An Officer and a Spy

compromising letter Blanche had written to her widowed lover, which was allegedly in the hands of a mysterious woman. The woman was supposed to have turned up in a park wearing a veil in order to return it. The police investigated the matter and the blackmailer proved to be the widowed officer himself.’
    ‘No? I don’t believe it! What happened to him?’
    ‘Nothing. He’s very well connected. He was allowed to continue with his career. He’s still on the General Staff – a colonel, in fact.’
    ‘And what did Blanche’s fiancé make of it?’
    ‘He refused to have anything more to do with her.’
    Pauline sits back in her seat, considering all this. ‘Then I feel sorry for her.’
    ‘She is silly on occasions. But curiously good-hearted. And gifted in her way.’
    ‘What is the name of this colonel, so I can slap his face if I ever meet him?’
    ‘You won’t forget his name once you’ve heard it – Armand du Paty de Clam. He always wears a monocle.’ I am on the point of adding the curious detail that he was the officer in charge of the investigation into Captain Dreyfus, but in the end I don’t. That information is classified, and besides, Pauline has started nuzzling her cheek against my shoulder and suddenly I have other things on my mind.
    My bed is narrow, a soldier’s cot. To prevent ourselves slipping to the floor, we lie entwined in one another’s arms, naked to the warm night air. At three in the morning, Pauline’s breathing is slow and regular, rising from some deep soft seabed of sleep. I am wide awake. I stare over her shoulder at the open window and try to imagine us married. If we were, would we ever experience a night like this? Isn’t an awareness of their transience what gives these moments their exquisite edge? And I have such a horror of constant company.
    I extract my arm carefully from beneath hers, feel for the rug with my feet, and pull myself away from the bed.
    In the sitting room the night sky sheds enough light for me to find my way around. I pull on a robe and light the gas lamp on the escritoire. I unlock a drawer and take out the file of Dreyfus’s correspondence, and while my lover sleeps I resume reading from where I left off.
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    1 The French detective police force.

5
    THE STORY OF the four months after the degradation is easy to follow in the file, which has been arranged by some bureaucrat in strict chronological order. It was twelve days later, in the middle of the night, that Dreyfus was taken from his prison cell in Paris, locked in a convict wagon in the gare d’Orleans, and dispatched on a ten-hour rail journey through the snowbound countryside to the Atlantic coast. In the station at La Rochelle, a crowd was waiting. All afternoon they hammered on the sides of the train and shouted threats and insults: ‘Death to the Jew!’ ‘Judas!’ ‘Death to the traitor!’ It wasn’t until nightfall that his guards decided to risk moving him. Dreyfus ran the gauntlet.
Île de Ré prison
21 January 1895
My darling Lucie,
The other day, when I was insulted at La Rochelle, I wanted to escape from my warders, to present my naked breast to those to whom I was a just object of indignation, and say to them: ‘Do not insult me; my soul, which you cannot know, is free from all stain; but if you think I am guilty, come, take my body, I give it up to you without regret.’ Then, perhaps, when under the stinging bite of physical pain I had cried ‘Vive la France!’ they might have believed in my innocence!
But what am I asking for night and day? Justice! Justice! Is this the nineteenth century, or have we gone back some hundred years? Is it possible that innocence is not recognised in an age of enlightenment and truth? Let them search. I ask no favour, but I ask the justice that is the right of every human being. Let them continue to search; let those who possess powerful means of investigation use them towards this object; it is for them a sacred duty of humanity and justice . . .
    I reread the final paragraph. There is something odd about it. I see what he is doing. Ostensibly he is writing to his wife. But knowing his words are bound to pass through many hands along the way, he is also sending a message to the arbiters of his fate in Paris; to me, in fact, although he would never have guessed that I would be sitting at Sandherr’s desk. Let those who possess powerful means of investigation . . . It does not alter my belief in his guilt, but it is a