An Officer and a Spy

I would number those few seconds as among the most excruciating of my life. Eventually I can bear it no longer and get to my feet. ‘If that is all . . .?’
    At once, Dreyfus also stands. ‘Yes, that is all.’
    I show him towards the door. It seems an appalling note on which to end.
    ‘It is a matter of some regret to me, Major,’ I say carefully, ‘that we have not met alone in private until now.’
    ‘No. Not since the morning of my arrest, when you took me to your office before conducting me to meet Colonel du Paty.’
    I feel my face colouring. ‘Yes, I apologise for my part in that lugubrious charade.’
    ‘Ah well. You made up for it, I think!’ Dreyfus looks around the office and nods in appreciation. ‘It is a great thing to have done all that, and at the end of it to have been appointed to the Cabinet of the French Republic.’
    ‘And yet, you know, the strange truth is I would never have attained it without you.’
    ‘No, my General,’ says Dreyfus, ‘you attained it because you did your duty.’

Acknowledgements
    A novel such as this is heavily dependent on the work of others, and I would like to express my thanks to all whose books have opened up this subject for me. The first general history I read was The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus by Jean-Denis Bredin: still the pre-eminent account for the general reader. The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France was also immensely useful, and I thank its author, Dr Ruth Harris of New College, Oxford, for the additional information and advice she gave me. I have also benefited from Dreyfus: A Family Affair 1789–1945 by Michael Burns, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters by Louis Begley, France and the Dreyfus Affair by Douglas Johnson, The Dreyfus Affair by Piers Paul Read and the monumental Histoire de l’affaire Dreyfus by Joseph Reinach, which remains indispensable even though it was published in 1908. Zola: A Life by Frederick Brown and George Painter’s two-volume life of Proust were also useful.
    Among more specialist books, I owe an immense debt to The Dreyfus Affair: A Chronological History by George R. Whyte, which has rarely left my side for a year. Another extremely valuable source was Georges Picquart: dreyfusard, proscrit, minister: La justice par l’exactitude by Christian Vigouroux, the first biography of Picquart to be published for more than a century, which contains family letters and information drawn from police files. I have been fortunate in being able to benefit from the very latest scholarship on the affair contained in Le Dossier Secret de l’affaire Dreyfus by Pierre Gervais, Pauline Peretz and Pierre Stutin. The associated website, www.affairedreyfus.com , which went online while I was writing, contains a wealth of information, including links to photographs and transcripts of all the documents in the secret file, recently released by the French Ministry of Defence.
    For primary research I read the transcripts of the Zola libel trial, the Rennes court martial, and the various inquiries and hearings of 1898, 1904, 1905 and 1906; all can now be found online. Most major French newspapers of the period are freely available at the website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, www.gallica.bnf.fr . I also found invaluable the digital archive of the London Times , which I accessed through the London Library.
    I have quoted extensively from Dreyfus’s own writings, published variously in Five Years of My Life , The Dreyfus Case (written with his son, Pierre) and Carnets, 1899–1907 . Other useful contemporary sources are My Secret Diary of the Dreyfus Case by Maurice Paléologue and L’Affaire Dreyfus: L’Iniquité, la Réparation by Louis Leblois. Finally, The Tragedy of Dreyfus by G. W. Steevens, an eyewitness account of the proceedings at Rennes, contrary to its title, is a comic delight – the affair as written by Jerome K. Jerome – and I have used his version of Bertillon’s insane testimony almost verbatim.
    The idea of retelling the story of the Dreyfus case first came up during lunch in Paris with Roman Polanski at the beginning of 2012: I shall always be grateful to him for his generosity and encouragement. I should also like to thank my English-language editors, Jocasta Hamilton of Hutchinson in London and Sonny Mehta of Knopf in New York, for their wise advice and suggestions; thanks too to my literary agent, Michael Carlisle. For many years, my German translator,