An Officer and a Spy (17 page)

The following day we take her home. On Sunday morning the bells of Saint-Louis ring for Mass, but if she hears them she no longer knows what they mean. She even seems to have forgotten how to eat.

We hire a nurse to look after her during the day, and from now on every evening I leave the office early and return to Versailles to sleep in the spare bedroom. I am not alone in this vigil, of course. Anna and Jules travel out from Paris most days. My cousin Edmond Gast and his wife, Jeanne, drive over from Ville-d’Avray. And one
night I arrive back later than usual to find Pauline by the bed reading aloud a novel to her unresponsive audience. When she puts down the book and rises to embrace me, I hold on to her.

I say, “This time I don’t think I’m ever going to let you go.”

“Georges,” she whispers primly, “your mother …”

We glance down at her. She is lying on her back with her eyes closed. The muscles of her face have relaxed; her expression is impassive, almost regal in its indifference; she is beyond all convention now, I think, all stupid narrow morality …

I say, “She can’t see us, and if she could, she’d be delighted. You know she could never understand why we weren’t married.”

“She is not alone in that …”

She says it wryly. She has never reproached me. We grew up together in Alsace. We survived the siege together. We clung to each other when we were both in exile, when everything else had gone. I was her first lover. I should have proposed to her before I left to join my regiment in Algeria. But I always thought there would be plenty of time for that later. As it was, when I finished my foreign soldiering and came home from Indochina, she had given up on me, and had already produced one daughter and was pregnant with a second. I didn’t even mind very much, especially as we soon resumed our love affair where we had left it. “We have something better than a future together,” I used to tell her. “We have the past.” I’m not sure I entirely believe it anymore.

“You realise,” I say, taking her hand, “that we’ve been together, in one way or another, for more than twenty years? It practically is a marriage.”

“Oh Georges,” she says wearily, “I can assure you this is nothing like a marriage.”

The front door opens, we hear my sister’s voice, and immediately she pulls away her hand.

My mother lingers on in this state for a month. It is astonishing how long the body can last without nourishment. Occasionally, as I jolt back and forth on the crowded Versailles train, I remember Henry’s
remark:
There aren’t many easy ways out of this life …
Her path, though, seems to be a smooth and gentle descent into oblivion.

Henry is solicitous throughout. One day he asks me if I might have a moment to step down to the waiting room to meet his wife, who has something for me. I have never before considered what sort of a woman Henry might be married to; I assume she will be a female version of him—large, red-faced, loud, coarse. Instead I find a tall and slender young woman, barely half his age, with thick dark hair, a clear complexion and lively brown eyes. He introduces her as Berthe. Like Henry, she has the accent of the Marne. In one hand she proffers a bunch of flowers, which she has brought for me to pass on to my mother; with the other she is holding on to a boy of two or three, dressed in a sailor suit. It seems strange to see a child in this gloomy building. Henry says, “This is my boy, Joseph.” “Hello, Joseph.” I pick him up and whirl him around for a bit while his parents look on smiling (we bachelors learn to be good with children). Then I set him down and thank Madame Henry for the flowers. She lowers her eyes flirtatiously. As I walk back upstairs, I reflect that Henry may be a more complex character than I appreciated. His pride in his pretty young wife is understandable, and I can see why he wants to show her off; but in Madame Henry I sense ambition, and I wonder what that does to him.

My mother receives the last rites on the afternoon of Friday, 12 June 1896. It is a hot summer’s day outside, full of the noise of the street; the sunlight, fierce beyond the drawn curtains, beats down on the glass regardless as if demanding entrance. I watch as the priest anoints her ears, eyes, nostrils, lips, hands and feet while he intones his Latin spells. His handshake when he leaves is moistly repulsive. She dies in my arms that night, and when I kiss her goodbye, I taste the residue of his oil.

The event has long been anticipated; the arrangements are all in place; but the shock is somehow as great as if she had dropped dead out of the blue. After the requiem Mass in Saint-Louis’s and the interment in a corner of the cemetery, we walk back to her apartment for the wake. It is an uncomfortable occasion. The weather is too warm; the tiny rooms are too crowded and full of tensions. My
sister-in-law, Hélène, widow of my brother, Paul, has turned up: for some reason she has always disliked me, and we take pains to avoid each other—no easy feat in that cramped space—so much so that in the end I find myself in my mother’s old bedroom, its mattress stripped, talking to, of all people, Pauline’s husband.

