The Dreyfus Affair (22 page)

Montaigne, whom Dreyfus so much admired, envied those who ‘could rest on the soft pillow of faith’, but, as Édouard Drumont had noted in
La France juive
, Montaigne was a ‘destroyer’ who ‘highlighted the vices and absurdities of humanity without proposing any better attainable ideals’.
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The only prayers Dreyfus offered up were ‘to the President of the Republic’.
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The ideals that sustained him were those of republican France. ‘Whatever may have been my sufferings,’ he wrote to Lucie, ‘however atrocious may have been the tortures inflicted upon me – tortures that I cannot forget, tortures that can be excused only by the passions that sometimes lead men astray, I have never forgotten that far above men, far above their passions, far above their errors, is our country. It is she who will be my final judge.’
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With the same belief as the French philosophers of the Enlightenment in moral progress and the perfectibility of mankind, he could not comprehend how ‘in the nineteenth century, in a country like France, imbued with ideas of justice and truth, such incredible wrongs can be inflicted’. And the wrong above all wrongs that he had suffered was, in Iago’s words, the ‘filching of his good name’. He was a man ‘who holds honour to be above everything’, and he suffered not just because he was dishonoured, but because the dishonour spread to those he loved. ‘If I had only my own life to struggle for,’ he wrote to Lucie, ‘I should certainly not struggle any longer; but it is for honour that I live, and I shall struggle inch by inch to the end.’ ‘I live, my loved one, because I want you to be able to bear my name, as you have done up to the present, with honour, with joy, and with love, because, in a word, I want to hand it down intact to my children.’ ‘It is a question of the honour of our name, of the future of our children.’ With no God to see into his soul, Dreyfus’s integrity existed in the eyes of others or not at all. ‘Above everything else’, he wrote to Lucie, ‘is the worship of honour, in the strictest sense of the word. We must detach ourselves from the passions occasioned by grief and from the depression resulting from external causes. That honour which is my own possession is the patrimony and the life itself of our children.’
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3: Devil’s Island – 2

On the night of 3 September 1896, the Governor of French Guiana received a telegram from the Colonial Ministry in Paris: ‘London papers announced Dreyfus escape on American ship. Telegraph immediately prisoner’s situation.’ Though it was soon established by the Governor that no such escape had taken place, it exacerbated the existing paranoia of the authorities, and orders were given to the Commandant on Devil’s Island to introduce new measures to ensure that such a rumour could never become true.

A double palisade was built around Dreyfus’s hut. The inner wall was one and a half metres from the walls and two metres high: it impeded the circulation of air and Dreyfus lost his view of the sea. Exercise was now permitted only between the two palisades, and in his walks around his hut Dreyfus was always accompanied by a guard.

After the erection of the palisades round my hut, it became utterly uninhabitable; it was a living death. From that moment there was neither air nor light, and the heat was torrid, stifling during the dry season. In the rainy season it was a wretchedly damp lodging-place, in a country where humidity is the great scourge of the Europeans.
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Worse still, as an extra precaution, Dreyfus was now shackled to his bed at night. ‘Two bars in the shape of a reverse U were fixed by the bottoms to the sides of the bed. Into these irons was inserted a bar to which were fastened two shackles. The prisoner’s feet were placed in these shackles and pressed tightly down on the bed by the bar so that the body itself could not move.’
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Open sores soon appeared on his ankles, which had to be dressed every morning.

The Commandant of the prison complex of the Salvation Islands, who ‘always bore himself correctly’, came to tell Dreyfus that putting him in irons each night ‘was not a punishment but “a measure of precaution” because the prison administration had no complaint to make against me’.
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However, soon after imposing these precautions, the Commandant was replaced by an official, Oscar Deniel, ‘specially sent from Paris’ to make sure there was a strict application of the new regime.

