Alsace

Alsace is more than a point of origin in Georges Picquart’s account: it is a remembered homeland whose bonds endure through siege and exile, even as German occupation shapes his judgment of Alfred Dreyfus’s family and fortune.

Setting and Personal Memory

Alsace enters the narrative chiefly through the lives and memories attached to it. Georges Picquart and Pauline grew up together there and survived the siege together. Later, when both were in exile and had lost much else, their shared past remained a bond. The landscape also recurs as an imagined refuge: among the woods, exiles could pretend they were home again, gathering mushrooms and insects in the forest of Neudorf. The recollection makes Alsace a place carried into displacement, rather than one left behind.

Occupation and Picquart’s Judgment

For Georges Picquart, Alsace’s division under German occupation also shaped how he viewed Alfred Dreyfus. He knew that Dreyfus’s family had chosen to remain in the occupied region and believed Dreyfus’s wealth came from Germany; Picquart treated these circumstances as grounds for mistrust. The passage presents this as Picquart’s judgment, not as evidence that Dreyfus had committed espionage.

That suspicion informed their early dealings. When Dreyfus invited Picquart to dinner at his apartment on the avenue du Trocadéro and later to a shooting outing near Fontainebleau, Picquart declined both invitations. Their strained connection surfaced again when Dreyfus confronted him after receiving lower-than-expected marks in cartography. In these recollections, Alsace is not only a shared homeland and remembered refuge: its occupation also supplies the political context through which Picquart misreads a colleague.

A Homeland Carried into an Unfinished Relationship

Alsace also frames the long, unresolved history between Georges Picquart and Pauline. Picquart later understood that he should have proposed before leaving to join his regiment in Algeria, but assumed there would be time afterward. By the time he returned from Indochina, Pauline had given up waiting, had a daughter, and was pregnant with a second; they nevertheless resumed their relationship. He had once treated their shared past as a bond stronger than a future together, but came to doubt that assurance. Their roots in Alsace thus persist not as a settled homecoming, but as the beginning of a connection shaped by separation, missed choices, and continued attachment.

Exile and the Landscape of Home

At a picnic in the woods, the exiles’ attachment to Alsace takes the form of a temporary return: among trees, they can imagine themselves back in the forest of Neudorf. The clearing and rocky stream become a gathering place for adults and children, while the children cool bottles of wine and lemonade in the water. Yet the scene also preserves the distance between appearance and reality. Georges Picquart joins the gathering, but after more than a year in his post, no one there knows what his work is. The remembered homeland offers the exiles a shared refuge, even as Picquart’s concealed role leaves him partly apart from the community around him.