In this nineteenth-century gulag archipelago operated by the French government in its torrid colony of Guiana, the prisons on the Salvation Islands were considered the bagne du bagne, the penal colony within the penal colony, and, of the three Salvation Islands, the most secure was Devil’s Island.
On 14 April 1895, the preparations made for Dreyfus’s transfer from the prison on the Île Royale to Devil’s Island were completed with the construction of a guard-house and, some distance away, a stone hut with a corrugated-iron roof. The guard-house was surrounded by a veranda and attached to it was a look-out tower topped by a loggia from which the guards could survey the whole island and scan the sea.
The hut comprised a cell four metres square, and a small annexe for the guard, two by three metres. The cell was separated from the guards’ annexe by an iron-grilled gate, and the guards’ annexe from the exterior by a wooden door. Both the gate and the wooden door were locked at night. There was a change of guard every two hours so Dreyfus was woken by the jangling of keys and the turning of locks. There was a barred window to the cell with a view of the sea. The island itself measured only 1,200 by 365 metres, but when Dreyfus was released from the cabin during the day, he was confined to an unshaded area of 170 square metres between the jetty and the ruins of the leper colony. He was accompanied wherever he went by an armed guard. Conversation with the guard was forbidden. He wore the regulation clothes for a deportee: a canvas jacket and trousers, a cotton shirt, a flannel belt.
Dreyfus received the rations of a soldier which he had to cook for himself, but on arrival he was provided with no utensils. On his first morning, on 15 April, he was given a ration of bread, raw meat and green coffee beans. Wholly ill-equipped by his upbringing to fend for himself, Dreyfus had first to gather firewood, light a fire and grill the meat on some pieces of scrap metal over the embers. With no means of grinding the beans, he could not make coffee. His lunch was bread and tea, his supper bread and water.
By 19 April, Dreyfus had somewhat developed his cuisine. He made a stew in an old tin with meat, salt and a pepper that he had found growing on the island. One of the main complaints that he made in the diary which he started on his first day on Devil’s Island was the way in which the wind blew the smoke into his eyes. ‘My eyes suffered horribly; what misery!’ On 24 April he was ‘lent four flat plates, two deep ones, and two saucepans, but nothing to put in them’. He was incensed when given tinned bacon. ‘I threw it all into the sea because the tinned bacon was inedible, the rice, which was brought to me in a filthy state, was offensive, and I had nothing with which to roast the coffee beans, which, in bitter derision, were given to me raw.’19 Instead, Dreyfus made himself a stew of dried peas ‘which will be my food for the day’.
In due course, Dreyfus established a daily routine. Because the heat quickly became intolerable, he rose early.
I get up at dawn (5), light the fire to make coffee or tea. Then I put my dried vegetables on to cook, then I make my bed, tidy my room and wash. At 8 they bring me my rations. I finish cooking my vegetables; on meat days I cook that. All my cooking is done by 10, I eat what’s left cold in the evening, not wanting to be in front of the fire for three more hours in the afternoon.
At 10 I eat. I read, I work and suffer until 3. Then I wash. When the heat goes, around 5, I cut wood, get water from the well, wash my clothes etc. At 6 I eat what’s left of lunch. Then they lock me up. That is the longest time. I haven’t been able to get a light in the hut. There is one on the guard post, but too weak to see for long. So I have to go to bed and that is when my brain begins to churn, and all my thoughts turn to the ghastly drama of which I am the victim, and I remember my wife, my children and all those who are dear to me. How they must be suffering too!
