“If God created the world, I would not care to be God”

“If God created the world, I would not care to be God” is a quotation from Schopenhauer that appears in Alfred Dreyfus’s censored correspondence from Cayenne. Its importance lies not only in the bleak thought it expresses, but in Georges Picquart’s sudden recognition of a phrase he himself has often used: the words make Dreyfus seem, for the first time, like someone trying to reach him across the distance of the case.

The Quotation in Dreyfus’s Letter

The passage surrounds the quotation with a catalogue of deprivation. Dreyfus describes ceaseless rain, a black sky, and a day that feels like one of death and burial. Mail has arrived from Cayenne, but not his letters; he has nothing to read and no avenue of escape from his thoughts. Books and magazines have stopped coming, and he walks until exhaustion in an effort to calm his brain and nerves. In this setting, the Schopenhauer line gives compact expression to a despair sharpened by isolation and the absence of reading material.

Picquart’s Recognition

Picquart is reading a batch of Dreyfus’s censored letters sent by the Colonial Ministry, which has asked for observations from an intelligence perspective. The quotation leaps out at him because he knows it and has used it often. He had not imagined that Dreyfus might read philosophy, much less entertain what Picquart regards as a blasphemous thought. The discovery unsettles his prior image of the prisoner: the shared phrase makes Dreyfus seem to Picquart like someone who has been trying to attract his attention.

Meaning in the Narrative

The quotation bridges two otherwise separate experiences: Dreyfus’s enforced solitude and Picquart’s reading of the file in an official capacity. The correspondence is presented as material for intelligence review, yet a familiar sentence interrupts that administrative frame and becomes a point of personal recognition. The text does not show the two men communicating directly here; instead, the repeated words make Picquart feel that a connection has finally registered through the file.