An Officer and a Spy

Mathieu stuffs the statement back in his pocket and stands. There is defiance in the way he plants his legs apart. ‘I’m sorry you feel as you do, Picquart. I understand that for the sake of your cause you’d prefer to have my brother die a martyr, if that is what it takes. But his family wants him back alive. He isn’t reconciled to this decision himself, to be honest with you. I think it would make a difference if I could tell him he had your agreement.’

‘My agreement? Why should that matter to him?’

‘Nevertheless, I believe it does. What message may I give him from you?’

He stands there, implacable.

‘What do the others say?’

‘Zola, Clemenceau and Labori are opposed. Reinach, Lazare, Basch and the rest say yes, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.’

‘Tell him I am opposed as well.’

Mathieu nods curtly, as if he expected nothing else, and turns to leave.

‘But tell him that I understand.’

Dreyfus is released on Wednesday 20 September 1899, although the news is not made public for another day, to enable him to travel without being accosted by members of the public. I learn about his freedom from the newspapers like everyone else. Wearing a dark blue suit and a soft black hat for disguise, he is driven away by automobile from the prison in Rennes at dusk by officers of the Sûreté and taken to join Mathieu at the railway station in Nantes, where the brothers catch the southbound sleeper. At a family house in Provence he is reunited with his wife and children. Afterwards he moves to Switzerland. He doesn’t return to Paris. He fears assassination.

As for me, I scratch a living and, with Labori’s help, pursue various newspapers for libel. In December I refuse to accept the government’s offer of a general amnesty for all those involved in the affair, even though I am told I will be restored to the army and given a command. Why should I put on the same uniform as Mercier, du Paty, Gonse, Lauth and that gang of criminals?

In January, Mercier is elected as senator for the lower Loire on a nationalist platform.

From Dreyfus I hear nothing. And then, more than a year after his release, one bleak day in the winter of 1900, I go downstairs to collect my mail and find a letter, postmarked Paris. The address is in handwriting familiar to me only from secret files and courtroom evidence.

My Colonel,

I have the honour to request that you set a day and a time when you will allow me to express to you in person my gratitude.

Respectfully,

A. Dreyfus

It comes from an address in the rue de Châteaudun.

I carry it back upstairs. Pauline has stayed overnight, as she does quite often now the girls are getting older. Madame Romazzotti is how she prefers to style herself these days, having reverted to her maiden name: people assume she is a widow. I tease her that it makes her sound like a spiritualist on the boulevard Saint-Germain.

She calls from the bedroom, ‘Anything interesting?’

I read the note again.

‘No,’ I call back, ‘nothing.’

Later that morning I take one of my visiting cards and write on the back: Sir, I will let you know the day when I can see you. G. Picquart.

And then I do nothing about it. He is not the kind of man who finds it easy to say thank you; very well; I am not the sort who finds it easy to be thanked; therefore let us spare ourselves the bathos of the encounter. Later, I am accused in the newspapers of flatly refusing to meet Dreyfus. One anonymous friend of the family — it turns out to be the Zionist pamphleteer Bernard Lazare — tells L’Echo de Paris, a right-wing newspaper: We do not understand Picquart, or his attitude. . you probably do not know, nor do many others, that Picquart is energetically anti-Semitic.

How am I to answer this? Perhaps by observing that if the true measure of a man’s character, as Aristotle says, is his actions, then mine have hardly been those of an energetic anti-Semite. Still, there is nothing like an accusation of anti-Semitism to get all one’s old prejudices flowing, and I write bitterly to a friend: ‘I knew that one day I would be attacked by the Jews, and notably by the Dreyfuses. .’

Thus our beautiful cause descends into tantrums, disappointment, reproaches and acrimony.

On the parade ground of the École Militaire, the companies of cadets wheel and stamp on the packed brown dirt. I stand behind the railings of the place de Fontenoy, as I often do, and watch as they are put through their paces. So much of my life is contained here in this spot. This is where I was taught as a young officer, and where I did my teaching. This is where I witnessed Dreyfus’s degradation. Over there in the riding school is where I fought my duel with Henry.