Monnier is a decent enough sort, devoted in his way to his wife and daughters. If he were a brute, our deception would be easier. Instead he is simply dull. Professionally, his role in the Foreign Ministry, as far as I can make out, seems to be that of the senior bureaucrat brought in to pick holes in the bright ideas of younger colleagues. Socially, he has the bore’s trick of seeking one’s opinion on something—in this case he asks my view of the impending state visit of the Russian tsar—and listening to it with barely disguised impatience, until he is at last able to interrupt and launch into his own prepared monologue. It turns out he has been appointed to the Franco-Russian planning commission for the trip—apparently His Imperial Highness’s official train, at four hundred and fifty tons, is two hundred tons heavier than our railways can cope with, and he has had to speak firmly to the ambassador on the matter …

Over his shoulder I can see Pauline talking to Louis Leblois. Her gaze meets mine. Monnier glances behind him, irritated not to have my complete attention, then resumes his speech.

“As I was saying, it’s not so much a question of protocol as of basic good manners …”

I try to concentrate on his diplomatic platitudes; it seems the least I can do.

Throughout this time, Operation Benefactor has continued running like an untended machine, churning out intelligence, almost all of it useless: stacks of blurry photographs and lists of visitors to the rue de Lille (
unidentified male, mid-fifties, walks with slight limp, ex-military?
) and fragmentary transcripts of conversations (
I saw him at the manoeuvres in Karlsruhe and he offered
[
unintelligible
]
but I told him we already had
[
unintelligible
]
from our source in Paris
). By July I have spent thousands from the secret fund bequeathed to me by Sandherr,
risked a serious diplomatic crisis, concealed a potential traitor from my superiors, and I have nothing of tangible value to show for it except that one picture of Esterhazy leaving the embassy.

And then, quite unexpectedly, all of this changes, and with it my life and career and everything else.

It is a broiling summer’s evening. I am out of Paris for once, accompanying General Boisdeffre on a staff tour in the Burgundy region. Our advance scouts have found us a good restaurant beside a canal in Venarey-les-Laumes, and we dine out of doors, to the sound of bullfrogs and cicadas, washed by the scent of the citronella candles that are driving away the mosquitoes. I am seated a little way down the table from Boisdeffre, beside his orderly officer, Major Gabriel Pauffin de Saint Morel. Moths dart in and out of the gleam of the lanterns; stars have just started to appear above the hillside vineyards to the east. What could be more agreeable? Pauffin is an exquisitely handsome, vaguely dim aristocrat, exactly my age, give or take a couple of weeks, who I have known since we were cadets at Saint-Cyr. His profile in the candlelight is flushed with the effects of the wine and the heat, and he is in the act of spooning some soft and pungent Époisses de Bourgogne onto his plate when suddenly quite out of the blue he says, “Oh, by the way, I’m sorry, Picquart, I clean forgot—the chief wants you to have a word with Colonel Foucault when we get back to Paris.”

“Yes, of course I will. Do you know what it’s about?” Foucault is our military attaché in Berlin.

Still concentrating on his cheese, without lowering his voice or even turning to look at me, Pauffin replies, “Oh, I believe he’s picked up some story in Berlin about the Germans having another spy in the army. He sent the chief a letter about it.”

“What?” I set down my glass with enough force to spill some wine. “My God, when was this exactly?”

The tone of my voice causes him to glance in my direction. “A few days ago. Sorry, Georges. Slipped my mind.”

There is nothing I can do that evening, but the following morning I seek out Boisdeffre over breakfast in the chateau where we are staying and ask permission to return at once to Paris to interview Colonel Foucault.

Boisdeffre takes a corner of his napkin and wipes a speck of egg from his moustache. “Why the urgency? You think there might be something in it?”

“Perhaps. I’d like to check.”

Boisdeffre seems surprised by my keenness to depart, even mildly offended: an invitation to join him on one of these leisurely tours of inspection to our finer gastronomic regions is regarded as a mark of favour. “As you wish,” he says, dismissing me with a flourish of his napkin. “Keep me informed.”

