An Officer and a Spy

I walk up the boulevard searching for the white light of a cab heading home to its depot at the Arc de Triomphe. Plenty of blues and reds and yellows bob past until eventually a white appears, and by the time I have stepped out into the street to hail it, and it has clattered to a halt, Pauline is already coming along the pavement to join me. I take her arm and help her up. I tell the driver, ‘Rue Yvon-Villarceau, the corner of the rue Copernic,’ and then I haul myself in after her. She lets me kiss her briefly then pushes me away.

‘No, I need to know what all that was about.’

‘Surely not? Do you really?’

‘Yes.’

I sigh and take her hand. ‘Poor Blanche is simply very unhappy in her love affairs. Whichever man in the room is the most unsuitable or unobtainable, you may be sure that he is the one whom Blanche will fall for. There was quite a scandal a couple of years ago, all hushed up, but it caused a lot of embarrassment for the family, especially to Aimery.’

‘Why especially to Aimery?’

‘Because the man involved was an officer on the General Staff — a superior officer, recently widowed, a lot older than Blanche — and it was Aimery who brought him into the house and introduced them.’

‘What happened?’

I take out my cigarette case and offer one to Pauline. She refuses. I light up. I feel uncomfortable talking about the whole business, but I guess Pauline has a right to know, and I trust her not to spread the tale.

‘She and this officer had an affair. It went on for some time, a year perhaps. Then Blanche met someone else, a young aristocrat her own age and much more suitable. This young man proposed. The family were delighted. Blanche tried to break off her relationship with the officer. But he refused to accept it. Then Aimery’s father, the old comte, began receiving messages from a blackmailer, threatening to expose the affair. The comte ended up going to the Préfecture of the Paris police.’

‘My God, it’s like a story out of Balzac!’

‘It gets better than that. At one stage the comte paid five hundred francs for the return of a particularly 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.

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