The inadequate diet gave Dreyfus stomach cramps, and he contracted a tropical fever. On 17 May, the prison doctor examined him: he prescribed forty centigrams of quinine a day and ordered twelve boxes of condensed milk for his patient and some bicarbonate of soda. ‘So I shall be able to put myself on a milk diet, and shall not have to eat the food that is so repugnant to me that I have taken nothing for four days.’20
The lepers had cultivated tomatoes on the island and these had now grown wild and yielded a good crop. Dreyfus also received some fresh food sent to the convicts by a group of compassionate women among the wives of the prison guards; and by the summer of 1895 food parcels would arrive from Paris sent by Lucie via the Colonial Office on the rue Oudinot containing delicacies from Félix Potin and other shops in Paris – condensed milk, Vichy water, coffee, cigarettes, pipe tobacco, chocolate, biscuits and quinine – the deliveries irregular, the packages frequently delayed and sometimes pilfered en route; they nonetheless contained welcome supplements to Dreyfus’s diet and were a sign that he was not forgotten. Lucie also paid 500 francs a month into an account as Dreyfus’s mass or pocket money which he could draw on to order provisions from Cayenne.21 He was permitted to smoke and was relieved of having to wash his own clothes: his sweat-sodden linen was sent to the laundry of the infirmary on the Île Royale but when returned to him was thrown at him as if he was a dog.
There was thus some small amelioration of the grim diet provided by the prison authorities, but there was no relief from the great heat and humidity. Around 5° north of the equator, the median temperature throughout the year in French Guiana was 30° Celsius. During the day Dreyfus would sit in the shade of his hut facing the sea hoping for a cooling breeze,22 but by the evening when he was locked up in his cell it had become a stifling oven. Emaciated, drenched in sweat, Dreyfus had to battle with unwelcome guests.
Vermin swarmed in my hut; mosquitoes, as soon as the rainy season began; ants, all the year round, in such large numbers that I had to isolate my table by placing the legs in old preserve boxes filled with petroleum . . . The most tiresome insect was the spider-crab; its bite is venomous. The spider-crab is a creature whose body resembles that of a crab, and its legs are long, like those of a spider. Altogether it is about as large as a man’s hand. I killed many of them in my hut into which they came through the aperture between the roof and the walls.23
Strictly speaking, under the terms of the law, deportation should not have meant imprisonment. ‘In its essence, it was simply a restriction on liberty, imposing upon the convict no other obligation than that of never leaving the territory to which he had been sent.’24 However, Dreyfus had been sent from France with the admonition that he was ‘to be treated like a hardened criminal, completely unworthy of pity’. He was never out of the sight of one of the warders. The number watching the single prisoner was increased in the course of his stay. ‘At first the number of warders, exclusive of the head warder, had been five; this was raised to six and afterwards to ten warders, in the course of 1897.’ At the beginning of 1898, the number was increased to thirteen.
The regime imposed on Dreyfus was posited on the assumption that at any time an attempt might be made to rescue him. It seemed possible, even likely, that under cover of night a cutter might be sent from a German cruiser; or that the power of Jewish finance might enlist help from the British navy: had not Palmerston sent gunboats to Alexandria to effect the release of the Damascene Jews? From the top of the tower attached to the guard-house, the guards scanned the horizon and the mere sight of a sail or smoke on the horizon sent them into a panic and justified in their minds the abnormal and, strictly speaking, illegal restrictions on Dreyfus’s movements and keeping him, month after month, year after year, in solitary confinement.
This solitude added mental suffering to his physical ordeal. ‘I never open my mouth,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I am more silent than a Trappist.’25 ‘I am subject to the stupid and useless fate of the Man in the Iron Mask.’26 ‘I never see a pleasant face; I can never open my mouth to speak to any human being; night and day I must suppress heart and brain in an eternal silence.’27 His only human contact was with the prison guards, but they were forbidden to talk to him or even to answer his ques
tions. ‘My speech was limited to asking if my letters had come or not. But I am now forbidden to ask even that; or (which is the same thing) the warders are forbidden to answer the most commonplace questions.’28 Despite their silence, some of the guards were more sympathetic than others. ‘A warder has just left, worn out by the fevers of the place. This is the second man who has been forced to leave since I have been here. I am sorry he has gone, for he was an honest man, fulfilling strictly the duties assigned to him, but loyally, with tact and moderation.’29
Dreyfus suspected that ‘the local administration . . . feels a horror of such arbitrary and inhuman measures, but is obliged to apply them’. The prison Commandant (Dreyfus never learned his name) was a straightforward man who played things by the book; however, he was constrained by instructions from above. ‘I have only to ask the chief warder for any insignificant thing of common necessity to have my request abruptly and instantly refused. Accordingly, I never repeat a request, preferring to go without everything rather than humiliate myself.’30 Dreyfus asked for a box of tools so that he could take up carpentry; his request was refused on the grounds that he might use the tools to escape.
