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An Officer and a Spy.
Robert Harris.
To Gill.
Author's Note.
This book aims to use the techniques of a novel to retell the true story of the Dreyfus affair, perhaps the greatest political scandal and miscarriage of justice in history, which in the 1890s came to obsess France and ultimately the entire world. It occurred only twenty-five years after the Germans had crushed the French in the war of 1870 and occupied the territories of Alsace and Lorraine-the seismic shock to the European balance of power that was the precursor of the First and Second World Wars.
None of the characters in the pages that follow, not even the most minor, is wholly fictional, and almost all of what occurs, at least in some form, actually happened in real life.
Naturally, however, in order to turn history into a novel, I have been obliged to simplify, to cut out some figures entirely, to dramatise, and to invent many personal details. In particular, Georges Picquart never wrote a secret account of the Dreyfus affair; nor did he place it in a bank vault in Geneva with instructions that it should remain sealed until a century after his death.
But a novelist can imagine otherwise.
-Robert Harris.
Bastille Day 2013.
Dramatis Personae.
THE DREYFUS FAMILY.
Alfred Dreyfus.
Lucie Dreyfus, wife.
Mathieu Dreyfus, brother.
Pierre and Jeanne Dreyfus, children.
THE ARMY.
General Auguste Mercier.
Minister of War, 18935.
General Jean-Baptiste Billot,
Minister of War, 18968.
General Raoul le Mouton de Boisdeffre,
Chief of the General Staff.
General Charles Arthur Gonse,
Chief of the Second Department (Intelligence).
General Georges Gabriel de Pellieux,
Military Commander, Departement of the Seine.
Colonel Armand du Paty de Clam.
Colonel Foucault,
military attache in Berlin.
Major Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy,
74th Infantry Regiment.
THE STATISTICAL SECTION.
Colonel Jean Sandherr, Chief, 188795.
Colonel Georges Picquart, Chief, 18957 Major Hubert Joseph Henry Captain Jules-Maximillien Lauth Captain Junck.
Captain Valdant Felix Gribelin, archivist Madam Marie Bastian, agent.
THE SRETe (DETECTIVE POLICE).
Francois Guenee.
Jean-Alfred Desvernine Louis Tomps.
HANDWRITING EXPERT.
Alphonse Bertillon.
THE LAWYERS.
Louis Leblois, Picquart's friend and attorney.
Ferdinand Labori, attorney to Zola, Picquart and Alfred Dreyfus Edgar Demange, attorney to Alfred Dreyfus Paul Bertulus, examining magistrate.
GEORGES PICQUART'S CIRCLE Pauline Monnier Blanche de Comminges and family Louis and Martha Leblois, friends from Alsace.
Edmond and Jeanne Gast, cousins Anna and Jules Gay, sister and brother-in-law.
Germain Duca.s.se, friend and protege Major Albert Cure, old army comrade.
THE DIPLOMATS.
Colonel Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen.
German military attache.
Major Alessandro Panizzardi, Italian military attache.
THE "DREYFUSARDS".
emile Zola.
Georges Clemenceau,
politician and newspaper editor.
Albert Clemenceau, lawyer Auguste Scheurer-Kestner,
Vice President, French Senate.
Jean Jaures, leader of the French socialists.
Joseph Reinach, politician and writer.
Arthur Ranc, politician.
Bernard Lazare, writer.
1.
"Major Picquart to see the Minister of War ..."
The sentry on the rue Saint-Dominique steps out of his box to open the gate and I run through a whirl of snow across the windy courtyard into the warm lobby of the htel de Brienne, where a sleek young captain of the Republican Guard rises to salute me. I repeat, with greater urgency: "Major Picquart to see the Minister of War ...!"
We march in step, the captain leading, over the black-and-white marble of the minister's official residence, up the curving staircase, past suits of silver armour from the time of Louis the Sun King, past that atrocious piece of Imperial kitsch, David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps at the Col du Grand-Saint-Bernard, until we reach the first floor, where we halt beside a window overlooking the grounds and the captain goes off to announce my arrival, leaving me alone for a few moments to contemplate something rare and beautiful: a garden made silent by snow in the centre of a city on a winter's morning. Even the yellow electric lights in the War Ministry, s.h.i.+mmering through the gauzy trees, have a quality of magic.
"General Mercier is waiting for you, Major."
The minister's office is huge and ornately panelled in duck-egg blue, with a double balcony over the whitened lawn. Two elderly men in black uniforms, the most senior officers in the Ministry of War, stand warming the backs of their legs against the open fire. One is General Raoul le Mouton de Boisdeffre, Chief of the General Staff, expert in all things Russian, architect of our burgeoning alliance with the new tsar, who has spent so much time with the Imperial court he has begun to look like a stiff-whiskered Russian count. The other, slightly older at sixty, is his superior: the Minister of War himself, General Auguste Mercier.
I march to the middle of the carpet and salute.
Mercier has an oddly creased and immobile face, like a leather mask. Occasionally I have the odd illusion that another man is watching me through its narrow eye-slits. He says in his quiet voice, "Well, Major Picquart, that didn't take long. What time did it finish?"
"Half an hour ago, General."
"So it really is all over?"
I nod. "It's over."
