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the road. It’s odd. I am about to become the youngest colonel in the French army but I feel no sense of exhilaration.
    In my apartment Pauline waits. She has kept on the same plain grey dress she wore at lunch so that I may have the pleasure of taking it off her. She turns to allow me to unfasten it at the back, lifting her hair in both hands so that I can reach the top hook. I kiss the nape of her neck and murmur into her skin: ‘How long do we have?’
    ‘An hour. He thinks I’m at church. Your lips are cold. Where have you been?’
    I am about to tell her, but then remember Gouse’s instruction. ‘Nowhere,’ I say.
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    1 The war of 1870 between France and Germany resulted in a crushing defeat for the French army, which suffered over 140,000 casualties. Under the terms of the armistice, the eastern territories of Alsace and Lorraine became part of Germany.

3
    SIX MONTHS PASS. June arrives. The air warms up and very soon Paris starts to reek of shit. The stench rises out of the sewers and settles over the city like a putrid gas. People venture out of doors wearing linen masks or with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses, but it doesn’t make much difference. In the newspapers the experts are unanimous that it isn’t as bad as the original ‘great stink’ of 1880 – I can’t speak to that: I was in Algeria at the time – but certainly it ruins the early days of summer. ‘It is impossible to stand on one’s balcony,’ complains Le Figaro , ‘impossible to sit on the terrace of one of the busy, joyful cafés that are the pride of our boulevards, without thinking that one must be downwind from some uncouth, invisible giant.’ The smell infiltrates one’s hair and clothes and settles in one’s nostrils, even on one’s tongue, so that everything tastes of corruption. Such is the atmosphere on the day I take charge of the Statistical Section.
    Major Henry, when he comes to collect me at the Ministry of War, makes light of it: ‘This is nothing. You should have grown up on a farm! Folk’s shit, pigs’ shit: where’s the difference?’ His face in the heat is as smooth and fat as a large pink baby’s. A smirk trembles constantly on his lips. He addresses me with a slight overemphasis on my rank – ‘ Colonel Picquart!’ – that somehow combines respect, congratulations and mockery in a single word. I take no offence. Henry is to be my deputy, a consolation for being passed over for the chief’s job. From now on we are locked in roles as ancient as warfare. He is the experienced old soldier who has come up through the ranks, the sergeant major who makes things work; I the younger commissioned officer, theoretically in charge, who must somehow be prevented from doing too much damage. If each of us doesn’t push the other too far, I think we should get along fine.
    Henry stands. ‘So then, Colonel : shall we go?’
    I have never before set foot in the Statistical Section – not surprising, as few even know of its existence – and so I have requested that Henry show me round. I expect to be led to some discreet corner of the ministry. Instead he conducts me out of the back gate and a short walk up the road to an ancient, grimy house on the corner of the rue de l’Université which I have often passed and always assumed to be derelict. The darkened windows are heavily shuttered. There is no nameplate beside the door. Inside, the gloomy lobby is pervaded by the same cloying smell of raw sewage as the rest of Paris, but with an added spice of musty dampness.
    Henry smears his thumb through a patch of black spores growing on the wall. ‘A few years ago they wanted to pull this place down,’ he says, ‘but Colonel Sandherr stopped them. Nobody disturbs us here.’
    ‘I am sure they don’t.’
    ‘This is Bachir.’ Henry indicates an elderly Arab doorman, in the blue tunic and pantaloons of a native Algerian regiment, who sits in the corner on a stool. ‘He knows all our secrets, don’t you,