There came a point when Dreyfus would have preferred to work on a chain gang than to be left idle and alone. ‘I have nothing to kill the terribly slow time. I asked long ago for some sort of manual labour, no matter what, with which to occupy myself a little; they have not answered me.’31 He was allowed books, some literary and scientific reviews, and pen and paper to write letters and keep a diary. He wrote constantly to Lucie and, on 1 July 1895, an appeal to the new French President, Félix Faure, which was returned four months later: ‘Rejected without comment’.
Dreyfus had with him the English grammar brought to him in the Santé prison by Lucie: ‘I am going to try to study English,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Perhaps the work will help me to forget for a while my sorrows.’ But the climate and privations made it hard for him to concentrate. ‘From time to time I try to study English, to write translations, and to forget myself in my work. But my brain is so utterly shaken that it refuses to labour; after a quarter of an hour, I am forced to give up the task.’32
Dreyfus was refused a lamp to enable him to read after dark. ‘I have been shut up since half-past six in the evening, my hut lit only by the lantern in the guard-room. Besides, I cannot work at English all night and the few journals which reach me are quickly read.’ He had a volume of Shakespeare’s plays and returned again and again to the tragedies which spoke to his own. ‘I never understood this great writer so well as during this tragic period; I read him over and over again; Hamlet and King Lear appealed to me with all their dramatic power.’ He was particularly struck by Iago’s words in Othello.
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name,
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.33
Dreyfus had the right to order twenty books every three months. Together with Shakespeare’s plays, Montaigne’s Essays were ‘the most sacred texts of his exile’.34 Besides these, in his small library, he had Études sur la littérature contemporaine by Edmond Scherer, Histoire de la littérature française by Gustave Lanson, some novels by Honoré de Balzac, Paul Barras’ Mémoires, the Petite Critique by Jules Janin, a History of Painting, a History of the Francs, and volume VIII of Ernest Lavisse’s Histoire de France, and Arthur Rambaud’s Histoire générale du IVe siècle à nos jours.35 He had trouble preserving his little library from predators. ‘At the end of a short time, my books were in a pitiable state; vermin got into them, gnawed them, and laid their eggs in them.’36
An even greater consolation for Dreyfus than his library were the letters he received from Lucie. Like his captors, Dreyfus scanned the horizon not for the sight of a boat sent to rescue him but for the mail boat from France on its way to Cayenne. His wife’s letters arrived sporadically, often having taken months to arrive from France. They were read by censors at the Ministry of the Colonies and could contain no reference to his case. Lucie could do little but give news of the children, protest her great love and do what she could to sustain his morale. Initially, she still hoped that she would be able to join her husband: ‘I suffer so much from being separated from you that I have made another appeal to go and share your exile. I shall at least have the happiness of living the same life as you, of being near you, and showing you how much I love you.’ But even before his transfer from prison on the Île Royale to his hut on the Île du Diable, Alfred understood that her presence was out of the question. ‘When I realised the rigours of my life at the Salvation Islands, I had no illusion as to the answer which would be given to my wife’s requests to be permitted to come and join me. I knew they would be steadfastly refused.’37
Dreyfus also wrote to his children. ‘I was touched to the depths of my soul’, wrote Lucie, ‘by the letter you wrote to our Pierre; he was enchanted, and his child’s face lit up when I read your lines to him; he knows them by heart. When he speaks of you, he is all aflame.’38 Later, she became anxious about her daughter’s development.