The shackling ended after two months, but the double palisades remained around the hut, and the reluctance with which the previous Commandant had imposed the inhuman regime was supplanted by the malign zeal of Deniel. The Governor of Guiana and the Director of the colony’s prisons expressed ‘surprise’ at the new measures, and suggested that Deniel was exceeding his powers in an unjustified aggravation of the punishment of his prisoner. However, Deniel had come out from Paris with ‘special instructions’ from the Minister of the Colonies, André Lebon. Lebon confirmed that Deniel was acting on his orders and the objections of the Governor and Director were withdrawn.

Oscar Deniel, Dreyfus later wrote, was possessed of ‘a low, hateful malice’ with ‘a mind that was as ill-balanced as it was full of vanity’. At times Dreyfus felt sorry for him. ‘I have an immense pity for those who thus torture human beings. What remorse they are preparing for themselves, when everything shall come to light, for history unmasks all secrets.’
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However, pity did not mean exoneration: Dreyfus, who in later life was remarkably magnanimous towards those responsible for his suffering, found it hard to forgive the unlawful excesses of Lebon and Deniel.

With hindsight, knowing that Dreyfus was innocent of the crime of which he had been convicted, his privations on Devil’s Island appear abominable; but, apart from being kept in solitary confinement, his treatment was consistent with that meted out to other convicts whose crimes, in the eyes of French public opinion, were less grave. Dreyfus complained of his atrocious diet, but that of the other convicts was no better. He also complained of boredom, and asked to be given manual labour, but it seems unlikely that he would have survived for long in a chaingang on the Île Royale or in the fetid swamps on the mainland.

And how would he have been treated by his fellow convicts? The French anarchist Clément Duval had a death sentence commuted to hard labour in French Guiana in 1886 after stealing money and jewellery from a Parisian socialite and stabbing a policeman. Transported to Guiana, he was not, like Dreyfus, caged alone in a cell but thrown in with other convicts – one who had shot his mother and another his brother, later dismembering his body and feeding it to the pigs. A third had killed two old women and then raped their corpses.

The prison system in Guiana, as Duval later described it, was one of violence and depravity in which he endured forced labour, fettered ankles, rotting food, punishment cells, poisonous insects, scurvy, dysentery – a regime designed either to break or to brutalise the convicts, with petty privileges granted to informers and those who grovelled before their guards.
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Duval’s later account of his time on the Salvation Islands describes ‘the scum, the murderers, the mindless brutes that people the prison’. How would the sensitive and hitherto pampered Alfred Dreyfus, with his pince-nez and love of literature, have fared in such company? Would his faith in the enlightened values of republican France – his ‘beloved country’ – have survived the ordeal? Forbidden to converse with his guards, Dreyfus seems to have been unaware of what went on the other side of the Passe des Grenadines: there is nothing about the penitential system in his letters, which were subject to the censor, and there is also no mention of the plight of his fellow prisoners in his memoirs. Dreyfus’s outrage was at his own treatment as an innocent man: had he been guilty, he would only be getting what he deserved.

It was his sense of the injustice of his conviction that broke Dreyfus’s spirit. For month after month after his arrival, he held on to the illusion that Commandant du Paty would keep his word and continue his investigation. He retained his faith in the fundamental decency of General de Boisdeffre. ‘I have just written to Commandant du Paty to remind him of the two promises he made me after the sentence was pronounced,’ he wrote in his diary in April 1895. ‘1. In the name of the Minister, to continue the investigation. 2. To inform me himself as soon as there is evidence of new leaks from the Ministry.’
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In October he received letters from France, but the joy of hearing from Lucie was tarnished by learning that ‘The guilty one is not yet discovered.’
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By December, he had lost faith in du Paty. ‘The opprobrium of my death will be on Commandant du Paty, Bertillon, and all those who have had a share in this iniquity.’