By early afternoon I am back in the Ministry of War, sitting in Foucault’s office, listening to his report. Our military attaché in Berlin is a competent, straightforward professional, hardened by years of dealing with liars and fantasists. His hair is iron-grey, thick, cut short; it fits him like a helmet. He says, “I was wondering when General Boisdeffre would get around to responding to my letter.” Wearily he retrieves a file from his drawer and opens it. “You remember our agent in the Tiergarten, Richard Cuers?”

The Tiergarten is the district in Berlin where German army intelligence has its headquarters.

“Yes, of course. He was working for German intelligence in Paris until we turned him. Sandherr briefed me about him when I took over.”

“Well, he’s been dismissed.”

“That’s a pity. When did this happen?”

“Three weeks ago. Did you ever meet Cuers?”

I shake my head.

“He’s a nervy fellow at the best of times, but when he came to tell me what had happened, he was in a truly terrible state. He’s scared the German General Staff are going to arrest him for treason. He thinks his friend Lajoux in Brussels ratted him out for money, which may well be true. In any case, he wants to make sure we’ll protect him. Otherwise, he says, he’ll have no choice except to go to Hauptmann Dame—that’s his section chief—and sing his heart out about us.”

“Does he know much?”

“A little.”

“So he’s trying to blackmail us?”

“I don’t think so. Not really. He just wants reassurance.”

“Then let’s give it to him. Reassurance doesn’t cost a sou—he can have all the reassurance he wants. Tell him he can be certain nothing will leak about him from our end.”

“I told him he had nothing to worry about. But it’s rather more complicated than that.” Foucault sighs and rubs his forehead: I realise he is under some strain. “He wants to hear it man to man—a personal meeting with someone from the section itself.”

“But that’s just an unnecessary risk for both of us. What if he’s followed?”

“I made exactly that point. He was quite insistent. That was when I began to realise there was more to it than he was telling me. So I fetched out a bottle of absinthe—he likes absinthe because he says it reminds him of a French girl he was once in love with—and gradually I got him to tell me the whole story.”

“Which is what?”

“He’s scared and wants to meet someone from the section because he says the Germans have a spy in the French army we don’t know about.”

Here it is. I try to put on a show of nonchalance. “Does this spy have a name?”

“No. The best he can offer are some details that he’s picked up here and there.” Foucault checks the file. “This agent is said to be at the level of a battalion commander. He’s between forty and fifty years old. He’s been passing information to Schwartzkoppen for roughly two years, mostly about artillery, and most of it not of high quality—he recently handed over details of a gunnery course at Châlons, for example. The intelligence has gone right up the chain of command to von Schlieffen
^*
himself, who apparently doesn’t like the smell of it—thinks the source could be a hoaxer, or an agent provocateur—and has told Schwartzkoppen to have nothing more to do with him.” He looks up from the file. “I put all this in my letter to General Boisdeffre. Does it ring any bells for you?”

I pretend to think. “Not immediately.” In truth, it is all I can do not to leap from my chair. “Is that all there is?”

Foucault laughs. “Do you mean: was there a second bottle?” He closes the file and returns it to his drawer. “Yes, there was. In fact I ended up having to clean him up and put him to bed. See how I suffer for my country!”

I join in the laughter. “I’ll arrange a medal.”

Foucault’s smile dies away. “The truth is, Colonel Picquart, our friend Cuers is a neurotic, and like most neurotics he is a fantasist. So let’s be clear: when I pass on to you what he tells me, I’m not endorsing it, you understand? There are some agents I might vouch for; Cuers isn’t one of them. That’s why I haven’t put the rest of his story in writing.”

“I know entirely what you mean.” I wonder what is coming next. “I shall treat everything you tell me in an appropriate spirit of scepticism.”

“Good.” Foucault pauses. He frowns at his desk and then looks at me—a very straight, level gaze, soldier to soldier. “Here it is then: Cuers says German intelligence is still very angry about the Dreyfus business.”

“You mean about the fact that we caught him?”

“No. About the fact that they’d never even heard of him—or so Cuers says.”