Jeanette is rather more difficult than she was. She is still not old enough to understand everything. She gets little fits of obstinacy, rebels against authority, and ends by shutting herself up in a silence that it is difficult for me to get her out of. But she is exceptionally kind, and makes everyone love her for her affectionate temperament. They are two good children.39
Dreyfus never lost interest in the way in which his children were being brought up and sent his young wife long letters of advice on their formation.
In your last letters you were telling me about Pierrot’s sensitiveness, and saying that you were trying to combat it. If it is sentimentality, I say yes, a thousand times yes. But if it is a sensitiveness, don’t try to deprive him of it, but try to add to it energy and determination. Let me explain: sentimentality is a weakness, a feebleness of heart expending itself upon insignificant things, or upon oneself. It makes us less able to face and bear the shocks of life. It calls upon all the energy of the soul, and ends by turning even the man who is basically good into a profound egoist.
Sensitiveness, on the other hand, so long as it is applied to things of the mind and heart, is a fine and noble quality. It is the mark of a soul capable of emotion in the presence of natural and spiritual beauties . . . In this sense it is the inspiration of all the best works of art and literature.40
This distinction was all-important to Dreyfus himself as he struggled to retain his sensitiveness without descending into a lugubrious, self-pitying sentimentality. While initially it was the physical privations that preoccupied him – the intense heat and humidity, the persistent fevers, the vile food, the tormenting insects – it soon became the mental suffering that was hardest to endure. He feared for his sanity and felt he might succumb to the temptation to take his own life. ‘They will certainly end up killing me by these sufferings, or forcing me to kill myself to escape madness.’ ‘I am in an indescribable state. I can’t sleep. I am afraid of losing my sanity.’41 ‘When shall I again pass a calm and tranquil night? Perhaps not until I am in the grave when I shall sleep the sleep that is everlasting. How sweet it will be to think no longer of human vileness and cowardice!’42
The sound of the sea surrounding Devil’s Island had a profound effect on him – both consoling but also holding out the promise of oblivion. ‘The ocean, which I hear moaning beneath my little window, has always for me a strange fascination. It soothes my thoughts as it did before, and now they are very bitter and sombre. It recalls dear memories to mind, the happy days I have passed by the sea-side, with my wife and darling children.’43 ‘I feel a very strong sensation, which I felt before on the ship, of being almost irresistibly drawn to the
sea, whose roaring waters seem to call to me like a great consoling power. This power the sea has over me is strong; on the ship I had to close my eyes and picture my wife so as not to give in to it.’44 Dreyfus had promised Lucie that he would not kill himself, but it was not a promise he found easy to keep. ‘What endless agony I am compelled to endure! What a sacrifice I have made in consenting to live!’45
Although the sudden, calamitous and incomprehensible reversal of fortune that Dreyfus had suffered brings to mind the sufferings of Job, he did not himself seek consolation in the many references to the fickleness of human fortune in the Hebrew Bible. Unlike Lucie, who referred to her husband’s ‘Calvary’ on a number of occasions and believed that ‘God, who has so sorely tried us, will give us the strength to fulfil our duty to the end,’46 Dreyfus never lost his wholly secular outlook: even in the depths of despair, he never had recourse to any of the consolations offered by religious belief. The ideals which sustained him were secular: Truth, Justice, Honour, Courage, Loyalty, Duty. The word ‘God’ appears only twice in his writings and the word ‘Jew’ not at all.47 The metaphors he used in describing his ordeal were Christian rather than Jewish – he too talked about his ‘Calvary’, his ‘martyrdom’ and being ‘more silent than a Trappist’. One of his rare references to God was not complimentary to the deity: ‘How often I am reminded of Schopenhauer’s exclamation, at the sight of human iniquity: “If God created the world, I would not like to be God.”’48
The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two Page 15
