An Officer and a Spy

The concierge brings me the morning’s newspapers; she leaves them outside the door. I wait until she’s gone before I fetch them in, and then I read them in bed, wearing my dressing gown. I have nothing else to do. As usual, the Dreyfus affair is the dominant story. It unfolds each day like a serial, peopled by an exotic cast of characters I scarcely recognise, including me (the forty-three-year-old high-flying bachelor spymaster who has betrayed his former chiefs). Among the latest plot twists are the letters Esterhazy sent to his then mistress, Madame de Boulancy, thirteen years ago, which have ended up in Le Figaro (If this evening I were told that I am to be killed tomorrow like an Uhlan captain while running my sword through the French, I would certainly be perfectly happy. I wouldn’t harm a little dog, but I would have a hundred thousand Frenchmen killed with pleasure). Esterhazy has denounced these as Jewish forgeries and demanded, through his lawyer, a full court martial to clear his name — a request to which the army has agreed. Émile Zola has written another of his passionate evocations of Dreyfus’s plight: a being cut off from everyone else, isolated not only by the ocean but by eleven guards who surround him night and day like a human wall. . Meanwhile, in the Chamber of Deputies there has been a full-scale debate on the affair, opened by the Prime Minister, who took shelter behind the ramparts of res judicata: ‘Let me be clear at the outset. There is no Dreyfus case! [Applause] There is not and cannot be a Dreyfus case! [Prolonged applause]’ And for the avoidance of any doubt on the matter, General Billot, summoned to the tribune from the Ministry of War, has restated the government’s position even more strongly: ‘Dreyfus has been rightly judged and unanimously condemned. On my soul and conscience, as a soldier and the head of the army, I hold that verdict truly delivered and Dreyfus guilty.’

I lay aside the papers. Really, it is beyond hypocrisy; it is beyond even lying: it has become a psychosis.

My uniform hangs in my wardrobe, like the sloughed-off skin of some former life. I have not been formally discharged from the army. Technically I am on indefinite leave pending the verdict of Pellieux’s inquiry and the minister’s response. But I prefer to dress in civilian clothes in order not to draw attention to myself. Just before noon I put on a good stout overcoat and a bowler hat, take my umbrella from the stand and go out into the day.

Outwardly, I hope, I wear my usual mask of detachment, even irony, for there has never been a situation, however dire, even this one, that did not strike me as containing at least some element of the human comedy. But then I think of Pauline, of how when I discovered her on my bed she could only keep repeating the same phrase, over and over: ‘He won’t let me see the girls. .’ She has given a deposition to Pellieux and has fled the press and gone to stay with her brother, a naval officer, and her sister-in-law near Toulon. Louis has agreed to handle her legal affairs. He has advised us not to have any contact until the divorce is finalised. We said goodbye in a rainstorm in the Bois de Bolougne, watched by an agent of the Sûreté. And it is for what they have done to her, more even than what they have done to Dreyfus, that I cannot forgive the General Staff. For the first time in my life I carry hatred inside me. It is an almost physical thing, like a concealed knife. Sometimes, when I am alone, I like to take it out and run my thumb along its cold, sharp blade.