An Officer and a Spy

talk to you first. With your permission, I’d like to brief the minister next. I hope to know more about Esterhazy in a day or two. Until then, I would prefer not to tell General Gonse.’
    ‘As you wish.’
    He pats his pockets until he finds his snuff box, and offers it to me. I refuse. He takes a couple of pinches. We round the place de la Bastille. In a minute or two we’ll be at our destination and I need a decision.
    ‘So do I have your permission,’ I ask, ‘to notify the minister?’
    ‘Yes, I think you should, don’t you? However, I would dearly love,’ he adds, tapping my knee to emphasise each word, ‘to avoid another public scandal! One Dreyfus is quite enough for a generation. Let us try to deal with this case more discreetly.’
    I am spared the need to reply by our arrival at the hôtel de Sens. For once, that gloomy medieval pile is a scene of activity. An official reception of some sort is in progress. People are arriving in evening dress. And there, waiting on the doorstep, smoking a cigarette, I see none other than Gonse. Our automobile pulls up a few metres away. Gonse drops his cigarette and heads towards us, just as the driver jumps out to lower the steps for Boisdeffre. Gonse halts and salutes – ‘Welcome back to Paris, General!’ – then looks at me with undisguised suspicion. ‘And Colonel Picquart?’ The statement is delivered as a question.
    I say quickly, ‘General Boisdeffre was kind enough to give me a ride from the station.’ It is neither a blatant lie nor the full truth, but hopefully it is enough to cover my exit. I salute and wish them a good evening. When I reach the street corner I risk a look back, but the two men have gone inside.
    I don’t want to tell Gonse about Esterhazy yet, for three reasons: first, because I know that once that consummate old bureaucrat gets his hands on the case he will want to take control of it and information will start to leak; secondly, because I know how the army works and I wouldn’t put it past him to go behind my back to Henry; and thirdly, and above all, because if I can armour myself with the prior backing of the Chief of the General Staff and the Minister of War, then Gonse will be unable to interfere and I shall be free to follow the trail wherever it leads me. I am not entirely without cunning: how else did I become the youngest colonel in the French army?
    Accordingly, on Thursday morning, at the same time as the team in Basel should be making its first contact with the double agent, Cuers, I take the Benefactor file and my private key – the token of my privileged access – and let myself through the wooden door into the garden of the hôtel de Brienne. The grounds, which appeared so magical to me under snow on the day of Dreyfus’s degradation, have a different kind of charm in August. The foliage on the big trees is so thick that the ministry might not exist; the distant sounds of Paris are as drowsy as the drone of bees; the only other person around is an elderly gardener watering a flower bed. As I cross the scorched brown turf I promise myself that if I am ever minister, I shall move my desk out here in the summer, and run the army from under a tree, as Caesar did in Gaul.
    I reach the edge of the lawn, cross the gravel, and trot up the shallow pale stone steps that lead to the glass doors of the minister’s residence. I let myself in and ascend the same marble staircase that I climbed at the beginning of my story, pass the same suits of armour and the bombastic painting of Napoleon. I put my head around the door of the minister’s private office and ask one of his orderlies, Captain Robert Calmon-Maison, if it would be convenient for me to have a word with the minister. Calmon-Maison knows better than to ask what it is about, for I am the keeper of his master’s secrets. He goes off to check and returns to tell me that I can be seen immediately.
    How quickly one accommodates to power! Not many months ago, I would have been awed at finding myself in the minister’s inner sanctum; now it is just a place of work, and the minister himself merely another soldier-bureaucrat passing through the revolving door of government. The present occupant, Jean-Baptiste Billot, is nudging seventy, and is on his second stint in the office, having held it fourteen years before. He is married to a wealthy and sophisticated woman and his politics are left-radical, yet he looks like an idiot general out of a comic opera – all