An Officer and a Spy

by Robert Harris

In fact, although I do not mention this, as I passed along the gloomy pavements of the rue Boissière and the avenue du Trocadéro, I began to wonder if the minister’s great production might turn out to be a flop. But then I reached the pont de l’Alma and saw the shadowy crowd pouring across the dark waters of the Seine, and that was when I realised what Mercier must have known all along: that the human impulse to watch another’s humiliation will always prove sufficient insulation against even the bitterest cold.

The headline is “The Expiation”: “We demanded for the traitor Dreyfus the supreme penalty. We continue to believe that the only appropriate punishment is death …” It is as if all the loathing and recrimination bottled up since the defeat of 1870 has found an outlet in a single individual.

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.

It is my first lesson in the cabalistic power of “secret intelligence”: two words that can make otherwise sane men abandon their reason and cavort like idiots.

How quickly one accommodates to power! Not many months ago, I would have been awed at finding myself in the minister’s inner sanctum; now it is just a place of work, and the minister himself merely another soldier-bureaucrat passing through the revolving door of government.

My four golden principles are more important now than ever: take it one step at a time; approach the matter dispassionately; avoid a rush to judgement; confide in nobody until there is hard evidence.

There is no such thing as a secret—not really, not in the modern world, not with photography and telegraphy and railways and newspaper presses. The old days of an inner circle of like-minded souls communicating with parchment and quill pens are gone. Sooner or later most things will be revealed.

For the first time in my life I carry hatred inside me. It is an almost physical thing, like a concealed knife. Sometimes, when I am alone, I like to take it out and run my thumb along its cold, sharp blade.

“There are occasions when losing is a victory, so long as there is a fight.”