At the beginning of July 1897, he wrote again to General de Boisdeffre, as ‘a cry of distress from a father who bequeaths to you all he holds most precious in the world, the life of his children, a life impossible so long as their name has not been washed clean of this horrible stain’; and on the 8th of that month he composed a second, much longer letter to the President of the Republic in which he ‘opened his heart’. It is a pitiable text.

I won’t speak of my life,
Monsieur le Président
. Today, as yesterday, it belongs to my country. All that I ask, as a supreme favour, is that it be taken quickly, not slowly in atrocious agony, under so many torments that I have not deserved. What I also ask of my country is to shine a clear and bright light on this terrible drama; because my honour does not belong to the nation but it is the patrimony of my children, it is the legitimate possession of two families. And I beg you also, with all the strength of my soul, to consider the atrocious situation, intolerable, worse than death, of my wife, my family, and above all of my children, my dear children, my dear little ones who are growing up, who are pariahs; make sure that everything possible is done, everything that is compatible with the well-being of the nation, to end as soon as possible the torment of so many human beings.
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The form of the letter with its endless repetitions, contradictions and disjointed expressions reveals the mental state of Dreyfus at the time. His guards noted his enfeeblement, but Deniel said that he was faking. Little by little, Dreyfus abandoned the few things that had kept his mind functioning during the monotonous passing of time. He gave up his diary.

I am so worn out, so broken in body and soul, that I am bringing my diary to a close . . . not knowing how long my strength will keep up or how soon my brain will give way under the strain of so much misery. I will close it with this last prayer to the President of the Republic in case I should succumb before seeing the curtain fall on this horrible drama. ‘
Monsieur le Président
, I take the liberty of asking you to allow this diary, which has been written day by day, to be sent to my wife. It may perhaps contain,
Monsieur le Président
, expressions of anger and disgust relative to the most terrible conviction that has ever been pronounced against a human being . . .’
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Dreyfus gave up gardening, and then reading: ‘he spends much of the day sitting in the shade, a book open in his hands’, reported one of his guards, ‘but he does not read. One hears him sob from time to time, and sees him hide his tears.’
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In August 1897, Dreyfus’s mental and physical condition was such that the prison doctor advised that his living conditions be improved. A new hut was built on a higher outcrop of land by convicts from the Île Royale; during the many weeks it took to construct it, Dreyfus was kept locked up. However, the new hut, once built, was ‘higher, more spacious, and altogether preferable to the old one’.
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It was divided in two by an iron grille with Dreyfus on one side and a guard on the other. Both rooms were lit by a lamp so that the prisoner could be kept under perpetual surveillance. A new stockade was erected at a greater distance from the walls of the hut so that there was more light, but Dreyfus still had no view of the sea and there was no improvement in the circulation of air; during the storms and hurricanes that came with the rainy season, pools of stagnant water formed on the floor of his hut.

As much as by the monotony and tedium of his intolerable life, Dreyfus was tormented by the lack of news from France. The letters he received from Lucie were infrequent, and suddenly, with no explanation given, he began to be given not the originals but copies made by ‘an unknown hand’. Many of her letters failed to reach him, and some arrived after he had returned to France.
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Some were, by Lucie’s own admission, ‘very commonplace and desperately monotonous’:
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forbidden to write about the measures she and Mathieu were taking on his behalf, she could do little but repeat time and again how much she loved him and attempt to sustain his morale.

In the autumn of 1897, there began to appear in Lucie’s letters coded references to developments in Paris: on 25 September she wrote, ‘I am indeed very happy to say that we are entering on the true path. I can only repeat to you to have confidence, not to grieve any more, and to be very certain that we shall attain our ends’;
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and on 6 October, ‘I should like to tell you the joy I feel at seeing the horizon clearing and having come nearly to the end of our suffering.’
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Not knowing what this signified, Dreyfus, in his replies, continued to urge her to do all that she could to secure his rehabilitation. Wholly unaware of who was responsible for his plight, he begged Lucie to see General de Boisdeffre and appeal to his sense of justice.