An Officer and a Spy

been running the surveillance operation on the Dreyfus family. I thought you’d want to hear how things stand.’
    ‘Please.’ I gesture and we take our places around the table in the corner of my office. Guénée has a file with him; so has Henry.
    Guénée begins. ‘In accordance with Colonel Sandherr’s instructions, I concentrated my enquiries on the traitor’s older brother, Mathieu Dreyfus.’ From the file he extracts a studio photograph and slides it across the table. Mathieu is handsome, even dashing: he is the one who ought to have been the army captain, I think, rather than Alfred, who looks like a bank manager. Guénée continues, ‘The subject is thirty-seven years old, and has moved from the family home in Mulhouse to Paris with the sole purpose of organising the campaign on behalf of his brother.’
    ‘So there is a campaign?’
    ‘Yes, Colonel: he writes letters to prominent people, and has let it be known he is willing to pay good money for information.’
    ‘You know they’re very rich,’ puts in Henry, ‘the wife of Dreyfus even more so. Her family are the Hadamards – diamond merchants.’
    ‘And is the brother getting anywhere?’
    ‘There’s a medical man from Le Havre, a Dr Gibert, who is an old friend of the President of the Republic. Right at the start he offered to intercede on the family’s behalf with President Fauré.’
    ‘Has he done so?’
    Guénée consults his file. ‘The doctor met the President for breakfast at the Élysée on February twenty-first. Afterwards Gibert went straight to the hôtel de l’Athénée, where Mathieu Dreyfus was waiting – one of our men had followed him there from his apartment.’
    He gives me the agent’s report. Subjects were seated in lobby and appeared greatly animated. Positioned myself at adjoining table and heard B remark to A the following: ‘I’m telling you what the President said – it was secret evidence given to judges that secured conviction, not evidence in court.’ Same point repeated with emphasis several times . . . After departure of B, A remained seated in state of obvious emotion. A paid bill (see copy attached) and left hotel at 9.25.
    I look at Henry. ‘The President has revealed that the judges were shown secret evidence?’
    Henry shrugs. ‘People talk. It was bound to come out one day.’
    ‘Yes, but the President  . . .? You’re not concerned?’
    ‘No. Why? It’s just a bit of legal procedure. It doesn’t alter a thing.’
    I brood on this; I’m not so sure. I think of how my lawyer friend Leblois might react if he heard about it. ‘I agree it doesn’t alter Dreyfus’s guilt. But if it were to become widely known that he was convicted on the basis of secret evidence that he and his lawyer never even saw, then some will certainly argue he didn’t get a fair trial.’ Now I start to understand why Boisdeffre scents political trouble. ‘How are the family planning to use this information, do we know?’
    Henry glances at Guénée, who shakes his head. ‘They were all very excited about it at first. There was a family conference in Basel. They brought in a journalist, a Jew called Lazare. He moves in anarchist circles. But that was four months ago; since then, they’ve done nothing.’
    ‘Well, they have done one thing,’ says Henry, with a wink. ‘Tell the colonel about Madame Léonie – that’ll cheer him up!’
    ‘Oh yes, Madame Léonie!’ Guénée laughs and rummages through his report. ‘She’s another friend of Dr Gibert.’ He hands me a second photograph, of a plain-faced woman of about fifty, staring straight at the camera, wearing a Norman bonnet.
    ‘And who is Madame Léonie?’
    ‘She’s a somnambulist.’
    ‘Are you serious?’
    ‘Absolutely! She goes into a clairvoyant sleep and tells Mathieu facts about his brother’s case which she claims to get from the spirit world. He met her in Le Havre and was so impressed he brought her to Paris. He’s given her a room in his apartment.’
    ‘Can you believe it?’ Henry roars with laughter. ‘They are literally stumbling around in the dark! Really, Colonel, we have nothing to worry about from these people.’
    I lay the photographs of Mathieu Dreyfus and Madame Léonie side by side and I feel my uneasiness begin to lift. Table-tapping, fortune-telling, communing with the dead: these are all the fashion in Paris at the moment; sometimes one despairs of one’s fellow men. ‘You’re right, Henry. It shows