An Officer and a Spy Read Online Free PDF

judicial process,’ as you put it, Louis, because the case involved matters of national security that simply couldn’t have been aired in open court, whoever was the defendant. And there was plenty of evidence against him: I can give you my absolute assurance of that!”
    Pauline frowns at me and I realise I have raised my voice. There is a silence. Louis adjusts his napkin but says nothing more. He doesn’t want to spoil the meal, and Pauline, ever the diplomat’s wife, seizes the chance to move the conversation on to a more congenial topic.
    “Did I tell you that Philippe and I have discovered the most wonderful new Alsatian restaurant on the rue Marbeuf …”
    It is five by the time I arrive home. My apartment is in the sixteenth arrondissement, close to the place Victor Hugo. The address makes me sound much smarter than I am. In truth, I have just two small rooms on the fourth floor, and I struggle to afford even these on a major’s pay. I am no Dreyfus, with a private income ten times my salary. But it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre; I get by, just about.
    I let myself in from the street and have barely taken a couple of paces towards the stairs when I hear the concierge’s voice behind me—“Major Picquart!”—and turn to discover Madame Guerault brandishing a visiting card. “An officer came to call on you,” she announces, advancing towards me. “A general!”
    I take the card: “General Charles-Arthur Gonse, Ministry of War.” On the reverse he has written his home address.
    His place is close to the avenue du Bois de Boulogne; I can walk to it easily. Within five minutes I am ringing his bell. The door isopened by a very different figure from the relaxed fellow I left on Saturday afternoon. He is unshaven; the pouches beneath his eyes are dark and heavy with exhaustion. His tunic is open to the waist, revealing a slightly grubby undershirt. He holds a glass of cognac.
    “Picquart. Good of you to come.”
    “My apologies that I’m not in uniform, General.”
    “No matter. It’s a Sunday, after all.”
    I follow him through the darkened apartment—“My wife is in the country,” he explains over his shoulder—and into what seems to be his study. Above the window is a pair of crossed spears—mementos of his service in North Africa, I assume—and on the chimneypiece a photograph of him taken a quarter of a century ago, as a junior staff officer in the 13th Army Corps. He refreshes his drink from a decanter and pours one for me, then flops down on to the couch with a groan and lights a cigarette.
    “This damned Dreyfus affair,” he says. “It will be the death of us all.”
    I make some light reply—“Really? I would have preferred mine to be slightly more heroic!”—but Gonse fixes me with a look of great seriousness.
    “My dear Picquart, you don’t seem to realise: we have just come very close to war. I have been up since one o’clock this morning, and all because of that damned fool Lebrun-Renault!”
    “My God!” Taken aback, I set down my untasted glass of cognac.
    “I know it’s hard to believe,” he says, “that such a catastrophe might have resulted from one idiot’s gossip, but it’s true.”
    He tells me how, an hour after midnight, he was woken by a messenger from the Minister of War. Summoned to the hôtel de Brienne, he found Mercier in his dressing gown with a private secretary from the Élysée Palace who had with him copies of the first editions of the Paris newspapers. The private secretary then repeated to Gonse what he had just told Mercier: that the President was appalled—appalled! scandalised!—by what he had just read. How could it be that an officer of the Republican Guard could spread such stories—in particular, that a document had been stolen by the French government from the German Embassy, and that the whole episode was somekind of espionage trap for the Germans? Was the