustic inn on the edge of open country. We walk to it for lunch, labouring up the hill in the broiling sun, trailed by my bodyguards. The auberge is a farmhouse, run by a couple named Jarlet, with a garden, orchard, stables, barn and pigsty. We sit out on benches under a tree drinking cider, buzzed by wasps, discussing the events of the morning. Edmond, who has never seen Dreyfus before, is remarking on his curious ability to repel sympathy – ‘Why is it that whenever he proclaims “I am innocent”, even though one knows for certain that he is, the words somehow lack conviction?’ – when I notice a group of gendarmes standing talking across the street.
    Jarlet is laying out a plate of pâté de campagne . I point the gendarmes out to him. ‘Two of those gentlemen are with us, but who are the others?’
    ‘They are standing guard outside the house of General de Saint-Germain, monsieur. He commands the army in this area.’
    ‘Does he really require police protection?’
    ‘No, monsieur, the guards are not for him. They are for the man who is staying in his house – General Mercier.’
    ‘Did you hear that, Edmond? Mercier is living across the road.’
    Edmond shouts with laughter. ‘That’s wonderful! We must establish a permanent bridgehead in the vicinity of the enemy.’ He turns to the patron. ‘Jarlet, from now on, I’ll pay to reserve a table for ten, for every lunch and dinner, for as long as the trial lasts. Is that all right with you?’
    It is indeed all right with M. Jarlet, and from that time on begins the ‘Conspiracy of Les Trois Marches’, as the right-wing papers call it, with all the leading Dreyfusards gathering here to eat the Jarlets’ good plain bourgeois fare each day at noon and seven – regulars include the Clemenceau brothers, the socialists Jean Jaurès and René Viviani, the journalists Lacroix and Séverine, the ‘intellectuals’ Octave Mirabeau, Gabriel Monod and Victor Basch. Quite why Mercier needs a bodyguard to protect him from such roughs as these is not at all clear – does he imagine that Professor Monod is going to attack him with a rolled-up copy of the Revue Historique ? On Wednesday I ask for my own police protection to be withdrawn. Not only do I view them as unnecessary, I suspect they pass on information about me to the authorities.
    All week people come and go to Les Trois Marches. Mathieu Dreyfus puts in an appearance, but never Lucie, who is staying with a widow in the town, while Labori, who has lodgings close to us, walks up the hill most evenings with Marguerite after he has finished consultations with his client in the military prison.
    ‘How is he bearing up?’ I ask one night.
    ‘Amazingly well, all things considered. My God, but he’s a strange one, isn’t he? I’ve seen him almost every day for a month, yet I don’t believe I know him any better now than I did in the first ten minutes. Everything is at a distance with him. I suppose that’s how he has survived.’
    ‘And how are the secret sessions going? What does the court make of the intelligence files?’
    ‘Ah, how the military adore all that stuff! Hundreds and hundreds of pages of it – love letters and buggers’ billets-doux and gossip and rumours and forgeries and false trails that lead nowhere. It’s like the Sibylline Books: you can put the leaves together however you like and read whatever you want into them. Yet I doubt if more than twenty lines apply directly to Dreyfus.’
    We are standing smoking cigarettes a little way apart from the others. It is dusk. There is laughter behind us. Jaurès’s voice, which was created by nature for talking to an audience of ten thousand rather than a table of ten, booms out over the garden.
    Labori says suddenly, ‘I see we are being watched.’
    Across the road, in one of the upper windows, Mercier is plainly visible, gazing down at us.
    ‘He has just had his old comrades round to dinner,’ I say. ‘Boisdeffre, Gonse, Pellieux, Billot – they are in and out of there constantly.’
    ‘I hear he’s planning to run for the Senate. This trial is a great platform for him. If it weren’t for his political ambitions, their side would lack direction.’
    ‘If it weren’t for his political ambitions,’ I reply, ‘the whole thing might never have happened. He thought Dreyfus could be his ticket to the presidency.’
    ‘He still does.’
    Mercier is scheduled to